Parveen's Christmas

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Mini worked as a lunch monitor in the local Sun Rise Elementary school, located in Ajax, a suburb of the Greater Toronto Area. She worked only one hour a day, 11 AM to 12 PM, five days a week – monitoring the kids during their lunch recess. Depending on which grade she was assigned to, the nature and load of her work varied vastly. It was easier to manage the younger kids; the older ones were outright trouble. You say one thing, they deliberately do something else. Sometimes even arguments ensued. Today’s kids have so little respect for just about anybody, forget about the poor lunch monitor. She drove about 10 kilometers each way to the job if one could consider it as one. She liked it though. Having young school-going children of her own it would be difficult to manage a full-time job in a store or other similar places (with her foreign degrees a regular higher-paying job was practically out of the question without going through more educational hoops). The timing usually never worked. She wanted to be home to see off her kids to school in the morning and welcome them back when they returned after school. This little work at the school gave her a short but refreshing relief from the daily chores in the house, the money definitely wasn’t anything to brag about – it barely covered the cost of gas back and forth.           There are plenty of good things about suburbs compared to big and bright cities like Toronto, one of them is surely the usual low density of vehicular traffic on the roads, most part of the day. It generally took Mini about ten minutes to drive to the school.  Unfortunately, today there was an accident at the first major intersection out of her house. With both lanes closed, vehicles trickled down the road using the narrow shoulder. It killed five minutes of her valuable time. She knew she’d be late today. Not a good thing. Teachers hated to see a lunch monitor being late for work. It meant they had to stay with the class until the monitor arrived, which cut their own lunchtime short.           Mini almost flew into the parking lot and parked in the first empty spot. She jumped out of the car, literally ran to the school office, reported her grand entry with a smile equal parts guilt and shame, and didn’t wait to hear what the vice principal had to say about giving it a few minutes longer while planning for the trip to school as the town had been seeing a surge of traffic accidents and a generally higher level of traffic, etc., and hurried to the playground located at the back of the school building. She could hear Parveen, one of her colleagues, screaming at somebody even before stepping out of the door. She must have gotten into another of her infamous arguments, Mini thought. At 70, slightly built Parveen from Pakistan was fit, loud, blunt, and unafraid to give anybody a sincere piece of her mind. As a result, every day she would get into several of her notorious conflicts. Today she was having it with poor Judy, who was white, somewhere between sixty and sixty-five, had most of her body covered with tattoos, rings on her nose and ears, clothed quite revealingly for a cold day in November. Parveen had never been very impressed with her. They usually fought once every few days during the best-behaving phases that they both went through, a few times a day outside that. Rushing into the backyard Mini wondered what might have started the trouble today. As she got close to them it didn’t take her too long to find out.             “I don’t care what you do with your body but why are you showing those to the kids?” Parveen was screaming at the top of her voice. “Don’t you have simple decency?”           Judy wasn’t particularly known to back off from any conflict, right or wrong. “Why is that a problem?” She retorted with as much strength as she could gather to prop up her naturally weak voice. “There’s nothing wrong with tattoos. They are a form of art.”           “Art my foot!” Parveen did her best to twist her face into an expression of total disgust. “Why are you putting these worthless ideas in their little minds? You should be ashamed of yourself. I am going to report to the vice principal against you. She’ll give you what you deserve.” She closed her right fist and hit the flat palm of her other hand with it, clearly suggesting the ultimate disciplinary action that Judy could expect to receive as a result of her heinous act.           “Oh boy, I am shitting in my pants!” Judy retorted with matching sarcasm.           Mini Stood between the two. “Are you guys out of your minds? What do you think everybody else is thinking about you? Break up. Please move to your own locations.”           “See, Mini,” Parveen turned to her,” she was showing the kids a tattoo right on her butt! Can you believe this?”           “Don’t you lie,” Judy protested. “On my back, not on my butt. Liar! Mini, do you want to see it?”            “Don’t you dare pull your shirt up again…” Parveen warned with her eyes blazing.           All that noise attracted several other lunch monitors who were now approaching them sensing something interesting might be on offer. “See, the whole school is coming to enjoy the show,” Mini said. “Please stop this nonsense and get back to work.” It worked. Both of them muttered something ineligible, possibly curses, and moved to their respective places. Mini sighed in relief. Even though she was much younger than them she had pretty good friendships with both. Parveen, a devoted Muslim, was very disciplined. Judy on the other hand was a bohemian type with a heart of gold. She suffered from some form of arthritis and walked with a visible limp. Since she gained quite a bit of weight in the last couple of years she walked with labour, often hunching down. She lived not too far from the school and usually walked back and forth. With no vehicle of her own, when her legs hurt too much and she had difficulties walking she asked Mini for rides. She opened up during those rides. She had a son and two daughters. The son was the eldest. He was married to a woman and had a little kid when suddenly he declared himself a homosexual man and left his wife and kid for another man. Nobody knew where he was. The eldest daughter lived somewhere in Toronto but she had whatsoever no contact with her mother. Judy didn’t even remember how long she hadn’t seen her or talked to her. The youngest daughter was single. She was severely overweight, not particularly good-looking, and was very shy – there was little to no possibility of her ever getting hooked, as Judy put it. She stayed with her mother. Whatever Judy got from the government as part of her old age pension along with her daughter’s earnings – their lives moved on. Mini had a mixed sense of love and pity for her. For a woman of her age all that was too much to take, Mini thought.           After work, Parveen caught up with Mini. “Don’t indulge that mischievous woman. Her family is ruined because of her. So distasteful!”           Mini tried to calm her down. “You are being too hard on her. Do you have any idea how much she suffers?”           “Don’t believe a thing she says. All stinking lies. Suffers my foot! A woman of her age with so much makeup and clothes that cover so little skin – it surely doesn’t look like that,” Parveen snarled.             Mini knew she wouldn’t be able to change Parveen’s mind. She was a hardened woman who had lost her husband twenty-five years ago to cancer and raised two children – a son and a daughter, the girl a doctor, the boy an engineer. She never dated or married anybody after her husband died. Barely educated, with the help of a sister who lived in the same town and the house that her husband had left for her with all mortgage paid, she had waged her own war against life in this less familiar country. She lived in her own way and couldn't care less what others thought about her. Mini had immense respect for her. But at the same time, she realized Parveen was far from being perfect. She had little to no patience for things that were exotic to her religious belief and cultural inheritance. And the worst part was, she did little to keep it a secret.                     It was a little over a month away from Christmas. The whole population of the town seemed to capture the usual craze for shopping at this time of the year. Mini and her family didn’t celebrate Christmas but that didn’t stop her from going around looking for a suitable sale knowing this was the time when the stores supposedly were selling off stuff relatively cheaply. At the same time, like most women, shopping was one of her favorite things to do as well. She usually would never bring her husband and the kids with her. Not even ten minutes would pass they’d be all worn out and ready to go home. In the Pickering mall, she met Judy, who was shopping for gifts with her youngest daughter. Overjoyed at her sight, Judy pulled Mini into a specialty snacks store and bought delicious sorbet for all of them. As they chatted, she brought up Parveen. “She has a really bad temper,” Judy said, unhappily. “Trust me, the other day, I didn’t do anything wrong. She shouldn’t have started a fight over that. It was really embarrassing.”           “Why did you have to show the kids your tattoos?” Mini cautiously said, careful not to hurt Judy. The truth was, like Parveen, she also had an unfavorable opinion about body art. It obviously had everything to do with the environment where she grew up on the other side of the hemisphere.             “They wanted to see it!” Judy said helplessly. “Do you want to see?” Mini didn’t have a chance to respond. Judy quickly turned around and pulled her shirt up baring her lower back. “See. Do you see?”           There was a heart in deep red ink with the word ‘Jim’ printed in black at the center of it. “It was my husband’s name,” Judy said. “I was feeling very depressed the other day. You know, Christmas is coming and all. People planning to get together with their families to spend some quality time. I have nobody but this daughter. I miss Jim so much. We were married for thirty years. Why was Parveen so mad about it?” Tears rolled down her cheeks as she spoke.           Mini leaned forward and hugged her, trying to soothe her. “Don’t take her too seriously. She had always been like this.”           It took a while before Judy allowed Mini to leave her company. After returning home later that evening, she called Parveen up on her cellphone. “You should apologize to Judy,” she said a little bluntly.           Parveen couldn’t hide her bewilderment. “Why? What did I do? It was she who got half naked showing everybody her stupid butt with a scrawling.”           “I saw that tattoo today. It is her husband’s name. He died a few years back. She was depressed, so she went and got it done. Since you yelled at her she has been feeling really down.”           Parveen was quiet for a long time. “Why should she be depressed? People die. My husband died twenty-five years ago. Did I cry and punch tattoos all over my butt? The memory of the people we love should be preserved inside our minds, like a sacred thought.” She spoke almost like a monologue.  There was another long pause. “I don’t feel good about it anymore. I’ll have to compensate for this. You are right, Mini, it was very mean and evil of me.”           “What are you planning to do?” Mini cautiously asked. She didn’t trust Parveen. She could very well turn things upside down while trying to deliver a simple apology.           “Not telling you. It’ll be a surprise. Are you going to hang around during Christmas?”           “Nope. We are planning to visit our relatives in the USA.”           “I see. In that case, you are going to miss the surprise,” Parveen wasn’t going to break the mystery. “You’ll see it on Facebook.”           Visiting her in-laws in Connecticut, the day after Christmas Mini opened up a Facebook app on her cell phone and almost had a heart attack. Parveen had shared a few images. The first one proudly showed a huge glittering Christmas tree right in the middle of her living room, decorated with hundreds of colorful balls, stars, and light bulbs! The next one focused on a large table almost tipping over in abundance of food – dishes Parveen must have had prepared for the Christmas dinner. And the third one held the real surprise – Parveen and Judy, standing next to each other with one of their arms coiled around the neck of the other, like two closest of friends, both holding wide smiles. The caption said – ‘Sisters’.           Mini stared at this image for a seemingly long time, with a wide smile of her own and tears in her eyes that blurred her vision.