SALMA UNDOES THE METAL latch of her old, metal trunk and breathes in its slightly musty, closed-up smell. It was shipped from Bombay along with a few boxes they could not carry with them on the plane, and its delayed arrival in Canada carried with it heavy expectation. Now, loaded up with bits and pieces that have no other place in the small apartment, it sits at the foot of Salma and Shaffiq’s bed, mostly ignored. It is the one piece of furniture in the Paperwala home that is from India.
Upon landing in Canada, the Paperwalas experienced the immigrant’s optimism, the heady, hopeful feeling that everything can be better in this new place. For most this sentiment lasts perhaps half a year and then the excitement, this faith in the new country, begins to dissipate when dreams become sidelined by the wearying challenges of looking for a home, finding a job, and searching for belonging. It’s as though the new country can only participate in the charade for so long, and eventually tires from the heavy expectation placed upon it.
For Salma, her Canadian honeymoon barely lasted three weeks and she remembers it like a summer vacation. She felt like a tourist in Toronto, carrying an open map wherever she went, marveling at the new things that delighted her: the huge selection of shampoos in the Shoppers’ Drug Mart, the rows and rows of books in the quiet of the Lillian H. Smith Library, the Music Gardens by the lake. Then, homesickness descended upon her slowly, manifesting in ways she didn’t understand. At first, she found herself growing irritated by silly things, like the cost of a ten-pound sack of Basmati rice or the unfamiliar quiet outside her window at night. Later, she found herself criticizing nearly everything that was different from home: the smells of Toronto pavement after a rain, the slow pace of the downtown pedestrians, the way she had to repeat her name three times before the Canadians seemed to be able to hear it.
She tried to hide her feelings from Shaffiq, who reveled in the newness, the freshness, the adventure of being out of India.
“Look Salma, see how clean everything is here! Not a speck of dirt on these sidewalks.” This was a month after they had arrived in Canada and the family was out for a walk through Yorkville, touring the city on a sunny Saturday. Shaffiq had wanted to check out a variety of Toronto neighbourhoods and so Asima had given them a TTC map and told them to get off at Bay Station. “Everthing is so clean and white here.”
“I remember, before Asima’s family came here, people used to say that the sidewalks in North America were lined with gold,” Salma scoffed.
“Yes, now we are more realistic, no? We just want clean. And we have that much. Bombay could never be like this.”
“Mummy, is that a beggar?” Saleema asked, as they passed a panhandler sitting in front of a fancy dress shop.
“Yes, I think so. Children, don’t stare like that. I suppose there are poor people here too,” Salma whispered.
“Yes, but not like in India. Here the beggars collect money from the government and then ask for money on the street. Remember what Quaid told us?” But Salma wasn’t so sure it was true. The man on the sidewalk didn’t look so different from Bombay beggars. “And anyway,” Shaffiq continued, “There are so few of them here. In Bombay you can’t walk one meter before hearing “paisa, paisa, paisa.” Look, an ice cream shop. Children, shall we have some ice-creams?”
Although she tried, Salma could not share Shaffiq’s optimism. While he looked back with disdain at India and forward in anticipation to their lives in Canada, she could not stop thinking about what she was missing back home. How were her students doing? Was the new teacher treating them well? Had her friend Ritu had the baby yet?
During her second month in Toronto, as she willed herself to push aside her homesickness and focus on settling in Canada, her nostalgia for home morphed into an obsession with her delayed trunk. She began to fixate on its arrival and felt that perhaps she would begin to feel better, more like a happy immigrant, if she could only have this last piece of luggage with her. She would do mental inventories of the items inside, trying to remember all of her belongings yet to come. At night, she dreamed about its contents: her old college books, an ancient shawl given to her by her nani, her wedding sari. Sometimes the dreams transformed into nightmares of her prized keepsakes being lost forever: a plane crash where her trunk sinks to the bottom of the sea; a corrupt agent stealing it away and handing out her possessions to his family; a mistake in the address label that sends it forever to the opposite side of the globe.
On nights when she awoke in the dark, these bad dreams fresh in her mind, her chest and neck wet with perspiration, she told herself, it’s coming, it will all be here soon. The rest of our things will come and then we can finally settle down.
When they got the call that their shipment had arrived, Salma was elated. She watched as Shaffiq and the Pakistani driver loaded the trunk and some boxes into a cab at the airport. For a moment she wondered if they had picked up the right trunk because it seemed smaller and shabbier than the one she had remembered. But of course it was hers; it had her name on it and it had been her imagination that made the trunk larger than life. And what was inside it anyway? She scolded herself for placing so much emphasis on this trunk full of useless keepsakes. Her eyes filled with tears and Shaffiq held her hand on the way home, confused at his wife’s distress.
She unpacked the boxes first, emptying their contents into closets and drawers. After a few days, she opened the trunk and decided to leave it in the bedroom as a storage box. She didn’t need any of the superfluous things in there anyway.
Today, she digs through the trunk knowing that it holds something of value. She takes out her old teaching textbooks. She flips through them, remembering her college days. She unfolds her nani’s shawl, holding it to her nose for the smell of India beneath the mustiness. Then, she finds what she has been looking for under her marriage sari. She pulls out an old photo album, its binding weak and its cover peeling, and flips through the plastic-covered pages.
She is not entirely sure why she packed this particular photo album at the bottom of her trunk, instead of with the others that came with them on the journey. Perhaps it was because this album is filled with memories of her life before she met Shaffiq, before the children came, before she really grew up. When people get married, their belongings stop being his or hers, mine and yours. They become ours. This album is about a life before this one, a lifetime ago. It is hers.
Inside, she looks at a photo of herself as an infant. In black and white, she sees how similar she looked to Saleema at the same age. She smiles at the possibility that her eldest daughter will grow up to look very much like her. She knows that Shireen will resemble her father more, as she already does.
There are photos of herself and her older brother, Rahim, at Chowpatty beach, drinking Thum’s Up and smiling into the camera. She looks to be five or six, while he is almost a man, tall, lanky, and clumsy in his body. A few pages later there is a graduation photo of her and beside it, one of herself and Ritu standing proudly together on their final day of classes.
She continues to turn the pages and holds her breath. And there it is. A photo of Raj, herself, and two of Raj’s friends in Lonavala, during a weekend trip they took together. They stand together like pals, each woman slinging an arm around the other, looking happy. She never showed that photo to her family.
Over a year later, when she packed up her belongings to be shifted to Shaffiq’s flat after their marriage, she found the photo and slid it into her photo album. She wanted to file the memory of Raj away in this book, put the photo in its place, so to speak. Later, when she unpacked her boxes in Shaffiq’s room, she showed him the album and explained that the photo was of a group of friends she hadn’t seen in many years. He looked closely at the photo, inquiring about her friends and why they lost touch. He commented that they all seemed close at one time.
Now, she pulls the photo from its sticky plastic sheath and holds it up to the light. There she stands beside Raj, her arm around her and holding her waist, while Raj’s left hand grazes her shoulder. She can’t see her own left arm, but it looks like it is behind Maya’s back. And beside Maya is Anjali, who is pulled in close to Maya. The four women pose good-naturedly for the camera, but there is a measure of tense caution in their stances. Everyone shines white teeth smiles at the photographer, except for Raj. Her round, young face tilts toward Salma at an angle that obscures her expression.