Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,38
baby isn’t any reason for someone to leave their son and their wife they married in a proper(ish) Hindu ceremony, the one where the woman dresses in a red sari and walks with her groom around the fire. But a pretty, poor servant like Ma and a daughter like me? He didn’t even come up to meet me when I was born. In the baby photos it’s just Aunty K, Ma and me. And later, Pammy and Columbus. That’s my family.
This brother, now. Junior. I’ve never met him before, but I know he’s around my age. We’ve been talking. I’ve known about him my whole life, but Dad always kept us apart. I think Ma wanted him to. I’m trying to work up the courage to ask what I really want to ask about Dad in Trinidad. But I’m distracted. It’s all so new. We talk every night for a week. About school, mostly. I tell him about Muay Thai, but he can’t get it straight from MMA. “So there’s no cage?” he says, sounding kind of disappointed. He’s not even a year older than me.
I send him some videos, and a clip from my last fight. It takes him a long time to respond. “You look like Dad.”
The way he says it confuses me, like we shared him or something. Like he belonged to the both of us. This had never occurred to me, before, but I guess that’s what you’d think, maybe, if you didn’t know what it was like in that co-op townhouse me and Ma share, and sometimes shared with him. That we’d been a family of a kind, and that he’d been a big part of it, or had an equal third. That some part of him belonged to me as much as it did to my brother I’ve never laid eyes on. I don’t have any pictures of Dad handy, but I have an image of him in my memory, so I dredge it up and hold it in my mind. I look closer at the video but I don’t see it, this resemblance that my brother believes is there. I don’t look like Dad at all. I don’t look like anybody.
* * *
But what Junior said gets me thinking about Dad. Then I start on the service after the cremation, and the moment in the kitchen just after Ma, Aunty K and Pammy looked at each other in that strange way.
I make myself remember that it wasn’t just the look that bothered me. There was a banging at the door and a woman downstairs, a polite young man next to her. The woman’s hair was wild, flying everywhere, and she wasn’t dressed for a Toronto fall. She looked like she’d just stepped off a plane. Neither of them was wearing a jacket. I saw them from the kitchen window. Saw Aunty K go down to speak to them. I opened the window, but I couldn’t hear anything Aunty K was saying, only that whatever it was, she was mad as hell. Ma went out and approached the woman, but Pammy pulled her back. Seeing Ma shocked the woman, who stumbled back into her son’s arms.
Her son, my brother, Junior.
This moment, so fresh in my mind. The woman was talking, blubbering, and I thought she was saying to Ma “You kill him?” over and over.
I was so sure it was a question but now…now, I’m not.
twenty-two
Against an indigo backdrop, Noor’s got her guard up. It looks like she’s standing against the night, like she’s part of it and it’s part of her. She’s sporting brand new leggings under her Thai shorts and a long-sleeve top that covers her from neck to wrist. She shadowboxes for a few seconds and then turns to the camera and says her name, a bit about her journey to becoming a fighter and what the Florida tournament means to her.
The camera guy asks her if her family’s traditional and what they think of her fighting. What that means in a cultural context.
She slaps him with a glare so gangster he takes a step back. Kru tries to hide a grin, badly. With Noor, like with me, family is a no-fly zone. When she steps down from the little platform in the lobby she rolls her eyes at me and I roll mine right back. As with discussions about who’s more likely to be a ho based on skin colour, there’s no space for conversations about family and traditions here.
Amanda’s