When She Was Queen Read Online Free PDF

Sunday she went with Guli to their family picnic and she saw for herself what her friend had meant. Amir Uncle was the star of the event—he played cricket with the boys, using a coconut branch for bat and a tennis ball; afterwards with the younger men and women he played hutu-tutu, the territorial game with two teams, and he entertained everybody by his teasing and baiting of the opponents. He helped in making tea, and after tea he played cards.
    His only handicap, if you could call it that, was that he was not very tall.
    “Why doesn’t Amir Uncle marry?” Anaar asked Guli. “He could get a wife like that—” she snapped her fingers smartly.
    “He’s too picky,” Guli replied. “All those single girls who were at the picnic are simply dying to see whom he’ll pick. One of these days….”
    The “single girls” were more like women, ten years older than either of them, and none of them looked very pretty to Anaar.

    “None of them married properly,” Anaar says to me. “It’s amazing isn’t it, they were in their twenties and their lives had run out.”
    There were five of these women and, as we observe together, all had completed high school, which was a rare feat in their time. One never married, four married widowers with children. Two died of breast cancer, one was murdered in Miami; one is divorced and lives somewhere in Toronto. We discuss her whereabouts, Anaar and I. In Toronto you locate a person not by the area they live in—this is a large city, spread out—but by the mosque they attend; that’s like a postal code—and if you think about it, guarantees where you’ll find the person on a Friday evening. I am the mukhi of Don Mills; Anaar has been attending York Mills; and this woman we spoke of goes to Eglinton. A far cry, this geometry, from the one in our memories.

    Amir Uncle brought movie passes for Guli and Anaar, and since the two girls had to be accompanied, he went with them. They liked Indian movies, which he didn’t much care for, and this made them giggle to themselves since it was
they
who were younger and supposed to be more modern. She didn’t mind that he made fun of the movies afterwards—you went for the songs and the romance and (as everyone who loved them knew) you simply ignored their lack of realism—the last-minute recognition of a lost son, the weepy hospital scene, or the obviously artificial full moon behind a tree! After every such outing with Amir Uncle, Anaar would be bursting with praises for him, until her aunt finally began calling him “your Amir Uncle.”
    With Amir Uncle, too, she got a taste of things they could not quite afford in her family—such as ice cream at Naaz Restaurant in the evenings, and the drive on Ocean Road to look at all the beautiful houses of the Europeans and other rich people and stop later by the sea and listen in silence to the waves. A taste of that other life, of well-being, which she so longed for. Where she lived, by seven the street was dark and quiet—the shops would be all closed, their owners huddled upstairs or behind the stores with their families and radios. There would be news on the radio, perhaps followed by a drama, and two nights a week half an hour of pop music, Monday’s “Happy Returns” and Friday’s “Favourites.” Lights out at ten, the absolute latest.
    Amir Uncle came like a ray of light, a happy beam, into that drab life.

    “If there’s one thing I don’t miss from those days, it’s those still, still nights,” she says. “And yet there was a strange mystery to them … something unforgettable … we were more religious then, too.”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you religious?”
    I cast an appropriate stare at her. “I am a mukhi,” I answer, as if that explains everything.
    The coffee shop on North Toronto’s Yonge Street is abustle with wealthy young couples out shopping. Time was, on this drag you’d find maybe one or two eating places open this late and serving “Canadian coffee”