My grandfather had not been keeping well. He suffered from a chronic cough. Nor was my grandmother working at my parents’ restaurant. She had a knee problem and it was too hard for her to stay standing while kneading the dough for the rotis. My father bought an industrial-size dough maker to replace her and he found it did the job, quicker. Effectively, my father had shafted my grandmother. Retrenched.
My parents remained very busy. My mother managed the business administratively while my father experimented with the menu. In the Summer Review, he was mentioned as one of the city’s most innovative chefs. The restaurant itself looked great. My mother had redesigned the menu as well as the interior. She had placed a steel counter around the bar, stainless steel lamps along the walls, and not a sign remained of Taj Mahal-style archways or elephants running wild along the headboards.
All this to explain that when I needed to talk it made good sense to bypass my parents and head directly to the grandparents, who had moved to a two-bedroom condominium with a large balcony near the Lachine Canal.
I must have walked in looking a bit down. My grandfather immediately perked up. “Ah! I see storm clouds!” We sat down to chat, but he treated the occasion as if we were preparing to climb a great mountain, attempting to break through the hovering fog and on to where things were calm and safe. My grandmother brought us a bowl of chips and two beers, informed me she had started to take swimming lessons at the local pool, and left.
My grandfather asked about “Nathuram,” the fascist Gandhi-killer. I told him Nat was struggling in his acting career and I hadn’t seen him for a while. I added, though, that he seemed to be maintaining himself in good physical shape. “Maybe,” I surmised, “he has a new girlfriend.”
“He visited us, you know. We had a long chat.”
“Really? Nat was here?”
“Yes, for several hours. Asking questions. About Afghanistan. He also brought some Muscat wine, which he knows I like.”
I was mystified. Nat had visited my grandparents, on his own, in their new place? It was nice that he had brought over the bottle of wine, but why? Then I realized that I had been over to visit his mom and taken her Armenian sweets my mother had made. Nothing unusual there. But it wasn’t like Nat. He wasn’t a chatterer. He was a doer.
My grandpa was revolted by the war in Afghanistan. Maybe he had driven the conversation to its unusual length, wanting to vent? Had Nat merely been a convenient outlet for his streaming opinions? It was possible. These inferences went by me in the first nanosecond. I had come to discuss Myra, or Malia, or both, to gather the wisdom my grandfather might offer regarding the weird and wonderful feelings she caused in me. I was a transforming nerd looking for mentoring—but mostly courage. My grandfather gently tolerated it. However, he only wanted, once again, to talk about Afghanistan.
“I told your friend that Canada had no reason to be there except to play second fiddle to the United States.”
“Where?” I was distracted.
“In Kandahar!” he said. And he continued, while he wheezed in a disturbing way.
“I explained to him the real reason. The Tories believe that military spending provides employment, jobs, and industrial growth. That’s cow manure, you know.” The filmy skin on one side of his face quivered. “This is all about the guilt of not having fought in Iraq. Do you really think young men and women are being sent off to die because this government thinks there are terrorists in the hills and caves of Afghanistan planning to attack us? Rubbish! This Afghan war has no meaning for Canada’s young. None. Besides, the more you bomb their hills, the more terrorists you grow in our cities. The fellows who carried out the attacks weren’t living in caves. They were living in France, England, Germany, and elsewhere, before they came legally to the United States.” He said all this with great energy, enjoying his beer. I noticed, however, the wheezing was increasing. I looked again at the filmy side of his face. What really did that to him? He had never actually told me.
He pointed to a picture perched on one side of his desk that I knew well. It was a faded grey shot of a massive gate, like a mini Arc de Triomphe, with a rickety tin sign hanging on it that said ‘Khyber Pass’. Under it were men in long Afghan tunics wearing huge headgear standing beside a few mules. They had Enfield rifles slung on their backs. A few had daggers visible beneath their tunics.
He used to show me the same picture when I was a kid, telling me that the people who lived there wouldn’t let anybody pass if they hadn’t come in peace. ‘The Khyber Pass’, he’d repeat ominously, eyebrows raised. In West End High when I did a presentation on Afghanistan—I don’t know why I chose Afghanistan—I, too, raised my eyebrows while telling the whole class that no one would pass through those gates unless they came in peace. My teacher, Mr. Leblanc, was suitably impressed and gave me high marks. From then on, he called me Khyber Pass when we met in the corridor. I liked that, considering it respectful, not derisive.
Nat had attended my high school presentation and asked a lot of smart questions. I had even taken him back to meet my grandfather to further discuss the subject. That was years ago. But now, for some unexplained reason, he had come again, and this time on his own.
“No one will win against a mountain tribal people,” my grandfather was saying. “They fight generation after generation, hidden away in the mountains, swooping down with fresh waves of their children until, exhausted, you find no reason to continue.”
“So, it’s a lost cause?” I said. “Try convincing the media.”
“You won’t beat them. No helicopters, drones, missiles, MANPADS, or Hummers will defeat them. They’ll sit in their caves and snipe away at you one by one, and if at night you’re not careful, they’ll come down to slit your throat and hang your head from a post for everyone to see.”
He pulled out a map from inside an old National Geographic and put his finger down on it firmly. “Here, in this pass, in a village called Daar, they make every kind of gun you can imagine. They even made antique guns like Gatlings if that’s what makes you happy. Otherwise, they make AK47s, Uzis, Mausers, Brownings, Glocks, you name it. Anything that makes you happy!” He laughed and wheezed simultaneously. “There are lathes in every hut and little kids hammering out cartridges before loading them with gunpowder; I tell you, they’re ready to meet any army, which is what the Soviets learned when the Afghans started trading poppies to buy shoulder launched missiles and turned the Pass into a tank cemetery. For us to pretend we’re on the side of a just cause is sheer folly. Everything that the Americans have brought in there from pancake makers and toilets to baseball bats and Coleman stoves will be packed up in 53-foot containers and shipped back or simply melted down by the Taliban. By the way, how is work going?”
I ignored that particular question and started on about Myra, telling him that she was a very attractive but eccentric person. He listened patiently and then said, “It’s important to have friends who are stable.” He went to get another beer for each of us. He was, I knew, thinking things through.
“What did you mean by ‘stable’?” I asked as he returned.
“You know, there comes a certain point in time when you can’t blame the things that don’t turn out right on your parents.” He said this looking at me. I thought he was going to bring up my dad, but he didn’t. He actually meant it in a more general sense.
“There used to be a time when parents controlled everything the child did right up to college and even beyond. If you were from an upper-class family and your parents were well educated they’d set the standards and you’d follow, like getting into good colleges, fighting for scholarships, all of that. It’s not like that anymore. Nowadays kids are more influenced by their friends. They’ve developed this strange notion that parents are an accidental happening, something that gets in the way, an impediment to independence. Social workers talk about broken homes but don’t seem to understand that society itself is broken. It’s society that sets standards nowadays.”
“What’s your point?” I asked.
“Well, you’d mentioned that Myra wanted to be an actress and that you felt she turned hot and cold, on and off.” I had described her that way. But it also occurred to me that Nat might have suggested certain ideas about her to him.
“People don’t want attention just for the sake of it. They want to be loved because maybe they never got the attention they needed. So, the child seeks a kind of loving attention when they’re older. Now if they’ve been loved and taken care of when they were kids, then there would be no real reason for them to be unstable. So, if she’s being hot and cold, it’s because she’s trying out different roles. It has to do with social mores. In her mind, she is testing the waters. She wants to be sure, probably because she has no one to fall back on.” For sure, Nat had spoken to him.
Having said that, he began to cough. I waited for him to settle down. He looked pale. “That’s what led her to become an actress, a profession where she’s encouraged to walk in and out of roles, each on a trial basis. You said she’s the daughter of a well-known critic, didn’t you? You said she doesn’t get along with her mother and her father has been long gone, yes? So, I think she missed out on a few things in life and doesn’t feel stable or doesn’t even know what stability means. Her interests may not be yours.”
My grandfather was no doubt from another generation, but his observations struck me as worth considering. I didn’t want to argue with him on any finer points or try to make too much of it, either.
I walked all the way downtown from the canal and passed by my parents’ restaurant. I looked in and saw my father greeting people, a smile on his face, tilting his head to the side and pleasing the entire world with the affected, maudlin ways of a charming, humble, Eastern man, which he was not. I chose not to enter. I finally relented and took the subway at the student-infested Guy-Concordia station, riding it toward the toilet-walled, destitute, and homeless St-Laurent station. I emerged, turned the corner and started for home. In the distance, I clearly saw two women stomping down opposite sides of the street. One wore a black dress that shimmered shapelessly. She was moving away from me. The other wore a white jacket and large sunglasses, and she was striding gauntly towards me.