The Hungry Ghosts

by Shyam Selvadurai

  A few months after we arrived in Canada, I started my first year at York University, studying English literature. The university had been built in the 1960s and ‘70s, and its structures were relics of the era’s worst architectural excesses—massive, starkly functional, a paucity of windows, a predominance of concrete. They were scattered about a windswept landscape and reminded me of grey boulders abandoned by a glacier. The considerable distances between buildings had necessitated a labyrinth of underground tunnels along which students could travel when the weather got too miserable. The tunnel walls were covered with images of fierce bearded men vomiting blood, snakes coiled to strike, fangs bared, poems that rhymed badly, elaborate graffiti tags of the artists. Parts of the wall were white where the university had come along and painted over the graffiti, but it was a losing battle.

  York had been established during a period of great student unrest, and the campus was designed to keep us on the move with very few places to congregate—lots of corridors and hallways, few common rooms and courtyards. The centre of the university, if there was a centre to this haphazard scattering of edifices, was the Ross Building, a lumbering mass built in the brutalist style, its inner and outer walls exposed concrete. With its tiny slits of windows, it resembled the secret service department in some fascist country, where unspeakable things were done to people.

  Most of the first-year classes were held in vast lecture halls, tiers of orange plastic seats rising in a vertiginous slant from the strip of floor where the professor lectured. I felt like a cork bobbing in the whorl of students coming and going around me. As I sat in those classes, twisting pen between fingers, I would watch other students talking and laughing with each other, sharing a bar of chocolate or a bag of chips. Eavesdropping on conversations, I came to realize that most of them were either in residence together or, if they were day students, had known each other in high school. When a class broke into tutorials for its second half, the more intimate atmosphere provided a chance to make friends. Yet despite my willingness to take on a difficult or long novel other students balked at, to share pens or paper, to initiate discussions, no classmate seemed interested in any interaction outside the course. The more I tried to force friendships, the more awkward I became. When I attempted to strike up a conversation, I was aware of a new creaking to my voice, my gestures too big, my laugh a bark. I was sure the other students sensed my desperation. It hung about me like body odour.

  After an evening class on Thursdays, I passed a student residence on my way to the bus. A party would often be in progress, rooms jammed with bodies, students shrieking out lyrics and stomping to the beat of a song by Annie Lennox or the Pet Shop Boys. Someone would lean out the window and bellow “Paaarty!” or “Fuck the world!” or some obscene political curse about Mulroney, Thatcher or Reagan. I would draw my jacket about me and keep my eyes on the ground, afraid someone might see my craving to be one of them, and mock me.

  Their merriment would linger with me on the hour-long bus ride home. Often the bus would be crowded and I’d be unable to find a seat, because in addition to regular students there were the adult learners, all of us disgorged by the university after its last class. I would hold on to a bar with one hand, my arm wrenching from its socket as the bus swayed or abruptly stopped. In the winter, melted snow sloshed in the ridges of the floor and left salty rims on my boots.

  I became aware that the two places downtown students considered cool were Kensington Market and Queen Street. I called the TTC information line and the young woman I spoke to was very helpful, especially after I pretended to be a tourist. She gave me directions for Kensington Market, but when I mentioned Queen Street, she said, “Sir, which part did you have in mind? It’s a very long street.”

  “The … the part that has lots of fashionable cafés and bookshops and other nice stores.”

  “Ah, sir, you mean Queen West.”

  She then gave me alternate directions to Kensington Market which would take me through “Queen West.”

  After I boarded the westbound Queen streetcar and it set off, I was sure I had written the instructions down wrong, because we were travelling through a corridor of tall buildings. Once the streetcar passed University Avenue, however, the buildings suddenly became two-and three-storey, with quirky window displays, the dummies often naked or wearing just hats and gloves and contorted into humanly impossible positions, some even dismembered. I sat back in my seat, arms folded tightly, an excitement humming in me. I tried to appear casual, indifferent, as I gazed out at the second-hand bookstores with wooden floors and large bay windows, a shoe shop with a display of fairies fluttering upwards in a diagonal, as if towards some luminosity, each bearing a shoe in her hands as an offering. A man dressed as Wonder Woman stood by the entrance to a comic store, handing out leaflets to pedestrians, who teemed the sidewalks of Queen West. We soon passed a huddle of pavement stalls—something I had never expected to find in Canada—and I turned to gaze at the chunky silver jewellery, knitted gloves, scarves and hats from Peru, strange foreign clothes, incense and shawls from India, tie-dye shirts. Two black men with dreadlocks and red-yellow-and-green tams were playing a drum and a guitar in front of the stalls, pedestrians dancing to their reggae music.

  Kensington Market was like the bazaars of Colombo’s Pettah, shoppers crowding the roadway because the stores had taken up the pavements with their wares. Vans and delivery trucks beeped their horns, trying to edge through the throng, but the shoppers largely ignored them, stopping to examine vegetables, buy bread and cheese. I drifted further into the market, nudging my way through the crowd. The metallic odour of raw beef and chicken in the butchers’ shops, the tang of salted fish hanging on hooks outside a Chinese store, the loamish smell of rice in large gunny sacks, the familiar stink of durian like a clogged drain, were the smells of a Colombo market, and I felt heady with homesickness. I could not help stopping to touch the thin, long eggplants (unlike the fat, round Italian ones we tolerated from the Bridlewood Mall), the okra, bitter gourd, snake gourd, yams, and, to my joy, rambutans and mangosteens. Even though the rambutans were expensive I bought a few, and as I continued through the market I sucked on each fruit until all the sweet pulp was gone from the seed.

  I ended up on a quieter street and saw ahead of me a café with soiled checkered floors, its dark walls chaotic with posters and notices. The front patio was crowded with young Canadians who leaned over the cracked table-tops in animated discussion or tipped backwards on the legs of their faded painted chairs. My footsteps slowed as I passed the patio, but I did not have the courage to go in. Instead, I stood at a store window a few shops down and gazed sideways at the colourful hats and jackets these Canadians wore, some of them dressed only in black, faces painted white. Their voices drifted to me like the raucous cries of parrots.

  After turning a corner, I found myself on a street that sold second-hand clothes. One of the shops had set out racks of clothing on the pavement, unattended. I strode to a rack and began to scuttle through the jackets and vests, expecting the store clerk to rush out any moment to make sure I wasn’t stealing something. Soon a young woman with a thick hoop through her nose ambled out. Her smile was shy and kind, her voice lilting and splintered like an adolescent boy’s as she called out a “huloo.” I nodded stiffly and moved to another rack that had hats pegged on hangers, ready for her to inquire what specifically I wanted. Instead, she came and stood with her arm resting on the rack, one booted foot cocked over the other, watching me with a smile. When I unpegged a hat to show I was serious about buying something, she clapped her hands lightly and laughed, “That is the exact one I was going to suggest to you!” She pointed excitedly to a mirror and I went and tried it on, grinning sheepishly. “That’s very Duran Duran,” she said with approval.

  I bought the hat. She suggested I wear it, but I shook my head dumbly. I did not have the guts to sport it on the street until I had practised in front of the mirrored squares on my basement wall.

  Only
later, when I had left the market behind me, did I realize the young woman might have been attracted to me.

  On that hour-and-a-half ride back home, the numbing tedium of the journey scraped all the pleasure and excitement out of me. It had started to drizzle, streaks of grime leaking down the bus window. The rows of grey-brick houses, stretches of wasteland, a field with a circle of overturned white lawn chairs in the middle of it, were familiar sites I passed every day, barely registering them. But now they were unbearable.

  That initial visit downtown released me from a fear I had not even been conscious of: a fear that white people, the natural inheritors of the life I craved, would share looks of dismay when I entered a café or store. I would be rebuffed with curt service, ignored by waiters and clerks. But everyone on that visit downtown had seemed indifferent to my presence. The famous Toronto coldness had proved to be a blessing.

  I began to haunt Queen West, going down on weekends, meandering up and down the strip, stopping to gaze at window displays. I spent hours in used bookstores, reading the first chapters of books as the sun slanted in, a thousand dust motes whirling in the beams. If the book appealed to me, I would put it in a growing pile on some shelf or window ledge, then choose what I could afford at the end of my visit. I learnt that, for the price of a coffee, neighbourhood cafés tolerated students spending entire mornings or afternoons reading at a table. The smell of old books in Canada was different from the raw-rice odour of books in Sri Lanka. Back in Scarborough on a Sunday evening, I would often pick up one of my purchases and sniff its greenish, crushed leaf scent—a promise that my life would not be confined to this suburb, that pleasure awaited me the following weekend too.

  I was in a used bookstore one afternoon, looking through the fiction section, when I saw, lying among the numerous pamphlets on a windowsill, a bright pink one which asked, in bold white letters, “Are You Gay?” Just the word gay, out there in the open, sent a frizzle of coldness through me. I glanced around to see if anybody had noticed the pamphlet or my attention to it, then slipped the pamphlet into the book I’d been inspecting, paid for the novel and hurried out.

  When my family was asleep and I could be sure they wouldn’t barge into the basement to do laundry or get something from a cupboard in the unfinished section, I took the pamphlet from my bag. If you think you might be Gay, and need help coming to terms with your sexual orientation or just connecting with the community, this pamphlet is for you.

  I read the booklet over and over again, and finally turned the light off and lay on my bed, hands behind my head. Here it was, the information I needed to search out a community in my city. And yet I could not do it; could not perform the simple task of calling the help line listed at the end of the pamphlet. It was an action beyond me, like trying to rise and do a chore when delirious with fever.

  Since our arrival in Canada, my grandmother had written to me fortnightly. Soon after I found that pamphlet, one of her letters arrived. It began with a familiar worry that felt to me like an accusation.

  My dearest Puthey,

  I have not heard from you in more than a month and I am very concerned that your letters to me have been thrown away by the postal office. Do you remember not to lick the flap of the envelope, but fold it inside? That way the rogues who work in our postal service will not think you are trying to send me money, open the envelope to steal and then have to throw the letter away. If you leave the flap tucked in, they can look for money and still send the letter on to me. Also, you must remember not to put your name on the return address as those devils might not deliver it because you are Tamil.

  I skimmed through the rest of the letter, which was not so dissimilar from the earlier ones, telling me about the conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the government, the killing of soldiers, the further devaluing of the rupee, which had doubled the price of rice, the rising rate of crime and how, no matter what Sunil Maama or Chandralal advised, my grandmother was not getting a watcher; not going to pay someone to sleep the night on her verandah. The letter ended as they often did.

  How is the house? Is everything in working order? If you need money for repairs please let me know and I will have a deposit made from my London account. How are your studies? I would like to know, as I have not heard a word for so long.

  If I don’t have a response to this letter, I will be truly worried.

  Your loving Aacho

  I had not written to my grandmother in six weeks and she had written me three times, always saying the same thing about tucking in the flap of the envelope.

  Irritated and guilty, I ripped a sheet of paper out of one of my spiral notebooks and sat at my desk.

  Dear Aacho,

  I am in shock that you have not heard from me. Have you really not received my past three letters? I too have not received your letters. In fact this is the first one I have got in a long while. What is going on? Did you get the address right on the letters? Do you trust our postman? Oh, Aacho, I hope you have not been fighting with the postman.

  I put down the pen, unable to go on with the lies that always filled my letters. I went to stand at my basement window and looked through the bars at the dirty snow in the backyard. There was no way I could bring myself to write about my new part-time job in housekeeping at a motel in the suburb of Richmond Hill—the hour-long commute past used-car dealerships and long, low windowless malls like penitentiaries. Then there was the New Richmond Motel itself, with its fake wood-panelled lobby, the grubby orange-and-rust shag carpet smelling of stale cigarettes and old beer.

  Later that night when the house was quiet, I took out the pamphlet from beneath my mattress and studied the whole thing over, as if I had never read it before. When I got to the telephone number at the bottom, I glanced at the clock. It was almost eleven. No one would answer the phone, but still, I would call from the extension in my basement. The very act of calling, even if only to get an answering machine, might give me the courage to try back tomorrow.

  The phone rang for a long time, and the more it rang the calmer I became. Then, just when I felt I had collected the necessary courage to call again and was about to hang up, someone picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?” a man gasped. “Hold on a sec.”

  He put down the receiver, then inhaled and exhaled deeply to control his breath. It took all my will to stay on the line, as if I were straining under something impossibly heavy.

  Finally he came back on the phone, and with a laugh that was both merry and easy, said, “Sorry about that. I’d left the office and was halfway down the hall when the phone rang.”

  “It’s … that’s quite alright.”

  “Are you from India?”

  “No, no.”

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. You don’t have to tell me anything about yourself.”

  “No, no, it’s really alright you asked.”

  “It’s just that I used to visit India quite a bit, particularly Goa. Although now I go to Thailand on my holidays.”

  After he told me this, I felt it was rude not to tell him I was from Sri Lanka.

  “How wonderful. I’ve always longed to visit there.”

  “You should go. It’s very pretty.”

  He asked me about the Tamil Tigers’ chances of getting an independent country and if I thought there would be a solution soon. I was taken aback at how much he knew about the country, even the names of the president and prime minister. Most Canadians I met thought Sri Lanka was part of the Caribbean.

  “Are you a refugee?” he asked, after I had answered his questions about the political situation.

  “No, I came here with my family. We’re immigrants.”

  “I live near this area called St. James Town, where there’s a lot of Tamil refugees. I feel so sorry for them. Actually, I used to have a friend who was Tamil, from Jaffna. A man named Cheran Muttuswamy. His family is from the village of Point Pedro. Do you, by any chance, know him?”

  “Um, no, I … I don’t, unfortunately.�
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  He must have read my mind, because he laughed. “Of course. Why should you know him? There are millions of Sri Lankans.”

  By now I trusted him. He told me he was a social worker with troubled youth, and soon I found myself telling him I went to York University and what I was studying there. All this time, we had not mentioned a word about my reason for calling.

  Finally he said in a businesslike tone, “So, what can I help you with?” After my silence became prolonged, he added, “Please, take your time telling me.”

  “I found this pamphlet, your pamphlet, in a bookstore, and I read it and …” I fell silent again.

  “And you’re gay, and you’ve never said this to anyone before, right?” he said gently.

  “Yes. Yes, I have never said this to anyone. And yes, I am gay.”

  It felt so strange, those words coming out of my mouth, and the next moment I was crying. As I sobbed, he talked to me in a soothing tone about how it was alright to be gay and how one could find a lot of happiness in coming out, a lot of support, that I did not need to be lonely anymore, that he knew exactly what I was feeling because he had spent his teens in a small town in the 1960s and knew as well as anyone what it was to feel different and alone. His voice, with its depth and quiet authority, calmed me. When I was no longer sniffling, he said, “Look, it’s sort of late and I must get home. Would you like to meet in person?”

  “Yes, yes, I would like that a lot.”

  He gave me directions to a café at Bloor and Spadina. “By the way, my name is Ronald. And you don’t have to tell me your name. Some people feel more comfortable making up a name.”

  “No,” I replied, “I want to, I really do. It’s Shivan.”

  “Well, Shivan, I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

  Once I had put down the phone, I lay on my bed, limbs heavy with fatigue.

  I arrived at the café early, and after darting a look around to see if anyone was trying to catch my eye, I sat near the door, hands clutched under the table. After a while, worried I might be evicted, I bought a coffee from the counter and returned to my seat. In my nervousness, I sloshed some on the table as I sat down and was patting the mess with paper napkins when someone said, “Shivan?”