Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (8 page)

As a writer in Canada, or anywhere else probably, your work gets labelled—mystery writer, science fiction writer, literary writer, gay writer, etc. And then there are the books that branch out and try on new labels—literary thriller, science fiction romance, etc. Living in Toronto now, I’m automatically a “Toronto writer.” I’ve even received reviews condemning me for where I live. Once you start selling to the United States and other countries, you are also a “Canadian writer,” even if you’re originally from India or Africa or Australia and are writing about that country. If you’ve immigrated to Canada, if you hold citizenship or landed immigrant status and live here, you are Canadian. I am a Canadian writer.

This is a strange way of belonging to a country. As an immigrant to this country I am alive to the differences that surround me, the differences that are a part of me. I don’t know anything about hockey, really, I can’t get my head around it. Nor do I understand curling. I played baseball as a kid and was pretty good at it.

There are ironies in the Canadian personality
which I find fascinating and my neighbours seem not even to notice. Cultured and polite Canadians, sophisticated Canadians, turn into maniacs during the Stanley Cup playoffs. Canadians who claim not to be patriotic will preach the merits of Canadian beer, heaping derision on the American product. But then, on Oscar night, Canadians will gather around television sets, desperate to know who has won this American gold statue. And in the arts it is a well-known fact that you haven’t really “made it” until you make it in the States. In fact, the Canadian personalities who go South end up being literally sucked, like a dip in quick-sand, into their new country. And then what happens? Years later, when we are reminded that this Super-Famous-So-and-So is Canadian it amazes us. “Really? No way!” Don’t think I haven’t noticed.

These perspectives can be seen as American. But am I really American either? When I go to the United States now, what I notice are the little things—the little things those kids at Oaklands Elementary School noticed in me. The food portions are always bigger in the States. Everything is bigger actually, television ads seem bigger and brighter. If I were really an American, these things wouldn’t seem bigger; they would seem just right.

The point here is that I am a combination of both nationalities. But, even more importantly, I am also neither. I occupy a space outside both countries that lends me a perspective that I think has facilitated my career as a writer. I can be a stranger in my own country. I can watch both Canada and the United States with fascination and curiosity. I can step back and watch. Not quite fitting in gives me the advantage of being able to undertake a kind of scientific examination of culture and people in an artistic way. I have the lucky position of an observer; I don’t really have to work on it. And as a writer is naturally an observer, the path I’ve chosen to walk down is nicely maintained. Paved, even.

It’s a constant blending. Memory and identity. It’s interesting that my mother, my father, my brother and I all decided to remain dual citizens. My brother teaches now in Barbados and he tells his students that he’s 100 percent Canadian. And 100 percent American. But if he is totally both, then, if you really think about it, he is neither.

My brother reminds me of the one year we celebrated two Thanksgivings. He says we ate turkey leftovers, stuffing, turkey sandwiches, cranberry sauce, for months. I think we had something else for Christmas dinner, maybe a ham. And I remember the
time I was shopping with my mom in the grocery store in October and she looked up and noticed the Thanksgiving decorations hanging from the ceiling and rushed to buy a turkey. The two dates—October or November?—played havoc with our holidays for years. My brother also remembers being mixed up about the songs at school “My country ’tis of thee … God save the Queen.”

It all has to do, really, with when I came to Canada. I came when I was seven years old. One of my daughters is five now, and I ask myself, if in two years we moved away from Canada, would she know anything about Canadian politics or history, about the cultural mosaic or Canadian immigration policies? No. She would know what I knew: the small differences, the minute things that made me stand apart and still make me feel individual. Home for me is exactly the spot where my family is right now.

I think this Canadian/American thing, this blending, has made my family closer than we might have been had we stayed put in Virginia. My mother and father left their own families to move to Canada, and so our tight-knit family became everything we knew. Holiday dinners were only the four of us. We were different from those other families in Canada with their big get-togethers, and we slowly became
different from those other families in the United States, different from the relatives we had left behind. So we had to stay together. We are some strange new breed—neither a part of where we came from nor a part of where we are now.

I’ve been playing dominoes here with my memory. I’ve knocked one over, and a whole row has gathered speed and fallen over all around me.

There’s a photo of me on the ferry, arms open wide. I’m wearing flowered pants, a long jacket. My brother is smiling. His face is happy and content. But where’s my face? My hair is in my face. Long hair blowing around my head, covering my eyes, my mouth. You have to look twice to see which direction I’m facing. You have to notice the little knee bumps and the way my hands turn. You have to look closely to see the bit of forehead peeking out of the wind-whipped hair. I’m sailing forward but looking back. Caught in a moment between two countries. Not knowing the differences that lie ahead but obviously enjoying that in-between stage that I seem to have stayed in my entire life.

Shyam
Selvadurai

CONVERSATIONS WITH MY MOTHER

I
N 1975, MY PARENTS
made a significant trip to America. My father was taking my mother so that she could decide if she would like to live there. He was a tennis coach and, for the past few years, had been teaching at a prestigious Massachusetts country club. They were now offering him full-time work. My mother was a doctor. By sitting for a simple exam (simple for her, anyway, as she had a real knack for exams) she could re-qualify as a doctor. The lifestyle they were contemplating was definitely an upper-middle-class one, with very few of the stresses and strains most immigrants face upon arrival in a new country. The decision was entirely up to my mother. Whatever she wanted, my father would abide by it.

She said no.

I telephone my mother to ask her why she said no all those years ago. Her answer is only one word:
“lifestyle.” Her voice lingers over the
l
, drawing it out in a quiet sigh. Immediately an image rises in my mind.

We are at the swimming club, clouds like gauze scarves fluttering in the blue sky. My mother slowly descends the steps into the water. “Ma-Ma-Mummy!” We children make a furious dash across the pool towards her, each determined to get there first. She raises her hand, palm outwards. A nervous swimmer, she does not like being splashed. I am the best non-splasher. As my mother glides out and down the pool, her head above the water, I stay as close to her as I can. I love the feel of her legs kicking the water behind us, the smell of her perfume mingled with the chlorine on her skin. To me there is no one more beautiful than my mother in her purple one-piece bathing suit.

Later, when the sun is too fierce for swimming, we will return home. Sunday lunch is always special. Even while paddling in the water, I can almost taste the explosion of flavours in my mouth—the buttery yellow rice scattered with sultanas and cashews, nutty eggplant moju, succulent chicken curry, devil shrimp, dal, fish cutlets, and chocolate biscuit pudding for dessert. We come running into the house ahead of my mother, go to wash our hands, take our places at the table. We bow our head for grace. My father thanks
God for our meal, for the fact that we have food. It never crosses his mind, or indeed strikes any of us, to offer up thanks to the maid who laid the table, to the cook who made this lunch.

My mother, on the other end of the telephone, breaks into my reverie. “Then there was the Lodge.”

The Lodge. Or to give it its full name, the Ibis Safari Lodge.

My father was a man who took his great loves and turned them into money. Even before I was born, he abandoned the steady climb up the corporate ladder that his schooling and family background ensured. He had played Davis Cup for Sri Lanka and had been the national tennis champion, and he decided to go to Australia and qualify as a tennis coach. His other great passion was wildlife, and in the early seventies he became the first person in Sri Lanka to offer safaris. So successful was this venture that he built a hotel—the Lodge—to house his tourists.

How I used to love going to the Lodge, beginning with the journey in the open Jeep. Our route took us first through the lush foliage and rivers of the wet zone of Sri Lanka, then the road emerged onto the coastline and we would travel past miles and miles of
white beach, turquoise water. The change of scenery, as it always is in Sri Lanka, was dramatic. We always stopped at Tangalle Bay for a picnic lunch, which we children would eat quietly, hoarse by now from screaming out jokes and mild obscenities at the village children we had passed.

Within an hour from Tangalle the landscape completely changed again. We entered the dry zone. The hazy, moisture-laden yellow light of the wet zone gave way to brilliant clear whiteness (the same quality of light as a dazzling February day in Toronto). The trees on the sides of the road were stunted, with few leaves, yet filled with brilliant red and orange flowers. Vast arid plains stretched into the distance, a smell of dried clay pervading the air.

To get to the Lodge, our Jeep would then leave the main road and go along a narrow jungle path. So close were the trees that we had to sit on the floor of the Jeep to escape the thorny branches which banged and rattled against the sides. When we were in the clear, we rose quickly to our feet, and there it was. The Lodge. A long wooden building, it boasted an extensive deck with pillars at regular intervals supporting the low-slung roof. Doors led off the deck into the bedrooms. The building was raised eight feet off the ground, for in the rainy season the Wirawilla
lake lapped at the base of the Lodge, with flamingos, painted storks, peacocks, buffalo, and deer, even an occasional elephant, along its distant banks. In the dry season all this animal life receded to the centre, around a water hole.

What adventures we children had at the Lodge. If the tank was full, there was fishing and bathing. The tank had man-eating crocodiles in it, though, so we always stayed in the shallows, one of us keeping an eye out for the deceptive logs. In the dry season we would play cricket or badminton on the parched floor of the tank, and make treks to the water hole to see the wildlife. We would go into the jungle, my brother leading the way with his air rifle, and thrill with terror when we came upon fresh elephant dung.

While the Lodge is, in my mind, associated with all that was best about my childhood and adolescence, it is also linked indelibly with the beginning of the end.