A talent for magical thinking
Author’s desire to write ever present
Most sisters are close. Beena and Sadhana Singh are something else again.
The heroines of Saleema Nawaz’s new novel Bone & Bread aren’t twins, though in many ways they may as well be. They were born exactly two years apart, and share a further bond as orphans: their Sikh father, proprietor of a Mile End bagel shop, and their New Ageinclined mother both died when the girls were young.
Under the subsequent guardianship of their strict Sikh uncle, the girls are forced to rely on each other and identify almost mystically — to the point where, as teenagers, they stop having their periods at the same time, but for two very different reasons. Beena has become pregnant after a tryst with one of the “bagel boys” in the shop downstairs, while Sadhana has reached a crossroads in her dual obsessions of extreme athletic pursuits and anorexia.
The novel opens with Beena narrating as the adult mother of a 14-year-old son; we know from the start that Sadhana has recently died, and we suspect that the death had something to do with her eating disorder. Beena inevitably finds herself looking back over the sisters’ shared life, groping for explanations, working her way through her own sense of guilt at what happened, and dealing with her son’s growing desire to make contact with his absent (and very problematic) father.
Nawaz draws the core relationships with immaculately rendered delicacy; she gives the narrative time and space to unfold and evolve in a way that carries uncanny emotional punch. She also invests the novel with a vivid sense of place: Many sections are as Mile Endspecific as any fiction since early Mordecai Richler, though the neighbourhood has changed a lot since Duddy Kravitz ran its streets.
Bone & Bread fulfils the promise of Nawaz’s acclaimed story collection debut, Mother Superior, and then some. It is one of the events of the year on the Canadian fiction scene.
Nawaz, 32, lives with her husband and 11-year-old stepdaughter in Montreal. She grew up in Ottawa, the only child of a single mother who worked as a nursing assistant and health-care co-ordinator. (Her Indian father went back to his home country when Nawaz was two.) Reading and the desire to write were always present: she recalls a room in her mother’s house with shelves along one wall from floor to ceiling.
“There were Harlequin paperbacks, medical textbooks, Catholic catechisms, lives of the saints, mystery novels, and some classics. I learned how to read and even write a little before I started kindergarten, though, so I had lots of books of my own, too. Most of which I still have.”
The writing bug, she says, can be traced directly to an epiphany that happened in Grade 1. “We had these little notebooks that were half-blank and half-lined. They were for writing stories and illustrating them. I was impatient with (the illustrating) aspect, because I couldn’t make the pictures do what I wanted in the way that I could with the words.”
Nawaz had a Catholic childhood of a kind that was already growing rare by the time she was born. “From comparing notes with other people, it seems like my Catholic upbringing was more intense than the average,” she says. “My mother and my grandmother are very devout Catholics. We had a framed photo of the pope in the living room. And my mother volunteered at the rectory, where the priests lived, so I sometimes went with her there. We also went on pilgrimages to Ste-Anne-de-Beaupre every summer, where you go to mass five times a day.”
Though she describes herself now as “beyond lapsed,” Nawaz says some aspects of those formative years have lingered, even in her work. “I think being raised Catholic predisposes you to a kind of magical thinking that can bleed into paranoid superstitiousness, as it does for Beena and Sadhana. It’s just occurring to me now. I definitely feel susceptible to that way of thinking, even though I know better.”
After getting a degree in English at Carleton University, Nawaz went to Winnipeg to pursue an MA at the University of Manitoba; some of what she wrote there formed the basis of Mother Superior, published by Freehand Books in 2008, by which time she was living in Montreal and working in the philosophy department at McGill.
While that debut was being prepared, she won the Journey Prize for one of its stories, My Three Girls. “Sometimes, when I think about it, I still don’t quite believe it,” she recalls of her Journey recognition, an accolade that has served many of its winners as a career launching pad. “When I was writing short stories and sending them out, I was reading the Journey Prize Anthologies in awe. Even hearing that Prairie Fire was nominating my story kind of blew me away.”
Another of the debut’s stories, Bloodlines, became the seed for Bone & Bread when Nawaz decided to pick up its characters’ narratives 20 years later. “The (original) story was one of those ideas that kind of arrives in a flurry … the kind that makes writers talk about always wanting to carry around a pen and notebook,” she says. “Basically, I really wanted to write a novel, and the logical place to start seemed to be this story I had that I was already having trouble keeping down to a mere 5,000 words.”
Bone & Bread
By Saleema Nawaz House of Anansi 447 pages, $22.95