Knots Read Online Free PDF Page B

lose?” and drove to Ottawa to hear her mother out.
    They got down to the business of talking after a hot bath and a delicious meal prepared and served with loving maternal care. All was good at the initial ground-clearing phase, in which Arda spent a long time on the preliminaries and Cambara listened with due patience and filial deference as her mother untangled the wool gathered from the mesh of her speculative fibers. However, when Cambara finally got the drift of her mother’s plan and paid more attention to the nuances being employed, Cambara found out that she could not fight the feeling of nausea gradually coming upon her in waves and eventually overwhelming her with a sense of despondent torpor. The short of it was that Arda was proposing a course of action that would prejudicially undermine Cambara’s sense of privacy and encroach upon it drastically.
    Cambara was disturbed. Not only was the plan, as her mother conceived it, unworkable, from her own point of view, it broke with a long-held understanding between them, reached during the young woman’s teens, that at no time and under any circumstances would either of her parents ever make a decision that might affect her without first talking it over and clearing it with her. In her zealous attempt to remain her own person, Cambara stood guard over her own privacy, allowing no one to intrude upon it and permitting nobody, family or nonfamily, to step past its threshold unless she approved of it. What upset her no end was that she and her mother spoke and met often, especially after her father’s death, and she was appalled that the old woman could entertain such a preposterous idea without taking Cambara’s feelings into account, in this way entering sensitive territories beyond which she knew she was not to venture ever. Whatever had made Arda barge in without her time-honored thoughtfulness! Yet this was precisely what Arda had done. Cambara could see no sense in her mother’s behavior, which was so unlike her. To put it another way, what her mother was now proposing did not tally at all with what she had alluded to when she invited her a couple of days ago to come and talk about the panacea to her daughter’s professional success.
    The languor that at the moment rippled through her whole body made her want to sit on the first available bench in the park where they were walking. From the expression on her face, you might have thought that someone had held a bottle full of ether to her nose—she was so breathless, and she was becoming drenched with cold sweat. It rankled Cambara that she, who always took exceptional pride in declaiming that she could read her mother’s mind as easily as a fortune-teller reads a desperate client’s particular needs, was being proven wrong. It was obvious one of them did not make the grade this time, and both would have to revise their views, which she was finding equally disturbing. And when, a little later, Arda seated herself at a small distance from her, Cambara’s chest produced something between a chuckle and a snivel.
    Emboldened, Arda took this as a sign she could resume speaking. She said, “The long and short of it is that I would like my nephew Zaak to join us here in Canada, legally.”
    Cambara was sufficiently vigilant to spot the catch, instantly feeling the sting in the tail of the key word “legally.”
    As irony would have it, planeloads of Somalis were arriving illegally at major ports or airports everywhere in the world, including Toronto, nearly all of them declaring themselves as stateless, and no one was turning any one of them back, not from Canada, anyhow. But Arda did not want her nephew to board an aircraft from Nairobi, where he ended up after fleeing the fighting in Mogadiscio, like tens of thousands of other Somalis, as a refugee. Being Arda, she intended to spread a carpet of welcome for him all the way from Nairobi, which he would leave, if at