by Pratap Reddy
They went to the carousel to collect their luggage. A paroxysm of panic seized Ramya when they couldn’t locate one of their suitcases. Prakash shambled away, and returned ten minutes later with the bag, like a hunter dragging a carcass. They looked around for a baggage trolley. Trolleys weren’t available for the asking; they needed Canadian small change to unlock them from the mechanized stack. Resourceful in ways Ramya could never fathom, Prakash materialized a two-dollar Canadian coin — which they came to know later was called a toonie — from his pocket. They loaded their suitcases on to the trolley, and proceeded to the taxi stand, following the overhead signs.
It was a spring evening with a shy sun taking cover behind a veil of clouds. The ground was wet as it had rained earlier in the afternoon. There was a nip in the air, sharp as a stiletto — that’s how it felt to her tropical skin.
They stayed for a fortnight at a guesthouse run by a family from Delhi. They had heard of the guesthouse from one of Prakash’s colleagues in Bengaluru. It was far cheaper than a hotel or a motel. Not surprisingly, the quality of service was slipshod and left much to be desired.
Since they were a couple they got a room to themselves. The room was small, more like a broom cupboard, with just enough space for two beds. The bed linen looked as if it hadn’t been changed since the time of Samuel de Champlain. (Ramya had read up on Canada before coming over.) There was no other furniture; they had to shoehorn their humongous suitcases into the room. There was a common bathroom adjacent, smelling of overuse and a nauseating room freshener likely procured from a dollar store.
The guesthouse provided a barely edible breakfast and dinner. Mostly bread with butter, jam, and boatloads of tomato ketchup for some incomprehensible reason, since they never served eggs or sausages or any such thing. For lunch you had to fend for yourself, the rationale being you would be out during the day, trying to figure out the system and making the first moves to settle down — like opening a bank account, applying for a Social Insurance card, and looking for the most elusive of quarries in Canada: a job.
The other inmates in the guesthouse were friendly and companionable in their own way. After all, they were in the same boat. Many of them were from small towns in India, and not fluent in English. They were mostly bachelors in their twenties. They were looking for, or already working at, jobs in warehouses and factories, and, to Ramya’s astonishment, seemed content with it. While Prakash socialized with the other residents in his hearty nonjudgmental manner, Ramya thought them to be a shifty lot, not averse to cutting corners or exploiting Canada’s welfare system.
Without even waiting for the jetlag to subside, they began to look in earnest for a place to live. A free local newspaper you could pick up at grocery stores listed rental properties. When they converted the rent into Indian Rupees for a place, comparable to the one they had back home, it seemed astronomical.
Eventually they decided on a basement apartment. When they managed to find an affordable one — a dingy place with an entrance located in the owner’s garage, like a trap door in a horror movie, they snapped it up.
They had to cough up two months’ rent in advance (called first and last), but didn’t mind, such a relief it was to get out of the guesthouse. The couple running the joint were friendly, helpful souls, but the place could be depressing. Some of the residents had to stay for months because they couldn’t break free from the low-paying survival jobs they were sentenced to. They may as well have been breaking stones or picking oakum.
It was only when Ramya and Prakash started looking for employment themselves that they realized all their education and the years of experience they had accrued in their line of work were of no account in Canada. It seemed new immigrants were debarred from white-collar jobs; the only job openings were in warehouses and factories, mostly labour-intensive work. Even these were not easy to come by.
Prakash enrolled at an employment agency whose owner was of Indian stock, though he hailed from the West Indies. A sympathetic soul, he provided Prakash with a series of short stints in all kinds of places — factories, warehouses, condos, and offices. Prakash went without protest to wherever his services were required and at whatever time of day. The jobs were all menial, and were not regular, full time work. There was no guarantee how much he would make in a week. The fortnightly paycheque he received had an element of either a pleasant surprise or a nasty shock attached to it.
Ramya, appalled by the requirement to be able to lift sixty pounds or so, avoided applying to warehouses and tried her luck with fast food places and garment stores. While all the establishments accepted her résumé (some of them even had a ‘Now Hiring’ sign stuck to the store front), not one of them called her for an interview or even bothered to respond in any way.
Though it made a huge dent in their savings, Prakash bought a second-hand car — pre-owned, they called it here — as soon as he could. Nothing fancy, no bells, no whistles, just a serviceable Chevy. Prakash had realized early that if you had a car in this country you improved your chances of landing a job. But for many immigrants you needed to have a job to be able to buy a car. It was the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum with a Canuck flavour.
Driving for over twenty years on Indian roads mattered little here; Prakash had to take the drive test three times before he was rewarded with a driver’s licence. It was like being awarded the Victoria Cross or the Purple Heart — not pinned to your chest but carried in a wallet on your hip.
Though the process was humbling, especially for one who had driven with so much self-assurance (to say nothing of his goggles and leather gloves), Prakash said: “Ramya, it’s good if you too got yourself a licence. It’s the most important ID card in North America.” Ramya could never understand how casually men picked up such odd little nuggets of information in whichever corner of the world they were in. Not only did such gen have a lot of practical value, it also made the men seem so worldly wise. Even if undeservedly.
Ramya never drove when she was in India, though as a matter of routine she had got herself a licence in her late teens.
“I think I’ll wait until I find a full-time job,” Ramya said. “The car insurance rates are much too high.”
“It’s true that the rates are unbelievably high here, but it doesn’t cost so much to add an additional driver,” Prakash said, street-smart, as always.
But Ramya did not want to rush. It stressed her to even to think about the elaborate system of licensing: a written test followed by two levels of road testing. In India it was different. In theory the driving test back home required the applicant to perform a formidable array of feats (making a figure eight in reverse gear with stones set on the ground as the only markers, or making a sharp right angle turn between two narrow posts or some such crap), but in practice it was child’s play because the driving instructor “took care of everything”.
But how right Prakash was about the driving licence. Proof of identity and residence was demanded at examination halls, banks, post offices, anywhere and everywhere. Her PR (Permanent Residence) card was inadequate because it did not display her address; in addition, she was required to show an envelope which had been mailed to their address as corroborative evidence.
Four and a half years later, when they stood in the hall of the local citizenship office to take their oath, raising an open palm shoulder high, one could say with some conviction that they had managed to settle down in Canada. Prakash had a job in a factory; though his job title was that of a lead hand, the pay was relatively good. Ramya, by sheer dint of persistence, had managed to steer herself into an office job. To reach her goal, she had attended night school and worked at a series of short-term contract jobs during the day. They bought their townhouse taking a mortgage from the Royal Bank of Canada. Most importantly, each had a car: They had arrived.
At the citizenship function they joined others in singing “O Canada,” with Ramya having to refer frequently to the words on the pamphlet provided to the newly converted. Prakash sang with t
he passion of a proselyte, and didn’t cast so much as a glance at the text. The anthem had a chest-thumping feel to it. Its Indian counterpart, which Ramya had sung — or stood at attention to — several hundred times, was little more than a short and incomplete geographical tour of India, even though penned by a winner of a Nobel Prize for literature. At the end of the performance, Ramya felt a bit of a quisling.
The magistrate made an uplifting speech, and then distributed the letter-sized rust-brown certificates of citizenship. Outside, there was a Canadian flag — a tomato-red maple leaf adrift on an empty field of snow — hanging from a pole, kept at readiness as a prop. The place had a touristy air, as many new citizens posed for pictures standing in front of the flag. Prakash made Ramya take his picture with his cellphone. He stood in front of the flag with his fingers raised in a V salute. With his dark glasses and winter coat, he almost looked like a mountaineer who had ascended a formidable peak. Prakash had conquered Canada.
It’s only five in the evening, but it’s already dark, and Ramya can see the wintry orange glow of the night through her living-room window. She has shelved her plans to go to a nearby Canadian Tire for some antifreeze. If she runs out of the fluid, she and Ms. Peggy — Ramya’s pet name for her car — could wait. Neither Ramya nor Ms. Peggy has any pressing jobs waiting to be accomplished (if one discounts the filling of EI forms, but Ms. Peggy is of little help there). Both are at loose ends with plenty of time on their hands.
Ramya remembers about the voicemail and reaches out for the phone. She has walked past the phone many times, but never felt the urge to pick up the receiver and access her message. Surely, it couldn’t be her ex-boss Randy McLaughlin inviting her back to work? Ramya gives a bitter chuckle at the improbability of the thought.
When the message comes on, the voice is not very familiar, but the man introduces himself as Mrs. Rao’s son-in-law.
“Subbalakshmi Rao suffered a severe stroke and has been admitted to William Osler hospital …”
Ramya catches her breath. Sudden tears sting her eyes.
Mr. and Mrs. Rao were some of the first friends they made when they landed in Canada. The Raos too are from Hyderabad and are related to one of Daddy’s patients. They immigrated way back in the sixties when things were not so difficult. Mr. Rao got a well-paid job in the provincial government, and Subbalakshmi, or Subbu-Auntie as Ramya called her, as a teller in a bank. They own a huge house, with an extensive backyard, and a large garage packed with a slew of shiny cars, with a couple more sitting on the broad tree-lined driveway.
She has a vague recollection of meeting Sudhakar, Mrs. Rao’s son-in-law, a few years ago. He’s a pleasant and deferential person, a bit wishy-washy perhaps. He has the tendency to be formal in the presence of his elders. Like most people who grew up in India, he would never address anyone older than him by their first name, and often added ‘sir’ or the Telugu honorific ‘garu’ at the end of the name.
Was it this phone call that had awakened her early in the morning that day? It must have started crowing insistently at dawn and then slyly crept into the voicemail. Was there something premonitory about its ringing? Something telepathic which reminded her of the sandalwood box? Her box which is chock-full of memories … memories of people who grow old, of people who fall seriously ill, of people who die and pass over to another world — the final emigration.
She has not seen the Raos in recent years. As a single woman — a fate she brought upon herself, people said, Ramya has kept herself to herself. Subbu-Auntie is neither a blood relation nor a person in her age group — yet she was a source of support and strength when they were new to Canada. Ramya wondered if Subbu-Auntie ever cast a thought in her direction, surrounded as she was by her children and grandchildren. She couldn’t be faulted if she completely forgot about Ramya’s unenviable existence. Now she is grievously ill and close to dying. A person of Mrs. Rao’s age could hardly be expected to survive a massive stroke.
Ramya dials Mrs. Rao’s residence. The call goes into the accursed voicemail. Ramya always feels inept when it comes to leaving a message. Though disturbed, Ramya overcomes the temptation to hang up, and plants her message hoping it doesn’t sound too disjointed. “Rao-garu, this is Ramya. I’m sorry to hear about Subbu-Auntie. I will call later and talk to you.”
Still feeling unsettled, but having nothing better to do, Ramya walks over to the glass-topped dining table at the end of which the sandalwood casket lies. There’s a small mirror, now dull and spotty, stuck to the underside of the lid. It could well be the looking glass through which you can see into the past.
But now she only sees parts of a tired, lifeless face. An eye with a bag under it, a nose with a sprinkling of blackheads, a ringlet of black hair entwined with grey …
Ramya sits down at the table and rummages in the box. Pulling out one memento after another, she lays them down on the table. A gold chain with a pendant, a filigreed dog-collar, a paperback signed by its author, and a small vial with Tik 20 written on its label … and many more.
4
Witch & Doctor
THE OUTSIDE WORLD is suffused with golden light. It’s another matter that the temperature is minus twenty-one Celsius. A bar of refracted light, entering through the glass window of the dining room, falls upon the heartshaped gold pendant Ramya holds in the palm of her hand. Inside the locket, which opens like a miniature book, there is a picture of a young, wispy, good-looking woman on the left-hand side, and on the right, that of a young man, almost dandy in appearance.
Ramya has to throw her head back a little, and crinkle her eyes to peer at the small black and white photos. She cannot see so well nowadays, and her reading glasses, which she picked up at a dollar store on a whim, are on the bedside table upstairs. Even though her companyprovided insurance paid for proper reading glasses — which otherwise cost a packet if one factors in the optometrist’s fee, she has neglected to buy them all these months. (Why the resistance? Are reading glasses, like grey hair and wrinkles, an unhappy harbinger old age?)
But there’s time yet. Her insurance will last a few more weeks … There! One more item in her to-do list.
There’s no doubt that the pictures are of her mother and father, in the dew-fresh bloom of youth. In the images she carries of them in her mind, they look much older: heads daubed with grey, faces etched with lines. These are the people she called Mummy and Daddy — a little shamefacedly, if her friends were around. Her childhood friends called their parents mamma, papa, amma, nana, ma, pa or some such non-English appellation. There’s something ridiculous about calling your parents Mummy and Daddy in India, a country which boasts of hundreds of indigenous languages. What’s worse, it’s almost elitist. It’s something about having the privilege of getting educated in English, in a country where millions have never stepped into a school.
In that small photograph — surprise! surprise! — Mummy has a faint smile that almost approaches a suppressed laugh. It couldn’t be true; Ramya doesn’t remember ever seeing her mother smile, let alone laugh. Perhaps, at the photographer’s behest, she’d loosened the thin lips of an otherwise tightly set mouth to utter the word ‘cheese!’ Louder than required apparently, going by the generous size of the smile. Her habitual expression had been a cross between a frown and a pout. Frout — if Ramya could be allowed to invent a portmanteau word.
Though Mummy’s delicate beauty is never in question, there’s a certain datedness to it — as is often the case with people in old photographs. Mummy has sharply chiselled features, which Ramya recognizes even without the aid of reading glasses. If an artist were to make a portrait of her mother in her youth, he’d choose a pointy pencil, and be tempted to use the services of a ruler.
On the other hand, her father’s foppish good looks — she can make out the collar of a lounge suit and the knot of a tie — hides a soft, kind-hearted man, but much lacking in will and determination. In his profession, his almost Buddha-like gentleness was much admired by the sick and the dyi
ng.
Ramya remembers seeing a row of dry-cleaned suits, in hopelessly sombre tones, hanging in an olive-green Godrej steel almirah. Hardly ever used, they might have been raiment for the skeletons in the family cupboard. (Mummy’s cupboard was the colour of hot-chocolate, and with an additional lockable compartment to stow her gold jewellery and silver puja utensils. On the shelves, the stacks and stacks of pressed and folded silk saris could well provide enough clothing for a national conference of distaff skeletons.)
Daddy dressed up in a suit only on special occasions, like attending medical conferences or wedding receptions. For everyday work, he preferred to wear, under his baggy doctor’s coat, a loose comfortable white shirt and a pair of dark-coloured trousers. Every morning, before picking up his car keys and the doctor’s bag, he would lift little Ramya into the air to give her a goodbye peck on each cheek. He had the very smell of freshness, a mingling of fragrances of Cinthol bath soap, and Brylcreem, the stuff he applied to his hair.
When Ramya was growing up, if she needed something, she wouldn’t approach her mother. She would ask the cook or one of the maidservants who was in their employ then — maids never stuck around for long. (Over the years they had an ever-changing procession of servants, coming and going as if their intricately carved teak front door were a revolving one.)
Most of the time, Ramya’s mother was as good as incommunicado. She would barricade herself in the puja room, indulging in elaborate worship of God. Though her mother’s eyes glowed with uncommon intensity, they had a distant gaze to them.
If Ramya ever blundered into the puja room and found Mummy there, seated with her legs folded in a yogic pose in front of the altar, she’d withdraw. Otherwise, she’d linger for a few minutes out of curiosity, basking in the sanctity of the place. Every morning before leaving for school, she was required to stand before the assemblage of gods, wearing her full uniform (minus the shoes), join her palms, and whisper a short prayer. It was considered a time-tested recipe for success, whatever the nature of the endeavour. (She should have prayed more ardently and perhaps recited longer prayers to save her marriage.) But to give the gods their due, the prayers had worked as far as her school exams were concerned.
