Talk for Metropolis Conference 2000 in Vancouver
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to be here tonight
although I must admit that when I received the invitation to speak at the
Metropolis Conference, my first reaction was "They've got me mixed up with
someone else." Once it was clear that this was not the case, I agreed, albeit
a bit nervously. What on earth was I going to talk about at a conference full
of erudite scholars, professional planners, sociologists, and
anthropologists? How could I contribute to the discussion from my position
as a novelist, a fictioneer, a creator of stories, a person who existed for
the most part in the realm of the imagination? Not one to turn down a
challenge, however, I put on my thinking cap and settled down with notebook
and pen. I might not be familiar with planning and policy decisions but I
could certainly give you a brief glimpse of my personal experiences as a new
immigrant here, of the in-between world that the most immigrant inhabits.
Let me begin by reading a piece that I wrote for Saturday Night magazine last
year. It was for a column known as Letters from Canada and I was asked by the
editor to combine in the piece, a sense of place, (in my case, of Vancouver),
and of my own identity in this city.
"My mother phoned me from India at six a.m. on the sixteenth of March. My
first reaction was panic. Ma never called unless it was an emergency. She
thought that telephone conversations were a waste of time and money. A letter
was so much more satisfying and tangible. But a phone call? Pah, could she
hold on to a voice over the ocean air? Could she listen to it again and again
when she was lonely and missing me?
She must be ill, I thought. Perhaps it was one of my aging relatives. The
last time she had called was to tell me about the death of a favourite uncle.
This morning, however, she merely wanted to remind me about our New Year --
Yugadi. On March the seventeenth. Tomorrow. Why hadn't she written to let me
know? Like she did at the beginning of every year? A list of all the feasts
and festivals I was supposed to observe and never did, a list that I looked
forward to for it carried a trail of jasmine fragrance, of memories from
childhood, kitchen aromas, excitement, new clothes, visitors, small
ceremonies and rituals.
"What's the point writing to you when you always phone me a month after the
festival saying that you lost the list?" demanded my mother. "Now you cannot
possibly forget. Tomorrow is Yugadi. For your son at least you must do all
the usual things. Cook a feast and call some people to celebrate with you. It
is important to keep in touch with your culture. Promise you will?"
I promised. In the first few years after our arrival in Canada, I was so busy
adapting to a new culture that I did not have the time or the energy to hold
on to the old. This Yugadi celebration would be a renewal of ties that had
been worn thin by distance, time, and more often than not a lack of interest
in matters ritualistic.
The "usual things" included oil baths before sunrise, cleaning the small
collection of silver gods sitting neglected at the back of a kitchen
cupboard, prayers that echoed in my memory still, and an eight course meal to
be shared with friends.
I would need new mango leaves to string together and hang over the front
door. In Hindu mythology, the mango is supposed to be a wish-granting tree.
Its foliage is a must for auspicious occasions. Not to mention the
foul-tasting leaves and buds of the Neem tree that had to be crushed into a
paste with jaggery and swallowed first thing in the morning. A metaphor for
the way life was to be lived - the bitter and the sweet - all to be taken
without a murmur.
Where was I to find these leaves? Most of the trees in my line of vision were
bare, except for dark stands of pine which would certainly not do. There were
cherry blossoms trembling like delicate ballerinas against the sodden sky,
and golden broom lit up the mangy, moss-eaten walls of the house across the
road, but mango and neem were definitely not part of the Vancouver landscape.
I called a friend who usually knew where to go for everything from antique
commodes to fresh lychees. But she was from the Punjab and had never needed
mango leaves in March. She suggested that I try the Indian grocers on Main
Street.
Main Street is another world altogether. Once there, it is easy to believe
that you have left Vancouver and landed in Delhi. The air is spicy with
cooking smells from the half a dozen restaurants that line the street.
Wild-eyed drivers hurtle toward the traffic lights jamming down the brakes at
the last minute as if they were truckers on the Grand Trunk Road in India.
Women in salwar-kameez suits and saris stroll along stopping to prod
vegetables displayed in stalls on the pavement or to greet friends. The muted
blare of Hindi film songs mingles with the voices of people speaking in
several different languages. And travel agencies offer fares to India dirt
cheap, although the appalling rudeness of the agents could persuade one to
pay a thousand dollars more elsewhere!
This was where I came to stock up my kitchen cupboards with dhals, assorted
beans, basmati rice, wheat flour and chick-pea flour, turmeric, mustard,
asafoetida and semolina and for my monthly fix of Punjabi samosas, deep-fried
and fattening, but oh so delicious! On a rainy Vancouver afternoon, nothing
tasted better with a cup of boiling hot tea than a crisp-cornered samosa.
Even if it meant tangling with the sour proprieter of the store, a sixty-year
old woman with fraying hair dyed deep black, the colour staining the bald
slices of skin in between. She was always dressed in bridal pink or red, her
lips stained a matching shade, her scraggy neck layered with heavy gold
jewellery, her wrists loaded with bracelets. She didn't like me for reasons I
hadn't been able to fathom. As a sign of her dislike, she slipped a samosa
less than I had ordered if I didn't keep an eye on her. In addition, unless I
asked, she would not include the small styrofoam container of tamarind
chutney that I jealously observed her giving everybody else.
When I asked if she had mango leaves in stock, she looked at me as if I had
demanded a rock from the moon.
"Why you want?"
"It's my New Year tomorrow. I need it for my front door."
"New Year? Where you are from?"
"From India."
"Me also, but we have New Year in April," she said. "Why yours is now?"
"I am from South India," I explained humbly.
Perhaps she had mango leaves stashed in the back of the store. I didn't want
to annoy her till I had them safely in my shopping basket.
"Not all South Indians celebrate New Year tomorrow," argued a woman in the
line behind me. "Tamil New Year is in April."
"I am not a Tamilian," I said, hanging on to the humility by the skin of my
teeth.
"What you are then?" asked the shop-lady, drumming her fingers impatiently on
her cash-machine. No, she definitely did not like me.
"It doesn't matter. Look do you have mango leaves?"
"No,"she said triumphantly.
"Do you have neem leaves then?"
"No."
I made my way to another store across the road from her where the proprietor
was far more polite even though he didn't like to see me carrying bags with
his rival's logo.
"You went there first," he said reproachfully. "What you bought? Why you went
there? They put stones in everything. To increase weight and cheat you."
"Only samosas," I said, opening the bag to show him the box.
He was appeased.
"I just need some leaves," I told him. "Mango and Neem."
"Why for you need those leaves?" he asked. "They are not very good. I have
others that are much tastier. Methi, coriander, two types of spinach. You buy
those, I am advising you."
I went through the whole rigmarole of explaining that I followed a different
calendar according to which the year 2000 was actually 5102, I was born in
September but my real birthday was in February, and my new year began
tomorrow.
He suggested that I try China Town. "Many funny-funny things they have," he
offered. "Definitely you will find your leaves there. And just a month ago
they celebrated Chinese New Year, so maybe."
I didn't think my leaves figured in a Chinese New Year, but there was no harm
trying. An hour later, I ended up in a poky little shop that sold inks and
painting material, and that had to be unlocked from the inside by a very
beautiful woman who hurried me in and locked the door again.
"Too many wicked people outside," she whispered. "Too dangerous."
I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to rob a paint shop that was flanked
by large, prosperous looking jewellery stores flaunting gem-stones and jades
in their display windows. After purchasing a paintbox and some intricately
carved stamps in order not to hurt the woman's feelings, I went home. I had
no leaves but at least I was celebrating Yugadi which was more than what I
had done the past eight years.
My neighbour, a slender, chic Rumanian woman who smoked guiltily, and as
frequently as a chimney in winter, waved when she saw me staggering in with
my bags full of unnecessary objects. She already knew of my leafy quest.
"Did you find any?" she asked.
No, nada, nix, nay.
Why couldn't I use something else, she wanted to know, waving her cigarette
in the air. Couldn't I be creative, make do, find another way? Wasn't life
one long garland of improvisations? Surely my gods wouldn't mind if I used my
imagination!
And so I did. At six in the morning on March 17, I hung a string of
rhododendron leaves over my door. They looked a lot like mango leaves. A few
sprigs of cherry blossom completed the decoration. Was it my fault that
flowers appeared before leaves here? For the bevu-bella, the bitter-sweet
concoction, I mashed up orange peel with jaggery from the Indian store. At
least half the recipe was as tradition demanded. The meal was no problem
apart from the time it took to cook eight courses for as many people. As my
friend from India informed me over steaming bowls of saaru, I was fortunate
that there was a whole street full of Indian grocers to go to. Fifty years
ago, she had had to smuggle pickles and papad and asafoetida past Canadian
customs. She had had to make do with local ingredients. What was I grouching
about?
When I phoned my mother to tell her about my celebration, it was the second day of her new year already.
"Ma," I said with some triumph. "I did all the usual things."
"The bevu-bella also?"
"Yes, Ma, yes!""
In this piece I attempted to give the reader a glimpse of my own attempts to
negotiate a way between the past and the present, to be a part of this city
where many cultures intersect, without sacrificing my own cultural
traditions. It was an attempt, to capture briefly, lives lived in a
multi-racial society such as Vancouver. As always I was working from the
belief that fiction, art, poetry or any other creative endeavour is most
authentic, most viscerally experienced when it draws from real life, the
world around us.
We came to Canada from India a little over ten years ago. Our relatives were
alarmed by this sudden decision to pull up our roots and plant them in
another country. They thought that we were mad to leave good jobs and
comfortable lives for an uncertain future. And why Canada they demanded as if
it it was a planet in another galaxy. Wasn't that somewhere near the North
Pole? Horribly cold? With bears that mauled people to death? Stereotyping as
you can see, is alive and well everywhere in the world.
In September of 1990 my husband was in Canada -- a student at the University
of Calgary. By March 1991, I had cleaned out our apartment in the bustling
metropolitan city of Bangalore, sold our furniture, and packed most of our
belongings in boxes and trunks to store in my in-law's home. No point taking
everything with us, I told myself and everybody else. We would be back in a
few years, I said, resenting this move and quite certain that I would never
want to live in a country that I knew only as a vague band of land between
the USA and the Arctic Circle. I had seen a picture in a geography book of a
vast, flat prairie with a grain elevator rising from its heart. Another time,
in an ancient issue of Readers' Digest, I had read about a forest fire in the
Rockies. The article was accompanied by a lurid picture of dark stands of
pines licked by flames against a red and orange sky. That was the sum of my
knowledge of Canada, a country that had hitherto existed only in the outer
edges of my imagination. Until March 1991 when I found myself in Calgary
airport dressed in nothing warmer than a mohair sweater and a pair of canvas
sneakers. My husband, who had already lived there for six months and survived
an extremely frigid winter, had buoyantly assured me that spring had come to
Calgary. It was deliciously warm, there was joy in the air, all the trees
were in bud and I would love it. I emerged from the nearly empty airport to
be hit by a blast of freezing air. I could see nothing for a few moments as
my eyes and nose had started to water with the cold. My lungs had panicked
and clenched up. I was wheezing like an old pair of bellows. It was minus
fifteen degrees and I had just arrived from a city where the temperatures
hovered at plus forty-seven in the shade.
In the week that followed, the desire to run back the way I had come became
even stronger. I missed the noise, the bustle of people, the smells and the
circus-like atmosphere of Indian streets. What was I doing in this barren
city where the sky covered everything like blue glass, where I could hear my
own footsteps echoing on an empty street, and where I was frequently the only
passenger on a bus? I had left a thriving career as a journalist and was
afraid of starting out all over again from scratch. I wanted to go back home.
Over the next year we struggled to fit in, to adjust, to make Calgary feel
like home. Inevitably, the first thing we did was to find an Indian grocery
store and a restaurant that served an approximation of the food that we were
used to back in India. Never mind that the "East Indian" restaurant in
question dished up a generic North Indian cuisine in which the same sauce
appeared to have been used for all the dishes. Our hunger for the familiar in
this strange new land drew us there repeatedly for naan, chholey-bhaturey,
paneer-palak. The trips to the Indian store were less frequent because we had
no car and had to switch three buses to get there. Once or twice our yearning
did drag us to the store and we went berserk loading up on varieties of
spices, lentils, beans, rice and flour which the Safeway around the corner
did not carry. I used to loathe pickles but now found myself buying an
assortment. Consumed by homesickness I craved the hot, tangy lick of green
mango or lime marinated in mustard oil and chilli powder. But with the advent
of winter, the trips to the store stopped altogether. We were preoccupied
with coping with the cold and the thought of sliding down icy streets bearing
back-packs and duffel bags bulging with exotic groceries was not very
appealing.
As a student my husband had a small scholarship that was barely enough for a
family of three. I had to find myself a job but kept coming up against brick
walls made up of the words "No" and "Sorry your qualifications do not match
our requirements," or "We will keep your application on file and get in touch
if something comes up." It seemed impossible for me to find a job as a
journalist or an advertising copy-writer even though there were endless
vacancies listed in the newspapers and I thought that I had enough education
and experience necessary. It was the first time that I was brought face to
face with the notion that my "foreign" qualifications were not enough for the
job market here. Finally I found a temporary job at the University bookstore,
and later at a china store, (where I broke a Hummel figurine worth 200
dollars on my first day), and later still at the University of Calgary
library. Anxious about losing my writing life, I also enrolled in a course in
creative writing -- a move that eventually turned me into a writer of
fiction.
I still remember the reaction from my classmates to the first story I wrote.
Why, they wanted to know couldn't I write something that was set in Canada?
For a writer a sense of place is vital. It is what provides the authenticity
and colour that transports the reader into a different world. It was easy
enough for me to create imaginary Indias, but try as I might, Canada would
not reveal herself to me.
Now, ten years later things have changed. I find it increasingly difficult to
decide which place to use in my fictions. India remains vivid in my mind's
eye, but the Canadian landscape is just as well-defined. I suppose I am going
through the hyphenated phase that must surely be part of the immigrant
experience.
There is a story in Hindu mythology about King Trishanku who was condemned by
the gods to drift suspended upside down too, in space, between worlds, for
all eternity. I feel like that king now, always straddling two continents,
two realities - Asia and North America, the East and the West. My identity,
to paraphrase from an essay by Salman Rushdie, is "at once plural and
partial. Sometimes I feel that I straddle two cultures, at other times, I
fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may
be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is
in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then
once again our distance, our long geographical perspective may provide such
angles."
Extending this idea into the larger community of people, Ruth Ozeki an
American novelist and the author of "My Year of Meats" says, "The richest
biodiversity is found in the overlapping areas where two ecosystems collide,
and that is the case for culture as well."
It is here at the intersection of cultures, generations, ethnicities that I
find the most interesting fictions. My characters are frequently caught on
the cusp of change. Sometimes they are the offsprings of two races. The space
they occupy is always shifting, dynamic, full of the energy that is generated
from the meeting of worlds and ideas. Which is why, unlike Trishanku, the
unfortunate king, I feel blessed rather than cursed by the experience of
hanging between worlds. It is wonderful to always see and feel as if for the
very first time. The wonder never fades, there is something new to discover
with each return home, home being both this place and that. Of course, at
times there is still a surge of guilt at having so swiftly abandoned the old
identity in an attempt to become Canadian; an anxiety about losing my past.
Hopefully, our son who has grown up here and will have a history that is
rooted in this land will feel none of the same discomfort, anxiety, and guilt
that comes from a dual identity. He might at a later stage make an attempt to
find his ancestral roots, but for him Canada will be home and India will be
where he goes for his holidays.
Finally, I should add this. Canada has been kind to me and my family. I have
never felt the humiliating sting of a racist attack; or the fear of a refugee
who struggles to forget the horrors of the past. I cannot help wondering if
things might have been different had I been poor, uneducated, or unable to
comprehend English. While it is true that, compared to fifteen, even twenty
years ago, there is a far more enlightened and tolerant attitude towards
immigrants who are visibly different from mainstream Canadians, it is also
hard to ignore periodic eruptions of paranoia or xenophobia every time a
boatload of refugees arrives at our shores armed with the same hope for a
better life that brought people from Europe here two centuries ago, of
newspaper reports describing them in words that make them sound like wild
animals who need to be hunted down, or of other reports that still define
non-white Canadians in terms of their race, religion or country of origin.
Hopefully this will change. In the metropolitan centres of the world one sees
an intermingling of racially and culturally diverse peoples who have one
thing in common - they all came from somewhere else. Great and thriving
cities such as London, New York, Toronto, to name but a few, grew out of this
massive infusion of energies and sensibilities, of ideas from many different
places, of skills, ambitions, and hard work. Hopefully this will continue.
Thank you.
