Authors: M.G. Vassanji
“Twenty floors.” Nurdin once did a small calculation for his wife. “Twelve homes in each – you have two hundred and forty families – that’s three good-sized blocks of any street in Dar.” Except that the variety found here at Sixty-nine would not be found in any street in Dar. Here a dozen races mingle, conversant in at least as many tongues.
For many of life’s amenities, there are enough local enterprises busy all day in this upright village to service all kinds of needs. This means that not everybody leaves the building to earn a living, or buy a service, and during the day life and excitement do not vanish from the corridors of Sixty-nine. From which fact Nurdin, unemployed for many months, could draw some comfort.
On the sixth floor, well along the corridor and away from the bustle of the elevators, runs the major local industry. Here one Gulshan Bai prepares full meals for two, to take out. Back in the days when servants cooked over huge coal and wood fires, more than thirty customers took away tiffin daily from Gulshan Bai’s Dar residence. Tiffin was carried in a metal contraption, four cylindrical boxes fitting one on top of the other, the last one with a lid, all run at the sides by two rods which met at the handle. Now the tiffin boxes are simply the plastic ice cream and
yoghurt containers. And Gulshan Bai minds the stoves herself, sweaty and red faced, perhaps not as cheerful as she used to be, and the flesh on her arms is a little tougher, but still ripples away as she rolls the chappatis every day.
The times are gone also when chappatis came thin and soft as hankies, and could be folded as such; when every time the last piece of the last chappati disappeared into your mouth, a fresh one from the stoves appeared on your plate. Now on the fourteenth floor, Sheru Mama dispenses chappatis at four for a dollar, cheaper wholesale. Sheru Mama makes hundreds of chappatis every day and babysits two toddlers at the same time, while husband Ramju helps with the dishes and puts the required dollop of margarine over every chappati. Her customers tend to be single men who will eat a chappati with a pickle, or butter and jam, or curry canned in the U.S.
The building has a peculiar incident as part of its lore. It happened before the Lalanis’ time. Several men had complained of waking up some mornings with a heart heavy with nostalgic yearnings and a clear memory of a Dar backyard strewn with grains and busy with the frantic clucking of hens. Why the persistence of that memory, so sharp and clear, over many others? This became clear when a local tabloid arrived one morning with the sensational headline:
VOODOO IN DON MILLS
! Apparently a gang of boys had come upon a site covered with blood and feathers in Rosecliffe Park, behind one of the apartment buildings. And then one realized, or was patiently
made to realize by those more experienced in the ways of Rosecliffe, that the mystery of the nostalgic dream had a simple solution: halal meat – meat from a correctly slaughtered animal, neck slit open with a sharp knife, blood allowed to gush out, appropriate verses recited by the slaughterer with his head covered. So the clucking hens were real Ontario hens, and those who could have sworn they’d heard a cluck or two in the elevators were probably right.
You can buy halal meat now, from Ram Deen, an Asian man from the Caribbean. You knock on the door decorated with two suras from the Quran in Arabic calligraphy and one in English in luminous green and gold lettering, and an
I LOVE ALLAH
sign; a head covered with Muslim modesty pops out with a wooden “Yes?” to which you tell your halal needs. It searches the corridor suspiciously and looks you up and down. It is usually Ram Deen’s young daughter, doing a mental calculation to check if you are a “brother.” If you are deemed not, she tells you her father is not in. If you are passed, the door closes, and a few minutes later out comes Ram Deen himself, a short thick man with a pointed greying beard, in a clean white smock, with your package neatly wrapped and a smile of appreciation. There is a practice at Sixty-nine to smile behind his back, but with restraint, for the last thing you want to do is to be caught laughing at a butcher, and a holy one at that.
If you are suddenly out of toilet supplies, you can run down to the first floor and buy them at almost
all hours from an apartment there. There are places to order snacks or go and eat them. There is an open house on the eighteenth floor every Saturday night, where over a spectacular view of the valley, with its orange-lighted highway, you can play cards, chew the fat with compatriots, or tease the women, and consume tea and samosas, which you have to buy there. There are babysitters on every floor, and housesitters; accounting or legal advice, a nurse, a genuine practitioner of folk medicine who will pray or knead your pains away.
In the mornings outside the elevators, the mothers of Sixty-nine stand hovering round their broods, eyes shining with pride, adding finishing touches to their morning’s work, a flourish here, a button there. And they all go down at about the same time. At five to nine a gang of mothers, a few unemployed fathers, and some grandparents accompany the horde of children to the nearby elementary school, yelling, scolding, cuddling. They march to that part of the street where another grandfather does service in an orange jacket, wielding a stop sign, controlling traffic rather proudly as if fulfilling a childhood dream, and the kids cross the road and race through the school gates.
One envies these children, these darlings of their mothers, objects of immigrant sacrifice and labour, who speak better-sounding if not better English: one envies them their memories when they are grown-up. Take this girl in hijab, standing in the elevator, head covered, ankles covered, a beautiful angular face, long body, who could have come
straight from northern Pakistan. But when she opens her mouth, out flows impeccable Toronto English, indistinguishable from that of any other kid’s, discussing what? – last night’s hockey game. In her arms, covered with a decorated green cloth, is a heavy book also apparently in hijab. She’s on her way to Quran class, on the fourteenth floor. What will she remember when she is twenty, thirty, what will she write?
Five o’clock at Sixty-nine. In the lobby, traffic is at peak because schoolchildren are still coming in and office workers from the Don Mills area are beginning to join the elevator queues. The three elevators have been taking a beating since three. They bring, every time they open their doors, fresh waves of food smells to assail the nostrils of the waiting crowd.
There are those, usually immigrants, who find the smells simply embarrassing. There are those who have grown old here, who walk helplessly by, chins up, wondering what it was they did to deserve the brunt of such an invasion. Some residents come home to Sixty-nine to the reassuring clutches of the friendly vapours, and then go up and have a good meal. And finally there are the visitors, couples who come to take their toddlers from the friendly, homely curry-smelling environment of the babysitters’ to their civilized odour-free homes, now tormented by the smells themselves, wondering what they would not give for a good warm traditional meal.
The cookers at Sixty-nine are on, full blast. Saucepans are bubbling, chappatis nest warmly under cloth covers, rice lies dormant and waiting. Whatever one thinks of the smells, it must be conceded that the inhabitants of Sixty-nine eat well. Chappatis and rice, vegetable, potato, and meat curries cooked the Goan, Madrasi, Hyderabadi, Gujarati, and Punjabi ways, channa the Caribbean way, fou-fou the West African way. Enough to make a connoisseur out of a resident, but a connoisseur of smells only because each group clings jealously to its own cuisine. And the experienced can tell, sniffing the air in the lobby, what Gulshan Bai’s tiffin is today, for the sixth floor is a popular stop at this hour. So it is not unusual to find coming down in an elevator a well-dressed young couple looking stiffly in front, holding baby, baby’s diaper bag, and the local version of a bundle that a Gujarati peasant might carry: a plastic bag around several plastic containers. Gulshan Bai’s tiffin travels far.
In the evenings, neighbourhood boys gather to play street hockey or soccer around cars and over roundabouts and between pedestrians; cars pass at their own risk, boys play at theirs.
Out of this world Nurdin would wander in search of a job and return dejected, plunged into deeper despair. Sometimes he took daily jobs, invariably menial, loading and unloading with fellow Dar immigrants, and would come home and lie and say “filing,” until that
became a joke. Everyone knew what “filing” meant. Sometimes he simply refused to go out to these humiliations, watching game shows and talk shows at home, and joining the “A-T” crowd of idle men who met for chitchat and tea downstairs in the lobby in emulation of Dar’s famous A-T Shop. On his idle days, in the afternoons he would clean up at home, sweeping away evidence of any degeneracy, giving the television time enough to cool. You could be sure that Fatima on one pretext or another, or when you were not looking, would detect any telltale residual warmth on its body. And when she did – did the girl show contempt already at this age?
Zera began to have trouble with jobs, which did not help matters. The job she had taken early on was as receptionist to a Chinese doctor. A perfect job, walking distance away, in the mall. She could do shopping during lunchtime. And after school the kids could play outside the office under her watchful eyes. But then, after a few months, she had been dismissed. “Your English,” the doctor had said vaguely. A “Canadian” was duly installed. “I brought so many patients,” she said. Which she had, and in revenge she soon sent word around that the doctor was unreliable.
Later she taught Gujarati, part time, at the Heritage Languages Program in a school, and money was scarce. Then a factory job came along, where her sister Roshan worked. But at this job, where she quality-checked sweatshirts and folded them for packing, there was a lot of dust and she had trouble
breathing. She had dropped a hint after dinner once that making chappatis would not be such a bad idea. Fatima protested. Not only was the smell of concern, but also the dignity of the family. Nurdin suggested that there was not much difference in status between the two jobs. An argument ensued. A friendly argument, one of the first – and friendliest. Fatima, who went to school and spoke English with an accent neither of her parents could even move their mouths to imitate, now had a mind of her own. The chappati idea was dropped.
Zera, always fleshy, had put on more weight at an alarming rate. There were many among Don Mills’ Dar immigrants who in their first three months of consuming potato chips and french fries and root beer simply burst out of the clothes they had come with. Happily for Nurdin, his wife, out of her sense of modesty, did not take to cutting her hair or wearing pants, as many other women started doing, regardless of the size of their buttocks. So there were homely women, who had always dressed in long frocks, suddenly emerging swinging immense hips clothed in brightly coloured acrylic pants, and you couldn’t help looking and feeling ashamed at the same time.
For Zera, such questions of modesty were referred to the Master himself, Missionary, who reflected on values and tradition, and sent his verdict: If you wear pants, cover your behinds. An ardent request was submitted by Zera and his other former pupils, begging him to emigrate. We are desperate
for guidance, they said. Life here is full of pitfalls. Children come home from school with questions we can’t answer. And want to celebrate Christmas. They sent him a long list of innocent-looking items that contained pork by-products, from bread to toothpaste. What is a by-product? Please come. He was said to be considering.
On weekend evenings most Dar Shamsis went to the mosque, held at a school gym on Eglinton Avenue, a destination every bus driver on the 26 route had come to recognize, at which he would let off nervous newcomers whether the stop button had been pressed or not. The newcomer, gazing intently out of the window at familiar-looking people converging in small groups to a place he didn’t quite know, would look up thankfully at the driver and step down with relief, spirits already soaring.
At the mosque a mukhi sat presiding from under a basketball ring. Here after prayers the newcomers announced themselves: tourists seeking spouses, jobs, ultimately reasons to stay; immigrants, en route to Calgary, Edmonton, or Vancouver, or simply staying in Toronto; visitors from south of the border. Once they had announced themselves the news would spread. So-and-so has come. What news from Dar? What price sugar? Do they mug you yet in the mosque in New York? And if they were staying in the city, the insurance agents would brace themselves, taking notes, keeping tabs – when the so-and-so’s found a job, when an apartment. And finally some evening one of them would knock on
the door – a former teacher perhaps, his own genial self, with all the authority of his old status, asking a thousand ifs – pointing out at once the virtues and the shaky foundations of this new existence. Insure, not against revolutions, but death.
On Saturday evenings after mosque, Nurdin and Zera would watch
TV
with the children. Or leaving them in the apartment, they would go up to the eighteenth floor to the open house, to watch people playing cards and to chitchat over tea, to find out the news in Dar – the status of roads and food prices and the dollar price – all, reassuringly, bad. And, perhaps, to meet “the boys,” as Zera called them, the two new friends they had made, and if “the boys” were so inclined, to bring them home.
In the cavernous lobby of Sixty-nine, somewhat away from the path of the daily traffic, is a circular platform raised a foot and a half high, often used as a bench. In the centre, seated on a stool, a plaster goddess takes in with dumb composure all that goes on in the lobby, the comings and goings, the rendezvous, the daily battles with the elevators. Nude, long legged, her one hand rests purposely on her lap, the other raised to hold up something that’s long been dislodged. She is, for all those who pass under her stony gaze, a real, if a little mysterious, presence. Her nose is bruised, giving her the look of an antique
statue, and the white plaster of her substance has invited many a creative hand to improvise on her features with chalk and markers, which the successive supers have patiently tried to wipe clean, leaving instead a dull grey skin. The lap has enough room so that on a Friday or Saturday night you might see some drunk taking comfort. Sometimes the raised hand holds a flower or a book or an umbrella, other times something more private or obscene. And once a pious Hindu pressed the lady into the ranks of the gopis by placing beside her a brass statuette of the flute player, the gopi-seducer Krishna.