Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives

by Stephen Henighan

  These memories swarmed over me as I closed the door of my miniature dormitory room, more like a space capsule than a living area, and dropped the plastic bag on the bed. I thought of S. A.’s warmth and hospitality. He did not seem to care that we came from different religious backgrounds, only that we were both Indians in the frozen north. And if the Sikhs lived in a borderland, so did I, with an education more English than Asian, a present in which I was learning about hockey rather than cricket. Against my will, I was gripped by the thought that the intermediate zone of Sikhdom might match my present state better than any declaration of purity.

  I sat down to think about this.

  I considered wearing my turban to the party in the lounge of my dormitory that Saturday night. In the end, I slid the plastic bag under the bed. I gathered my hair into a ponytail, went downstairs, and peered in the door, where titanic quantities of beer were being chugged. Enormous hockey players—in my eyes, all white Canadian men were hockey players—stumbled around the lounge as though they had ventured onto the ice without their skates. It was not the place for a hippie, or an Indian, or anyone who was not six feet tall. As I trailed back to my dormitory room in loneliness, I told myself that I must find my way, my means of asserting myself. I decided to lay Sikhdom aside and polish my reputation as a man of culture. If I could not chug beer, I would find an alternative. I settled on wine. I would present myself as a connoisseur of wine. I had never tasted wine. But, where I knew I would make a fool of myself if I tried to match the hockey players’ slaking of beer, wine was linked to culture. It was part of the world I wanted. I was confident that there were young women who also yearned for this sophistication. I borrowed books on viticulture from the university library—the scant reading for my courses did not detain me for long—and soon became knowledgeable. Knowledge, alas, is not visible. I felt ashamed at having to learn this lesson again. In truth, I’d known it already: I had arrived in Thunder Bay possessed of far more reading than my fellow undergraduates—was I not B.A. Bombay, M.A. Bombay (failed)?—yet neither my classmates nor my professors gave me credit for this learning. I needed to announce my difference. I needed an identity which, as my history professor said of the identity of the French province of Quebec, was distinct.

  I sat down on my bed, reached beneath it, and pulled out the plastic bag. I stood before the small mirror on the wall and concentrated on replicating the movements S. A. had shown me. They weren’t difficult to recall: as I had told myself, they were simply a series of gestures. Within ten minutes, my turban crowned my head. I looked like an illustrious fellow. I paraded back and forth across my room until walking that way felt natural. On Sunday night I again practised being a Sikh. On Monday I wore my turban to my lessons. Professors who had ignored me now treated me with cautious deference. My classmates stared. Many of these stares—particularly female stares—were stoked by curiosity.

  In the halls after class, in the cafeteria, and in the corridors of my dormitory, I received questions not only from the blank-eyed oddballs who had asked me if I was a guru and knew how to glimpse the infinite, but also from young women who liked to read, were majoring in English or History, and were interested in foreign countries and cultures. My turban did for me in Thunder Bay what the magazine with photographs of girls had done for me at the Academy: it made me normal. As the only brown-skinned person in a class of straw-haired pale-faces, I was abnormal; my turban acknowledged the abnormality, smoothing the way for strangers to approach me. It opened the door between me and them, making it easier for everyone to speak with me. With girls whom I liked, I edged the conversation away from meditation or transcendence to the subject of wine. As I did so, I felt the young women relax. I was exotic but not too exotic: like other men, I offered the opportunity to drink and cavort. I merely did so in a way that was steeped in culture. As we bantered, I discovered that my initials, R. U., flowed easily from Canadian lips.

  My dormitory room was as bleak as any other, but it was never lacking in bottles, or candles. A bottle of wine on a table, the lights turned off and the candle sputtering, conversation, invariably naive, about art and antiquity: all this rarely failed to produce the desired result. By the end of Lakehead University’s fall semester, I was a man of the world. My trysts might have been with veritable untouchables, but they were untouchables with white skin, firm thighs, and perfect breasts. Across two continents and an ocean, I felt my brothers burn with envy.

  four

  north and south

  Tuition fees, residence fees, the foreign student levy, wine, and the exorbitant cost of groceries and a winter coat depleted my handsome send-off. By December, I faced the prospect of spending the Christmas holidays alone in my dormitory with a handful of Chinese students and threadbare finances. When an envelope arrived containing a card decorated with a painting of a wilderness landscape, and, on the back, a scribbled invitation to Christmas dinner, I was exultant, even though I could barely decipher the handwriting. The invitation ended, “Most sincerely, Sam.” Who was Sam? After reading the card a second time, I realized that my would-be host was S. A.

  It had not occurred to me that Christmas was celebrated in Canada, far less by Indians. Christmas! The very word evoked Merry Old England. I thought of Mr. Pickwick on his way to Dingley Dell. But what could Christmas mean among bare rock, withered pine trees, and frigid gales moaning off an endless lake? Nothing felt so far removed from England’s green and pleasant land. Of course this was another of S. A.’s larks, as showing me how to tie a turban had been. Yet, as that incident had proved, toying with the boundaries between cultures could have long-term consequences. My Hinduism had always been passive rather than active, agnostic rather than fervent. Though a man of Victorian inclinations, I saw little point in agonizing over a crisis of faith. Now I wore a turban. Did a man in a turban lose his Far Eastern credibility if he celebrated Mr. Pickwick’s favourite holiday? I’d have expected him to celebrate Diwali, in a strained, artificial way, humouring the children by dressing it up as a substitute for Christmas. Yet I understood his urge to dispense with such charades. We were in Canada, where, apparently, Christmas was as ingrained as it was in the land of Dickens. It made sense to plunge into the local waters.

  On December 25, after tying my turban with precision, I walked through streets so empty that the waves of snow seemed to have extinguished humanity. The glass door of Singh’s Quick Curries was bolted shut. I went around to a side door. Seema, dressed in a merry red Christmas sweater that was pulled tight over her exuberant bosom, greeted me with a smile. Recognizing in her a knowing look purged of innocence, which I relished when, by candlelight, white Canadian women turned it in my direction, I responded with warmth. I then realized what I was doing and felt appalled. This was precisely how I had been taught not to look at an Indian girl. Nor should I expect an Indian girl to look back at me in such a way. When she opened her mouth, her brazen speech reminded me that she was not Indian. Her father hurried up behind her. His bellowed greeting trailed away at the sight of my turban. “Why are you wearing that piece of tomfoolery? This was a joke between us.”

  Seema retreated.

  “Why are you signing yourself Sam?” I countered. “That’s not your name.”

  Hostility jostled between us. I had not expected this. I had imagined myself greeted by the S. A. who loved a good joke, not by this censorious fellow.

  I stood on the doorstep, the blood-sapping cold at my back. Toeing a rubber mat inside the door while the sounds of Christmas carols tinkled over his shoulder, S. A. replied, “I am Canadian now. As you will be if you stay here. I recommend the taking out of Canadian citizenship. It makes a man feel like he belongs.”

  “If you’re Canadian,” I replied, beginning to get angry, “why are you wearing a turban?”

  “I am Canadian and Sikh. You are neither. You’re making a damn fool of yourself.” Refusing to budge from the doorway, he lowered his voice. “Do you think I invited
you here simply to sing ‘Jingle Bells’? I am concerned about my daughter. She is fraternizing with Canadian boys. I need to find her an Indian husband. I thought that a university-educated fellow like yourself, from a respectable family—”

  “But I am not Sikh.”

  “We are not in Amritsar. We are not even in Bombay or New Delhi. We are in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. I will settle for an Indian man—any Indian man, as long as he is a decent man. But you come here dressed like a harlequin. How can I take you seriously? My wife will think that you are mocking us. My daughter will giggle at you and go back to her hockey players.” Running out of breath, he regarded me with a sigh to which the frigid temperatures lent an asthmatic wheeze.

  “Please take off your turban.”

  “Let me come in.”

  “Come in and take off your turban.”

  I crossed the threshold of his family’s rooms off the back of the shop. Without presenting me to his wife or son, he hustled me through a kitchen-dining room of linoleum and yellow wallpaper spotted with brown stains. Seema watched me subordinate myself to her father. I was resentful at having fallen in her estimation; the visit was ruined. I had not come here to flirt with her, yet as soon as S. A.—Sam?—had broached the possibility, the thought that I might supplant hockey players had become tantalizing. I did not compete with hockey players for the girls who came to my dorm room: my trysts were with young women who sought someone more cultured than a defenceman. To wrest Seema away from the husky fellows down at the rink would be a triumph. Or it would have been. My turban had ruined my chances. This was evident from the irate haste with which S. A. tore the garment from my head and tossed it onto the bed he shared with his wife.

  “Let us see what we can do with that mop of yours.”

  He twisted my hair into a bun, which he lodged on the back of my skull. When I glanced in the mirror, I looked like a housewife, or a preadolescent Sikh boy who did not yet wear a turban. I resembled S. A.’s young son, the baby brother of my would-be betrothed. Over Christmas lunch, Seema refused to look at me. I reciprocated her disregard. I was polite to S. A.’s wife; I asked his son about hockey. S. A. was in a bad mood, and so was I. We listened to Christmas carols on the radio, but made no effort to sing along as we ate our curried turkey.

  Having expected to stay into the evening, I left at three o’clock. S. A. accompanied me to the door. “In February,” he told me, “when business is slow and airfares to India are more reasonable, I will close the shop for six weeks, remove my children from school, and take my family to the Punjab. There I will find a suitable husband for Seema.”

  He uttered the words as though they were an insult. Freeing myself from the ridiculous bun he had given me, I said: “I want my turban back.”

  He frowned at me. “You are not a Sikh. Why do you wear a Sikh turban?”

  “It is not a Sikh turban,” I replied. “It is my turban.”

  I had not imagined this answer until it sprang from my mouth. Once I had uttered these words, I felt that my place in Canada had become clear to me.

  I waited on the doorstep for S. A. to bring me my turban. I walked back to the university and spent the rest of the holidays alone in my dormitory. When lessons resumed after the long, vacant winter holiday, I was in a fix. I had failed French, Political Science and Canadian History; my two English literature classes had been elementary, yet my sonorous essays had left my professors unmoved. They reprimanded me for not interrogating literature from my position as a visible minority. They asked how I could remain complicit with the discourses of patriarchy and heteronormativity. They described my essays as Victorian. I received this as a compliment until I understood that it was a justification for giving me a mark of C.

  During the bleak Christmas holiday when, as my driver had promised, the temperature dropped to thirty-five degrees below zero, a letter from the registrar’s office had informed me that I was on academic probation. During the first week of January, I was summoned to see a counsellor, who told me that in order to maintain my status as a full-time student, I must be disciplined, I must work hard, I must struggle.

  I do not struggle: such indignity is beneath a Victorian gentleman. Adding a line to my curriculum vitae—B.A. Bombay, M.A. Bombay (failed), B.A. Lakehead (failed)—I left. I did not even go to Singh’s Quick Curries to say goodbye. The Chinese students had told me that in Toronto winter temperatures were milder. One of my paramours—was it Shelley or Melissa?—had asked me why I didn’t choose to study in a place that was more multicultural. I had not heard this word before. She gave me to understand that it meant there were many Indians. I had a cousin in Toronto. Everyone on the planet, I would learn, has a cousin in Toronto. Mine was more accommodating than most. When I told him I would be arriving on the Greyhound bus, he agreed to take me in.

  Whether it was the right or the wrong decision to slip away from the wilderness like a fugitive, I cannot say. My cousin, having been in Canada for many years, knew people who helped me parlay my student visa into a permanent resident’s

  permit. Yet I lost my sense of myself, and would not regain it for many years. As some men speak of their years at war, so I recall my years in Toronto: a grim, grey time when I kept my head down and survived the shrapnel. I lived in drab apartments in towers long bus rides from final subway stops, which in turn were a lengthy journey from the city centre. No one cared about, or respected, my education or my reading. My cousin was outraged when I appeared with a beard and a Sikh turban. “You make a mockery of us all! We must show these Canadians that we have an authentic culture. They have no culture!” I preserved my new dignity until a pair of spotty-faced dacoits thrust me up against a cement wall near the subway station, pummelled me, and tried to tear my turban from my head.

  After that, I went about short-haired and clean-shaven. Without my turban, I was nobody. In the summer months, I wore a Toronto Maple Leafs baseball cap. No garment had ever felt so empty; my baseball cap drained intelligence from my brain. I read Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell on the subway, but had no one with whom to discuss their art. The buildings where I lived, and those where I worked, were grimier enlargements of my dormitory in Thunder Bay. I was a pizza delivery man, a distributor of flyers to automobile windshields, a stocker of shelves in a large grocery, a loader and unloader of cartons in the warehouse of a big-box store, an assistant to an installer of refrigerators in cheap apartments. Like Kipling’s Kim, I drummed my heels on the pavement. I saw filthy corridors and three-bedroom flats crammed with a dozen beds, inhaled the odours of the unwashed, spent my days alongside tattooed men who spoke in curses, until I sympathized with the decision of my cousin and his friends to live only among our community.

  “Community” was not a word I would have used prior to my arrival in that grey, slushy city where, as the Chinese students had promised, the temperature rarely sank to thirty-five below. In Toronto, “community” meant people who looked like you. Here the air was never as clear as in Thunder Bay. Blended cloud and smog seeped into one’s brain. I felt that I was neither in Canada nor in India. I kept my head lowered. I enjoyed the vindaloos and biryanis that bubbled in cauldrons when my cousin and our flatmates and their cousins and their cousins’ wives and children gathered on weekends. Yet I despaired of their disconnection: their ignorance of Canadian life, on which I informed myself by reading the newspapers; their mistrust of anyone who was not Hindu; the withdrawal of their bewildered children from school each February, when airfares to India dropped and everyone went “home” for one or two months.

  Each time such expeditions were organized, I wondered who Seema had married.

  My cousin and his friends asserted this supposed community as the core of our beings when the core of our beings was earning Canadian dollars. I pitied the rudderless young men, forbidden to hold uninhibited Canadian girls in their arms, who were told that they must marry an Indian virgin whom their parents would r
ecruit from “home.” I held myself apart from this dance, resisting all attempts to marry me off to supposedly suitable girls, who had been born in Toronto but were more assertively, provincially Indian than any girl from India. I resisted and resisted until my cousin asked me whether I liked girls at all. If only he knew! If only he had seen Melissa or Shelley. Refusing to answer his impertinent questions, I withdrew into myself.

  I did not want to talk about my conquests,

  not only because my cousin would be shocked, but also because the worst part of my life was that, in the tower-block ghettos a raucous bus ride from the end of the subway line, I no longer drank wine with Canadian girls. I rarely saw a Canadian girl. There were Somalis and Jamaicans and Chinese and Russians and Sri Lankans and Filipinos and Indians and Pakistanis. On crowded buses, they all acted like ruffians. The few Canadians who lived in our districts were more likely to call me a Paki than to think me picturesque. Toronto perpetrated a monstrous hoax against me: having adopted picturesque garb in order to be embraced by Canadians, I had been sewn into my native costume, trapped in a permanent game of charades, defined by my “community,” even after I replaced my turban with a baseball cap. I despaired of being able to weave myself into Canadian reality as I had done in the dormitory in Thunder Bay. I knew, of course, that in the Victorian houses downtown and in certain posh districts north of downtown there were well-off Indian families who sent their children to Canadian universities, where they studied with Canadians, worked alongside well-off Canadians and sometimes even married them, a fact that made my cousin clench his fists. In the city, integration required money.