When She Was Queen by M.G. Vassanji Page A

argued) what was wrong with the kids spending time with their own kind? Her reservations arose mainly because she was losing friends. They were all professionals, married to other professionals or businessmen, and all observant community members—a class Karim had contemptuously dismissed as the “Markhamites” and the “Scarberians,” suburbanites spending their nonworking hours on the highways and in mosque. He was so passionate in his beliefs, she simply went along with them because ultimately she didn’t quite care as much, and she wanted him happy. But she had her qualms and she had her guilt. She needed her God in small doses, like normal people.
    He was, of course, a professed agnostic—all that meant was that he battled against God all the time, worried about all the problems ailing the world. What had seemed like a darkly romantic trait, a soulful detail in his character, had grown into a hopeless view of the world and an anger simmering beneath his surface. Deep in hisheart, she believed, he missed being a suburbanite, happy with his people and happy in his simple, blind faith.
    He always thought he would die young, and when he finally did so, in his fifties of stroke, it was almost with relief in his eyes, in all his demeanour—the world had been too much for him; and she too felt a semblance of relief, for he had made her so conscious of his impending death. But then, after he died, he started to haunt her—or, what was the same thing, she began to recall his presence. She heard his voice in her mind, felt his presence looming behind her, whenever she felt she was straying from the path the two of them had followed together.
    Of their three children, the two eldest were on their own, the first, a son, working at a downtown brokerage firm, and the second, a daughter, in university in the States. The youngest, a son, was eleven and had come with her to her new life; he was reserved but polite with Uncle Abid. Her husband’s attempts to teach him Urdu or interest him in the tenets of Islam had been to no avail.
    Yasmin felt loved—by Abid; by his friends and their wives; by her stepdaughter Rabbia, who occasionally came to visit them with her young family and had taken an immense liking to Yasmin.
    “Amma,” Rabbia said, “you are an angel, you’ve come like a farishta into my father’s life. He gave up so many years of his life out of respect for my mother, worrying about me—but you know what, the wait was worth it. I’ve never known him happier—
never
, if you get my meaning.”
    “I get your meaning, thank you,” Yasmin replied, with a smile. “And I’ve also … never been happier….”
    Never? And that pregnant pause, that sharp breath you took there for a moment before that glib remark …
never
? Not when the first child, Emil, was born? Not on that trip to Acapulco, or Spain—in Andalusia, in Cordoba—that second honeymoon?
    I am happy as I’ve never been in a long time. I am respected as a woman and a wife, not as a mere companion and sex partner. I am the lady of the house and a lady in a community. My husband is calm and gentle; he rarely gets annoyed, and I have yet to see him at full boil. He is not at war with the world, he is a meditative, a spiritual man.
    Visiting Pakistan was the most wonderful event of her life. Yes, it eclipsed all those memories of Andalusia, strolling with Karim through fields of orange and bougainvillea, hand in hand staring up at the awesome ceiling of the Great Mosque in Cordoba or at the palace of Alhambra, the two of them picking up their lives again when the kids were older. Of course on this trip there was no dearth of the frustrations typical of the Third World—long waits at the airport, people jumping queues, dimwitted or sleazy officials, murderous traffic. But there was such warmth in the people she met; she had never experienced anything like it in Canada. You knew these were your people, in spite of the differences; and all the history