Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab Read Online Free PDF Page B

murmur. In my years of coming to Trinidad to visit Sydney, I had often wished people around me were not quite so attuned to my everyneed, while on returning to Canada I missed and longed for that same attentiveness.
    I asked Sydney what he meant by the phrase “someone like Zain.” He paused, then said: Someone who hadn’t tried to make him into who he wasn’t, but rather helped him to become who he already was.
    That night, Sydney told me that throughout his thirty years in Canada the same thought had come to him every winter as the mercury plummeted and the snow descended, outlining the weathervane on the balcony. I would think, he said, how I wished that my dear friend Zain—and how I wished, too, that my dear mother, my dear father, my high school teachers and all of my classmates, my gynecologist in Trinidad, even my dentist, not to speak of the women who one day delighted in what they called my boyishness and the next whispered disparagingly about it, and especially the men whose eyes hardened and lips curled when I didn’t field their flatteries and advances—how I wished these and numerous other people could have seen me negotiate Toronto’s icy pavements while the wind drilled painfully into my forehead, or battle the two blocks to the streetcar in a whiteout, or seen me trudge home in ankle-deep snow carrying heavy bags of groceries. Living in Canada, Sydney said, with its complicated protocols and rules of conduct, is a test indeed to the mettle of anyone who arrives there from a tropical country, indeed anyone from anywhere who landsthere with more determination than credentials. Being able to survive in a country like that is a recommendation of all who arrive with the earnest intention to become a grander person than would have been possible had they remained elsewhere, of all who come despite the fear that it will be a feat to achieve anything at all without the structure of culture and family, without the armour of one’s connections. You found out in no time, Sydney said, that the clout your good name carried back home in the village, or on the entire island of Trinidad—an island that could easily be tucked into a bay in Lake Ontario—was useless there. My own negotiation of Toronto, Sydney told me, was indeed a testament to my mettle, and Zain, who one summer visited Toronto especially to see me, acknowledged this. She stayed for a week in my bachelor apartment, and drove about the city in my nineteen-year-old second-hand car whose body had been rusted by the salt used on the roads in the winter to melt snow. She told me—I who had known nothing of life’s hardships before leaving Trinidad—that I had indeed taken the harder way, and that she admired and even envied me for this.
    I was moved by the surge in Sydney’s energy as he spoke. His voice grew steadily stronger. It was as if a force rose out of him and he was determined to once and for all relate his story.
    On returning to Trinidad, Zain had gone to see Sid’s parents. She thought she was telling them of Sid’s courage when she said that it was quite something to see Siddhani Mahale, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Mahale, living in a rentedbachelor apartment in a rough part of the city and driving an old rusted car. Mrs. Mahale immediately called Sid, but not to commiserate. Instead, she delivered a lecture on how she herself had lived through seven winters in Ireland when Sid’s father was in medical college there, how a little adversity never hurt anyone. If she, who had been thoroughly spoiled by the comforts and privilege of an old and grand business family, could do it, then anyone could. The real shame, said Mrs. Mahale, was that Siddhani had friends calling them up to tell them of the conditions their child was living in, as if it were their fault.
    Of course Sid hadn’t asked Zain to mention the conditions in which she lived, and wasn’t at all pleased that she’d done so, but her mother’s response enraged and saddened her.