Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives

by Stephen Henighan

  Aware of this, I husbanded that which was still mine. Without telling my cousin, I held back the remnants of my handsome send-off, using it to purchase a savings certificate. But nothing would restore me to the privilege I had enjoyed, failing to realize how extraordinary it was, when I sat in a dormitory room in Thunder Bay and stared across flickering candles into the eyes of Shelley or Melissa. If I had followed that path, if I had struggled to complete my B.A., though the thought of such exertions appalled me, I might have become Canadian. Vowing not to succumb to nostalgia, I muffled my memories. I muffled everything and became no one.

  five

  desperate remedies

  As celibate as the Mahatma, I found that celibacy deepened my indolence. Eight years passed. The 1970s, the decade of my youth, yielded to the 1980s. My revered England, like tortured India, fell under the rule of a woman of iron. America was led by an actor; in Canada, the prime minister who had said that the state had no place in the bedrooms of the nation lost power briefly, then returned, strengthening the newspapers’ conviction that Canada was exempt from the torments that rocked the world.

  I might never have rediscovered myself had it not been for my eldest brother. One day the phone rang and I heard the voice of the left-armed fast bowler, who now knocked over wickets

  on the Bombay stock exchange. “Our father is not getting younger,” he said. “You would know that if you had returned in February with the rest of the rabble … He wants to see you settled. Do you need capital to invest in a business? Why are you not married? You’re not a poofter, are you?”

  “I …”

  “What is it you want, R. U.?”

  I held my breath. My dormant instinct for opportunity, muted by eight years of grovelling for jobs, warned me this might be my last chance. A fifth son must bow to an eldest son. Any reader of Victorian novels knows that.

  “We need to make a respectable man of you. You know what they say here, don’t you? They say that girlie magazine they caught you with was a ruse and you went away because you have tendencies. Remember when you were a child and played dress-up like a girl? They’re saying that was evidence—”

  “I certainly do have tendencies—”

  “I knew it! I’m not going to support that. You don’t belong in our family. You debase us, R. U. You can just fuck off—”

  I allowed him to work himself into a fury, then I let him have it between the eyes. “I have

  tendencies towards the seduction of white women. It’s a weakness I can’t satisfy in India. It drives me mad.”

  “I’ll wager they don’t let you near them.” For the first time, his voice betrayed hesitation.

  “On the contrary—” I detailed my Thunder Bay conquests by name, by blonde or brunette, by clear skin or freckles, by leg and breast; I gave him to understand that I continued to pursue such lasciviousness.

  When one is poor, one is never alone: my cousin and his flatmates were watching a film that starred the Bollywood actress Helen, their ideal of pure Indian beauty. They muted the film to eavesdrop on my salaciousness with expressions of satisfied disgust. I had never been so foolish as to share my triumphs with them. Now I was on the razor’s edge. After hearing this, my cousin would eject me from the apartment and his community. Unless I extracted a pay-off from my brother, I would be out on the street.

  “You’re a pervert!” My brother’s affection was unmistakable. The left-armed fast bowler was a champion of patriarchy and heteronormativity. “You do it with white women? How could you? I say, brother, I’ve always thought you were a tremendous fellow. Now tell me. What is it you want in life? What line of work do you want to go into?”

  I thought so hard that I began to sweat. I knew that if I tried to run a business, I would run it into the ground. If I applied myself, I could complete a degree in literature. But to find a job, I would have to speak of literature as Canadian professors did, and on one point I was certain: no group’s thinking was more muddled than that of Canadian professors. I thought: a squire, and heard the half rhyme with lawyer. A lawyer in rural Canada … I envisaged an idyllic hamlet where I would be unique and picturesque rather than common and ghettoized.

  “How much does law school cost in Canada?” my brother asked.

  His question initiated a period of negotiation, punctuated by phone calls and letters and application forms. I became aloof from my cousin and his flatmates. To them, I had become immoral. I did not respect my community; I was a bad influence on young people. Fortunately, the cost of law school in Canada remained reasonable.

  In September I left Toronto.

  I cashed in my savings certificate to buy a Lada that had been slewing over Canada’s snowy roads since before my arrival in Thunder Bay. The day I stowed my clothes in the back seat and my books in the boot, and bid farewell to my cousin and his roommates, who clamoured that I was unclean and they would slam the door in my face when I came crawling back to them, I knew my tribulations were over. I could consign those years to memory as a blur of ordeals endured. Just as stout Englishmen had returned from the North-West Frontier or the source of the Nile to the comforts of London clubs, so I was returning to the society that soothed me.

  As I drove west, past turnoffs to towns with names from English history, I realized I was going to London, as I had dreamed of doing. Like me, this London had shed any pretensions to the authenticity of the original. Rather than fog, I was bathed in sunshine. The city looked like a suburb, the grim little downtown emptied at 5 p.m., but the university campus, with its grandiose sandstone gates and nineteenth-century tower, filled me with confidence that here were people like myself: people of no particular distinction who were in the process of acquiring distinction—or a convincing veneer of it, which was what

  mattered. Though many of my classmates came from wealthy families, the pitch of my accent and my capacity for literary allusions made them treat me with circumspection. These budding lawyers from families that had money and yearned for culture knew they were in the presence of an erudite fellow. Had they glimpsed me unloading a truck at a big box store, they would have written me off as a Paki; here they deferred to me. I let my beard grow. The day I arrived and moved into my rented room, I took my turban downstairs to the laundry room and washed it and my turban cap. Later, I practised folding them again, letting the little tail dangle down the back of my neck. I wrapped the cloth around my head, then wrapped it again. My conscious mind had forgotten this sequence of gestures, but my hands remembered. When I looked in the mirror, a handsome fellow in a bright blue turban, perfectly tucked, stared back at me. His beard was still scraggly, but time would take care of that.

  In conversations at pubs after class (I ordered wine, my classmates preferred Guinness) I explained that Sikh men took the name Singh in rejection of distinctions of caste and class. The crown of my turban lent my declarations a princely authority, enhanced now by a body that was fuller than it had been in my Lakehead days. My disquisitions gained me a progressive following in a conservative university. More than that: they earned me a girlfriend. Intimidated by my need to struggle—an indignity, I now grasped, that would open the door to a dignified life—I had not sought a girlfriend. I had promised myself, and more importantly, had promised the left-armed fast bowler, that I would work to justify my family’s confidence in me. A third degree to which “(failed)” was appended would condemn me to life imprisonment in the towers beyond the end of the subway line.

  I had hoped for other Shelleys or Melissas. As I allowed myself a little cautious activism, sufficient to establish myself as an open-minded fellow, without distracting myself from exams or being labelled as a hothead, I rubbed shoulders with women of passion and commitment. Before long, I was an object of passion, a partner in commitment. The apparatus of seduction—wine, candles—was hers, not mine. The left-armed fast bowler would have said that by allowing a woman to take such initiative I was not behaving like a
man, yet how he would have envied the manly outcome of my unmanliness! By relinquishing patriarchy, I quaffed from the chalice of heteronormativity.

  I was nervous on my first night with Esther. (Yes, my beloved was Jewish. Her grandparents had fled Czarist Russia as communists. I was impressed. At two generations’ remove, communism is a form of aristocracy.) I knew I must conceal how many years had passed since my last intimate experience with a woman: she could regard my long celibacy only as evidence of failure. Once you begin to mingle with future lawyers, you cannot allow even your beloved to suspect that you have ever failed at anything. The ethos of my new community would oblige Esther to spurn me if I revealed myself as less than a practised, habitual lover. I was surprised to discover that this troubled me: hadn’t I been seeking a tryst? Yet in the shadow of the tower that dominated the campus of this London of the provinces, sliding in and out of women’s bodies was no longer sufficient: to secure my position, I must anchor myself in an enduring connection.

  The extent of my anxiety took me by surprise. It drove my perceptions inward, honing my consciousness of my body as our clothes dropped to the floor in a dishevelled embrace. I reminded myself that the act in which I was about to engage was a series of gestures. Like culture, love was the product of deft movements. When our lovemaking began in earnest, I realized that now I was over thirty, the vein-searing climaxes of my early youth had cooled. My body expanded to fill the room; hers became invisible. I longed for the easy pleasure I had taken in Thunder Bay, my wide-eyed tourism of white female flesh. Morose in the aftermath of passion as I lamented the waning responsiveness of my nerve-ends—a waning, I was certain, I scarcely would have noticed on a day-by-day basis, but which an eight-year hiatus had thrown into jagged relief—I confronted with painful clarity the years of pleasure that had been quashed by my cousin’s community.

  Having returned to my body, I lavished attention on Esther. Even as I did so, my attention felt as trumped-up as a politician’s palaver. Yet she seemed charmed; perhaps verbosity was what she expected from her cultured Indian? She asked me how she differed in bed from Indian girls. It was clear that by “differed from” she meant “was better than.” I flattered her, concealing that I had no experience of Indian girls, that such experience was not normally available to an unmarried Indian

  man. I told her that with her hooded eyelids, dark hair, and slightly olive skin, she could pass for a Kashmiri girl. She told me that my beard scratched and aroused her as though she were making love with a Talmudic prophet. Like my cousin, Esther asserted her membership in a community.

  My classmates did not grasp the predicament of being a fifth son in a country where rules cannot be breached, of lifting the phone late at night and hearing the left-armed fast bowler demanding a full accounting of my grades. “You are studying as your father’s son! You must honour our family!”

  Esther laughed when I told her of these calls. “Your brother,” she said, “sounds like my father.”

  She invited me to meet her parents.

  six

  the hamlet

  Esther and I became one of the law school’s recognized couples. The fact of our being together, though I myself had not thought of it in this way, was seen as a political statement: an emblem of multiculturalism and Canadian tolerance, a challenge to the bland, white assumptions of London, Ontario. I was noticed, I was respected. Realizing that any word I uttered would only blemish my status, I avoided risky declarations. Preferring the security of silence, I cultivated the mien of the inscrutable Oriental. I adopted this pose even with Esther’s parents. When we went to dinner at their house, in one of the Toronto neighbourhoods where rich Indians fraternized with whites, my return to the city unnerved me, as though I were revisiting the scene of a trauma. I boxed up my agitation in long, thoughtful silences. At the end of the evening, Esther told me that I had made a good impression. As we drove back to London, with the lorries swooping past us in the darkness, I said: “They didn’t seem worried that you might have Indian children.”

  “They know,” Esther said, “that any children I have will be Jewish.”

  “Because Jewishness passes through the mother?”

  “Because I wouldn’t let them not be Jewish, silly!”

  I stared ahead over the steering wheel as a lorry shot past in the outer lane and vanished into the darkness. “How foolish of me not to think of that,” I murmured.

  This conversation sowed the seeds of a disquiet whose slow germination over the next three years condemned us not to marry. Not that I feared Jewish children: I would have welcomed them. My fear was that, like most Canadians, Esther underestimated unassimilated cultures. Any children I had would be Indian sons. I would beget repetitions of my brothers. For all its Jewish tenacity, Esther’s third-generation Canadian tolerance

  wouldn’t stand a chance against the ancient intransigence I would transmit to our offspring. My children would resemble the left-armed fast bowler.

  I never wished to encounter such beings.

  Nor did I wish to return to Toronto. My provincial ideal was within reach. Once I was a lawyer, I would be able to settle in a village and hang out my sign. I could earn a living on the side while devoting myself to cultured pursuits. I could take walks along the river and through the park, and be recognized by my fellow village professionals as a gentleman of property and culture. Esther, though, was committed to alleviating the plight of immigrants: this was integral to her commitment to me (it was unclear which was cause and which effect), her commitment to her society, and her reverence for her refugee grandparents. To sacrifice her earning potential on the altar of immigration law, she would have to go work in Toronto; I refused to return there. Our classmates, who exulted as they lined up articling jobs with Bay Street law firms, thought we had both lost our minds.

  We no longer wanted the same things.

  I graduated from law school and did my

  articling with a small firm in London. Having suppressed my past failures, I was now B.A. Bombay, LL.B. Western. I no longer had a girlfriend.

  My articling passed in a flurry of long nights that wore me out. By the time I passed the bar exam, I was ready to repair to the countryside. For a week, I drove around southern Ontario in my dilapidated Lada in search of a likely village. That was how I met the woman who would make and break my fugitive’s life. A woman whom I took to be the core of Canadianness, yet who turned out to be an immigrant more desperate for acceptance than I was. A woman who was not a lover, but something even more alluring: a transfixing mentor.

  I stopped in an old Scottish mill town. Nineteenth-century chipped limestone walls dived straight into a ravine where water swirled after plunging over rapids, then ran deep and black towards the weir that sucked it downstream. I sauntered uphill. The main street had cafés and shops that sold souvenirs and local baking, a post office, a quaint old city hall, and a grocery. Branching out on either side were leisurely quarters where houses, some of them built of red brick and others of the pale local limestone, sat on broad, sloping lawns. Maple trees reached to the sky. This was the home I had imagined. It was an English village built by Scots in Canada. The layered residue of a British colonial history that I shared renewed my spirits, assuring me that here, in contrast to my cousin’s tower—in contrast, even, to an authentic village in England’s Home Counties—I would find a congenial home. I walked around every block of the residential area, then returned to a corner where a high hedge screened a bevy of conversation. I heard the splattering of a fountain and the rise and fall of voices.

  I stepped through a gap in the hedge and entered a garden party. I glimpsed the labels on the wine bottles that stood, more empty than full, on a long wooden table fit for a medieval feast. The word Château abounded. Very fine taste was evident here. The people were older than me, in bohemian middle age. The women wore their grey hair loose. Their earrings were oversized and struck from dull gold. One man had mu
tton-chop sideburns; another, who spoke with the accent of an overseas English colonialist, wore the uneven beard of a sensitive swashbuckler. Their clothes were of nonchalant elegance: loose-fitting silk dresses, bright dress shirts. Mine, fortunately,

  were formal: taken by the notion that I might apply for a lease, I had put on a grey suit and a pale turban.

  The people who sat along the table looked uncomfortable at my entrance, not because I was Indian, but simply because they seemed accustomed to living in clusters where they never met anyone whom they did not know already. The woman at the head of the table was different. Her eyes were hard with the insights of a survivor. Her swoop of blond hair was unmarred; unlike the others, she had not allowed herself to go grey. I saw that she was the hostess and that the tall, shambling man with the ragged white mane who roamed the yard with an oversized wine glass in his hand was her husband. I perceived in that moment that the bond between husband and wife was elastic, allowing ample space for others in their lives. All of this was clear to me at a glance, with a prescience that reinforced my conviction that I had come home. Though these people exuded wealth and sophistication, the hostess frightened me. I knew in a second that she was my challenge and the pivot of my acceptance: if I could win her over, I would belong to this group.

  I stepped towards her.

  “Well, how do you do?” she said. “I didn’t know there was anyone like you in this town.”

  “Milly,” a frizzy-haired woman said in a gravel voice. “Mind your p’s and q’s.”