Snapshots
SNAPSHOT
A BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO shows a dark-skinned baby propped up on a wooden bench, like a pew or perhaps an institutionalized chair, the type that can be easily wiped clean. The child’s black hair is cropped short, the bangs uneven and her chubby arms hang straight by her sides. She looks doll-like, in a white dress—perhaps a christening dress—and old-fashioned baby shoes. Her black eyes are averted to one side, as if there’s more than one person in the room, or maybe is frightened. She is frowning, perhaps on the verge of tears.
I know the picture was taken at the North York Children’s Aid Society because the date and location are handwritten on the back of the photo. The report detailing my adoptive history states when I was eleven months my foster mother died. It’s an undocumented mystery where I ended up for the next seven months, before transracial adoptive proceedings began with the Gilmour’s. Perhaps wherever I was, with whoever I was, added to a distancing from myself, not just in regards to ethnicity but also in how I attached to others, thus cultivating my lifelong search for connection and belonging.
SNAPSHOT
A BROWN-SKINNED GIRL is standing stiffly in front of a red brick school with her long legs spread wide and her gangly arms hanging at her sides, fingers turned inwards. She is slim, some would say skinny, and wears a boyish red checked shirt over her flat chest, tucked into blue jeans with a low waist. Her shiny black hair with straight bangs is cut to shoulder length and her head is tilted to the side with a half-smile. Her almost-black eyes seem to follow you.
Growing up, I was often the only non-white person in the small towns where we lived. When I was six or seven, my adoptive parents told me I had been born in Toronto and my ‘original’ parents were from the West Indies. I had eagerly run downstairs to find West Indies on our world globe and mistakenly thought my ethnicity was West Indian. At the time, I didn’t know the difference between ethnicity and country of origin.
When I rode the school bus to high school, a teenage boy regularly spat at me, his spittle hitting my jacket and slowly gyrating to the floor. Every school day my stomach lurched when I climbed the bus steps and stumbled to my seat. The bus driver and other students ignored the whole thing. Maybe they didn’t know what to do. I certainly didn’t.
SNAPSHOT
TWO PEOPLE STAND BEHIND A WOODEN TABLE on which sits a small square cake with congratulations written in pink icing. The man, his black hair swooped back, is tall and wears a smoky blue suit with red and navy striped tie. His gleam-white smile stretches from ear to ear revealing two perfectly molded dimples. Long tapering fingers rest on top of the woman’s hand, pressing an ornate knife against the cake. The young woman stands slightly in front and wears a lacy top with matching long white skirt. Her smile isn’t as big, looks hesitant, certainly wispy, but her almost-black eyes look hopeful. The photo isn’t great, the light behind, too bright, showing their skin as deep brown, his almost black. The bystanders look like wraiths peering from the shadows.
I married Reverend Sanjay Jaikaran at the Peoples Church in Toronto, coincidentally, the same weekend my ex-boyfriend—my first love who I still loved—complied with his family’s wishes and travelled to mainland China to marry a woman chosen by his traditional Chinese parents.
My adoptive parents had braved the Toronto traffic to attend our small wedding, which was difficult for them being from smaller places and of the age of most grandparents. Growing up, my adoptive mother would often imply that white was better. “Look how white your hands are!” after I had a bath or, “a true Canadian is white” or say I looked too Indian when I tied my hair back. They thought the marriage was a mistake. Sanjay was too foreign, too dark, too unknown.
When Sanjay with his deep brown skin said he and his family were South Asian from Guyana, I decided to adopt his cultural and racial heritage as my own. They were immigrants with brown skin. They had understood why one stays silent when they should really shout. My heart, both broken and full, said “yes”. I had found my people at last.
“I’m no longer alone,” I said to Sanjay. “I’ll be a Jaikaran now.”
SNAPSHOT
A YOUNG WOMAN LIES ON A COUCH pushed up against a window framed by huge trees. Shadowed sunbeams give the illusion of time paused, perhaps waiting for a better moment. The woman’s skin looks pale, ghost-like, in her shorts and crumpled t-shirt, the leaf-print blanket pushed to the side. Her almost-black eyes are half open, she is smiling, not a big smile, like she doesn’t quite feel it but wants to be polite.
“Wake up sleepy head,” a voice said. In my dream I was speaking Mandarin to my ex-boyfriend, who kept wavering in and out. He had hoped I’d learn to speak the language of his people. His people. Who were my people? Why was he telling me to wake up? My legs were caught, wedged somehow, stuck. Something was pushing the air around my face. Tingles shot down my legs to my feet. Danger. I creaked open my eyes like a pine cone to the sun. My body was covered in sweat, my legs twisted in the bedclothes. Beth, barely peeking over five feet, was leaning over me waving a newspaper. The voice had been hers. The newspaper crackled and snapped like it was trying to tell me something.
“You need an apartment and then things will be much better,” Beth said like she had just read my fortune. “There’s an ad for a basement apartment in the Jewish newspaper.” I closed my eyes again and groaned. After my sister and some friends had helped me ‘disappear’ from my life with Sanjay, Beth had offered me sanctuary in her tiny shared apartment. I knew she wasn’t kicking me out but trying to move me along, get me back on my feet.
I had been stumbling through my days for a month now, not sleeping or eating much, and while astute at feigning wellness, was barely managing to function at work. When I attended Sunday church service there was a rustle-silence at my approach, like the wind’s passage through a forest. An aversion of eyes, their smiles like hiccups. I hadn’t just left a marriage, I had left a Reverend, without any attempt at reconciliation. “What would Jesus do?” I regularly mumbled to myself.
My nerves had become gnarled from my insatiable need to look over my shoulder for Sanjay. He knew where I worked and when at Beth’s, I was terrified he’d follow me home. I had recently moved into Mrs. Becker’s basement apartment in a neighbourhood full of fences and security cameras. She was a widow who needed someone to keep her company in the immense brick home her late husband had built in the Bathurst/St Clair region of Toronto. The basement was half decent aside from the earwigs with their flash-scuddle-dash and for the looming threat of extension cord plugged into extension cord plugged into extension cord. Mrs. Becker liked to bake challah, the aroma drifting downstairs like her ambient loneliness.
In order to access my apartment, I needed to enter Mrs. Becker’s back door and walk by her sitting room. Mrs. Becker asked me about my day and told me about hers, her grief a weight upon my grief.
SNAPSHOT
A WOMAN WEARING A PINK BALL CAP, her white-black hair askew, wears black shorts with a colour-splashed tank top and has her arms wrapped around an aspen tree. Its greenish-white trunk ridged with black scars, seems sturdy enough even with its Pisa-lean and dribbly sap. The woman’s eyes are closed and her smooth brown cheek presses against the bark as if listening for a heartbeat or a connection of sorts. Her purple shoed feet embrace the stony ground as if they’ve been planted.
Trees share nutrients and some have interconnected roots preventing individual trees from being knocked over by storms. No one suspected that Sanjay’s violence had branched into my inside parts, clogging rational thought, leaving room only for the fear that I had carried since childhood. The fear that sustained me. But when I needed help, my sister, friends and Mrs. Becker had sheltered me, creating a community where I felt safe.
I felt rooted. Connected. I was not alone.
Charmaine Arjoonlal (she/her) is a writer and social worker who lives with her husband and two spoiled dogs in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. When she’s not squeezing in writing, she enjoys hanging out in coffee shops, biking, and swimming in cold lakes. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Reckon Review, MUTHA, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. You can visit Charmaine’s website at charmainearjoonlal.wordpress.com.
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