Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab by Shani Mootoo Page B

bird baths, the avocado tree, the lime tree, the mango trees, the anthurium lilies, the orchids, the philodendron as large as a living room in a downtown Toronto apartment, the dracaena reaching up as high as a billboard, even that lizard, the butterflies, roaches, spiders, mosquitoes, beetles, bees and birds. These are all more mine, I thought, than not. They are more mine than all the birds in Toronto, than the snakes and turtles at Leslie Street Spit, the orange-and-black butterflies bobbing about my second-floor balcony in early fall will ever,
can
ever be. More mine than the yellow-jacket wasps that tap their antennae on the screen door of the balcony of my apartment on Bergamot Avenue in Toronto’s East End.
    The pool was the first built in our neighbourhood. Now it seemed so much smaller than it had when I was a child and swimming its length had been a test of strength, courage and worth. Half a dozen strokes and I would conquer it now. The water was crystal clear that day and the sun ignited the ripples caused by the breeze. Everything sparkled.
    I sat on its steps, taking in the warm sun and reflecting that I had been living “abroad,” away from my parents, for about twenty years by this time. Mum and Dad had been very young when they had Gita and me, and I was now older than they had been when I immigrated to Canada. Yet I was their child when I left, and so many years later, with so much distance between them and me, I continued to be their child, an obvious fact that seemed almost incomprehensible and miraculous, for I was in many ways a stranger to them, and they to me. I reflected that no walls had been torn down or built up in our house, the flooring remained the same, the parameters of the yard were unchanged. But the trees I remembered as saplings now had trunks I could barely wrap my arms around. The house had been painted numerous times since it had been built some thirty years before, but always in the same off-white colour. Some pieces of furniture had changed, but the living room was the same as the day I first left for Toronto, and so was my bedroom, and my parents’ bedroom, and the library in which Gita and I had studied and where Dad still kept a desk—except that it now held a computer. The physical aspect of the place had not changed. And neither had our relationship to oneanother. Yes, I was still their child, and my parents were still my parents, regardless of all that we did not witness of each other’s lives when we were apart.
    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 thatI could glimpse from behind pillars. I carefully scanned the face of every man in the church, my heart thumping in fear, and in my