Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives

by Stephen Henighan

  When the phone rang, it was already ten-thirty.

  I scrambled out of bed.

  “R. U.?” It was the CBC reporter I had met in the atrium. I was glad it was someone I knew, rather than an anonymous, predatory voice. A contradictory wave of relief rushed through me, evoking a sentimental companionship with this man who was one of the many friends and acquaintances I had made in a world which had become mine without my having expected it, and which I was now in danger of losing.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You’re finished. I’m sorry, man. There was nobody there to defend you. The evidence was all on one side.”

  “What evidence?” I asked.

  “Three of them testified. All long distance by speakerphone.”

  “Was Milly one of them?”

  “Millicent Crowe from South Saskatchewan? Yeah. Can you tell me about that? I thought she was part of that gang you hang out with. What happened?”

  “I have no idea.” I bit my lip, realizing I was more upset than I could possibly understand. I fought to control myself. “I suggest you ask her.”

  “Hey, maybe I will. I have to tell you, R. U., it was quite a scene. There were Indian guys outside with placards saying you hated your culture or ranting about cultural appropriation—all kinds of crazy stuff. Can you clear that up for me: are you a Hindu or a Sikh?”

  “I was a Hindu in India. In Canada I am a Sikh. I do not apologize for that. It is in the nature of immigration that the immigrant reinvents himself.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” I imagined him copying down the quote. “After the testimony, they went out then they turned around and came back in. It took eleven minutes. That’s all. Eleven minutes and they disbarred you.”

  I winced at his utterance of the fatal word.

  “Could I have your reaction, R. U.?”

  “How can I react? I don’t know how to react. I don’t know how to deal with this. It’s as though they’ve taken away my soul.”

  “Thanks.” He was taking notes again.

  I was sick of this man. I wanted to get him off the line. I knew the others would be worse, but he was making me ill. I ended the conversation and hung up the phone. I sat down. I was no longer a lawyer. What could I do? In an access of desperation, I phoned Davies and asked for Esther. I left a message with her administrative assistant, asking her to call me back. I waited for her call.

  Sitting on my bed in my pyjamas, I felt ravaged by isolation. I pressed the button on my answering machine. You have twenty-three new messages.

  First message: “Hi, Mr. Singh, this is Jamie from What’s New This Morning. Just to let you know that we’ve had a programming change and won’t be needing you for the panel on the seventeenth. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.”

  The messages continued.

  “Hello, Mr. Singh, this is Rubicon Collegiate. We’ve decided that a different speaker will fit better

  with the themes of our multicultural festival. Our students are proud of their identities.”

  “You are a self-hating Hindu. You think you are a Sikh? We will stick a kirpan in your fucking traitor body!”

  “Hi, R. U., this is Ahmed from Multicultural Television. Listen, I’ve just come from a meeting and we’ve decided it’s best for all concerned if we suspend your column for a month. I’m sure you understand. We’re taking a wait-and-see approach here. We can talk later, okay?”

  “You think you are a Sikh? You think a Sikh is just dressing up? You remember Air India? That is what will happen to you, my friend.”

  “Mr. Singh, this is Captain John Wilson from the Police Services Board. I’m afraid I have to ask you not to attend the next meeting of the committee on police-community relations. Pending the outcome of your hearing—”

  The outcome of my hearing was now public information. In eleven minutes I had ceased to be the southwestern Ontario lawyer R. U. Singh. The personage whose life I had enacted without ever fully inhabiting him had vanished. As I listened to cautious Canadians scurrying for cover and obstreperous Indians howling threats, I prepared

  myself for the next wave. For a few deluded moments after my conversation with the reporter, I had imagined that I could transition from my legal life to a career as a full-time commentator, television personality, and journalist. As I listened to my messages, this last hope crumbled.

  The tape ran out in the middle of howled curses in Hindi. I erased it. I did so just in time. The phone began to ring again. In no mood to answer, I listened to the messages as they came in. The calls were from reporters requesting interviews. A few latecomers rang with contrite cancellations of invitations to speak or appear on panels. I stayed in my apartment, not daring to show my face in the village where I had once strolled down the street with the proud gait of a squire. No one phoned to commiserate, express sympathy, or see how I was feeling. The phone rang and rang, devastating messages piling up one after another until the answering machine tape was full again. I erased it. By late afternoon, the gap between calls had grown longer. By evening, I was almost forgotten.

  In the morning, the final wave of opprobrium struck: FedExes, courier messages, and registered letters that required signatures on receipt obliged me to open the door. Legal documents, ejecting me from the charitable boards on which I sat, were thrust into my hands. One after another, my retainers were cancelled. With each envelope brought to my door by a shambling figure in uniform, I watched ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars in annual income vanish. Two days after my hearing, I was destitute. I could no longer practise law, I was no longer welcome as a journalist or commentator, and my retainers had been cut off. I had money in the bank, but no way of making more. Without having read them, I knew that the major newspapers had trumpeted my disgrace. My refusal to do interviews would not have changed that. Some helpful soul slid a copy of the village weekly into my mailbox. This quaint six-page publication, which normally mingled accounts of the town council’s discussions of property taxes with photographs of local lads who had been invited to try out for NHL teams, had got on the story quickly. My face was at the top of the front page. LOCAL LAWYER DISGRACED.

  I had to leave. To flee my village, as Fielding’s Tom Jones had done. That evening, I phoned my Shanghai widow. Like my cousin in his tower, Chyou did not read Canadian newspapers or watch Canadian television. Having no idea what had happened to me, she received me with her customary charm. Talking to her was like entering the Good Kingdom. I felt a surge of hope. It was still possible for me to dwell in an unblemished past. If Chyou received me with such candour, others might, too. I asked her if I could spend a day and a night with her, maybe two. She laughed like the sheltered young girl she had been decades ago. “So you are eager to see me.”

  “Yes, I am.” For the first time in days my voice felt steady.

  She told me I would be welcome. Knowing that there would be no return after this departure, I packed my belongings. I would come back to the village to clear out my flat, but I could not live here again. From now on, my credentials were: Squire (failed), Southwestern Ontario Lawyer (failed). Only as a fugitive, that identity I had refined in tandem with Milly, did I remain active. After all that had happened, I would be a fugitive forever in the circles where I had been famous: a fugitive who had been expelled from being a fugitive. I had belonged to Milly’s rural aristocracy as long as I had snapped to attention like a brown-skinned bellhop to carry out the chores that were necessary to advance her friends’ careers. In retrospect, I saw that they had underestimated the consequences of my lawsuit against the prime minister; it had given me recognition, money, power, and an autonomy that dethroned their certainties. One of their protégés had slipped the leash, growing nearly as powerful as they.

  As I rose in the darkness of a Saturday morning, a dozen tiny incidents pestered my brain: novels I had read that Milly, the English professor, had not; my idenfication of a quo
te uttered by a British writer who had joined us at the long oak table one summer, which drew blank looks from famous Canadian writers; a time when she had said to me, “Of course everybody knows who you are. You’re always on television!” Milly’s resentments flared in the night of my memory like an uneven row of torches. I had been so intoxicated by the miracle of our companionship that I had failed to appreciate that miracles are precarious. I had recognized the volatility of my flirtation with my woman in white, how it teetered on an emotional tightrope where it could neither remain simply a friendship nor plunge into a full-blown affair. Naive colonial that I was, I had failed to see that relationships that are volatile

  rarely last long. I had not realized how much she resented my success.

  I zipped my bags. Knowing that I would soon be with my sensuous Chyou, with whom from the beginning my entente had been of body with body, I performed my ablutions, as my favourite novels referred to them, with precision. It was still dark outside when I carried one large bag then the other down the outdoor staircase to my parking space near the river. The outdoor air drilled cold into me. After days stuck in my stuffy apartment, where I had eaten little but rice, the morning chill seemed, paradoxically, to enlarge each pore of my flesh. It rendered me as alert in my body as I would have liked to be in my spirit.

  I climbed the stairs again for two smaller bags. The scent of bread in the oven wafted from the bakery. I locked the door and hurried back down the stairs to my car before anyone could spot me. Above the bluff on the opposite side of the ravine, a wash of paler sky scythed into the blackness. I listened to the rapids for a second, then slipped into my car and drove down the street, and across the bridge where streetlights shined down on the weir.

  I drove into the countryside.

  Barely an hour and a half later, I parked in front of Chyou’s squat red-brick house, its roof pitched as low as that of a Buddhist temple. It was not yet breakfast time.

  Chyou lived two blocks north of the Danforth. Years ago, with the help of a legacy from her husband and a bank loan, she had opened a manicure and pedicure business between a souvlaki house and a Lebanese pita takeaway on the Greek neighbourhood’s main thoroughfare. Hiring girls from the Philippines to do the work, she had managed her investment with an astute eye. Five years later, she had opened a second shop on the edge of Chinatown. Though our intimacy did not extend to financial revelations, it was clear that she was prospering.

  She met me at the door in the sporty style she adopted on weekends: white running shoes, black spandex leggings, and a thigh-length white dress. My other woman in white, the one who had not betrayed me. Seeing that I was not myself, she made me a breakfast of toast, kalamata paste, and Chinese dumplings, then led me to a back room where she sat me in an armchair, and removed my shoes and socks. She dunked my feet in a small bucket of warm water, rubbed oils into my skin, then flayed my soles with a pumice stone. It was a delicious sensation: a blend of caning and kissing that relieved me of a husk of my being.

  As Chyou worked on my feet, I stared across the room at the decorations on her living room wall: Chinese prints of men and women’s bodies entwined, a photograph of arid ruins overlooking a pellucid Aegean bay that reminded me of my history lessons at the Academy. I murmured formless expressions of gratitude. Chyou smiled. We moved to her bedroom and rubbed oils into each other’s bodies. In contrast to Esther, whose body had slid out of my view when we made love, Chyou’s lusty eagerness, which belied the delicacy of her proportions, made her utterly present. I inhabited her as I inhabited the world. She was a southern woman, darker skinned than most of the Chinese people I saw in Toronto. But for a coppery underlay in her complexion, our skin tones would have been very similar. Her sports gear emphasized a tapered litheness that refuted the initial impression of a petite East-Asian woman. Waking close to noon to find that we were still in bed together, I felt a gush of relief. No one who knew of my disgrace could find me in this place. I reached for Chyou again.

  “You are a greedy man,” she said.

  “Infinitely greedy.”

  She slid into my arms.

  It was a lovely day. Late that afternoon I spoiled it by asking her to marry me.

  “R. U., what’s wrong with you?” Her tone was forgiving, yet I saw that I had upset our accord. Her shoulders had stiffened. “You know that is not how it is between us.”

  We were sitting at her kitchen table sipping Chinese tea. The moment was so idyllic that I wished to hold it forever. Was that why I had made my impulsive declaration? As I saw Chyou get to her feet and pace with an impatience that I had not provoked in her before, I realized that I had been trying to turn the diaphanousness of longing into a palpable object; to freeze in place an eroticism that thrived on changeability. I needed both Milly of the fugitive spirit with the immigrant’s drive for institutional acceptance, and Chyou of the generous body and diffident independence, who had made it on her own terms. Each had nurtured me; both had refused to become mine alone. I needed these two women to weigh on opposite flanks of my being to sustain my equilibrium of body and mind.

  Having lost Milly, I was off balance. My mind was making serious missteps.

  I regretted my words, but it was too late. Chyou was troubled, even offended. “I said you could stay for two nights, R. U., but do not try to stay longer. I will not let you bind my feet. I specialize in setting the feet free.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “How could you say something like that?” She leaned her hips against the kitchen counter. I sensed her desire to back even farther away from me. “I thought we understood each other.”

  “We do understand each other, Chyou. I’m sorry. Please take my declaration as a compliment and not a threat.”

  “I take it as a sign that you don’t understand me the way I thought you did. I will tell you something, R. U. The year after my husband’s death was the worst time of my life. But the years since I’ve gotten used to being a widow have been my best days. I would never have left my husband, but now I would never go back to being married. Marriage is not good for women; it stops them from doing too many things.”

  “I know, Chyou. Forget what I said. Please take it as a moment’s madness, an excessive declaration of how much I appreciate you.”

  “I can try. I thought you and I understood each other. Now I have doubts.”

  I offered her a night on the town, of the sort I had courted her with when we first met: dinner in Yorkville, a show on King Street West, late-night drinks at the top of the Park Plaza Hotel. She demurred. We stayed home and watched a video. She went to bed before me. I sat in the living room, reading William Wilkie Collins. On Sunday morning, as she was making toast and eggs to eat with the rest of the kalamata paste, she said: “You know what my name means, don’t you, R. U.? ‘Chyou’ is ‘sweet autumn.’ I am not yet at autumn in my life, but when I get there I want it to be sweet, not ruined by a stale marriage.”

  “Chyou, please, I understand.”

  “I still cannot believe that you asked me that. I thought you knew me!”

  On Sunday the Danforth manicure and pedicure shop opened at noon. Chyou was in the habit of going in on Sunday morning to do inventory. “Girls from the Philippines are just Spanish enough to steal from me if I don’t keep track of the materials and the money.” She smiled and kissed me. After she left, I sat reading in her living

  room. I realized how unaccustomed I was to being in this house; I had scarcely ever spent time here during the day. Chyou and I did not know each other in our workaday lives. If I had nourished foolish illusions about her, she, too, had been deluded to imagine that I was a man who understood her.

  Too agitated to read, I put my book down. I played with the remote control of the television set. When I pressed the button, the television lit up on a station where a newsreader was speaking what I took to be Cantonese. I flipped around, looking for the CBC. The news was o
n. I watched the prime minister—a new prime minister (though he was old) who had succeeded the man against whom I had brought my case—speaking in English with a heavy French-Canadian accent. Political stories gave way to human-interest pieces that took place farther from the nation’s capital.

  Then, to my horror, my photograph appeared on the screen.

  I felt so sick that I barely heard the announcer’s words as she reeled out a biased account of my humiliations. I saw her smirk beneath her blond hair—was it a wig?—as she reported that the southwestern Ontario lawyer, noted promoter of multiculturalism, had been disbarred. And now, it emerged, he had always been a fake, a confidence trickster who had conned the nation in its honest search for authentic identities. Though he wore a turban, lawyer Singh was not a Sikh. The blonde cut away to a rugged-looking male reporter standing in front of a chipped rock face.

  “I’m here in Thunder Bay, Ontario,” the male reporter said, holding a microphone in front of his mouth, “where a local woman says that R. U. Singh adopted Sikh dress because he wanted to marry her. Mrs. Seema Robinson, now married with three children, says that when she was a teenager, R. U. Singh came to her house to court her.”

  An Indian woman approaching forty, wearing a white T-shirt, appeared on the screen. She sat in a small kitchen; lanky light-brown teenagers lounged around her in attitudes of impatience. “My father ran an Indian takeaway. R. U. was a foreign student. He was lonely and my father took him under his wing. I was sixteen. R. U. was very traditional, he was looking for a traditional Indian wife and he began courting me. Life in Canada confused him, but he was always respectful.

  I can’t believe they’ve kicked him out of being a lawyer.”

  Her puzzled face gave way to that of the reporter. “According to Mrs. Robinson, it was her father, a practising Sikh who died with her mother in the Air India tragedy, who taught R. U. Singh to tie a turban. He hoped the young man would convert to Sikhism and marry his daughter.”