What might I have become had I not left? Was remaining in Canada an act of courage or was it timidity? I certainly didn’t feel like a returning champ in front of my parents. I slid into the warm water. Keeping my eyes open, I dived under and splayed my hands on the concrete at the bottom. I thrust my feet up, pointing my toes to the sky. I stayed like this for several long seconds. When I stood again, my eyes stung, and cool air hit my body, and an acute awareness of my present washed over me: there on the pool’s ledge was a sweating glass of lime juice made by my family’s housekeeper, there just beyond was the yellow-green of the dwarf coconut trees waving up to the transparent blue of the sky, and there, farther off, was a variety of birds, carrying on like competing vendors in a market. In Toronto, no one save India and Jonathan, neither of whom I was in touch with, could have accurately pictured me in those surroundings. My sense of belonging was as profound as my feeling of aloneness. I dreaded attending the funeral I had come for.
I arrived at the church twenty minutes early, and yet all the pews in the church were full. People stood at the back, along the sides, and clogged the main entrance and the two side doorways. I took my place at the back, hidden. I scoped out every corner, and moved a bit this way or that so that
I could glimpse from behind pillars. I carefully scanned the face of every man in the church, my heart thumping in fear, and in my distraction I missed most of what was being said throughout the service and the eulogies. But Eric was nowhere to be seen. I even stepped out of the church partway through, and circled the building looking for him, before squeezing back inside. When I was sure he wasn’t present I joined the queue and paid my respects. I rested my hand on the blond, highly polished wood casket. It was smooth and slippery, and unyielding, and I had to tell myself that if I began to cry, I would surely fall apart and I would be unable to put myself back together again. I would bring unwanted notice to myself. I imagined myself being watched instead, and was able to walk past her casket knowing that that was as close as I’d ever be to Zain again.
I went to Angus, who sat in the front pew with Zain’s parents and the children, Aliya and Peter. He had not known that I had come back and when I approached he stood and wrapped his arms around me. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t speak. He pressed me to his chest and kissed the top of my head. I remained in his tight embrace for what seemed like minutes. Neither he nor I spoke. Aliya asked in a barely audible voice if I was coming to the cemetery. I hesitated, and she asked me if I would instead stop by their house that night.
When I left the funeral, I asked Tank to drive past the yacht club. I knew where Eric kept his boat, and that it could be seen from the road. His boat was not visible,
though, and this further confirmed my suspicion. Just to be certain, I had Tank drive in to the yacht club. I had him stop at High Tide restaurant where Zain and I and Eric had eaten a short time before, and where Eric was known. As if I were a regular, I asked the waiter who met me at the door what had happened to Eric’s boat. She told me that he had come in two days ago to let them know that he was taking off on a trip up the islands; by the end of the day he’d pulled up and out. “Just like that?” I said, and she answered, “Yeah, that’s how all these boating people are.”
That evening I did visit Zain’s house, as Aliya had requested, but I could not bear to stay long. The passageway that led to the guest room both called out to me and repelled me. It gnawed on me that I had failed to do something, something that might have prevented Zain’s murder, something that might have led to an arrest. Weakened by remorse and guilt, I did not have it in me to be more polite, or to consider that Angus, Aliya and Peter had little choice but to carry on living in that very house. I left without eating or drinking any of the offerings. Within days, I returned to Toronto.
All this, I hope, will count as some sort of answer for you, Jonathan. But there is, of course, more to tell. There is the walk.
The very week I was back in Toronto, I went and saw a doctor and began the process of counselling. I had my body
measured and my mind assessed. I knew that I would not do anything to myself while Mum and Dad were alive, and that perhaps they would live for such a long time it would mean I’d never reach my goal. I am somewhat ashamed to say I waited for that freedom. In the meantime, I was encouraged to join a peer group who were at various stages of the process that some of them called
transitioning
. In such a way, I became part of a community where I met people whom one did not usually, in those days, see in the streets. I met men whose gender, height and sturdy limbs were ill-disguised behind long hair, hair that was coiffed into exaggerated women’s styles. They wore makeup, nail polish, dresses and women’s shoes with heels. They went by women’s names and were referred to, with remarkable ease, as “she” and “her.” I was quite drawn to one person in the group, a Chinese woman who had chosen to be female. At first, I would stare at her, in vain, to try to see traces of the man she once was. She was the only person in the group whose voice and demeanour did not betray the fact that she had started out as a man. She had not, I saw, merely changed her physical body; it was as if she had studied and taken on the thoughtfulness and graciousness traditionally expected of her new gender. I was moved by her, and yet there were moments when, regarding her, I felt sadness, and saw that whatever she had gained by this change must certainly have come at a cost. The people in this group often talked about the price they had paid—the loss, that is, of family, friends, employment—but they always concluded with testimonials about having achieved a rare inner peace.
I also met women who went by men’s names. The women wore their hair short, not as a woman might, but with an exaggeration that paralleled that of the men with women’s hair. Some of these women were well along in their process of transformation and had already had their chests reconstructed surgically. Others bound their breasts. They wore boys’ or men’s clothing, and shoes that were clearly a size or two bigger than their feet, and, regardless of their age, had the attractive awkwardness, the intriguing mix of bravado and shyness of teenaged boys. Neither the men nor the women were flamboyant like cross-dressers and transsexuals, but they moved about, at least in our sessions together, with a quiet confidence I admired. Whenever I entered the room where we gathered and I saw the ones who were no longer women but were not men either, my chest would heave, and from deep inside would well a confusion of emotions. I would be breathless with the excitement of recognition. I would want to collapse with relief at the prospect of my own change. I would feel envy and impatience that I was not further along on my own path. But I felt fear, too, that in becoming like them I would find too late that I had given up more than I had intended to, fear that there were steps on the journey that, once taken, were irreversible.
As time went by, and I was provoked by the group to become clearer and firmer about my needs, my goals and my reasons for this journey, I knew that I did not simply want to embrace within myself what some in the group called “a female masculinity.” This seemed to mean taking on the
appearance and manner of boyish and masculine women, and I already fit that mould. What I felt in my very bones was that I could no longer live my life as a woman; I no longer wanted to be identified by others as a woman, and treated, as a result, in predictable and predetermined ways. It was easier to change myself than to wrestle with society. Above all, I desperately needed a kind of annihilation, and a rebirth. I did not want to stand next to a woman and feel, ever again, that I had to guard my love for her, or that I dared not touch her in public in the ways I wanted. Never again did I want to cower, or to be with a woman who in private would allow me to love her, yet in public would feel shame or fear to be seen with me. I did not want to live in a body that was scorned by men, that triggered the need in others to subdue it—to subdue me. I did not want a body that attracted hatred and brought harm to those women I cared about. A body that could not protect her. Looking back now, I realize that no one had ever asked me directly if I wanted to be a man, for I would have had to answer “no.” I remember saying, however, I could not bear the body in which I—this “I” quite separate from any body—existed. I suppose that was good enough for my peers. Perhaps many of them shared my sentiments, but our options then were black and white, between this and that. The grey area of freedom we longed for existed only in dreams. I was coaxed to dress, to negotiate streets and to engage in encounters with people as if my surgical and hormonal transformation were a
fait accompli
. And regardless of how strangers might have viewed me, I felt the power of this.
Even as I found strength among these people, I knew we had little in common besides the goal of physical transformation, and after a couple of unfulfilling attempts at romances with “peers,” I allowed my circle to grow smaller. My parents passed away some years later, one not too long after the other. I returned each time for their funerals. My feelings, in the end, were complex and confusing—being without parents conferred on me a new kind of aloneness. I felt, to say the very least, naked and lost and frightened, as if my parents and I had been inseparable. But lurking alongside these real and deep feelings was excitement, impatience and a blind hopefulness.
And so, one snowy morning, I made my way, walking alone, from my apartment on Bergamot Avenue to the clinic where my body’s transformation would begin. I legally changed my name from Siddhani Mahale to Sydney Mahale, knowing full well that I would—more likely than not—thereby cut myself off from all whom I had so dearly loved. I was embarking on the chance to appear on the outside as I wished myself to be inside. I would reinvent myself in my own image, on my own terms and, finally, enter a life of fulfillment.
If it weren’t for your search for me, Jonathan, you and I would not have reunited. And if, in the end, anything was fulfilled, it was not through my actions. It was because of you. Your presence in my life is the bigger part of that fulfillment. The smaller is to tell you this story.
———
It is only in writing down Sydney’s story that I have gradually understood the truth: Had he simply come straight out with an explanation or a defence delivered in distilled sentences—for instance, if he had bluntly said that our family broke up because my mother wanted a different kind of lover for herself and parent for her son—I would have heard only a string of words held together by the conventions of syntax. What would I have understood by this?
Or, had he said directly, “Ah well, Jonathan, you see I changed myself so drastically because I expected it would be easier for me to cut a path in the world with women, and love, and art exhibits and sales, and shopping for clothing, and just existing in society, and I thought that it would afford me a surer respect. I thought, that is, that it would help me to rise tall in the eyes of people like your mother,” I would certainly not have understood.
Had he explained to me that he returned to Trinidad after living in Canada for more than fifteen years because there wasn’t a soul he could ask to accompany him to the hospital, I might have granted that this hinted at something profound, and was perhaps darkly humorous, but I might also have thought that he was lacking in fortitude.
Had he taken a minute, or even a day, to share with me that he’d returned to Trinidad because the changes he made to himself had not made life easier for him but had only alienated and isolated him further, I might have thought that he was weak and cowardly. I might have been scornful.
Had he told me in a brief sentence or two about the
day he lay on his bed with a fever, so sick that he couldn’t go to the drugstore to get the simplest aids such as throat lozenges and a box of NeoCitran, and decided then that it was time to return to Trinidad, I might not have wanted to hear of his isolation and might have buried myself in my writing. But then again, this might not have been a bad thing, for it has been nine years, from the day I found Sydney here in Scenery Hills, since I have been able to produce a worthwhile piece of sustained writing.
Had he told me long ago, when I first inquired about Zain’s whereabouts, that he thought he knew who had killed his best friend, I would have been horrified that he had not taken his suspicions to the police and would have insisted that he do so immediately. I would not have understood the repercussions of such an act for a person like Sid, much less the consequences of a friendship with a person like Sid for a woman like Zain. I would not have understood that, even in death, Sydney wanted to preserve Zain’s good name and that of her family.
Sydney knew that I had to hear
all
of the stories, in a seemingly digressive way, for
any
to make sense in the end. But more than this, Sydney knew what I myself did not, not then: that in my presence he was on trial. He cared enough, I understand now, to give me through his stories every nuance of evidence so that I would make my judgement fairly.
By nighttime, Sydney could only whisper, but his memories burned bright. He had talked, stopped and seemed to reflect, and then carried on in little spurts, for hours. It was clear—and fair enough, I suppose—that there were things he kept to himself, but still, a fuller picture of this storyteller who had once been my other mother had emerged. When he was satisfied that he had told me all that he had wanted me to know, his breathing became shallow. He no longer asked that I hold off from calling for help.
He was in the hospital for three days. I spent most of my time there, returning to the house only twice to wash and change.
Rosita came to the hospital at mealtimes and returned to the house in between. The first time she visited she brought Sydney and me a breakfast of rotis wrapped in tea cloths and a dish of potatoes she’d fried with onions and cumin. She brought the good plates, knives, forks and glasses and
orange juice she had herself made that very morning. She set it all out as if we were at a picnic and announced, “No sugar in anything.” Sydney seemed pleased. We both ate, I shyly but with much appreciation, the aroma of the potato dish enveloping us, making a family of the three of us in the sterile room.