SHAFFIQ SCRATCHES THE STUBBLE on his chin and pushes his cleaning cart sluggishly down the long hallway. It is just seven p.m., only the beginning of his shift. He rounds a corner, and then stops for a moment to retrieve a Walkman from his bag. He slips the earphones over his head and allows the Greatest Hits of Bollywood II to saturate the silence around him.
He listens for his favourite song, number two on Side A: Dum Maro Dum. Ah, here it is. He closes his eyes, imagining the black-haired, fair-skinned songstress trilling out her high-pitched longing. He sways to the tune, taking his cleaning cart as his dance partner. He opens his eyes and once again sees the bland institutional walls around him. He sighs.
He hates working the night shift. He is bitter that he is working in darkness and sleeping through the afternoon sun. He misses the world’s regular rhythms. Right now, he should be sitting at home with his family, eating his daal and rice, watching Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Somewhere deep in his heart he believes that this must be a sacrilege of some kind, a crime against nature, even.
He empties the garbage bin in the Vice President’s office. Stuck to the bottom are the two halves of a woman’s photograph. Shaffiq holds the pieces together, admiring the puzzle she makes. He decides that he likes her eyes and that she is a good-looking white woman. He pockets the torn photo and considers its possibilities. Why did the torn-up woman end up in the Vice-President’s garbage? Is he cheating on his wife, that silver-haired lady in the framed portrait on his desk? Carrying on with his cleaning, he imagines love affairs as he scrubs toilets, conflicts and ruined lives while mopping floors, and heartbreaking betrayals when emptying garbage cans. This is the kind of drama he catches on Maury at three-thirty. He wonders, not for the first time, if his thinking has become more melodramatic since moving to Canada.
He has made a habit of studying the clues left behind by the daytime workers: the half-eaten lunches, candy bar wrappers, the stains on carpets. He notices if some maverick has snuck a smoke in the bathroom, discarding the butt in the sink, even though the sign clearly says “Smoking prohibited – penalty $2000.” He looks at the beginnings of notes and memos that get crumpled up in mid-sentence. He uses all these clues to construct stories about the people who work here. His sleuthing helps pass the time and relieves the monotony of his work.
He’ll bring the photo home and show it to Salma. She’ll get a laugh out of it. Then he’ll store it away in his top drawer along with the other bits of clues and curiosities he has picked up at work: a going-away card for Louise who retired (which unfortunately had very few well-wishes), a crumpled bowtie he found at the top of a recycling bin, and Mr. Sneider’s discarded Atavan prescription. He doesn’t like to throw these things away.
Upstairs, Nasreen says good-bye to her last client of the day. She stretches her arms over her head, arching her long back and then sits down heavily at her desk to write her notes. This task prolongs her workday by twenty minutes, but she prefers to complete her reports before going home rather than leaving them for the next day. She gathers together all her client files and arranges them alphabetically in a steel cabinet. She collects the stray pens and pencils on her desk and corrals them into their places, sliding open drawers and shutting them again efficiently. Her eyes linger a moment on a gold box on top of her desk, its lustre and fine details pleasing her. She moves it slightly, centering its position. Satisfied with the state of her desk, she switches off her computer and desk lamp. In the half-light of her office, the gold box shines, beckoning her. She reaches for it, opens the lid slightly and then snaps it shut again. She grabs her coat and bag and hastily steps out into the empty corridor.
Shaffiq stops his cart in front of the washrooms near the building’s rear exit. He takes off his Walkman and selects his cleaning supplies. There are three different bottles of identical-looking aquamarine fluid that he must spray, pour, and wipe over everything. The solvents cause his stomach to rumble, his lunch and bile coming up for an instant, before being swallowed down again.
He hears footsteps coming down the corridor. Checking his watch, he sees that it is just past nine o’clock. Who is here this late? Usually, just as he arrives for his shift, the last bunch of daytime workers are rushing to the back doors, eager for the sane, cool air outside.
Except her. He has seen her many times since he started working here three months ago. She has always stood out to him. Not only because she works so late, but because she doesn’t seem anxious to leave this place. And, of course he recognizes Home in this woman. She has those features so like the women in his family: the round-oval face with the strong, but not too large nose; the full lips; the dark almond eyes that will grow creases in their corners the more she laughs. She has long black hair that almost reaches her bottom, so much like his mother’s. Indeed, she does remind him of his mother. Only, this girl is blessed with height; he estimates that she must be what, five-four, five-five?
Despite her familiarity, there is also something vaguely foreign about her. It is in the way she walks with that busy, hurried tightness in the hips. There is also that disinterested, closed look in her eyes. Shaffiq guesses that maybe she has lived here longer than he, and perhaps has become more Canadian too. He wonders if his daughters will become like this one day, possessing the faces of their elders but the expressions and strides of strangers.
Recently, he has tried to be friendly to her, to say hello, to look directly into her dark eyes the way people do in Canada. A few nights ago, while mopping near the back door, he said to her, “Hello, hello! How are you tonight?” At first he wondered if he was being too forward, if she took offence at the question. Her eyes darted between his face and the back door as though she were afraid of him. She answered him with a curt “I’m fine thank you,” her tone telling him that she was not scared, but irritated, and so he lowered his eyes to the grey linoleum and continued his cleaning.
Tonight, he decides to try again. As he bends down to empty a garbage can, he sees her polished black boots approaching, her presence filling the long hallway. Straightening slightly, he looks over his shoulder and beams at her with a broad gap-toothed grin.
“Hello, hello! How are you? What is your name? I see you often here.” She continues walking but slows her pace a little. She settles her gaze on him for just a moment.
“Nas. Actually, it’s really Nasreen.” She picks up her pace and is out the doors before he can tell her that his name is Shaffiq. Before he can tell her that he comes from India and has been here for over two years. That he got this job in July, almost three months ago, after looking for so long. That he isn’t really a janitor. He doesn’t know why, but he wants to tell her all this and more. Like how he looked for work everyday until he felt a kind of helplessness and humiliation he has never felt before. Like how useless he felt while his wife and children left every morning and returned each afternoon to him sitting on the couch. He doesn’t say any of this. A gust of cold air let in by her departure chills him. After a moment, he shrugs off Nasreen’s bad manners and finishes the bathroom. So now he knows her name, at least. He chooses to see this as progress.
Nasreen pulls her long coat around her, shivering in the cold, the janitor’s sweet smell of patchouli still lingering in her nostrils. She likes the scent and wonders for a moment if it is his cologne, but then registers the smell as incense. He must burn a lot of it at home, she thinks. She sniffs the cuff of her own coat and smells damp wool.
The streetcar lumbers up to her stop and she races across the street, dodging a man on a bicycle. She boards the streetcar and heads toward the back where there are a few empty seats. She feels the fabric of the seat before sitting down (you never know who has emptied their bladder at the back of a streetcar) and then settles herself behind a man on a cell phone, talking too loudly to someone.
“Well, we just passed Beverley, no, now we are at Huron,” the man says. “Do you want me to meet you at Bathurst, or should I walk the three blocks over?” Nasreen bristles and moves to another seat further back to get away from the cell phone tour guide.
Now, in a quieter seat, she reviews her day, trying to remember the stream of clients she saw. How many? She lists them off in her mind. First there was the women’s anxiety group, or WAG for short. Then there was Josie, Angela, Miranda, and Cora, back to back in the late afternoon. That’s six hours of counseling, she calculates, pressing her throbbing temples.
It was Miranda who really wore out Nasreen today. At least she was cooperative, and Nasreen appreciates that in a client, especially when she is tired. And she has felt tired for a long time now. Overtired. Maybe burned out, even. I have to start going back to the gym, she thinks. Get myself in shape.
At Palmerston, the streetcar jerks to an abrupt stop, interrupting Nasreen’s thoughts. She sits up in her seat, and along with the other passengers, cranes her neck left and right to see the source of the trip’s disruption. A middle-aged man staggers across the street slowly, wearing only a pair of boxers and a red Santa hat. He’s yelling something, his muscled arms raised in some kind of victorious salute to himself. A woman in an SUV pulls up beside the streetcar and begins honking at the man. The other streetcar passengers, who at first were quiet, perhaps unsure how to assess the situation, begin chuckling and talking amongst themselves about the seemingly crazy or intoxicated man blocking the road.
The woman in the seat ahead of her has opened the window wide, leaning her head out to get a better look at the spectacle. Nasreen pulls her wool coat around her against the chill of the autumn evening. She wants to admonish the passengers-turned-audience, wants to tell them to keep quiet, to shut their windows. She has seen this scantily-clad Santa near the entrance of the hospital before and she feels protective of him, wishes she could stop his humiliating performance.
Eventually, the man stumbles across the road and clears the way. The streetcar lumbers forward, and Nasreen turns in her seat to see the man talking animatedly to pedestrians on the sidewalk. Each gives him a wide berth as they pass by him.
She turns back around in her seat, and rubs her neck. There is a familiar strain there, an ache that travels from her jawbone to her shoulder. As she massages the tension there, her mind shifts back to Miranda.
“When I was a kid, my father and I would practically do acrobatics to drag my mother out of bed. That went on for years until she finally got diagnosed with depression,” Miranda told her, taking in a deep breath, her pink cheeks filling with air. “After being medicated, she started to feel better and began to take part in family stuff again. We were all really relieved about that. Then two years ago, a day before my birthday, she went out and stepped in front of a casino tour bus,” Miranda explained, with little emotion.
Nasreen sometimes marvels at the ease with which some of her clients are able to reveal shameful secrets, intimate details, and harrowing stories. Nasreen nodded at Miranda and tried to look empathetic, the two Therapist Skills she relies on most when she can’t think of anything to say. She wondered how she would bring Miranda back to the task at hand. She still had the rest of the intake forms to fill out.
A group of East Asian girls gets on the streetcar, giggling loudly and Nasreen watches them settle into nearby seats. They wear the funky orange tones and shiny synthetics that Nasreen recognizes as teeny-bopper club wear. She feels boxed in by their warm cheery bodies. She shifts her hips and tote bag to make more room for herself and the girl beside her interprets this to be as an invitation to take even more space. Nasreen studies the girl’s amber plastic skirt and then looks out the window, steering her mind back to Miranda.
“I guess I started drinking when I was fifteen or sixteen. I began nipping into the basement bar. Nothing serious. Anyway, I didn’t start to drink heavily until two years ago, after she killed herself.”
“I see,” Nasreen said, knowing that this response was not quite adequate.
After Miranda left, Nasreen locked her office door and struggled to pull open the bottom drawer of her steel filing cabinet. The old, stiff drawer resisted and so she crouched down, putting all her weight into the effort. Finally it jerked open, hurling her backwards onto her ass. Undeterred, she steadied herself on her haunches and searched through some loose papers and books. Underneath she found the three chocolate bars she had hidden there. She hesitated for a moment, giving cursory attention to resisting them. Then she grabbed them all, kicked the drawer shut and mindlessly ingested them while contemplating the case note for Miranda’s visit.
“How do I summarize the pain of a whole life and a mother’s suicide?” She wondered.
“What?” The teenager in plastic asks her. Nasreen orients herself back to the present, on the streetcar, among the girls. Did she say that out loud? Nasreen looks at the girl’s black-lined eyes. Embarrassed, she pulls herself up, sees that they have reached Dovercourt. She pushes past the girl and moves toward the back door. It’s OK, she tells herself, my stop is just two blocks away. I could use the exercise anyway. She rings the bell and steps off onto the cracked sidewalk, plodding briskly across College and then down Donald Street to her apartment. As she climbs the steps to the door, she hears the recognizable mewing of Id, who waits noisily for her dinner. Damn, Nasreen thinks, I forgot to fill his bowl this morning.
Having cleaned half his floors, Shaffiq pushes his cart to a patient waiting area. He walks around the chairs and table, stooping to collect countless coffee cups from tables and overflowing garbage receptacles. He has never seen so many of them in his life. But then, it was never his job to hunt, gather, and then throw them out before. He finds the white cups everywhere, in lounges, in staff rooms, in waiting areas, in offices. He hates the smell of coffee, being a man true to his heritage, a tea drinker. Even in India the coffee is not this bitter, acrid liquid. Rather, there is cafelatte, thick and creamy and sweet. In the waiting room he stacks the magazines and wipes down the tables. He looks around to inspect the room, and decides that the vacuuming can wait another day. According to his supervisor, he is supposed to vacuum daily in the high traffic areas, but who can tell the difference? He wheels his cart toward the offices.
Sometimes, while cleaning offices, he glances over desks, reading scrawled case-notes about depression, or anxiety, or family problems. He knows that these notes are confidential and that he shouldn’t be reading them, but he can’t help himself. He has even opened patient files left on desks, caressing their cardboard covers before reading their mysteries inside. Sometimes the entries are rather dull: “John came to the appointment suitably attired. He states his mood was low all month, and shoplifted once this week.” Sometimes the notes are stranger and more interesting to him: “Allison says that she hears voices while traveling on the TTC. She reports feeling afraid to travel by subway, but not by bus.” He wonders about these Canadian people and why they seem to have so many problems. Such complicated problems. He has never heard of these things back home. Yes, of course some of the men in his family sometimes drank a little, and once in a while he heard about people’s marital problems. But hearing voices? Fears of transit? Depression? What do these white people have to feel depressed about anyway? After all, he and his family have been through so much and they are not going around depressed and drinking and shoplifting.
He wonders what a counsellor would write about him. “Shaffiq is a nosy man who hates his job, and came to the interview dressed in janitor’s clothes.” Or, “Shaffiq has a florid imagination and thinks jealous thoughts about people who work from nine to five.” He laughs out loud at his own joke.
He lets himself into one of the offices, scans the room and empties a garbage can containing a half-eaten (tuna?) sandwich, a coffee cup (no big surprise) and some plastic wrap. Nothing so interesting. Looking around, he sees that the plants are dry and wilted. On the desk is a muddle of paper, pens, and folders. Back home, he had a little cubicle, which he kept scrupulously tidy and organized. If he had had the privilege of such a nice, big office, surely it would have been better kept than this. He turns off the light, shuts the door, and pushes his cart further down the hallway.
Nasreen doesn’t go to bed until after Springer. She likes the late night, loves to stay up into the darkness, and although the TV is raging about lesbians who have cheated on their boyfriends and girlfriends, she considers this her quiet time. When the phone rings, she thinks she might ignore it, but then senses that something could be wrong. She mutes the TV and answers it after the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
“Nasreen, Oh good, it’s your father. You’re home.”
“What’s up, Dad? You’re usually in bed by now.”
“Yes, but I just had to tell you my news. I called earlier and left you a message. Didn’t you get it?”
“I forgot to check my messages today,” Nasreen lies. She listened to all her messages earlier, but skipped over his.
“Well, today I won a trip for two to any destination of my choice! Can you believe it? Anywhere in the world! It was from a contest I entered online!” Nasreen’s father retired last year and has started using words like “online.” Before his retirement, he barely knew how to use a typewriter. Now with the whole day for leisure, his favourite pastime has become entering contests and trying to get “free stuff” on the “net.”
“Oh, that’s great Dad. Where are you gonna go?”
“Well of course I’m going Home. You know we haven’t visited since a few years before your mom died. I want to see everyone again. Why don’t you come with me?”
“Really? A trip to India? Well, I uh…,” she stammers. This she wasn’t expecting.
“Everyone will want to see you too. We’ll have a great time,” he says enthusiastically.
“Gee Dad, but –”
“And we don’t get to spend much time together these days. You haven’t come to visit me for awhile. This would be a nice time for us to be together too.”
“Oh I don’t know. When were you going to go? I don’t know if I can take time off work,” Nasreen says, tiredly.
“But it is a free trip! Surely you can plan to take time off. You work so hard. You really should take some time off. Don’t you want to go to India?” he asks, in a tone that sounds like a plea to her.
“Let me think about it. Why don’t I call you tomorrow after I’ve checked out my vacation time?”
“Fine, fine. Think about it then. I hope you come with me. Who else could I ask otherwise? You know, since you mother died, I haven’t taken any vacations because I didn’t want to go alone.” Nasreen feels a familiar pain in her sternum that her therapist aptly labelled Daughter Guilt.
“Well, thanks for asking me, Dad. I’ll call you tomorrow, OK?”
“Goodnight, then. Sleep well, Nasreen.”
“Goodnight.” She hears his sigh just before she hangs up the phone.
She stares at the silent TV, wondering what she should do. Two women who don’t look like lesbians to her are swinging at each other while three beefy bouncers try to separate them. The audience goes wild.
She considers her father’s proposal. After all, she has been thinking about taking a vacation, just not with her father, and not India. The last family trip was not much fun for her. She was treated like a twelve-year-old by her relatives who seemed to want to feed her all the time. She got sick a lot. She couldn’t understand anything anyone said to her and then felt embarrassed when her cousins laughed at her for not knowing Gujarati. There were endless visits to family she didn’t know and more eating to do. She felt bullied by the persistent questions: “What are you up to now?” “When are you getting married?” “Are you looking for a boy in India?” Often she felt like she was being scoped out as someone’s nephew’s potential bride.
Nasreen turns off the TV and heads to bed. She rolls herself into the down quilt and dark blue sheets her friends bought for her last year on her thirtieth birthday. Id joins her, curling up on the pillow next to her, the side that has been vacant since the break-up. Before long, Nasreen is asleep and dreaming about swimming in the Indian Ocean with her mother and father. She is wearing an orange salwar kameez, the thin dupatta floating up around her body. The sun is warm on her face. Her mother does the butterfly stroke, splashing away from her while her father treads water nearby. She feels light and calm. She floats over to some steep wooden steps and climbs them. As she emerges from the water she realizes she is now naked and that big, ugly, brown bugs are stuck like leeches to her skin. She tries frantically to pull them off her arms, legs, and stomach. She shouts for help, but her mother has drifted out with the tide and her father is nowhere to be seen.
At four-thirty-five in the morning, Shaffiq boards the twenty-four hour bus that will deliver him to his home, his bed, his sleeping family. Shaffiq counts his blessings that he only has to walk twenty minutes to get to Ossington where an all-night bus passes every fifteen minutes. He feels bad for his co-worker Ravi who has to spend an hour in a coffee shop waiting for the subway to start running each morning.
There is only one other passenger on the bus, a young disheveled man who sleeps uncomfortably, his head bumping against the cold window whenever the driver presses on the accelerator. Shaffiq passes him, smelling the alcohol reeking from the man’s pores. He mutters a judgmental “chaa” under his breath, guessing that the man is probably on his way home after too much boozing. But then Shaffiq has a moment of sympathy for the man and begins to worry that maybe he will miss his stop, or that he has already slept well past his destination and will awake on the wrong side of town. Shaffiq looks around and notices that they are almost at St. Clair. He has just eight more stops to go and he knows this because counting stops is the only way that he has managed to stay awake on these pre-dawn rides. Should he wake the man? But what if he hasn’t missed his stop and Shaffiq has interfered unnecessarily?
A block away from his apartment building, Shaffiq rings the bell and the young man stirs. Cautiously, Shaffiq averts his gaze. Men don’t like to be stared at in their sleep. He finds his way to the back door and down the steps of the bus.
His building’s dimly lit lobby is deserted at this hour. He checks the mailbox, hoping for a blue air mail envelope from his ma, but the box is empty and he remembers that Salma already picked up the mail yesterday. He sometimes forgets the many small tasks of the day that pass him by while he sleeps. He taps the elevator “up” button and watches it slowly descend from the eighteenth floor, the indicator lights blinking teasingly at him. He resists an urge to yell “Why is this elevator always stuck at the top floor at five-o-five every morning?” Finally, the doors open and the old elevator carries him upwards, wheezing with the effort. At the fifth floor he steps out, turns right and walks what feels like an eternity to his door. He digs into his pocket for his keys and soundlessly turns the lock. He leaves his coat, shoes, and bag in the small foyer and tiptoes through the quiet apartment to his bedroom. In the dark he slips off his clothes and slithers gently into bed. Despite his slow and careful movements, Salma turns over and says,
“Hello, Shaffiq.”
“Go back to sleep, Salma dear.”
“Wait,” she says groggily, her voice thick with sleep, “first tell me what strange thing you picked up and brought home today.” Then, turning onto her stomach, she resumes her snoring. He strokes her head gently, willing her back to the depths of her dreaming. He scans her round, relaxed body tangled in the sheets. There is a quickening in his groin, a memory of warm pleasures.