A photograph of S. A. and his wife flashed across the screen, then vanished.
“He was supposed to convert,” Seema said in a halting voice. “But he never did. We never got engaged. He got scared and ran away to Toronto. I can’t believe he went around all those years pretending to be a Sikh.” Her eyes glinted; her children looked embarrassed.
“And so,” the reporter concluded, the wind blowing off Lake Superior ruffling his hair, “one woman’s youthful broken heart sheds light on a once-famous media commentator’s disgrace—”
I clicked off the television. Liars! What unconscionable falsehoods they peddled. And they said that I was not true to myself? I was so upset that a vein began to throb in my temple. I went to the kitchen, ran a glass of water and sat down in the leather chair where Chyou had massaged my feet.
Once I had calmed down, I devoted a few minutes to dwelling on the memory of my friend S. A. and lamenting his terrible demise. I could only suppose that the shock of her parents’ death had unhinged Seema.
Chyou came back at three in the afternoon. Her head was lowered. A free newspaper that Toronto commuters read on the subway drooped from her hand. She stalked towards me. As she looked up, I saw that her eyes were glassy.
“You did not tell me that you had lost your profession. You wanted to marry me because you are poor now!”
She held up the paper, showing me a headline: DISGRACED LAWYER PRETENDED TO BE SIKH.
“You pretended to be someone else.” She stamped her foot. “You didn’t take your culture seriously. That is not for me! I thought you and I were proud of our cultures—”
“You are Canadian, Chyou. You’ve been here for more than half your life.”
She waved the newspaper at me. “I am pure Chinese. But you!”
“You speak English—and Cantonese, not Mandarin—you eat Greek food, you work with girls from the Philippines. You have an Indian man in your bed! You’ve reinvented yourself. As you had to. People who don’t reinvent themselves don’t survive.” My mind trawled from the late Sam Singh of Thunder Bay to my cousin in his tower to Milly’s husband. I remembered the writer from the Deep South, the last time I had spoken to him in his house, wondering about Milly’s next move. “I’ve done the same. We can be proud of ourselves.”
“I am proud of being Chinese. Nobody who is not Chinese understands my identity.”
Then why are you with me? I wanted to ask. But my position was already precarious. “The kids don’t care,” I said. It was a phrase I had used on television panels. “Look at the children on the street. Even when their parents are from the same culture, they are a mixture of one thing and another. They don’t care where people come from.”
Her tiny mouth flexed. She stepped forward and took my hand. “R. U., how could you pretend to be of one religion when you belonged to another?” Her hand reached up and gave my turban a derogatory tug. “How could you hide from me that you had lost your profession when you asked to marry me?”
“After the last week, you’re all I have left. Chyou, I wanted to hold onto you.”
“So that I could support you like a child? Neither of us has children, R. U. That’s why I do not care what the kids think. I will never be a Canadian kid or have a Canadian kid. I will always be an immigrant. I like hard work and honour and loyalty to my culture. I thought you did, too.”
Her words brought us to an impasse. We stood in her kitchen holding hands. I had too many problems that were mine alone to solve problems that Chyou and I shared. I bowed my head and released her fingers.
fourteen
new grub street
To be a man without a profession is to know that you must make your own way. I told myself that I would have a handsome send-off. When I emptied my savings account in the village, the clerk I had known for years serving me with averted eyes, I left with a bank draft that was nearly six figures. Even so, I realized that I had not managed my funds well. If I had bought a house when the prime minister had spoken my name, then resold it now, I would have been comfortable for years to come. I had assumed my media popularity would last forever; I had taken for granted that I would always be a lawyer. Now I had sufficient funds to keep me going, in the most modest of lives, for no more than three years. I had a name that had been dragged through the mud, and the eternal loathing of countless Indians. I was a pariah among my own people, and an unperson among the chattering classes. My formal credentials had been obliterated. I was B.A., M.A. (failed) Bombay (ranked equivalent to Ontario Grade Twelve), B.A. Lakehead (dropped out), LL.B. Western (nullified by disbarment), Q.C. (rescinded), O.C. (cancelled). I was no longer an educated professional. All that remained was my experience as a migrant.
I migrated again.
In Canada, as in India, the quickest migration is internal. Uneasy following the youthful tides west, I inverted the movement of history and drove east. I left Chyou’s house in the evening and returned to the village. I sorted essential possessions from mere trifles of which the Buddhists would counsel me to let go. The village was silent except for the sound of the rapids. I saw no one I knew.
When my car was packed, I drank a strong Darjeeling tea and wrote a letter to my landlord to tell him I was leaving. I asked him to sell my table, chairs, bed, couch and television. I wrote him a cheque for the last month’s rent; I wrote cheques for the utility bills. Only after all my envelopes
were ready did it occur to me that I could not buy postage stamps in the middle of the night. I laid the envelopes on the front seat of my car.
I had thought I would drive all night, but by the time I reached Kingston, I was swerving out of my lane. I turned onto the off-ramp, booked into a motel, and slept. In my light, fitful sleep, I struggled with the thought that in the Victorian novels I read, people were shackled by their identities. They kept their accents and class identities, even as their fates rose and fell. In contrast to the plays of Shakespeare, identities were fixed: people were rarely in disguise or in drag, no man was mistaken for a woman; society was vast and all-encompassing, and the only way to be reborn was to emigrate to Australia. I wanted to anchor myself in a world with that same degree of stability, yet I needed to fix my stability in a place where no one would recognize my most stable, once-famous self. Like Chyou, who rode at the front of my mind in a patchwork of mingled memories of fleshly passion and bitter parting, I wanted things that contradicted each other. I woke at noon to a grey sky and drove down into the centre of the dark limestone city of Kingston in search of a post office. I watched students wandering the streets in their Queen’s University jackets. I mailed my envelopes, then kept walking until I reached a bridge that crossed a strait that fed into Lake Ontario. In the middle of the bridge, I unwound my turban, tugged off my turban cap, and threw them both into the water, imagining the Hindus and Sikhs of Toronto cheering in triumph as I did so.
The turban unravelled as it floated towards the lake. Yet my foes should not imagine that I had given up on self-reinvention. I shook out my hair, then walked back into the city centre that was a magnified version of my limestone village. I looked for a hairdresser. Nearly twenty-five years earlier I had gone out to look for a barber and had taken a wrong turn. Now I would complete that curtailed walk in the snow.
“Take it all off,” I said to the middle-aged barber, who had hesitated when I sat down. “Give me the haircut you give to the boys from the military academy.” Fifteen minutes later, I peered into the mirror he held up to my face. The grey military crewcut that crouched on the crown of my head made the beard spilling over my jowls look dishevelled. “Now shave me.”
“Holy cow. Not even your wife’s gonna recognize you.”
“Sometimes that is a good thing!” We laughed like men who meet at a bar. The breath of male companionship hauled me back from the abyss of exile. I enjoyed the feeling of lather on my cheeks, the lethal perfection of the straight razor: I had not seen one in ye
ars. When I looked in the mirror for the second time, I saw that the fellow staring back at me had endured hard times: his eyes were baggy, his dewlaps drooped, the skin that had been covered by a beard was of a sallow, unburnished brown.
“You look great,” the barber said. After he untied my bib, I stood up like a toddler taking his first steps. I paid him and gave him a generous tip. “Thanks, man,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Richard. My friends call me Ric.” We shook hands. I refused to concede victory to my enemies. In my ability to start again, I was rich in potential, a winner. And with my large, frank face and burly brush cut, I looked like a Ric. I resembled a garage mechanic or a plumber, anything but a literary lawyer and cultural commentator, as I used to be introduced on television. I did not even look particularly Indian. All that was clear was that I belonged to that difficult category, the immigrant.
The day after my arrival in Montreal, I rented a modest apartment with parquet floors in an older red-brick building in a mainly English-speaking neighbourhood. Then, as I had done prior to my move to the village, I went to the public library. I soon found what I was looking for: an island chain called the Turks and Caicos. It had a population of 30,000 people, two per cent of whom identified themselves as East Indian. Two percent of 30,000 was six hundred people. The odds of running into one of them in Montreal were negligible.
Frazzled by my ordeals, I spent five days sleeping and setting up my apartment. Then I booked a sorely needed holiday. I flew to the Turks and Caicos. I stayed for two weeks, hired a car to drive around the main island, chatted with East Indian merchants in their ramshackle shops, attended a Sunday sermon in a stone church built by English colonialists, read up on the islands’ history, and imagined where my ancestors might have lived if I had come from this place. I returned to Montreal confident in my identity as Ric Singh, who had immigrated to Canada from the Turks and Caicos as a teenager, then lived in Toronto for many years before moving to Montreal.
Here in the materialistic West, I found, I was able to engage in punarjanma, or reincarnation, without the inconvenience of relinquishing my body. I shook off the claims of India, of Hindus and Sikhs; my religious upbringing, if anyone asked about it, was West Indian Methodist. I felt relieved, but also anxious. At the first literary event I attended, I was cornered by a garrulous Bengali, who obliged me to lapse into taciturn grunts to keep my shadow Indianness under wraps. The most pressing danger, I grasped, was not that a West Indian would realize I was not like him but that an East Indian would realize I was. Fortunately, in this regard, Montreal was not Toronto; far fewer of my compatriots had settled here than in southern Ontario. I had chosen the right city in which to hide out from Indianness.
I devoted my days to compiling a plausible CV, elaborating my work of art as though it were a sculpture of which Ric Singh was the result. Pangs of furious regret ripped through me as I realized I would never again enjoy a lawyer’s respect or financial security. I spent hours mulling over the possibility of a phone call to the Law Society of Upper Canada to ask about the procedure for reinstatement to the Ontario Bar. Yet I knew it was hopeless; and if I phoned Toronto legal institutions from a Montreal number, I was in danger of exposing myself: a single leak to the newspapers and my self-reinvention would have to start again in Texas. Fraternization with my past was off limits. The only heritage I could carry with me, because it enriched me without marking me, was my reading. My imagination would always be animated by the lessons of the Victorians; in the depths of my soul I would remain an aspiring squire.
With this in mind, I constructed my CV from the rubble of the life I had lost, inserting references to work on community newspapers, columns written for small publications, fictitious book reviews and minor feature articles that no one would be able to trace. I gave myself a B.A. in English literature from Lakehead and an M.A. from Western. I bought the Montreal Gazette and picked up the free arts tabloids to learn about local reference points, local outlooks on Canada and the world. Whenever I spotted a promising literary event, I went to it. My fears of running into someone I had known in Toronto were appeased by the realization that literary life in Montreal had few points of contact with the glamorous pageant
I had feasted on as a southwestern Ontario lawyer. I asked people I met at these events about their day jobs. Some taught in Quebec’s system of junior colleges, others translated business materials between English and French, many scraped by on irregular teaching or editing contracts. At a particularly uninspired poetry reading, I made polite conversation with a friend of the hapless poet. Miguel was dark, with a long, woebegone face that belied the burliness of his robust chest and shoulders. He did not reveal where he had been born, but mentioned that he had travelled in the Caribbean. He invited me out for a beer. (Ric, unlike R. U., drank beer. I savoured Molson Canadian and Labatt Blue. I learned how to pronounce Belle Gueule, and how to order one in French.) In between telling me about his adventures in Trinidad, my new companion mentioned that a friend worked for one of the free newspapers that was hurled into driveways in districts where people lived in houses rather than apartments. “You should send him a CV,” he said. “I think he’d like you.”
His hand lingered on my shoulder, then dropped to my hip. I excused myself to go to the toilet. The warmth of Miguel’s palm in a place where men’s palms did not usually rest made me less uncomfortable than I would have expected. Since having myself shorn in Kingston, I had felt pared to a male essence that gravitated to the company of men. The lust that had driven me into Chyou’s bed and body in search of the vital counterpart to the other, more ethereal woman in my life, fell into abeyance. I ceased to sleep with women. I did not sleep with men, either, but I craved their camaraderie, their bulkiness, their muscularity, their solidity, their ineptitude at deception. I did not care whether the men I talked and drank beer with slept with women or men or, as was sometimes the case, with both. Uncaring of their orientation, I revelled in male directness and male simplicity. The cultural maze of my life had grown too intricate: I longed for straight talk and company detached from concealed strings. Or, if I did not, Ric did. Being Ric was less disorienting than being the southwestern Ontario lawyer: I experienced the impression Ric made on others only from the inside; I did not see him on television or read about what he said in the newspapers. Talking to men anchored me in my new persona in a straightforward way. When I returned from the toilet, Miguel gave me a smile and touched my hip. “I’m going to tell my friend he should interview you.”
He was as good as his word. I called the number he gave me and was invited to drop off a CV, then come around two days later for an interview. I answered my new employer’s questions in a manly monotone. After my holiday in the Turks and Caicos, I had affected a West Indian lilt. I squelched this caprice when I discovered that being an obvious West Indian invited prejudices even more virulent than those endured by East Indians. An East Indian might be a Paki, but a West Indian was a ganja-monger, a hood, a man who was feared as being both lazy and violent. I spoke in ambiguous tones, revealing my Turks and Caicos origins to new acquaintances by cautious stages that allowed them to interject, “But you’ve been here for a long time,” or, “You’re Canadian now.”
During my interview, I emphasized my Canadian university education, my itinerant career on community newspapers. I got the job. It did not pay well, but I earned enough to live on. I was able to stop depleting my handsome send-off. Located on an upper floor of an aging industrial building on the edge of Old Montreal, the tabloid thrived on advertising. Four-fifths of the publication was publicity and supermarket coupons. The first three pages contained hard news, pulled off the wire, or rewritten by employees who had simply listened to the radio; local news stories, sports line scores, and announcements of cultural events were squeezed in around the advertising over the remaining eighty pages. The paper appeared once a week, on Thursday, and hit the driveways of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, the Town of Mount
Royal, Montreal West, Côte-Saint-Luc, Westmount and other anglo residential neighbourhoods, out to the West Island, on Friday morning. Having slotted me as an intellectual after I had answered a question about my hobbies by saying that I liked to read Victorian novels, the editor assigned me to compile the cultural listings. I learned about every jazz and rock concert, experimental theatre production, and poetry reading in the city.
I attended few of the events that I arranged into columns. I was now employed, inhabiting a bareknuckle form of literary existence. My life having passed its mid-Victorian zenith of glory and abundance, I had declined into the nether world of fin de siècle disillusionment. In the evenings, riding the metro to work, I read less Dickens and Trollope, and more George Gissing. Surrounded by culture in French, I amused myself with the decadent prose of J. K. Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont. I was aware that I was scraping by in a premature autumn of life, an autumn that lacked any glimmer of the sweetness Chyou expected in hers. My boon days of television appearances, tuxedo dinners, famous acquaintances, and generous retainers from charitable boards could not return. Montreal, which had also passed its peak of glory, was the proper city in which to live this life. With its skyline held low by the brooding mountain, the neighbourhoods dispersed by the contorted geography of a city bunched around a solidified blob of magma, it was limping into the future on its cumulative inheritance from the past. If I could no longer be a squire, I wished, in spite of the burly exterior I now displayed, to be a man steeped in history. Montreal was drenched in the residue of the past; if I could no longer afford to be rural, then an urbanity that was stately and quasi-European suited me better than exile to pseudo-modern towers beyond the last subway station. In Montreal, in contrast to Toronto, immigrants did not have to settle in the outskirts; old and new residents mingled in the city’s core.
Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives Page 11
