Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab Read Online Free PDF

that he was as good as could be expected. I asked if he’d taken his medications, to which he merely nodded. I glanced at the correspondence, feeling awkward about my intrusion. Letters from a friend, he said, as if I’d asked.
    He gathered the scraps. These are the first ones she wrote me, he said.
    I was a grown man, but transparent as a child to Sydney. He had spotted the flicker of curiosity in me, and commented, No, no; it’s not like that, Jonathan. There was never a romance between my friend—Zain is her name—and me. Zain and I were, however, the very best, the closest of friends.
    I felt these words with a prickle of jealousy as acute as if I, and not my mother, had been his lover. Seconds later, he elaborated in a fashion that unsettled me again, as if I were a pebble caught in the push and pull of small quarrelsome waves at the water’s edge. In a way, Sydney said, it was better than a romance.
    The letters, now part of his legacy to me, were written with a fountain pen, in ink that had turned a purplish brown. None were dated. I remember his voice as he read snippets from them aloud, one after the other.
    Dear Sid,
    Where are you? Why aren’t you at school today? I’m not saying you are missed, so don’t get a fat head. It’s just that there is nobody to provide me with my much-needed quota of comic relief. Thisnote—which, stupidly, you will only get when you return—is just to let you know that I am doing the job Miss Augusta saddled me with—looking after rejects from other schools. I’m getting to like it. Gives me a glimpse of my potential.
    Dear Sid,
    It was Eid yesterday. I brought you seiwine from home—my mother’s own. Bet your mother can’t make seiwine, can she? Your loss. The other Hindus, Moonsie and Bhags, enjoyed it. Zain
    Dear Sid,
    If you’d like—and I do think you should like, even if only for the seiwine—to become a Muslim I can introduce you to our Imam. He won’t hold the fact that you are still a Hindu against you. We know our ancestors were once too. Choice and power. You too have it.
    Z
    As I recalled the substance of those letters, I was brought back to the present by Sydney’s voice saying that Zain had never experienced winter, and that he’d always wished she’d had the chance to live abroad, on her own. Sydney imitated Zain, “But,
you
are brave!” I was impressed that in his condition, even as his voice shook and the effort came with some hesitation, he had the energy to imitate thehigh-pitched soft and musical accent. “But, Sid, how you could
live
in a place like that?” he mimicked, and followed with an explanation for my benefit that “living in a place like that” meant a place where it snowed, and where for almost half the year you had to have your arms and legs and feet covered because it was too damn cold. “A place like that,” he said, meant a country where one didn’t have the kind of family connections common in Trinidad. In Trinidad, friends of your cousins’ cousins’ in-laws accorded you the same treatment as if you were related to them by blood, as if you were a brother or a sister—meaning that other concerns would immediately be put aside, without question, if you called in a moment of need. Whereas, he continued, in “a place like that,” friends passing your home wouldn’t dream of stopping in just to say hello because such a visit hadn’t been pre-arranged. It was a place where you didn’t know the names of your neighbours and couldn’t ring them up and ask them to drive you here or there. To someone like Zain, being able to live in “a place like that” was a testament to Sid’s mettle. I was pleased when Sydney added, But you have been here often enough, Jonathan. Surely you know these things by now.
    He was on a roll, on a subject that interested me, for I had spent the first decade of my life with one parent who had little time for me, and another—this one—who’d dropped everything to attend to my slightest