Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives

by Stephen Henighan

  “I am always pleased when a breathless woman pays me that compliment.”

  I was learning how to entertain her. We sat down to have a drink; I, too, had begun to keep a stock of expensive wine. She told me the score from her husband’s reading tour of the Maritimes.

  “Two undergraduates and one conference organizer,” she said with drawling precision. “That’s what he’s confessed to, anyway.”

  Having learned to avoid blunt statements, I was now a better listener. My career, though recognized now, was not yet generating income. I drew up wills for two village residents; this paid only another month’s rent. Despondency set in. The summer ended and with the first cold nights, a mist of Holmesian density, yet twice as chilly as any in Sherlock’s London, lofted up off the river below my apartment. Milly was busy at the university. Esther got in touch to let me know that she was marrying and—far more hurtful—that she had given up immigration law and the men it had brought her way. Her fiancé, who had proposed to her on a beach in Israel, was the son of friends of her parents. She was working at a corporate law firm called Davies, which, because of the exorbitant hours it demanded of its employees, was known in the profession as Slaveys. As Esther worked late at a tower on Bay Street, I sat reading in the silence of my apartment. My Lada coughed its last burst of exhaust. Having paid to have it towed away, I was both impoverished and trapped. No longer a squire, I was a pedestrian peasant.

  At the point where my despair had dipped down deeper than the bottom of the river, my telephone rang. A pale, stifled Toronto voice invited me to join the board of a charitable organization. Board members had been present, I was told, on the night of the southwestern Ontario lawyer’s appearance in Toronto; they had been impressed by my suavity—this was the word he used—and, to be frank, he said, their board was in need of diversity. I accepted before I could wonder how I would get to Toronto for the board’s four annual

  meetings, and also before I realized that such posts came with what were known as retainers. In return for reading files and being ready to discuss them, I would receive ten thousand dollars a year.

  From this point, though money arrived by fits and starts separated by hiatuses that were long enough to make me fret, I knew I would not starve. I went into debt to buy a reliable second-hand car; I spent certain nights in Toronto, where I had met Chyou, a slender widow from Shanghai who owned two manicure and pedicure shops. Urgency drifted out of my life, as did the hope of conspicuous success. When the left-armed fast bowler phoned to boast of his latest corporate merger, I found myself on the defensive. He didn’t care that I knew everyone who mattered in the literary world of puny Toronto. Yet I cared. Never had I loitered so magnificently in the garden of loiterature. Millicent Crowe’s fountain splattered all summer, in a dulled, syncopated echo of the sloshing of the rapids outside my window. That summer I was reading Marcel Proust. Milly became my Duchess of Guermantes: the dazzling hostess who bestowed an illustrious shimmer on society, purging experience of drab dailyness. Milly’s literary friends arrived, with their casual yet shimmering clothes, accompanied by famous writers from New York or London or Paris or Buenos Aires who were eager to cast an eye on Canadian rusticity—the rusticity of a beautiful, enclosed garden behind a renovated nineteenth-century house, where Toronto’s illuminati and France’s finest vintages were married for their delectation. The local colour—in more senses than they had perhaps anticipated—was provided by R. U. Singh, the southwestern Ontario lawyer. A lawyer, it must be said, whose client portfolio remained meagre; but who had acquired three charitable directorships, each of which provided an annual retainer.

  My means were modest. When I took my widow out on the town, I squandered money I should have been saving. I brought Chyou to the village only once, on a day when Milly was at the university. I intimated to Milly that I had a lover in Toronto, yet did not go into details. It was a fine balance. I feared Milly’s defection if I made her the confidante for my delights and doubts. If I angered her, I would never again step inside the garden. My rural financial viability, and the squire’s existence it brought me, would trickle away, obliging me to move and become simply one more Toronto lawyer. Had I hidden my lover from Milly, she would have found me out: she knew everyone’s secrets. Even if she had not discovered me, to appear sexless would have diminished my allure. For our bantering to continue yielding fruit, I had to appear desirable: not a cipher, but a man of the world who had women in his bed. As in every aspect of this anti-marriage between two high-caste refugees, I must keep the sheen of my desirability well buffed. Actual sex with Milly would bring my village life to an abrupt end; banishing all intimations of sex would have the same result. It was in an intermediate zone of endless enticement and eternally open erotic conversation that Milly and I tantalized each other.

  I sat beside her at the head of the table as the writers vented their anger at all that offended them in the literary world, and in the nation. Milly helped them devise campaigns against destructive policies. In law school, where I had learned so much more than the law, I had become accustomed to the idea that in Canada the pursuit of a cultured life went hand-in-hand not with the conservative politics of an aristocrat, as I had believed in my youth, but with those of nationalism and social democracy. When, during one of our early conversations, I had expressed my passion for Rudyard Kipling, Milly had hushed me. As a visible minority, she said, I could never divulge such sympathies.

  I grasped that Milly had gone through a process that I must emulate, exchanging her aristocratic elitism for a more liberal variety to secure her Canadian friendships. As time went on, the vestiges of my aristocratic impulses withered away: the longer I lived in the village, the clearer it was where my interests lay. I resolved to say little, to absorb in silence the assumptions that were expressed around me.

  One afternoon, I listened with care as Milly offered the writers counsel on how they should refute a notorious literary troublemaker who had attacked their friends. The key, she said, was to outflank him. By the end of the afternoon it had been decided that they would enlist a young woman writer from Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley to refute this thug. In this way, the riposte would not appear as a wounded howl from the privileged heart of Toronto, but as a balanced argument made by a popular young woman in a national context. The young woman, it was decided, would be rewarded by being named a finalist

  for a national literary award. As always, Milly’s strategy worked. The thug was discredited; his publishing opportunities dried up and he was not heard from again. The young woman became quite famous.

  Politicians, by contrast, were more difficult to vanquish. Though I did not say so—not saying what one thought was essential to developing a Canadian personality—I considered it a sign of poor taste for artists to meddle in political debate. Yet Milly’s friends regarded art as inseparable from national identity. I was familiar with this tendency from India; there I had opposed it. Politics had no place in the life of a literary squire. Milly was better than I at responding to these activist enthusiasms. She brought her administrative acumen to the writers’ campaigns. I—and I alone, I suspected—discerned the downward thrust of the bunched wrinkles in the corner of her mouth. In her life as an administrative infighter, she had confided to me over coffee, it fell to her to do many distasteful things. She was prepared to use the same ruthlessness to make herself indispensable to her friends.

  I did not reflect then on the implications of this statement.

  eight

  the prime minister

  The fountain doused the stones in happy cacophony in the late summer afternoon. The swashbuckler recounted tales of the Orient, observing me with an eye at once complicit and wary. My senses enlarged, yet their sharpness diminished, by Pinot Grigio (Niagara Peninsula variety), I played along with his fabrications in a way that may have been forced. He changed the subject to Canadian politics. Milly’s husband, who had returned from Winnipeg the night before,
remained quiet. After decades in Canada, he had as little understanding of the country’s politics as my cousin.

  The writers were deploring the prime minister. Unable to push a tax on books, among other items, through a Senate that remained top-heavy with politicians who belonged to the party of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the prime minister had announced a unilateral enlargement of the Senate. He was adding new senators from his own party to create a majority that would make books cost more.

  “He always was an utter prick,” the swashbuckler said, impatient to return to his monologue.

  “This is different than being a prick,” the woman with the gravel voice replied. “This is weakening culture.”

  “It wouldn’t stand up to a legal challenge,” the man with the sideburns of a Kiplingesque colonel said.

  “A legal challenge!” The idea made Milly shine. She drew herself upright at the head of the long oak table.

  “It couldn’t come from us,” the gravel-voiced woman said. “You know what the papers would say—”

  “Exactly. We need that girl from Nova Scotia again. The challenge must come from a source who is indisputably autonomous—from the new Canada, not the old!”

  Had I drunk less, I would have been wary.

  Or eager. My bleary perceptions made it difficult to discern whether I was on the brink of triumph or disaster. They were all looking at me. I glanced at Milly. For her, for the love of loiterature, I would consider taking on this knight errant’s errand, this fool’s commission. Feeling like a young woman scrutinizing her suitor, I wondered whether I could trust her. “If I do it,” I said, “if it goes wrong, will you come to my aid?”

  “We’re not in India, you know,” the swashbuckler said.

  “There is always danger in attacking a sitting government. A prime minister who is willing to break the law to change the Senate can easily destroy a defenceless immigrant.”

  “You’re not defenceless, R. U.,” Milly said. “We’re behind you.”

  I looked down the table. In their blank-faced expressions, I saw not a promise but a threat: the fugitive must pay the price of his asylum. As I observed this group of Canadians, for whom directness was a way of never saying what they thought—because to do so was in poor taste, because it might be held against them if the mood changed—I realized how precarious was my squire’s life. These people did not possess the

  authority to banish me to my cousin’s tower, and yet, I felt, they did. Without their advocacy, I would not be drawing my retainers on charitable boards. Was I being paranoid, as Milly said of her enemies at the university? The terror that crawled up my spine came from not being certain, from not possessing an intuitive understanding, as I might have had in my own country—yes, in that dangerous moment I felt that India, not Canada, was my country—of how people could be expected to act.

  “Aren’t you a Canadian citizen?” a lanky, patrician man, who attended Milly’s garden gatherings when he was not in Africa or Asia, dining with dictators or roaming the bush with guerrillas, said. “All citizens are equal. No one can touch you.”

  The others smiled in self-satisfaction. I glimpsed their certainty that all was right in Canada, that their country was an exception to humanity’s corruptions, was unique in its tolerance, and, above all, was demonstrably superior in every respect to the putrefying United States of America. I glanced in the direction of Milly, my fellow outsider. Her face rebuffed my claim to intimacy. She was in disguise as a Canadian, repudiating the experience that she and I shared. Behind her back, her husband prowled the yard, unable to feign interest in the incident that was unfolding at the table. His incomprehension made me realize how much I understood. I did not want a tax on books, either. I acted for, talked for, lived for this world now. My anger merging with that of my friends, I murmured: “I want to stop this. The freedom to read is sacred.”

  “Do it for your country!” Milly said, pouncing on my uncomfortable silence.

  I hated her with the hatred one feels for a lover who has committed a betrayal. In that instant, we were a couple. Startled by the force of feeling that cuffed me across the shoulders like a brusque schoolmaster, I got to my feet. Chyou, my seductress of the manicures and pedicures, had never aroused me as Milly did in that second. Realizing that I was on the verge of being repelled, and that I must reclaim her, I stood up. “I’ll do it,” I said. “I shall make a legal challenge to the Prime Minister of Canada to preserve the right to read books untaxed.”

  Famous writers applauded me.

  “But I will need your support,” I continued, feeling like a politician myself.

  They hooted with self-conscious restraint, then left, driving back to Toronto in their long, sleek cars. They said they wanted to give me time to work, yet in their mass departure I saw a rehearsal of the abandonment I would face if my enterprise failed.

  As I read about the history of the Canadian Senate as the peaceful domain of the sober second thought, my anger grew. Not only was reading being assailed by this wanton enlargement; a kind of aristocracy was being threatened with destruction. Canadianness—the Canadianness I loved and embraced—was rooted in sedate aristocracy: my apartment above the mill-run, the nineteenth-century architecture of my village, the invitations to boards and broadcasts that enabled me to earn a living without slaving as other lawyers slaved. Like Milly’s friends, I felt the prime minister’s manipulations as a personal attack.

  My anger swelled as I wrote my brief. I made a plea for freedom of speech, freedom of access to culture rather than, as I asserted would be the outcome of the prime minister’s tax on books, freedom from culture. During long nights fuelled by strong black tea, a dash of potent feeling—was this loyalty to my new country or devotion to Milly?—coalesced into pages of prose, a firm entity that had not been there before. As I reread my text, I marvelled at the artful use of precedent, the passion and conviction, and the grasp of constitutional history that resounded in my document. I stumbled to bed, deciding to mail in my challenge in the morning.

  After that, everything happened fast. I received a confirmation by telegram, then a phone call from Milly. “Come over here,” she said. “They’re debating the new tax.” When I arrived at her house, she was in the living room with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. The fountain in the yard had been turned off, her husband was away, the lights were dimmed. We awaited the evening news. She motioned me to sit on the couch and sat down beside me. She wore a long, august, vice-presidential dress, which flipped up when she crossed her right leg over her left, revealing pale flesh. She plied me with wine. “What you’ve done is wonderful, R. U. You’re a wonderful man. Our friends will be so proud of us. There’s no doubting that we belong.” As the final words slipped out, her expression shifted from effusive to ironic. After the second glass of wine, the warmth flowed back. She leaned against me. I was ebullient with achievement, and eager for the delights that awaited me in my future.

  My heart—but only my heart—rose to meet Milly’s flesh.

  She gave me a leering smile. Her arrogance was a form of teasing, even affection. A homage to our collaboration, that smile sealed our intimacy. Her grandfather clock struck ten. Milly clicked the remote control to turn on the CBC. The voice of Knowlton Nash filled the room, reading the day’s news. “Today the prime minister found himself facing fresh challenges to his plan to enlarge the Senate, including a legal challenge!”

  Reclined on the chesterfield, our heads side by side, we watched the nation consecrate the scheming of two fugitive foreigners. The screen displayed a scene from that afternoon, the sun shining down on Ottawa. The prime minister strode out of Parliament. Reporters hurled questions at him. One of the reporters, in a voice that made my heart clench, asked him about the legal challenge to his actions launched by “the southwestern Ontario lawyer, R. U. Singh.”

  The prime minister snapped upright, as though a rod had been driven up his spi
ne. Wielding his jaw like a weapon, he stepped towards the crowd. “I’ve never heard of Mr. Singh!” he snarled. Surrounded by aides and Mounties, he pushed past the scrum.

  “R. U.! You’re famous!”

  Milly grabbed my head, as though plucking an artifact off a shelf. She kissed me hard on the cheek and slithered to her feet, the drooping wings of her dress exposing her legs. “Get out of here!”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You’re famous. Your phone will be ringing. You must be at home to answer it. The rest of your life depends on it!”

  I straightened my turban and headed for the door. As I walked downhill towards the river, every shop was closed. They were all at home watching the CBC. They had heard my name on television. I had never been so widely known, so accompanied in my new country. It felt thrilling to be alone on the street, passing under tall lamps that illumined venerable red brick and washed-out limestone in silence so deep that I could hear the burbling of the river at the bottom of the hill. As I descended the slope, I felt myself going up and down at the same time: my body dropping towards the river as morsels of my being levitated into warm night air shot through with televised ether. R. U. Singh, the southwestern Ontario lawyer, diffused across Canada: I straddled the nation, drenching it in my essence.

  nine

  great expectations

  When I came in the door of my flat, the red stud of my answering machine was flashing. I pressed the button: You have eleven new messages. As I reached to play them, the phone rang. It was a journalist who wanted to know why I had used the word “stacking” in my brief: wasn’t it particularly harsh to say that the Prime Minister was “stacking” the Senate? Did I have prior political affiliations? Was I connected to the Official Opposition? “By instinct,” I replied, “I am an aristocrat and a conservative. And I am a proud Canadian citizen. Citizenship has its responsibilities. One of them is to preserve democracy.”