No New Land

by M G Vassanji

  “What is this?” he said, coming slowly towards Roshan, a sneer of contempt on his face.

  “Oh, the children were – ”

  He landed a tremendous smack on her face. You could see it smarting, swelling with the hurt, tears in her eyes.

  There was absolute silence, the children were terrified. Roshan stood nursing her cheek, Nurdin turned to look at his wife and saw Zera in a rage, lunging at Abdul with the hot iron. Nurdin moved to block her way, barely missing getting burned himself, and Abdul was saved. A loud quarrel ensued, threats and abuses were exchanged, and the police were almost called. Roshan cried and Zera cried and the children wailed.

  In such quarrels, where he was obviously at fault, Abdul had a simple stratagem. He would go out and sulk in the corridor. In Dar, he would go for a drive, leaving Roshan extremely worried, since it was usually at nighttime. “Leave him alone,” said Zera. “Let him be,” said Nurdin. But for how long? Finally, to save embarrassment, Roshan went out to her husband, and the two talked in whispers for close to half an hour, huddled like young lovers, before Abdul agreed to come back inside. It turned out that he had a grievance against the Lalanis for not contributing to household expenses, and letting Fatima bully his children.

  “But you refused to take money,” Nurdin protested. “And we do buy groceries. We were saving to buy you a present even though I am not yet working.”

  The next day they had to search for an apartment and move. They came to Sixty-nine Rosecliffe Park Drive, a building some fifteen minutes’ walk away. The money they had brought with them from Dar and hardly touched now went to pay the deposit and the first month’s rent.

  4

  What would immigrants in Toronto do without Honest Ed’s, the block-wide carnival that’s also a store, the brilliant kaaba to which people flock even from the suburbs. A centre of attraction whose energy never ebbs, simply transmutes, at night its thousands of dazzling lights splash the sidewalk in flashes of yellow and green and red, and the air sizzles with catchy fluorescent messages circled by running lights. The dazzle and sparkle that’s seen as far away as Asia and Africa in the bosoms of bourgeois homes where they dream of foreign goods and emigration. The Lalanis and other Dar immigrants would go there on Saturdays, entire families getting off at the Bathurst station to join the droves crossing Bloor Street West on their way to that shopping paradise.

  The festival already begins on the sidewalk outside: vendors of candy, nuts, and popcorn; shop windows bright and packed; shoppers emerging, hugging new possessions; and bright signs with all the familiarity of hookers clamouring for attention. “Come in, don’t just stand there!” shouts a sign wickedly. “Come in and get lost!” winks another. And in you go, dissolve into the human tide flooding the aisles and annexes. You enter a crowded bright tunnel of a passageway lined with record jackets and throbbing to a loud, fast rhythm, the tide draws you in, the music lulls your mind, sets you in the mood, deeper and deeper you go into the tunnel, which opens onto a large cavern busy with the frenzy of buying. After a lifetime of waiting, it is easy to get drawn in blindly, forgetting what you came for, lured from every side by cheeky price labels and imagining new needs for the home. Buying is a narcotic, so you have to be quick and know your business, pick out the genuine sales from the spurious, think of your budget and your needs. Many times you’ll catch yourself in temptation: A bargain, but do I need it? No, you steel yourself, you put it back. Several times at this and you’re one of the pros, walking easily up and down the aisles, into and out of the annexes, from the basement to the top floor and back … in this place so joyous and crazy where people give free unasked advice, and just as freely demand it.

  The first few times they would stand in wonder before the racks, piles, and overflowing boxes and crates, fingering perfectly good clothes for sale for peanuts, as it were: shirts for $1.99, dresses for $4.99, men’s suits for $14.99! Compare with the headaches you could buy in Dar with such difficulty: size sixteen shirts with size fourteen sleeves, pockets sewn shut, flies too short, shoes not matching, zips not closing. Even after converting dollars into shillings, at black-market rates, you couldn’t beat these prices. Cheap, cheap, cheap, as the sign said. No more haggling over prices; you just had to know where to go. And this was it. They began to buy. Business runs in the blood, they are former shopkeepers after all, and the thrill of chasing a bargain is irresistible, a pleasure which sharing can only enhance. News of special bargains, the not-to-be-missed sales, passed by human telegraph from aisle to aisle – Bai, the women’s underwear is on special, way over there behind the coats, you won’t get such sizes anywhere at any cost, so-and-so has dropped one on the floor for you, just in case. Beats sewing your own.

  Where else could you stock up your kitchen, buy your winter wardrobe, add the luxury of a few ready-made clothes, while looking for a job?

  From Ed’s to Knob Hill Farms for groceries, by subway and bus, clutching coupons, purses, bags, and kids, running up and down aisles gritty with spilled grain and discarded peanut shells, hunting down specials, past boys and girls tasting and filling up with as much as they could. For limited quantities whole families appeared, toddler to grandma, emerging each with a can of oil, a bag of sugar, whatever.

  And later still, if there was a job in the family, and money flowed a little more easily, a stop at Consumers Distributing: a TV stand, a toaster, an iron.

  From their apartment, through the living-room window and the balcony, the Lalanis could see, penetrating through a mass of foliage in the distance, the top of the CN Tower blinking its mysterious signal. In rain or shine, a permanent presence in their lives, a seal on their new existence, the god-head towards which the cars on the parkway spilled over, from which having propitiated they came racing back.

  After their initial excitement, the days of wonder when every brick was exotic and every morning as fresh as the day of creation, came the reckoning with a future that they’d held at bay but was now creeping closer. They had come with a deep sense that they had to try to determine it, this future, meet it partway and wrest a respectable niche in this new society. First the man of the house had to get work befitting his status. But try as he might, Nurdin Lalani could not find a job. The first few rejected job applications he took in stride: a few disappointments only to enhance the sweetness of eventual success. But the pattern persisted, and slowly in his mind the barest shadow became discernible, of impending despair, the merest possibility of a jobless vista ahead, but nonetheless frightening.

  Patience, they tell you, those who’ve been here before you. The women are always in demand, as typists and clerks, even babysitters, changing jobs with ease, confidently picking up the new ways, never looking back from their new freedom. But look around you. It takes months before the men uncertainly settle down at work they’ll never be satisfied with.…

  You check the mail hopelessly, before taking your bus to meet the jobs head-on. These are the first days and you hate yourself for arriving in winter. Braving the punishing cold, you beat the footpaths, searching for vacancies. You do Yonge Street, then Bloor, Dundas, and Queen, the East End, then the West. Taking refuge in donut shops, using precious change to make phone calls doomed by the first word, the accent. I am a salesman, I was a salesman. Just give me a chance. Why don’t they understand we can do the job. “Canadian experience” is the trump they always call, against which you have no answer. Or rather you have answers, dozens, but whom to tell except fellow immigrants at Sixty-nine. You try different accents, practise idioms, buy shoes to raise your height. Deodorize yourself silly. On these hopeless treks, how many times you’ve sniffed the air outside a restaurant, wishing – oh, shame of shames! – you could afford a hamburger, a hot dog, french fries. But the price of a hamburger here could buy four at Dominion. Sweaty, dishevelled, tired, and desperate – a state you had never known in Dar – you go home and wait for the kids. You clean up, do laundry, do anything, so as not to appear useless. Then she arrives, the breadwinner, t
ired, rightfully so, but will she understand your fruitless exhaustion? Over dinner you jealously hear her talk, full of the new life. You look sideways at her: do you see contempt, or merely pity?

  Mr. Rogers of Eatons was a tall big-boned man with large feet and hands. Do they all have to be so tall? Nurdin thought to himself. In Dar, the short took refuge in the saying: “Too tall, too stupid.” Mr. Rogers was polite: “Gentleman.” the word formed itself in Nurdin’s mind. Perhaps his candid and easy manner – lack of arrogance, unlike those whites at Sixty-nine – belied a little stupidity?

  He was being interviewed at the shoe department of the downtown store, a job simply tailor-made for him, he thought; there was no job he had felt so qualified for. Mr. Rogers had asked him about his experience, had heard all about his Bata salesmanship, and was now escorting him to the seventh floor to fill out some forms. Nurdin was bubbling with excitement and enthusiasm. Mr. Rogers appeared to be a man in his late fifties, elderly, and inspired in Nurdin a feeling of genuine respect. He already saw himself working under this fatherly figure. It was this that made him gregarious that morning. He wanted to show this man that he could talk, was capable.

  “The safari shoes,” he was saying to Mr. Rogers pointedly, detailing his past experience on their way to the elevators, “seemed to go best of all – ”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Rogers.

  “Because, you see, they don’t show the dust – ”

  “We don’t have much of that here,” Mr. Rogers said in good humour.

  If only he would let me finish. “Yes, yes, and they became fashionable, you see, because John Wayne wore them in the film Hatari – ”

  “I don’t believe I have seen it.”

  He felt he had to keep talking, get closer to the man, develop this first-time meeting which had started so well, beyond his wildest dreams, into something solid and permanent. He had never talked with a white man on such terms before – sure, the super at Sixty-nine, and some of the cashiers in stores, but not to a real white man, a gentleman – and he was simply carried away.

  They took an elevator filled with a clutch of well-dressed elderly ladies.

  “Good morning, ladies,” Mr. Rogers called out and checked if the button for his floor had been pushed.

  “I can tell good leather just from a single look,” Nurdin told him unabashedly.

  “Indeed.”

  “Now there,” said Nurdin, pointing to the man’s well-polished brogues, “that is a good leather.”

  Mr. Rogers grinned. “I should say so, I paid a good buck for them.”

  There was no stopping him now.

  “You see, when I was young, we had our shoes handmade by a cobbler,” Nurdin grinned. “It was very funny. Every day I or my brothers went to ask him, ‘Uncle, are the shoes ready?’ And every day he would say, ‘Tomorrow.’ Finally – ”

  “This way, ladies,” Mr. Rogers beckoned with a loud voice to the elderly women as the elevator stopped, standing against the door with a slight bow in an act of exaggerated courtesy. “Straight ahead and to your right!”

  “As I was saying,” continued Nurdin, when the women had gone and the elevator was on its way up again, “finally I would get fed up and say, ‘Uncle, if they are not ready, don’t bother.’ ”

  The elevator stopped and he followed Mr. Rogers out. The man was taking long strides and calling out to people he knew on this floor, making Nurdin acutely aware of his short stature.

  But he would have his say, even though he realized by now that Mr. Rogers was not really interested. “And you know what? The cobbler would give a look of protest. ‘But these ones, they are yours!’ he would say and point to the shoes he was making just then. But, listen, of course they were not mine!”

  They had arrived at a tall counter, from where Mr. Rogers picked up an application form for employment. Across from it were a table and chair.

  When Nurdin had filled in the form he asked Mr. Rogers if he would get the job.

  “There are many other applicants, you know. But we’ll call you. Keep your fingers crossed!”

  “Fingers crossed, eh.” Nurdin demonstrated, grinned in a final gesture of good humour, and left.

  When he didn’t hear for a week, he called Eatons and asked for the shoe department.

  “I’m afraid, Nurdin,” Mr. Rogers said, “we gave the job to someone else.”

  Nurdin exploded. “But my experience! I know shoes, I can give references – ”

  “I’m sorry, there were many applicants.”

  “I know I don’t have Canadian experience,” he breathed hotly and with emotion on the phone, “but how can I get Canadian experience if you don’t give me a chance? I’ve sold shoes for eight years! Eight years – ”

  “Perhaps you were overqualified, sir.”

  That was a new one. Overqualified. Good for laughs, and it got many.

  The phone rang one day.

  “Hullo,” said a cautious voice at the other end. “Am I speaking to Mr. La-la-ni?”

  “Yes, this is Mr. Lalani.”

  “How are you, Mr. Lalani?”

  “I am quite well, thank you,” he answered, exactly as he had been taught in childhood.

  “Good! My name is John McCormack, Mr. Lalani, and I would like to invite you to a party.”

  “A party.… ” He thought it might be some church group up to a new trick.

  African immigrants appeared in the limelight for a brief period when the Uganda refugees started arriving. In the basements of churches, welcoming committees got busy. Clothes and food were collected, Bibles ordered. What were expected, after subway posters and newspaper ads showing photos of starving and naked pot-bellied children with runny noses, suffering dreadful diseases like beriberi and kwashiorkor, were hungry pagans. What the church groups saw were healthy-looking people, some thin, no doubt, and bow-legged, but many – especially women – were heavy, and some positively chubby. The refugees took shelter and disappeared into the developments of Don Mills, Willowdale, Brampton, and Mississauga, there to be joined by fellow Asian immigrants from Africa.

  At Sixty-nine Rosecliffe Park and its neighbours the new immigrants were beset by hosts of proselytizers. They came from several different sects, singly or in packs, using all manner of approaches, bearing literature and tidings, goodwill and goodies, warnings and mercy. But in the Dar immigrants these missionaries met a litigious lot, for they love to debate, and they debate nothing better than community politics and religion. Zera would be in unmatched form. She could tell of her master, Missionary’s legendary public debates in Dar against sheikhs, pandits, priests, and scientists. So when the Bibles were produced, they were gratefully accepted. But somewhere in the ensuing discussion, the conversation took a wrong turn and became – pointless. For one party it showed no direction, no purpose. For the other, it was simply – fun. We also have a God. We have a Pope too. Don’t you know that Prophet Muhammad (upon whom be peace) is predicted in your Bible? What you’ve got, we’ve got too, only more modern. We change with the times. So the invitations ceased, dry muffins and cakes stopped arriving: the proselytizers gave up in frustration. All, that is, save three hardy ladies, two black and one white, who came Saturday mornings. Get trapped into a religious argument with that threesome on Saturday, and you practically starve the following week for not having bought your groceries. From apartment to apartment telephone lines buzzed with alarm as soon as these harbingers of hell were sighted getting off the bus, waddling towards the buildings, gravely bearing their packages of books and pamphlets full of warnings.

  “A party,” said the friendly voice of John McCormack, a little more forcefully this time, bringing Nurdin back from his thoughts. “A party where new Canadians can meet the old and learn from their experiences. A party to welcome the newcomers. This country was made by immigrants like you, Mr. Lalani.”

  He gave directions. “Would you like us to invite anyone else you know, Mr. Lalani? The more the merrier, as we say.”

&
nbsp; “My wife’s sister and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Abdul Ismail.”

  “Oh, the Ishmaels. They’ve already been invited. Anyone else you can think of ?”

  “No.”

  “Well, goodbye. And see you on Thursday!”

  “See you on Thursday. Thank you Mr. McCormack!”

  “John.”

  “.…”

  “John. Call me John.”

  “See you Thursday, John! Thank you!”

  The party was at the Don Mills Inn on Eglinton Avenue, a short brisk walk away, except there are no sidewalks on Eglinton there and you are exposed to cars whizzing past. They were with Roshan and Abdul. They needed Roshan yet, her boisterous confidence, if not entirely convincing, was at least enough to draw attention away from themselves in unfamiliar situations.

  They entered through revolving doors into a large lobby brilliantly illuminated by a central chandelier and numerous wall lights. Dazed by the sudden brightness, they stood back, uncertain, bewildered. And terribly impressed by what they saw. “Wow!” muttered Roshan, a little too loudly. “This is what I call posht.” The carpet under them was a plush red. In the distance was the reception desk, large and busy, impressively modern. People sat and stood, merry pageboys in green and gold sauntered around, the elevators pinged. An attendant came towards them, and instinctively they all drew a little closer together. Nurdin thought nervously of his suit. A bargain, though the checkered design was not to his complete liking. And the sleeves were just noticeably long. If he had come alone or even with Zera only, he would have fled. This was not for him, an atmosphere that made him so conscious of himself, as if he was onstage and those people were the spectators. He had moved a little behind Roshan, who was dressed in a bright olive green bargain and had on her most garish makeup. Also taking refuge behind her was Abdul, while Zera stood a little to one side taking everything in. The man politely but firmly pointed out the escalator: “Up and the last door in the corridor.”