Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives

by Stephen Henighan

  When I returned to the village, welcomed by its venerable limestone and the chattering of the rapids, I found a fresh harvest of envelopes in my mailbox. Though residual jetlag was creeping back, draining away the exhilaration of my television appearance, I took the cardboard box where I had been storing correspondence for weeks and turned it upside down on my kitchen table. I rifled through the pile, looking for envelopes from the Law Society of Upper Canada. I had taken these to be service bulletins or reminders

  of membership dues. I opened them. The printed words shocked me. A man at home in his books, I knew that printed words were truth: this truth rebuked me. I felt as though my very existence had been impugned. Weeks ago, a certain Gita Kidambi had filed a complaint against me, alleging that she had paid me $3,000.00 to draw up a marital separation agreement (I vaguely recalled her visit: a thin Tamil woman who lived in Kitchener). She further alleged that I had cashed her cheque (this was possible) and that I had done no work on her file (this, I admitted, was all too likely). Ms. Kidambi asserted that she was unemployed and needed the separation agreement to oblige her husband to support her while she looked for work.

  My shock receded once I had finished reading the letter. This was a matter that I could dispatch with a couple of phone calls. When I rang the Law Society, I got the answering machine. I paced the kitchen, then staged a fresh assault on the mail. I was rewarded with the discovery of a cheque for a television appearance I had forgotten. Beneath this envelope were others from the Law Society. Since we have not received a reply to our notice of May 10, we ask that you give these allegations all due attention … Then: As you have failed to reply to repeated communications, we have no alternative but to refer this matter to a disciplinary panel. This panel is comprised of two lawyers and one lay bencher …

  My breath shortened. I resumed pacing. I told myself to be calm. Still dehydrated from the plane, I drank water from the tap, eschewing the Cabernet Sauvignon I had promised myself to celebrate my television appearance. I had to attend to this mess instantly. If the disciplinary panel had met already, I might have no choice but to ask for a suspension of my right to practise law while I drew up Ms. Kidambi’s separation agreement.

  I continued opening letters. The shock, the kick in the stomach, from which I have not recovered to this day, came in the next letter. A second complaint had been added to the first. This complaint was from Professor Millicent Crowe, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., D.LITT., F.R.S.C., O.C., President of the University of South Saskatchewan. Like Ms. Kidambi, Professor Crowe alleged that I had failed to complete a separation agreement for which she had contracted me.

  My Milly! My dearest friend, my eternal flame, with whom my bond was sweeter than that of any lover because it was untainted by the disappointments of intimacy, the daily griping of cohabitation, the beady-eyed knowingness of those whose bodies have coupled. What a terrible misunderstanding!

  I lifted the receiver and rang her number. There was no reply. I left the kitchen and went out the door. Day was turning into night, summer into autumn; the rapids hissed over the rocks as the water level dropped at the end of the season. I clumped down the stairs, walked past the riverfront shops and cafés, then turned up the hill, as I had on my first visit to the village. Without my bold step into the garden that day, I would not have become a man of substance. Longing coursed through me for my literary loitering, for bright afternoons of fine wines and a splashing fountain in the company of famous scribblers; yet the memories only heightened my alarm. What had gone wrong? My Milly could not have done this to me. The complaint to the Law Society must be the result of academic politics, of some scheme to discredit her in her new job.

  Who knew what forces were conspiring against us?

  I reached the house to find a sign with the red-and-white logo of a real-estate company planted on the front lawn. Taped over the discreet For Sale sign was a bright red Sold. Had Milly completed her move from the village during my August vacation? I knocked on the door again and again, hoping to commiserate with her husband, hoping he might tell me how to contact the woman we both adored. There was no one. I stepped into the garden, as I had that first afternoon. The lawn was empty, the fountain extinguished. The long oak table, the core of our conviviality, had been carted away, leaving an indented nub of flattened yellow grass where each leg had stood. The flowers were in bloom. The care to which the yard had been subjected accentuated its vacancy. Drained of humanity, it was a museum.

  I left the garden and stood in front of the house. I must talk to her.

  “Hey, R. U. Did Militant Cow fuck you over and leave? What did you expect? Militant makes and Militant breaks.”

  I feared these words had surged up from the ugliest corner of my psyche. I trembled at the thought that such mutinous hatred lurked inside my purest feelings. It was a relief to turn and find the professor, unshaven for the summer, his greying curls in need of a trim, walking his dog along the street.

  “Has she left already?” I asked.

  “Left us, and left you in the lurch.” He shuffled his Birkenstocks; a toe poked through a hole in his left sock. His dog, a prissy poodle, sniffed the grass as if in disdain. “Nobody at the university’s shedding any tears. But you shouldn’t have dragged your feet on her separation agreement, R. U. You caused her tons of grief. Her hubby tried to go out west for the ride. She finally got rid of him, but it was ugly. He showed up drunk at her official residence. Her first act as prez was to call the campus cops to haul him away.” He pulled on his dog’s leash. “Nobody does that to Militant Cow and gets away with it.”

  “We are friends. Fellow immigrants.”

  “I hate to tell you, R. U., but you are a visible minority. When the going gets tough, those nice multicultural sentiments you talk about on TV aren’t worth squat. Especially if you go up against a white woman from the empire next door. Militant being militant, she’ll make sure you get screwed up the ass in public.”

  “This is wrong.” I remembered the facile formulae of my professors in Thunder Bay. This man was no different; he was as superficial as they, and just as wrong. “Milly and I are fugitives together.”

  “It’s your funeral.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and swung the poodle’s leash as though he were redirecting a horse. He left me alone in the dusk. I stared into the darkening street, concentrating on the blacker-than-shadow outlines of the trunks and branches of the maples. Did we reserve the decency that Canadians called tolerance for those to whom we were indifferent, releasing hatred on those whom we loved? Was hatred not only the reverse of love, but the deepest proof of its existence? Could we hate only those whom we loved, or wished to love? Or—I mustered the strength to stare in the face a conclusion I did not wish to reach—had Milly never loved me? Had it all been a charade undertaken to butter her ego with the ointments of cultural sophistication and sought-after diversity? It was possible, too, I conceded, that in promoting me, Milly had expected the southwestern Ontario lawyer’s success to be local and limited. She might have been jealous that I had become a national figure. It was possible that she had craved an opportunity to put me in my place. Success was the prerogative of her all-star friends, in whose reflected light she basked. Her protégés could not outshine her.

  I did not want to believe such slander. I remembered the promise of Milly’s face in the candlelight. In all of my time in Canada—in all of my adult life—I had not been closer to anyone. With Chyou, I practised an eroticism of the body; Milly invested me with an eroticism of the spirit. And now she was gone. Could I win her back? I paced my flat until after midnight, sipping Cabernet not in celebration but in an embittered search for succour. I wondered how one contacted the president of the University of South Saskatchewan. If I could only speak to her.

  It took me hours to fall asleep. I woke with a headache, ushered back into the daylight by the sweet scents of the bakery downstairs.

  I rubbed my eyes a
nd stared at the river. At the stroke of nine, I rang the Law Society of Upper Canada. I was passed from a secretary to a grave-sounding man who hummed and hawed. “Mr. Singh,” he said. “The lay bencher on your panel happens to be in the office right now. I think he’s best qualified to fill you in.”

  To my horror, a jovial Indian voice came on the line. Of course. This was Canada. No self-respecting institution would dare execute me unless a member of my own tribe were appointed to the firing squad. I knew that another Indian would be all too eager to worry out my faults. Certain he would be a jealous bastard, I longed for a triumvirate of circumspect Anglo-Saxons.

  “I have to tell you, my friend,” the fast-talking fellow said, after introducing himself as Dr. K. S. Sundaresan, a Toronto surgeon, “your case is looking very serious. Very serious indeed. We received two more complaints this morning.”

  “What? Who are these people? Why are they coming out of the woodwork?”

  “I imagine it is because of the story in yesterday’s Toronto Star.”

  “In the Star?”

  “You didn’t see the newspaper? Where have you been?”

  “In Bombay,” I said, hoping to strike a chord of fellow feeling. But, showing himself to be all business, the lay bencher wallah bored straight on. As I listened to him, I realized that the professor must have read the newspaper story. I had been so startled by his news that it hadn’t occurred to me to ask him how he knew. If everyone in my village was equally well informed, my life would become unbearable.

  “Two new complaints,” Dr. K. S. Sundaresan recited. He read out the names, pronouncing them correctly. “Both members of our community, Mr. Singh. Both claim that you cashed their cheques but did not perform the work contracted. Furthermore, that you failed to respond to repeated subsequent communications.”

  The names rang a remote bell. I feared that, as with Gita Kidambi, there might be sufficient truth to the dates and allegations to make me look bad. “Listen, my friend,” I said, “I can clear this up. I have done nothing wrong. I’ve been very busy. In addition to my law practice, I have many public obligations—”

  “I know that, Mr. Singh. You are the Canadian media’s favourite Indian! Ha! Ha!”

  I didn’t like the sound of his laugh. “You cannot expect me to refuse such invitations,” I said, trying to mollify the unforgiving fellow. “I realize it could as easily have been you as I, my friend, but you cannot expect me to rue good fortune. We came to this country to get ahead.”

  “Personally, I came to this country intending to respect its laws.”

  How humourless this Dr. K. S. Sundaresan was! What a prig! “My friend,” I said, “you and I can reach an understanding.” In India that is precisely what we would have done. The understanding would have involved someone doing him a favour; the possibilities would have been implicit in his knowledge of who my father was, in his being aware of the left-armed fast bowler’s stock-market prowess. But in Canada we could not take such understanding for granted. In making the possibilities explicit, I would sound like a low, untrustworthy fellow.

  The net of Canadian legal life deprived us of flexibility. I writhed against my new country. I had barely opened my mouth when Dr. K. S. Sundaresan cut me off.

  “If you continue to speak like that, there will be fresh charges against you. I advise you to stick to the matter at hand.”

  “Let me clear this up. I can clear it up. It is simply a question of my having been rather busy, and of my having gone to India to visit my family. My father is elderly. I’m sure you understand. I can sit down and do this work in a matter of days.”

  “You could have done,” he agreed.

  “Then that is the solution, my friend. Simply suspend me. Suspend me for two weeks. I will do the work. At the end of the two weeks you reinstate me, the work will be done, and my clients will receive their services.”

  “As I say, Mr. Singh, we could have done this. Had you got in touch sooner. Now, however, it is too late.”

  “It is never too late when there is goodwill between men. Let me tell you, my friend, one thing I have learned in my public career is that with honest conversation and goodwill—”

  “There is honest conversation and goodwill,” Dr. K. S. Sundaresan said, “but there is also the law. The regulations governing the Law Society of Upper Canada dictate that once an investigation is undertaken, the object of the investigation may not resign his membership of the Law Society.”

  “I am not asking to resign. I am merely asking you to suspend me. This is not a resignation, it is a mere trifle—”

  “According to the Law Society of Upper Canada, it is the same.” How he loved the sound of his own voice rhyming out that title! I wanted to grit my teeth. “You are under investigation, Mr. Singh. At this stage there are only two possible outcomes: either you are exonerated or you are disbarred.”

  Staring at the river, I felt as though an evil bird were beating its wings in my chest. “How do I exonerate myself?” I said in a flat voice.

  “You come to the hearing and defend yourself against the charges of professional misconduct that have been brought against you. That is the course open to you now, Mr. Singh.”

  I imagined myself facing a panel on which K. S. Sundaresan was the native informant. What an utter farce!

  “I am not going to be judged by some goddamned kangaroo court. I am a man of substance. I have simply gotten behind on my work. You should ask yourself why this has happened, my friend. It has happened because I have been serving the community. I have been promoting better relations between the communities of our multicultural society. And you are going to punish me for that?”

  “I know,” the Toronto surgeon replied. “For that you were going to receive the Order of Canada.”

  “How do you know about that?” I could not control my voice. Heat prickled beneath my turban as though I were walking through the deserts of Rajasthan. The Order of Canada had been our secret. It was the consecration of my intimacy with Milly, our hidden-in-plain-sight public marriage ceremony. How could this pushy, jealous fellow besmirch the pinnacle of our concord? How could he even know about it?

  “For a public man, Mr. Singh, you are not well informed. You should read the newspapers.”

  “That was in the newspapers? How do they know?”

  “I only know what I read,” the surgeon wallah said with a chuckle.

  “I read the newspapers, too. How do you think I educated myself about this country’s public life? But I have just returned from India. I am barely over my jetlag. Listen, my friend, my life has not always been easy. For my first ten years in Canada I did the most degrading work. I delivered pizzas, I placed notices on automobile windshields—”

  “I am aware that you are a self-made man,” Dr. K. S. Sundaresan said, “and not a natural leader of our community.”

  The bastard! It required little imagination to guess who he saw as our community’s natural leader.

  “In this country,” I retorted, “the natural leader is the person who has climbed to the top in an atmosphere of freedom, not the person who was elevated by caste and class. You need to learn more about Canada, Dr. Sundaresan.”

  “I have also worked hard, Mr. Singh. I put myself through medical school at the University of Toronto. Unlike you, I do not have a wealthy father.”

  He let this phrase hang in the air. Panic scrambled in my chest. Had this also been in the newspaper? I breathed hard, pacing my perch high over the rapids’ tumult. My purchase felt uncertain, as though I might tumble straight through the window into the deep black water below me that turned translucent as it swooshed over the flat stones. Too distraught to reply, I let the silence go on and on.

  “Assuming,” Dr. Sundaresan said at last, “that you are the son of the man whose son I take you to be.”

  “You know who my father is?” My voice was a bleat. />
  “I think so. I am from New Delhi, but my uncle does business in Bombay. I spent the summer prior to my departure for Canada as his assistant. I have met your brothers, Dr. Singh. If you are the Singh that I take you to be?”

  “Why should there be any doubt?” I asked, my voice at once defiant and despairing.

  “There might be doubt,” he said, “because there are so many Singhs. And because in Canada you present yourself as a Sikh while in India your family are known to be Hindus.”

  No! I could not tolerate another threat to my dignity. I felt short of breath and overwhelmed by suffering. I longed—it may seem perverse—I longed for a wife to commiserate with me. I imagined myself levitating like a fakir over the rapids. In that second I grasped that I was a fissured being. I had divided myself. If it was true that Milly had betrayed me—a betrayal that seemed senseless and inconceivable, that I was certain would be cleared up the moment I spoke to her—then I was a man pared from his own soul. I was a body without purpose or impulse. Even my public life—particularly my public life—lacked rhyme or reason unless Milly was there to witness and approve of it.

  I did not want to discuss the religious guise I had chosen for my public being. That was no one’s business but my own. “That is a complicated story, Dr. Sundaresan.”

  “I am sure it is, Mr. Singh,” he said in an unctuous voice.

  “Here we are discussing a different question. Here we are discussing my suspension from the Law Society of Upper Canada so that I can clear up some work on which I have lamentably fallen behind schedule. Once I have done the work in which I have been remiss, we may all go on with our lives.”