Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives

by Stephen Henighan

  How they adored that line! “An aristocrat of democracy”: I repeated the words twenty times that night, and thirty times the next day. I belaboured my adopted colony-nation with its Victorian heritage of aristocratic democracy. Before I could finish my breakfast, I was a model New Canadian, a budding member of the country’s enshrined hierarchy of chatterers. I was waiting for my coffee to boil when the girl from the bakery came to my door, waving that morning’s Globe and Mail. Fetching in her blue jeans and ponytail, she told me her father sent me the paper with his compliments. Near the bottom of the front page was my law-school graduation photograph! I was astonished that they had found it.

  By noon, men with bulky cameras were at my door. I posed with the rapids in the background while my neighbours stared. A professor from Milly’s university who lived in the village, and was fond of parading along the river in sandals and socks, greeted me as though we were comrades. Knowing he hated my Milly, I gauged his hypocrisy with a cold eye. The men with cameras elbowed him aside. Excitement combed through me until I became addicted to it. I sat in my flat, waiting for the phone to ring. If half an hour passed without a call I felt neglected. I lived for each fresh interview, each acknowledgement that I was an object of spectacle. I stopped reading. I watched every newscast my television could receive, waiting for references to myself. Interviewed on television, I remained calm and factual, a source of serene wisdom and moral probity.

  After the first interview aired, a fresh gale of phone calls blew through my flat. Law-school classmates sent congratulatory notes on letterhead stationery. Esther phoned to say that she was proud of me. Even Shelley (or was it Melissa?) found my number and offered me effusive congratulations.

  With time, the requests for interviews tapered off. Fickle journalists turned their attention elsewhere. Another sort of phone call, less frequent yet more significant, came to the fore. I heard from a community college in suburban Toronto where eighty-five per cent of the students were immigrants or the children of immigrants. They offered me a healthy fee to speak about immigrants in Canadian society. A newspaper asked for a column, and also offered a fee. The organizers of a class-action suit invited me to join their legal team.

  By the end of the week, I had more work than I could ever complete. My head was in a whirl.

  I was a man of standing in my new country, but I had lost my squire’s leisure. Gone were my evenings immersed in Trollope or Thomas Hardy, my afternoon teas by the water with Milly. The hike up the street to her house was an excursion I would need to schedule for the scarce spare moments permitted by our respective agendas.

  Every day I seemed to be driving into Toronto, and when I came home late at night, or the next morning, after a night with Chyou, my answering machine was pulsing. I saw Milly and her friends less often, and when I did, we met not in their garden, but at events in Toronto at which literature or human rights—or, as was often the case, both—were celebrated. I wore a tuxedo and a turban. The men gave me hearty handshakes and cuffed me on the shoulder as though I were a boon companion; the women delivered dry kisses to my cheek. They looked at me with relief, confirming my impression, formed on the afternoon I had entered Milly’s garden, that they lived in a world where they did not meet people whom they did not already know. I had become one of the people whom they knew. I was a brown-skinned bearded man in a turban for whose rise into the Canadian spotlight they would take credit.

  They slapped my back or kissed my cheek with the same stiff-bodied restraint they expressed with their white Ontarian compatriots. Respect tempered their familiarity; they asked me to comment on the outlook in my “community,” by which they meant Indians, South Asians, all Asians, all people of colour. Constricted by this multi-purpose role, I was noncommittal in my replies. I avoided provoking activist hotheads, I did not pretend to be a spokesman for the people in the towers, whom I was pleased to have put behind me. Following my mentors’ example, I sat on the moderate liberal fence. I was as harmless and ineffectual as a Canadian writer, committing myself to campaigns that failed as activism yet succeeded as public relations.

  My legal challenge to the prime minister’s enlargement of the Senate bogged down in court. The government’s lawyers issued procedural objection after procedural objection, repelling all discussion of the case’s substance until it was too late. The enlarged Senate, with a majority that supported the prime minister, introduced the tax on books. Milly’s friends moved on, their books selling as well as ever, and found fresh outrages to denounce. My challenge had inflicted little

  damage on the prime minister—though the word “stacking” crept into news reports—but it continued to benefit me. Each time the government issued another procedural objection, I was interviewed on radio and television, and after each round of interviews, I received offers to speak, write, or represent new clients.

  I mitigated the onrush of fame by reminding myself of the reserve and discretion commended by the novels I read. I tried to be as discreet as a Jane Austen matron, as opaque as a Henry James narrator. Though my turban had become my visual signature, I obviated explicit associations with Sikhdom. Canadians prized authenticity: I must not violate their values by risking exposure as a non-Sikh. I declined offers to talk about Sikh politics, or participate on panels with Sikh community leaders. I was in my element as the representative Indian in radio or television debates in which the other panel members were not Indian. When, in the midst of my legal challenge to the prime minister, the woman of iron who ruled India was assassinated, I commented in general terms on the years of her government, passing over the fact that she had been murdered by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for her attack on the Golden Temple. (The left-armed fast bowler, raging over the phone about Sikh secessionism, served notice that Hindus in India no longer regarded Sikhs with the equanimity my father had shown.) The next summer, when an Air India flight blew up over Ireland, I refrained from entering into discussions of Sikh politics, limiting myself to reprimanding the prime minister for having responded to the disaster by sending a letter of condolence to the government of India when more than three quarters of the dead were Canadians like myself. Each interview I did on this subject consolidated my Canadianness.

  Money was no longer a problem, except in the sense that my means exceeded my needs. I had to decide whether to continue to let a flat, or to buy a house like Milly’s; whether to trade in the aging second-hand compact car for a new vehicle; whether to invest my money or to spend it. When I met the bearded swashbuckler or the woman with the gravel voice, circumspection muted their greetings. I took their guardedness as a compliment, reading in it a recognition that I had developed my own circle of influence. There were the CBC panels where I appeared, my weekly opinion piece on multicultural television, a newspaper chain where I was a monthly columnist. Beyond these activities, which belonged to a world that the writers understood, was my legal work, which they did not understand, but which they knew earned me an income.

  With success came notoriety in my own community. I learned that I was not the only Indian in southwestern Ontario. There were others in London and Kitchener-Waterloo, and even in smaller outposts. It became a matter of prestige for these people to engage me to represent them. I was deluged with requests for work from Indians who were buying condominiums, Indians who were writing wills, Indians who were separating from the Indian spouses with whom they had immigrated in order to wrap their arms around white Canadian bodies. These transactions—bit work, in most cases, that paid no more than a few hundred dollars—became so numerous that I sometimes lost track of them. Caught up in my hectic travel agenda, I forgot to finish them on time and had to be reminded with letters and phone calls. I came home from Toronto (or, after my columns on immigrant issues became syndicated, from Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary, or Vancouver) to be surprised by impatient Indian voices on my answering machine. This was more of a homecoming than I desired. It was like being back in Bombay, and not in a w
ay that pleased me. This hectoring on the part of my clients, far from being efficacious, often had the reverse effect, making me dawdle even more in my legal work as I threw my energy into the world of newspapers, radio, and television: into activities that gained me public notice, reminding Milly of my existence. Each time my name was broadcast in public, I wondered whether Milly would catch wind of it and invite me to come and see her.

  One evening, when I had just driven back from an event in Hamilton, the phone rang, and the Indian voice I heard belonged to my cousin. He reminded me that he had looked after me when I arrived on the Greyhound bus from Thunder Bay; that he had sublet me rooms in his apartments for nearly a decade.

  “I am fed up with paying rent, R. U. I am fed up with being so far out. Can’t you buy me something downtown? A good place to live? Your brother says you’re richer than he is now. Don’t forget who gave you your start, you ungrateful sister-sleeper—”

  I cursed my eldest brother. My cousin did not read Canadian newspapers or watch Canadian television—not even multicultural television—and would have remained oblivious to my success had the left-armed fast bowler not boasted about me. I squirmed to get this hanger-on off the phone. He failed to realize that the man he was talking to did not exist. In truth, neither of the men to whom he might have been speaking could be said to exist: neither the morose, introverted fellow in the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball cap who had slouched through humiliating jobs and with whom he had shared dowdy apartments, nor “the southwestern Ontario lawyer R. U. Singh,” a person about whom my cousin knew nothing other than that he had money. The first fellow had long since disappeared, and, as for the second, not even I was properly acquainted with him. Late at night, turning on the television—I now had the full range of cable channels—I would watch “R. U. Singh” discoursing on subjects of which I had only the most superficial knowledge. I marvelled at his self-confidence, his firm, grey-whiskered presence on the screen, his unflappable calm.

  If, during my years in Toronto, my being had been muffled by drudgery, success, by contrast, had pulled me out of myself. A few of my salient characteristics—not always, I felt, the most important ones—had been sucked out, baked solid beneath the kiln of television lights, and exposed in public like a death mask. Sometimes I opened the newspaper and read that the signatories to a petition included the southwestern Ontario lawyer R. U. Singh, or that R. U. Singh, the noted commentator on ethnic relations, had made a declaration about immigration or integration or racism. I would hesitate, failing to connect that enterprising fellow with myself. The words that Singh sang felt disconnected from my soul. Before his certainties, my perceptions dissolved into inchoate clouds, fleeing the steady march of raptly structured sentences that flowed from the composed fellow on the screen as he articulated worthy sentiments, some variant of which someone else had always expressed before him.

  Fame may not be an aphrodisiac, but it allows one to meet people. For nearly ten years I had spoken only to my cousin, his friends, their relatives, and a succession of surly employers. Now I met new people, many of them charming and intelligent, every week. When one is introduced as an important person, women linger at one’s side over a second drink. I do not wish to sound like a Casanova, and I have not been one, but I will admit that, in addition to Chyou, who continued to receive my visits, other opportunities presented themselves. Not in all cases did I reject them. Most of these events—now that I was older, the word tryst sounded too risqué—occurred in hotel rooms after dinners or conferences. They had little life beyond the moment that brought the bodies together, though they certainly made my life more exciting. Since I could not tell Chyou about these adventures—our relationship was not quite that open—I recounted them to Milly. They became part of our mutual titillation, the currency of our salacious friendship, as we raised the stakes by proving to ourselves just how frank we could be with each other. As we each became more successful, we saw each other less and less. The fact that we did not speak often challenged us to be more daring, more open, on the rare occasions when we had time to talk, as though this would reconfirm our essential bond.

  One evening, when I had no events and no pending legal work beyond the separation agreements of disenchanted Indians, I left my flat, where I continued to live because I did not have time to buy a house. I walked up the street, as I had on my first afternoon in the village. I was planning a trip to Asia to spend some of the money I had made, to demonstrate to my family that the fifth son was not the failure they had expected, and to pay my respects to my father in his declining years. When I reached Milly’s house, the fountain was silent and the lights were off. I rang the doorbell. Her husband answered. His hair was long and completely white. Looking down from his teetering American height, he said that Milly was away. “She’s always away these days.” His jowls were inert, like those of a hunting dog in repose.

  The dynamics of Milly’s marriage had reversed. Isolated from his readers in the Deep South, her husband had seen his audience shrivel. His wilder-than-Faulkner extravagance was off-putting to cautious Canadians. Fewer and fewer invitations to travel, read, and seduce younger women now came his way. Milly, by contrast, was in demand. She was travelling often and—though she was more discreet with me than I was with her—it was now she who had adventures.

  “She goes to conferences on ac-a-dem-ic

  ad-min-i-stra-tion,” her husband said in the slow tones that I had learned to refer to as a drawl. “I used to get invited to read at shindigs like that. Now they all want Milly.” I realized that he had been sampling the house’s stock of wine. “Milly’s planning her next move. I bet you it’s gonna be a big one.”

  “That will be good for you,” I said, hoping I sounded polite.

  “Yup. I guess I’ll be along for the ride.”

  Imagining that he was trying to decide whether to invite me in, I spared us both this discomfort. Asking him to give Milly my regards, I left.

  ten

  vanity fair

  Two weeks later, I saw her.

  The conference was in Montreal. As we were speaking on different panels, I had not been aware that she would be there. Having spotted her name on the program, I attended her event. She came on stage dressed in white like an apparition: white slacks, white jacket, a cream-coloured blouse. She was trim and looked younger than her age. Her hair was as voluminous as ever, and just as blond. As I listened to her speak, I marvelled at how she had expunged the Deep South from her voice. Unlike her husband, Milly sounded as though she had been born in Canada. She had advanced as a chameleon, while I was a more boldly sketched portrait of the man I might have been at home had I been a first son rather than a fifth, or had I been born a generation earlier, when the need to earn money was less urgent and one could comport oneself as a squire. My sole true charade, an outrageous one, lay in my masquerading as a Sikh. Yet in our own ways, each of us was in disguise.

  After Milly’s panel had ended, I waited on the edge of the crowd. She noticed me. I imagined I saw the corner of her mouth jut up in mid-sentence. She patted a man in a navy blue jacket on the shoulder to dismiss him, then turned towards me. “R. U.! I was hoping I’d see you here!” We hugged. The kisses she gave me on both cheeks had nothing of the dry peck of Ontario. Our effusiveness dispatched those who were lingering with questions. We glanced into each other’s eyes to confirm that our bond remained potent. “Let’s get out of here,” Milly said.

  I followed her out of the conference hotel and into the street. The smell of French fries saturated the cold air. The dim pavement in front of us receded into darkness. I glimpsed the silhouette of Mount Royal squeezed between two office towers. Milly looped her arm in mine. We promenaded like a courting couple. “This used to be the red-light district,” Milly said, gesturing at rashes of garish neon.

  Women whose stockings were held up by suspenders loitered in doorways. My failed French course at Lakehead University allowed me to read th
at on this corner, “tourist rooms” were rented by the hour. A breeze of a chill unexpected in June penetrated my spine. “Let’s find somewhere to go,” Milly said. “I’ve got things to tell you.”

  She directed me towards a derelict building on the south side of the street that looked as though it had once been the private home of a moneyed family. We were in a district with snack bars that offered frites and poutine, dark doorways of clubs that promised XXX videos, shuttered Vietnamese pho houses, and striding ruffians with unkempt moustaches and tattooed necks. The wooden mansion, whose balconies, jutting at odd angles, interrupted the regular progression of its four storeys, resembled a ship from a more stately era that had set out on a journey of exploration and run aground in the grim present. I was startled when Milly turned towards the door. Mentioning the name of a well-known gay writer, she said he had assured her it was worth the visit, and that everyone was welcome.

  There was no security guard; no one asked us to pay a cover charge. We walked down a long corridor in which the light had a purple tint and menacing music played. I felt as though I had entered a dimension where the boundaries of my being expanded and contracted in unforeseen directions. The mansion’s rooms were in near-darkness. There were extravagant chandeliers and a plethora of leather couches on which men were embracing men. This sight startled me less than the mansion’s emptiness. By the time we reached the second floor, we were nearly alone. The threatening music trembled through rough, unvarnished floorboards. On the third storey the corridor opened onto the stage of a small theatre. We looked down, captured in our performance: the stalls were nearly empty. Two slender young men sat in the front row.

  “No way that beard is real,” one of them said.

  We hurried off the stage and emerged into a room that opened onto one of the mansion’s balconies. Here there was a bar and tables; tinny, rhythmic music was playing. Milly suggested we sit down. A waiter appeared. We each ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio. “To commemorate our first glass of wine together,” I said.