The Boat People

by Sharon Bala

  Fred turned off his BlackBerry and laid it on the table. Sorry about that. He leaned over to peck Grace once on each cheek. She had always found this old-fashioned habit charming.

  Still battling the godfather? Grace asked.

  Eight people dead at the Prince Regent Hotel and he’s filing a Charter challenge against extradition!

  There had been a shootout in front of the city’s premier hotel the weekend before. Rival drug gangs, and three tourists caught in the crossfire. The twins were at the beach when it happened, and Grace had spent a frightening couple of hours waiting by the phone. Steve, of course, thought she was overreacting.

  They’re at English Bay, he said. Nowhere near the shooting.

  They could have changed their minds, Grace said. Who knows where our children are?

  She perched on the edge of the coffee table, inches from the TV screen, trying to spot the girls in the flurry of activity.

  They have no reason to be downtown, Steve had said, switching off the TV. Don’t jump to conclusions.

  Fred didn’t think Grace was overreacting. Snakeheads, Triads, bikers, the Sikh gangs…if you only knew half of what I see in this job.

  When we were kids, we’d play outside until the street lights came on, she said.

  This began when we started letting people in willy-nilly, Fred said. Skilled workers and immigrants, that’s one thing. But look at this menace, the godfather. Bastard ordered six executions and got a couple of innocents killed, Fred continued. Now he wants to play the victim. Some bleeding heart at Immigration bought his story twenty years ago and we’re left to pick up the pieces.

  Fred squinted against the sun, pulled off his glasses, and dug in his breast pocket for a pair of aviators. Speaking of, how are things at the new job? Have you whipped them all into shape yet?

  It’s going well.

  He shook his head. They’re making a mockery of public safety over there. Things have to change. I expect you to set a new tone.

  Grace saw her face reflected in Fred’s sunglasses. Well, there’s a learning curve….

  You always had a sharp mind.

  But I’m cresting it. Grace pulled her shades off her head and down over her eyes. A month in and she still felt like an imposter. Team meetings were about information dissemination, not discussion. Requirement of nexus, real versus speculative risk – she was unequal to the legalese. But all her colleagues were so confident and independent, to ask for help would be to admit defeat.

  I’m reading a law book, she said. It’s been helpful.

  Several of the adjudicators had the same text on refugee law on their shelves, so Grace had bought a copy too, but she was finding the reading hard going.

  Fred waved his hand. You don’t need any of that, he said. Trust your instincts. Precedent and case law – where has it got us? Smuggled-in convicts who are a continual headache for Public Safety.

  Grace thought about the Prince Regent Hotel shooting, how the terror hadn’t left her until the girls walked safely in the door.

  Fred said: These people get a foot in the door, put down some roots, and then they’re impossible to turf. Informants, wiretaps – if you only knew how much this Russian mobster is costing the taxpayer. But the RCMP and Border Services – those are the true heroes. They are on the front lines every day.

  The automatic sprinklers came on and Grace tuned out briefly to watch them under cover of her shades. Fred sometimes forgot he wasn’t behind a microphone.

  Fred had given Grace her first job. Twenty years earlier, before Steve, before the twins, there had been Fred trusting her with his calendar and his voice mail and then asking her opinion on white papers. When a position opened up for a policy analyst, he’d nudged her into the promotion. There were other, better candidates, Grace thought. But Fred told her: You don’t need a master’s to do this job. By the time Fred made the move from provincial to federal politics, Grace was the director of operations and his right hand.

  And when she’d confessed boredom at Christmas, Fred offered a reprieve: a three-year term with the Immigration and Refugee Board. Think of it as a secondment, he said. A stepping stone to better things. There’s an opening to fill and a backlog of cases. I can’t think of anyone more suited.

  Grace thought of Mitchell and what he’d have to say about her qualifications.

  Do you know a Mitchell Hurst? she asked.

  King of the bleeding hearts, Fred said. Has he given you trouble?

  No, Grace said reflexively, and then wondered where the impulse to protect Mitchell had sprung from. He’s been…fine. Everyone’s very welcoming.

  Hurst is one of the old guard, Fred said. The Liberals stuffed the place with his ilk, left-wingers who let feelings undermine common sense.

  Fred wanted to talk about the ship. Trial by fire, he said. What did the Vancouver Sun call it?

  Grace rolled her eyes. The “ship of dreams”?

  Oh yes, those terrorists dream big.

  On the other side of the hedge, someone cannonballed into a swimming pool. Two children shrieked, gleeful. On Friday, Grace had conducted a detention review for a man whose child was being held at the women’s facility. His lawyer called the separation an undue hardship and Grace had felt a small twinge. But then she thought of all the times she had spent working late or away at conferences when the girls were small. These little absences were only short chapters in long parent–child histories. The man and his son had the rest of their lives together, and if their case was legitimate, they would spend it in Canada. Though when Grace contemplated the mechanics of the decision – how would she separate sincere testimony from tall tales? what were the criteria, apart from intuition? – her thoughts fragmented, flustered strands unfurling in all directions.

  Fred tapped his index finger against the side of his glass in an allegro. The whole world is watching our every move, he said. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

  What do you mean?

  It’s difficult to get good information out of these countries, but from what we can gather, it is certain there are more ships. Who knows how many more illegals. This is a test, Fred said. One false move on our part and we’ll be inundated with freeloaders.

  Grace imagined a fleet of rusting cargo ships floating in the Indian Ocean, all of them waiting on a signal. Five hundred and three people on a sixty-foot boat. Nothing was too outlandish. Alarm flooded her stomach and she willed it away by reminding herself that she hadn’t made any mistakes. Not yet.

  Fred said the real problem with the system was its porousness and Grace could identify with this. It’s one big grey area, she said. The lack of IDs, for example. These people come without any papers and we’re supposed to take them at their word? They could be anyone.

  And you can’t trust the ones with documents either, he said. There are good reasons to believe half the people on board are LTTE.

  What do you mean?

  There were things recovered from the ship. Identification documents. I’m sure Border Services will raise it at the hearings.

  Really? Grace thought of the migrant with the young son. He had arrived with a raft of paperwork. She hadn’t even considered it might all be fake.

  These people are not who they say they are, Fred said. The LTTE are using civilians as cover to sneak in. Don’t forget, these are the terrorists who invented suicide bombing. India tried to mediate a truce and how did the Tigers thank them? By blowing up Rajiv Gandhi. You can’t put anything past them. If even one of them gets in…

  Grace’s mouth went dry. This was what she hadn’t fully appreciated when she accepted the job. It wasn’t just about sifting legitimate from illegitimate; the real and present danger was inadvertently letting a dangerous offender in.

  Fred said, Bottom line: legitimate refugees should apply for status before they arrive, at the High Commission in their own country. Our families took the slow, legal route in. Why should others be allowed to skip the paperwork and cut to the front of the line?


  New world

  The television was a riot of noise and colour – the announcer’s voice sonorous over the hysteria, words spinning and flashing across the screen. The camera panned overhead like a drone as people in the seats screamed and clapped their hands.

  Those who were chosen ran down the aisle, slapping outstretched palms, crying, hands on their heads or covering their faces. There were old women and young boys, black men, Asian girls, a man leaning on a cane, a young woman with a tie printed on her T-shirt. All of them wanting to win, each one hoping to beat the odds.

  In the prison’s recreation room, the dilapidated folding chairs were arranged in two banks in front of the television and every wobbly seat was taken. Sometimes there were arguments over what program to watch (Mahindan could never understand why; comedy show or tele-drama, it was all incomprehensible to most of them anyway, and half the time the television broke down mid-program), but this prize show was the uncontested favourite. Everyone hummed along with the familiar, synthesized tune.

  Mahindan did not join them. He was hunched at a table in the back of the room, labouring over a series of hieroglyphics in an exercise book. The symbols were arranged left to right with space underneath where Mahindan was meant to recreate them. He was making slow and plodding progress.

  What he was good at was taking apart the innards of vehicles, reducing a trishaw or motorcycle to its component parts before putting all the pieces back together. He stared at the enigmatic figure in front of him, separating and reassembling. Two identical semicircles joined to a vertical line. It was full of portent and meaning, all of it inaccessible.

  He had taught Sellian to write just like this, the fat red pencil clutched between his small, clumsy fingers. Sellian was forever distracted. Mahindan would go away to answer the door or check on the rice and when he came back, Sellian would be doodling pictures in the margins.

  Ai! Mahindan would yell, smacking the back of Sellian’s head. Useless child!

  Mahindan drew a shaky semicircle and tried to set thoughts of Sellian aside. It had been six long weeks since their separation and he found it unbearable to dwell on just how much he missed his son. This was nothing like sending the boy to school or packing him off to stay with relations for the night. In Kilinochchi, Mahindan had never worried about Sellian when they were apart. At home, he’d been grateful, relieved to have a break. But here, his inability to leave, to walk out the doors and go collect his son, stirred up every apprehension. Was the child well? Was he eating? How frequent were the nightmares? Had he wet the bed again?

  Standing on the gangplank the month before, breathing the crisp, free air, he’d seen a new land stretched out at their feet, every opportunity theirs to earn. Now, Mahindan summoned that optimism once again. Sellian was not in any danger. And the best thing Mahindan could do was learn English.

  The Tamil Alliance came regularly with supplies: exercise books, CDs, pencils, maps of the country. Mahindan and his roommates were learning the geography of Canada. They quizzed each other on the provinces, Mahindan closing his eyes and reciting while Prasad checked his progress. He could get as far east as Ontario. After that, all the names mushed up together. Nova Brunswick. New Prince Island.

  They had a portable CD player on loan from the Tamil Alliance that they shared with the men in five other cells. Mahindan had fallen into a grudging coexistence with Ranga (what choice did he have?), and when it was their turn with the CD player, they sat on the bed, each with an earbud, sounding out the syllables of unfamiliar words.

  At meals, they practised their English by pointing to various compartments on the divided tray and stating what was inside. Bread, chicken, carrots. There were things that had no Tamil equivalent. Prasad said lasagna was Italian. Lasagna. Mahindan took it out for a test run, feeling the foreign sounds rattle against his teeth, working his tongue around the vowels.

  Make your tongue flat, Prasad coached him. Lah. Lah. Lah.

  One good thing about this place: it kept them well fed. Chicken and pork and eggs, more meat in a week than Mahindan was used to having in a month. He was bloated with constipation. He had asked for kadukkay powder and coconut water, but Prasad said they didn’t have all those things here. He’d been given some tablets instead, but they weren’t helpful.

  The symbols had to be drawn between the lines. Mahindan placed the tip of the pencil on the blue rule and drew a straight edge up to the red, keeping his eye on the original the whole time, taking care not to press down on the lead too hard. After he was finished, he would rub out his work and give the book to Ranga.

  On the television, a woman in an orange shirt came racing to the stage, arms flailing. Two doors slid back to reveal a silver car. A glamorous lady in a short blue dress walked around it, trailing her fingers against the sleek chrome and metal. The announcer said words Mahindan could not understand. The audience shrieked its approval. Rainbow chevrons lit up in a pattern of arrows. Mahindan blinked against the flashing lights. He could not take his eyes off the car.

  How to work with this racket? Ranga stuck his fingers into his ears and closed his eyes, reciting numbers under his breath in English.

  Beside him, Prasad, unfazed, set his novel on the table like a tent and reached for the Tamil–English dictionary.

  A guard came to the doorway and called out something in English. Mahindan picked out three words. Bus. Here. Now. Every day, his store of vocabulary expanded.

  The guard read five names from a list, dropping vowels and mangling up consonants. The men he called stood and picked their way to the aisle. Mahindan watched them leave, the combination of hope and fear on their faces. Even though it had been more than a month since they arrived, no one had left detention.

  Best of luck, machan! a few people said.

  Don’t come back, someone called out.

  No need for us to see your ugly faces again.

  Every day, the same routine: breakfast, television, detention reviews. Later, when the men returned, shoulders hunched, there would be conciliatory murmurs, pats on the back. What to do? Only try again next time.

  Some, like Ranga, were growing frustrated, but Mahindan had adopted the stoicism of his lawyers, confident all would work out in the end. Mr. Gigovaz had warned them – had he not? – from the very first day that they must be patient. What use was it to harp on about what had been lost in Sri Lanka, to pout and mutter about what little they had gained here? Mahindan was contemptuous of such lazy cynicism and prided himself on his positive attitude.

  Whenever Ranga hissed derisively through his teeth and made some ungrateful complaint about this country and their rules, whenever he brooded on his old life in Mannar, the lost prosperity of his vegetable stand, Mahindan turned and walked away. He was forced to share a cell, even workbooks, with this man, but he refused to indulge his sulking.

  Mahindan had already faced three different judges and failed all three detention reviews. From now on, there would be reviews only every thirty days, one bid for freedom per month. The first failure had come as a shock, the allegation that his identity was suspect. He had all his papers in order; what was the confusion? But Mr. Gigovaz had said not to worry. The government was being overly cautious. There were too many Tamils and not enough government workers to process them quickly.

  You see? Mahindan had said to Ranga the day before, when another busload of men returned shaking their heads. No one is allowed to go. You aren’t the only one.

  Not that it helped. Ranga’s expression only darkened. They’ll keep us here forever, he said. They’re no better than the Sinhalese.

  How can you say such things? Mahindan had thrown up his hands. Have you forgotten how those devils made us suffer?

  What was most difficult for Mahindan was feeling stalled. Every day he passed in this jail was another day he wasted fretting about Sellian instead of searching for a job.

  Outside, a dismal rain spat half-heartedly against the window. In the exercise book, the next character was a sin
gle curve, like a crescent moon.

  Mahindan missed working with his hands, letting his mind run free as he lay under a bus, fingers slippery with grease, inhaling the kerosene and rust. He missed doing the work he was good at – repairing brake lines, diagnosing faulty transmissions.

  Hidden between the pages of the exercise book was a drawing Sellian had made in blue crayon – a cement block house with a palmyra tree in front and two stick figures, under which he had carefully spelled out in Tamil Appa and Sellian. He had labelled the picture Home.

  Sellian would have taken over the garage if they had stayed in Kilinochchi. But now they were here, and when Mahindan saw professionals like Prasad and Charlika, people who wore suits and spoke in English, who were not frightened by the shower, he was proud to give his son a better legacy.

  —

  Sellian always ran to his father when he came for Saturday visits. Mahindan bent down and reached out as his son barrelled into his arms. Each time was a relief, like exhaling a long-held breath, the moment when the small, familiar body made contact, Sellian sweet-smelling in his arms, holding on as if for dear life and panting hard into his chest.

  Don’t go, Sellian whispered. Don’t go.

  Where to go? Mahindan would say. Always, I am here.

  Mahindan was happy to remain in the hug for as long as Sellian wanted, marvelling at every change he noticed, every ounce of added weight, storing it up for later as a balm for his nerves when, alone, anxiety snuck in.

  But Saturdays were also when Mahindan assigned Sellian his studies and checked his work from the week before.

  You need to read and write in English if you are going to succeed in this country, Mahindan told him.

  They sat across from each other at a square table in the visiting room. There were guards at the doors and a machine that belched out Coca-Cola in a plastic bottle when you fed it a gold coin. Sellian’s eyes flicked to its polished red surface every few minutes as he swung his legs back and forth under the table.