Clockwork Canada

by Dominik Parisien

  We lose to the weather. We attempt to quell the temper of the Earth. But there is no protection, and once my husband was swallowed by the mountain, I wanted no more of the gold towns. No more of that greed and mud and cold. Season after season, until he became a memory pushed beneath layers of ice. I would not let him turn into an effigy.

  You listened. We told our hearts to the ones with the least comprehension. There, they would be safe.

  You watched me, dark eyes alight with golden shards. Maybe you understood. The storm warred with the night, and both of us with some taste of poison on our tongues.

  * * *

  I wondered how long you’d been up here. A solitude surrounded you like night around the moon, but there was no loneliness in your gaze. No grasp for companionship. Nor was there the danger of insanity, as one sometimes found in those who spent too much of their time apart from other people.

  When the storm abated you led me into the white world. The trees, thick, green and spinal, were weighted with snow. The ground spread pristine and reflected the sun. My husband loved the green, the encompassing multitude of nature. He knew the winter intimately, but growing up in a place did not mean it wouldn’t one day turn on you. There was no taming the bear, though it crawled from its den a cub.

  Overhead, the sky was a uniform grey. If it were possible to rise above the globe, I imagined this coast would look like the murky banks of churned river water, where silt and rock turned silver-blue into a blind opaqueness.

  I stepped in your footsteps, calf-deep in the snow, arms tucked against my body while you forged ahead further into the forest like you were on a scent. I gave no thought of danger, though you moved with such confident precision, perhaps to abandon me somewhere eventually. Many were suspicious of the Chinese, even afraid, though the ones I’d known had never been anything but industrious and kind. They kept to themselves, but why wouldn’t they? When the towns and camps shunned them or worse.

  We must have walked for an hour. I stared at your imprints in the snow and pretended I was following my husband to the place he wouldn’t lead me. The cold scoured my eyes and bit at the tips of my ears. It dried out even tears.

  But this wasn’t Sam. Your soft footfalls melted the snow in your going. I did not believe it until the more I followed, the more green I saw beneath our feet. Damp, deep green, and wet fallen leaves, and the brush and the dirt of this mountain, the underbelly of a spring that was still months away. You touched the icy branch of a weighed-down pine, swaying it from our path, and water melted off your fingers when you let go. As if some silent burning furnace emanated from your palms.

  “Wait.”

  But you either didn’t hear, didn’t understand, or chose to ignore. The air around us had grown warm. At first I thought it was from the exertion of our walk, but now it seemed more like you were releasing it, this heat, something that crackled the ends of your hair and seeped through the layers of your clothes to bury deep into the earth.

  I had no way to explain it and we had gone far enough that I lost my bearings.

  You stopped so suddenly I almost tread on your heels. You did not sweat, yet your cheeks were burnished with warmth and I felt it rising off of you to cling to me, carrying with it a scent not unlike a metal forge. I wanted to ask, yet did not want to know.

  You pointed through the blue shadows and I shuffled closer to the break in the forest.

  A cabin, this one a little bigger than the one we came from. You looked at me and I shook my head.

  “Go,” you said.

  “Who’s in there?” My thought was a white hunter. Someone that would take care of me and release you from any stranger obligation.

  “Go,” you said, and you touched my arm. It burned like I was too long near a flame, forcing me to take a step away. “I wait.”

  And just like that, it was inevitable. Once aboard the ship, there was no disembarking until landfall. Between you and this cabin was an ocean voyage.

  Every step I took was tiny, hemmed in. Coffin steps carrying me deeper into the cold.

  No answer to a knock. Three knocks and silence. I had to shove the door with all of my weight, until it burst in on shadows and a dance of dust in the light that lanced in from the doorway.

  In the middle of the room, a block bed.

  On top of the bed, covered in blankets, my Sam.

  Behind me the mountain was silent.

  My steps grew heavier the closer I drew. Until I was looking down into drawn lids covered by ice. His face was wrapped in a scarf but I knew the grey wolf fur on his shoulders and the blond curling around his ears, pale like sunlight.

  Here he lay, as if he waited.

  A cruel dream.

  * * *

  You told me in lilting English that you’d found my husband beneath the snow. You tried to revive him, your hands on his chest, on his cheeks, over his mouth where breath should’ve pushed. You carried his body, twice your size, through the snow. And when you could carry him no more, you crawled and pulled until you’d taken him to your door. Your hands in the snow, burning the cold.

  But he was already dead.

  So you built another cabin and you took him back.

  You laid him to rest so he wasn’t buried.

  You wanted to set him on fire but something told you to wait. Something said I would be coming. Because you would have gone too, if you could have. Your father dead on the voyage over the ocean, your family lost back in China. Your hands worked to the bone for an iron will.

  Some things should be reclaimed.

  And here I was.

  * * *

  My hands wrung in the fur and leather and cloth, an attempt to tear his body from this death. And you said words and they stuck onto my skin like ink, emblazoned there like history that would forever be repeated, indelible and true, long after my inability to make sense of the meaning.

  The mountain crashed itself upon me like a wave, like a rock slide, like a crushing cave compounded by darkness, swallowing up the only avenue of escape. You can drown in pain – we know this now – like a fire sucking breath and a storm covering sight.

  I had wanted to know for certain, but who was to say it wasn’t better just remaining in the dark?

  Loss was no less loss when it was touched.

  “You go home now,” you said.

  Maybe that was your answer because you never could.

  Woman climbs mountain after dead husband.

  Woman dies on mountain with dead husband.

  This woman stood by the encircling trees and watched you set your hand on the cabin wall. She watched you melt the wood with the fire that arose from the palm of your hand. Fire hot enough to explode stone and forge iron.

  For everything built, something must be destroyed.

  I would die up here with you, but I knew you would not let me. It wasn’t in you, to allow things to die.

  You carried my husband’s name in your hands, like all of the men and boys who’d died before him at the feet of these mountains, in the valleys, in the canyons. One killed by a rock slide. Another smothered to death in a cave-in. One knocked off a bluff by a hail of stones.

  “You go home now,” you said, when morning brought ash.

  Blackened ash against low white ridges and burnt autumn green.

  The long shadows of dawn.

  And where you were silent, I still screamed.

  KOMAGATA MARU

  RATI MEHROTRA

  Gurdit Singh leaned against the starboard side of the Japanese steamship and inhaled deeply. Cold and clean the night air, soft the swell of waves. From behind him came sounds of laughter and happy shrieks as children chased each other on the crowded deck. Tomorrow, May 23, 1914, they would dock at Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet. The grace of the Almighty had brought them so far. Surely they would not fail now.

  A hand touched his shoulder. Gurdit turned. “Daljit,” he acknowledged. “Is everything all right?”

  Daljit was his secretary; the young man ha
d helped sell tickets in Hong Kong for the voyage of the Komagata Maru to Canada. He shifted now, looking uncomfortable. “As well as can be, Baba,” he said at last. “But I am worried. Suppose it does not work?”

  “It will work,” said Gurdit. “Do you not trust me?”

  “Of course,” said Daljit. “But we have over four hundred people on board, including women and children.”

  “I know,” said Gurdit. “They are my responsibility – mine and Captain Akhiro’s. I hired him for a reason, Daljit. Akhiro is an expert and believes in our cause.” He looked over Daljit’s shoulder at the boy hovering behind him. “Yes, Balwant?”

  “Pitaji,” said his son, waving a slip of paper, “Captain Akhiro says we have received a wireless message of headlines from the Vancouver newspaper, The Province. He asked if you wanted to see it.”

  Gurdit knew what the headlines would say, but it was better to have the worst out in the open, to be prepared for the reception they would get in Vancouver. “Go ahead,” he said. “Read it out to me.”

  Balwant cleared his throat. “Boat Loads of Hindus on Way to Vancouver,” he recited. “Hindus Cover Dead Bodies with Butter. Stop Hindu Invasion of Canada.” He looked up at his father with anxious eyes.

  “Three hundred and forty Sikhs, twenty-four Muslims and twelve Hindus,” said Daljit bitterly. “Not that it makes any difference to them. We’re all brown dirt to the Englishman.”

  “Daljit,” said Gurdit, keeping his voice calm yet authoritative, “I will have no talk like that. We are going to find a new home for our people. No matter what happens tomorrow, I need you to be positive. Do your job and leave the rest to God. You are my right-hand man; the passengers look to us for guidance. Do not fail me.”

  A moment of silence passed between them, then Daljit nodded and left. Gurdit heard his cheerful voice tease one of the children, and exhaled with relief. He didn’t blame Daljit or any of the other hot-headed young men on the ship. They all longed for the same thing – a home where they could be safe, where they could plant and grow food or work for honest wages, and be free from the ever-present threat of imprisonment by their British overlords. A place where they could be equal to their fellowman, no matter the colour of their skin or the language of their birth. That place was not Vancouver. Perhaps one day it would be – but not now, not in 1914. Canada, proud Dominion of the British Empire, was not yet the land of the free.

  Gurdit looked at Balwant and felt a pang. Balwant’s mother had refused to come; she had clung to her son and begged them not to go. Gurdit – a successful ship engineer who had carved a new life for his family in Hong Kong – had no need to put everything at risk for the hundreds of poor Sikh men desperately looking for a ship to Canada. Not in the current political climate, with every Punjabi suspected of being a Ghadar Party sympathizer, bent on overthrowing British rule. Not with the current anti-Indian immigration policy of Canada that demanded every Indian arrive with two hundred dollars in his pocket, direct from India without stopovers. Even the steamship companies had been ordered not to sell passage to Asians.

  But wasn’t this precisely why it was important to do something now, to play a role, to make a statement that would reverberate around the world?

  We are here. We matter.

  “Go, Balwant,” he told his son. “Thank Captain Akhiro and then get some food and rest. Tomorrow is a big day.”

  “Yes, Pitaji.”

  His son left and Gurdit turned back to face the Pacific. The same ocean, given different names from the start of their journey in Hong Kong to the end of their journey in Vancouver. Naming it did not change its nature. God was like that too. Pity that more people did not understand this.

  Despite his outward assurances, a needle of doubt pierced his core. Daljit’s worry was well founded. What Gurdit and Captain Akhiro were planning had never been attempted before. The ship was untested – a secret experiment born in >a Kobe shipyard, plans drawn up by Gurdit’s own exacting hands. The passengers knew the risk, but they had been willing to take it. Anything was better than the years of hardship they had suffered.

  There was always the tiny possibility that they would actually be allowed to disembark in Vancouver. There was the larger possibility that they would be forced to turn back and return to Calcutta, where the British waited with loaded guns to greet them. And then there was the third possibility, which Gurdit could not bear to contemplate: the failure of the experiment and the burning of the Komagata Maru with all four hundred passengers on board.

  So fragile, the vessel of their hope. Gurdit closed his eyes and prayed. “Ik Onkar.” There is one God. “Satnam.” His Name is Truth. “Nirbhao.” He fears none. “Nirvair.” He hates none.

  * * *

  The next day dawned clear and bright. As the Komagata Maru chugged into Burrard Inlet, the passengers crowded the upper deck, pointing excitedly at the tall buildings of the city rising opposite. After a two-month voyage, everyone was packed and ready to go ashore, wearing their best clothes, such as they were. Gurdit moved among them, exchanging greetings, ruffling the hair of the children, answering questions in his patient voice. He had slept little last night, tossing and turning in the tiny cabin he shared with his son.

  The Komagata Maru dropped anchor on the far side of the inlet. Daljit gripped his arm. “Look Baba,” he said. “We are being met.”

  Gurdit raised his eyes. An immigration launch was headed towards them. There were armed guards on its deck. And so it begins, he thought, and his chest tightened.

  The launch came up alongside the ship, and the crew tied it and lowered the walkway. Daljit made everyone else back away and leave a circular space for Gurdit and Captain Akhiro. Gurdit stood and waited, thinking of everything he could say, everything he had already said to news reporters in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Would it make a difference to these hard-eyed men climbing up the walkway? Would it change their minds?

  Two tall men, one swarthy and clean-shaven, the other pallid and moustached, came to a halt before him. Behind them were two guards. The rest of the party remained on the launch below.

  “Gurdit Singh?” demanded the swarthy man. “I’m Hopkinson and this is Reid. We are the chief immigration inspectors for the Vancouver port. I’m afraid there has been a terrible mistake. You do not have permission to disembark here.”

  “We are British citizens,” said Gurdit, “and we have the right to visit any part of the British Empire.”

  “Your ship has violated the Continuous Journey Regulation,” said Reid. “None of you have come direct from the country of your birth. We telegraphed the governor of Hong Kong to prevent your ship from leaving port, but unfortunately our message arrived too late.”

  “That is an unfair regulation,” said Gurdit. “It is impossible to travel from India without stopping in Japan or Hawaii. You know this.”

  “And we doubt you are carrying the minimum required amount of two hundred dollars per person,” continued Hopkinson, as if Gurdit had not spoken. “You are aware of the rules governing Canadian immigration, and yet you dragged these people on a fruitless journey. How much did they pay you for the false hope you gave them?”

  “How dare you!” shouted Daljit. “We all contributed what we could…”

  “Quiet, Daljit,” said Gurdit, and his secretary fell silent. Behind him, he could feel the hot glares of some of the men, the anxiety of the others. He turned back to the immigration inspectors. “There are less than thirteen hundred Indians in Canada,” he said. “But there are several hundred thousand British in India. Consider this a test case. What is done with my shipload of people will determine whether there is any peace in the British Empire.”

  Hopkinson’s lip curled. “Ghadar Party, just as I thought. You may as well plan your route back, because no court will allow you to stay. Just yesterday there was a protest by the citizens of Vancouver in front of the mayor’s office, demanding that Asians be expelled from our city. No one wants you Indians – don’t you understand?”r />
  “Our men are strong and work hard,” said Gurdit. “The lumber yards and mills will be happy to employ them. Besides, we do not have supplies for a return voyage.”

  Reid shrugged. “Not our problem. You will leave today. If you’re not gone by tomorrow morning, a military ship will escort you out of the harbour.”

  The men left. Gurdit watched them go with a heavy heart. It was what he had expected, but a part of him had hoped for less intransigence.

  The ship doctor came up to him. “It’s all right, Baba,” he said quietly. “Do what you have to do. I will talk to the men.”

  Gurdit nodded and glanced at Captain Akhiro, who had stood immobile as stone while the inspectors were on board. “When, Captain?” he asked.

  Captain Akhiro considered. “Midnight,” he said. “Tell them to lose every bit of extra weight, including the benches of the lower deck.”

  “And to pray,” said Gurdit.

  The captain laughed. “Do you think prayers will keep the Komagata Maru from exploding?”

  “Why not, Captain?” said Gurdit. “Why not?”

  The rest of the day, Gurdit threw himself into preparations, even though the captain and the doctor urged him to rest. He would know no rest until their journey was over, one way or another.

  Everyone ate heartily, for what was their last meal on board Komagata Maru. When dusk fell, men went below deck to pry everything loose. There was no furniture apart from four hundred wooden benches; this was to their advantage now as they worked to clear the area.

  Under the cover of darkness, pre-arranged groups dropped all the benches, packed suitcases, lifeboats, and supplies overboard. Only a single coal stove and the bare minimum provisions were retained.

  Some wept to lose their belongings, which were all they had in the world, but most, Gurdit was glad to see, were stoical about it. Once everyone was back below, and a check had been done to make sure no one had kept any personal items, Gurdit, Daljit, Balwant, and the ship doctor joined Captain Akhiro at the crowded pilot house on the bridge. All the crew were present here, their faces taut and expectant. Maps gleamed on the walls, red lines showing the route by which they had arrived in Vancouver, and green lines showing the path they yet had to travel.