Our population crossed the 8 billion mark in November, 2022. As we move towards trying to hunt for alternative domiciles for our ever-expanding population, even in outer space, we still have to take into account the increased movement of people across the Earth in search of alternative homes driven by external circumstances or by personal needs.
Some have lost their homes and lands to war, some to climate emergencies and some moved out out of choice. Here we have collected narratives of past and present migrations, emphasising the fluidity of borders, despite the lines drawn artificially by manmade constructs. In an earlier interview, Anthony Sattin talks of nomadic migrations and the concept of asabiyya, or brotherhood, which tied humans to ideas and ideals instead of a piece of land mooted in Arabia by Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century. Has the time come to revive this concept with conflicts and the climate crises becoming real? As weapons, fire and water affect our habitats, one wonders if reverting to the concept of nomadic existence is not becoming a necessity… This small collection of writings will hopefully highlight the concerns.
In Belacan, Farouk Gulsara shares a narrative based on the life of a migrant in 1950s Malaysia. Clickhereto read.
Ujjal Dosanjh, former Minister from Canada and former Premier of British Columbia, talks of his own journey and learning as he migrated out of India to Canada. Click hereto read.
In Mister, They’re Coming Anyway, Timothy Jay Smith writes on the refugee crisis in Lesbos Island, Greece, in 2016 with photographs by Michael Honegger. Click here to read.
An excerpt from Ramy Al-Asheq’sEver Since I Did Not Die, translated from Arabic by Isis Nusair, edited by Levi Thompson. The author was born in a refugee camp. Click hereto read.
Ujjal Dosanjh, former Minister from Canada and former Premier of British Columbia, discusses his autobiography, Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada, and the need for a world with less borders. Click hereto read.
Professor Fakrul Alam discusses his new book of Tagore translations, Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore. Click here to read.
Translations
Tagore’sMusalmanir Galpa(A Muslim Woman’s Story) has been translated from Bengali by Aruna Chakravarti. Clickhere to read.
Masud Khan’s poem,In Another Galaxy, has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click hereto read.
Wakeful Stays the Door, a poem by Munir Momin, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Songs of Freedom: An Ordinary Taleis a narrative by Nandani based on her own experiences, translated from Hindustani by Janees. These narrations highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and Pandies. Click hereto read.
“Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them…”
— TS Eliot, ‘Four Quartets: Burnt Norton’(1936)
Humans have always been dreamers, ideators and adventurers.
Otherwise, could we have come this far? From trees to caves to complex countries and now perhaps, an attempt to reach out towards outer space for an alternative biome as exploring water, in light of the recent disaster of the Titan, is likely to be tougher than we imagined. In our attempt to survive, to live well by creating imagined constructs, some fabrications backfired. Possibly because, as George Orwell observed with such precision in Animal Farm, some perceived themselves as “more equal”. Of course, his was an animal allegory and we are humans. How different are we from our brethren species on this beautiful planet, which can survive even without us? But can humanity survive without Earth? In science fiction, we have even explored that possibility and found home among stars with the Earth becoming uninhabitable for man. However, humanity as it stands of now, continues to need Earth. To live amicably on the planet in harmony with nature and all the species, including our own, we need to reimagine certain constructs which worked for us in the past but seem to have become divisive and destructive at this point.
Ujjal Dosanjh, former Minister in the Canadian cabinet and former Premier of British Columbia, in his autobiography, Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada, talks of regionalism as an alternative to narrow divisive constructs that terrorise and hurt others. He writes in his book: “If humanity isn’t going to drown in the chaos of its own creation, the leading nations of the world will have to create a new world order, which may involve fewer international boundaries.” We have a candid conversation with him about his beliefs and also a powerful excerpt from his autobiography.
An interview with Professor Fakrul Alam takes us into Tagore’s imagined world. He discussed his new book of Tagore translations, Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore. He has brought out a collection of 300 songs translated to English. In a bid to emphasise an inclusive world, we also have a translation of Tagore’s ‘Musalmanir Galpa’ (A Muslim Woman’s Story) by Aruna Chakravarti. A transcreation of his poem, called ‘Proshno or Questions’ poses difficult challenges for humanity to move towards a more inclusive world. Our translation by Ihlwha Choi of his own Korean poem to English also touches on his visit to the polymath’s construct in the real world, Santiniketan. All of these centring around Tagore go to commemorate the month in which he breathed his last, August. Professor Alam has also translated a poem from Bengali by Masud Khan that has futuristic overtones and builds on our imagined constructs. From Fazal Baloch we have a Balochi translation of a beautiful, almost a surrealistic poem by Munir Momin.
We travel to Andaman with Mohul Bhowmick and further into Sierra with Meredith Stephens. Ravi Shankar travels back in nostalgia to his hostel and Kathleen Burkinshaw dives into the past — discussing and responding to the media presentation of an event that left her family scarred for life, the atomic holocaust of 1945 in Japan. This was a global event more than seven decades ago that created refugees among the survivors whose homes had been permanently destroyed. Perhaps, their stories are horrific, and heart wrenching like the ones told by those who suffered from the Partition of India and Pakistan, a divide that is celebrated by Independence Days for the two nations based on a legacy of rifts created by the colonials and perpetrated to this day by powerbrokers. Aysha Baqir has written of the wounds suffered by the people with the governance gone awry. Some of the people she writes of would have been refugees and migrants too.
A poignant narrative about refugees who flock to the Greek island of Lesbos by Timothy Jay Smith with photographs by Michael Honegger, both of whom served at the shelters homing the displaced persons, cries out to halt wars and conflicts that displace them. We have multiple narratives of migrants in this issue, with powerful autobiographical stories told by Asad Latif and Suzanne Kamata. Paul Mirabile touches on how humans have adopted islands by borrowing them from seas… rather an unusual approach to migrations. We have an essay on Jane Austen by Deepa Onkar and a centenary tribute to Chittaranjan Das by Bhaskar Parichha.
The theme of migrants is echoed in stories by Farouk Gulsara and Shivani Shrivastav. Young Nandani has given an autobiographical story, translated from Hindustani to English by Janees, in which a migration out of various homes has shredded her family to bits — a narrative tucked in Pandies Corner. Strange twists of the supernatural are woven into fiction by Khayma Balakrishnan and Reeti Jamil.
I would like to give my grateful thanks to our wonderful team at Borderless, especially to Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork. Huge thanks to all our gifted contributors and our loyal readers. Borderless exists today because of all of you are making an attempt to bringing narratives that build bridges, bringing to mind Lennon’s visionary lyrics:
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
Ujjal Dosanjh left his village in Punjab in quest of a better life. He had a bare smattering of English, very less money and some family overseas when he left his home at Dosanjh Kalan at the age of seventeen. That was in 1964. He spent the first three years in Britain and then, moved to Canada to become a prominent lawyer, activist and political figure.
When he started in the 1960s, to earn a livelihood in England, he shunted trains in the British Railways. He left for Canada in hope of a better future. He had to work initially in sawmills and factories to support himself. Eventually, he could get an education and satisfy his ambitions in British Columbia, which became his home. Coming from a family which contributed to the freedom struggle of India, it was but natural that he would turn towards a public life. His uprightness, courage, tolerance, openness and commitment had roots in his background, where his parents despite different political ideologies, lived together in harmony. His family, despite their diverse beliefs, stood by him as he tried to live by his values.
Dosanjh voiced out against separatist forces that continue to demand an autonomous country for Sikhs to this day. In 1985, he was beaten almost to death by such Khalistani separatists as he boldly opposed the movement that had earlier led to the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) and to the bombing of an aircraft where all 329 people aboard died. However, undaunted by such attacks, he continues to talk unity, welfare for the underprivileged and upholds Mahatma Gandhi as his ideal. He went into Canadian politics with unfractured belief in the Mahatma. Dosanjh was the Health Minister of Canada and earlier the Premier of British Columbia. He has been honoured by both the Indian and Canadian governments. In 2003, he received the highest award for diaspora living outside India, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, and, in 2009, he was a recipient of the Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award.
Now, sixty years from the time he left his country of birth, he shares his narratives with the world with his updated autobiography — the first edition had been published in 2016 — and also with fiction. As an immigrant with his life spread over different geographies, he tells us in his non-fiction, Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canada:“Canada has been my abode, providing me with physical comforts and the arena for being an active citizen. India has been my spiritual refuge and my sanctuary.”He writes of what he had hoped could be a better future for humankind based on the gleanings from his own experiences and contributions to the world: “If humanity isn’t going to drown in the chaos of its own creation, the leading nations of the world will have to create a new world order, which may involve fewer international boundaries.”
In this interview, he shares his journey and expands further his vision of a world with diminishing borders.
You travelled from a village in Punjab, through UK and ended up in the Canadian cabinet to make changes that impacted humanity in your various public roles as a politician. Would you have been able to make an impact in a similar public role if you had never left India? Was the journey you went through necessary to help you become who you are?
It’s almost next to impossible to imagine what actually would have happened to my life in India had I stayed there. The most complicating element would be the standards that I would apply in such reimagining, the standards I most certainly wouldn’t have known or applied to my Indian life’s journey. I do think though and I have said it often in conversations with friends that had I stayed in India I would have either turned into a saint or devil; nothing in between for one who in 1964, the year I left, already hated the beginnings of the corruption that has now almost completely enslaved the country’s polity and ensnared the society.
Even though what has guided me throughout my life were the lessons I learnt from my freedom fighter maternal grandfather, my activist father and Mahatma Gandhi’s life, I believe the ethics and mores of public life, first in Britain and then in Canada helped shape and sculpt who I became and how I conducted myself. Had I not been to Britain and not lived most of my life in Canada, it’s impossible even to imagine the ‘me’ that would now be walking upon our planet earth.
While within five years of landing in Canada, you were studying in University of British Columbia and driving an Austin, some other immigrants fifteen years down the line continued in abject poverty. What does it take to rise out of endemic poverty? Do you see that happening in the world around us today?
The way you phrased the question conceals the fact that before I resumed full time college in January 1970s and went on to complete my BA and then LL.B. in 1976, I had spent full six years of my life in UK and Canada working jobs including shunting trains with British Rail, making crayons in a factory, being a lab assistant in a secondary school and pulling lumber on the green chain in a saw mill in Canada while often attending night school.
And I must add that my extended family and my spouse were largely responsible for paying my way through my B.A. and LL.B.
While even then it wasn’t easy, I do recognise the union wage then available to students in summer employment enabled them to save enough for the school year; with most summer jobs that’s not the case now. The students now more often than not have to depend on loans or help from the parents.
A significant section of the immigrant diaspora has done reasonably well while for many it’s becoming harder and harder to just make ends meet.
And by the way the Austin, you refer to, was the used Austin 1100, Austin Mini’s sister, I had bought for the then princely sum of six hundred dollars; it took mere six dollars to fill its tank.
That’s truly interesting. At the beginning of your biography, you stated ‘politics is a noble calling’. Later you have written, “I had realized I needed to make a clean break from thepettiness of politics.” Which of these is true? And why the dichotomy — pettiness as opposed to nobleness? And what made you change your perspective?
No, I have not changed my view of politics. It is a noble calling but only if you do it for the right reasons. More and more I found that a significant number of people seeking public office did so for glory that they perceived the elected public office bestowed upon them. Shorn of any lofty ideals and the pursuit of public good politics often degenerates into petty squabbles rather than the giant battles of great and contrasting ideas.
The pettiness is the result of small minds pursuing the mirage of glory in phony battles that barely move the needle on the bar of public good. I often refer to the absence of great leaders in the political landscape of India and the world; Canada has not escaped the current curse of the dearth of great minds in the political arena. Hence my exasperation at the situation I found myself in.
The world over, politics seems to have become the refuge of intellectual dwarfs—no offence intended to our shorter brothers and sisters. The small minds tend not to see too far into the future; they are oblivious to the need to constantly challenge the world to be what it could be.
After a lifetime of activism and close to eighteen years of elected office it was only natural for me to tire of the myopia and pettiness in what otherwise remains a noble endeavour.
You met Indira Gandhi — the second woman to lead a country in a prime ministerial role — and had this to say of her “Indira Gandhi loved India immensely. One can be an imperfect leader and yet a patriot”. Do you think she was an effective leader for India?
My wife and I spent an hour speaking with Indira Gandhi on the afternoon of January 13, 1984. We spent the first few minutes comparing notes about our grandparents and parents as freedom fighters and activists before discussing the issues related to the agitation in Punjab, its growing militancy and increasing violence in and outside the Golden Temple. From what she said it was clear she was extremely troubled about the dangerous situation of the militants holed up in the Temple and the toll it was taking on the peace, politics and the economy of the state. I sensed a certain helplessness in this otherwise quite brave woman when describing the unsuccessful efforts she and her office had made to reach a peaceful settlement of the issues raised by the Sikh agitation. Because I had met both the militant Bhindranwale and the peace loving leader of the agitation, Longowal, and understood the tension between the two men and their followers, I knew she was grappling with a political minefield. All of this and much more that we discussed left me in no doubt about her love for the country and all its people.
But I do believe she allowed the situation at the Golden Temple to linger too long and deteriorate before trying to bring it under control; thus, it and the Operation Bluestar, her ultimate response to the armed militants holed up in the Temple, remains one of her great misjudgements—perhaps as grave as the declaration of the National Emergency in 1975.
Imperfection being part of the human condition, one isn’t surprised that Indira Gandhi who saw all Indians as equally Indian, too, was imperfect; a strong but imperfect leader.
“Sikri was the capital for the new world of unity that Akbar had wanted to create. Ashoka took a similarly bold leap toward peace after a bloody war. Two millennia after Ashoka and four centuries after Akbar, Mahatma Gandhi shared with India a similar vision and a path out of colonialism. India killed him.” Please explain why you feel India killed Gandhi.
One can’t and mustn’t blame an entire country for the actions of one or two persons and yet what I said of Gandhi’s assassination, at least figuratively if not literally, can be said with ample justification; not one but several attempts were made to end Gandhi the mortal. If many Indian hearts and minds—and there were many in his lifetime, perhaps not as many as there are in Modi’s India—wanted Gandhi and his philosophy of nonviolence and love for all dead, then I must say, even without resorting to the writers’ licence, India stands accused and guilty of his January 30th, 1948 assassination; India killed Gandhi.
Even before the advent of Modi on the national scene India’s politicians had substantially diminished and damaged Gandhi’s legacy of Truth, Love and Non-violence. Considering the so few prominent voices in the public domain criticising the Modi regime’s single-minded undermining of Gandhi’s legacy, almost to the point of extinction, it can be said that if it already hasn’t done so, India is close to annihilating Gandhi’s Truth, Love and Non-violence.
“To India’s shame, the rich and ruling classes of today mimic the sahibs of yore. Some of them still head to the hills with their servants, the Indian equivalent of the slaves of the United States.” As Gandhi is seen as one of the architects of modern India, what would have Gandhi’s stand been on this?
When Gandhi lived in England and South Africa, he was part of the diaspora of his time and learnt new things as such. Today with social and digital media one hopes even living in India he would have been aware of the yearning of humanity for equality and economic and social justice. The way most rich and powerful treat the poor and the weak in India is absolutely antithetical to what an egalitarian India would demand of them.
I’m aware of how Gandhi didn’t support the abolition of caste and of his position or lack thereof on the question of equality for the blacks of South Africa at the time. But different times throw up leaders with different and perhaps better approaches to the fundamental issues. Were he alive today, he would have argued for the abolition of caste, equality for all and he wouldn’t have accepted or ignored how India treats its workers, poor and the powerless.
You have told us “India leads the world in the curse of child slavery and labour. Millions of India’s children are trapped in bonded labour, sex trafficking and domestic ‘help’ servitude.” Most people plead poverty and survival when they talk of children working. Do you see a way out? Is there a solution?
Yes, like all problems, this, too, has a solution:
Legislate, legislate and legislate.
Enforce, enforce and enforce the legislation.
I know some laws do exist but we need legislation with more teeth. The laws regarding minimum wage, hours of work, overtime and holiday pay and health regulations must be strengthened and more vigorously enforced, in particular, in the so-called domestic help sector. Better wages and working conditions rigorously enforced would attract adult workers who would be able to send their children to proper schools rather than thrust them in to slavery in exploitative homes, factories and workplaces.
Not much will improve on this front though unless Indians end the endemic corruption in law enforcement. You see corruption confronts and stares us in almost all, if not all, issues Indian; it is the elephant almost in each and every room.
“Violence can never be a tool for change in a modern, democratic nation.” You tried to use Gandhian principles through your life — even in Canada. Do you think non-violence can be a way of life given the current world scenario with wars and dissensions? How do you view Gandhi sanctioning the participation of soldiers in the first and second world wars? Can wars ever be erased or made non-violent?
First let’s deal with Gandhi’s sanction of the soldiers in the two world wars. Whether or not he had sanctioned their participation, the soldiers would have gone to war; most of them fought for wages, not for the love of war or the country except those for whom the Second World War was a war against fascism and hence justified.
I don’t believe Gandhi ever stated that in fighting a violent enemy or a perceived enemy one was not allowed to use violence. All I ever remember him saying was that you throw your unarmed body wrapped in soul force in front of the enemy but if you are too chicken to do so or can’t do so for some other reason but fight an aggressor you must, violence is better than doing nothing.
As for countries fighting each other I don’t believe he ever said that, in an uncertain world where the military of another country could invade at any moment, a country must forego a military of its own.
As for nonviolence being a way of life, it can and must be for a country in its internal life. On the borders however one always has to deal with what one is presented with; you can’t ask Ukraine to not fight; in the face of a suddenly expansionist China or a belligerent Pakistan, Gandhi wouldn’t have urged the Buddha’s meditational pose for India; he didn’t do so in late 1947 when Pakistani fighters invaded Kashmir.
As for wars being non-violent, they can never be if the likes of Russia continue to invade others.
You opposed the Khalistani separatists and stood for a united India. What is your stand on Khalistan, given the recent flare up? Did you do anything this time to allay the situation in Canada?
I have always been opposed to countries being carved out on ethnic, linguistic or religious basis; I am a firm believer in multilingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-racial populations living together in peace within the boundaries of peaceful countries; for that to happen, secularism remains a sine qua non[1]. That is why I so passionately continue to support a secular and inclusive India.
As for me doing something in the face of what is happening in Canada today vis a vis the Khalistanis, I didn’t say anything because I don’t believe it would have added to the debate; everyone already knows what I think and believe.
What does concern me though is the weak-kneed response and reaction of the public leaders of Canada; they have not unconditionally condemned the glorification of terrorists, known murderers or those who on the streets of Canada glorify and revere the killers of Air India passengers or of Mrs. Indira Gandhi. For me, someone who immigrated to Canada in 1968 when the elder Trudeau became the Prime Minister of the country, the near silence of our politicians on Khalistani violence and its glorification has been a low point; the older Trudeau knew how to deal with the terrorists; he didn’t and wouldn’t have pussy footed around terrorism or its glorification.
When your autobiography was published the first time in 2016, your column in Indian Express was cancelled. As many of us grew up in India of the past, we believed in secularism and democracy with freedom of expression. How has it changed over a period of time?
After I left India and particularly when I was introduced to the Hyde Park, I reflected on India and it seemed to be one of the freest places in the world; any intersection of a city road or a corner of the village served as a mini Hyde Park; from the millions of speeches made in such Hyde Parks all over India, millions of ideas tumbled forth from the lips of ordinary but engaged Indians.
Of course, I do realise that in the lives of the poor and the powerless, the freedom hadn’t shone as bright. The imprisoning of the Naxalites without charges and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency were the first real jolts of un-democracy and unfreedom I felt India as a whole had suffered. From there it went downhill; that sporadic communal riots continued; that Godhra was done to the Muslims as was done the post Indira assassination violence to the Sikhs; lynchings of Muslims and Dalits continue today.
India’s response to the first major unfreedom, Indira’s Emergency censorship, was encapsulated in the blank front pages of the censored Indian Express, that symbol of the Journalism of Courage. That symbol may still burn today but it is smouldering and clearly less bright enveloped as it and others are in the atmosphere of fear of the likes of ED[2] and CBI[3]; almost none amongst the traditional media homes shines much or at all; the digital media has thrown up some brave examples like The Wire. But the overall scene is dismal. India needs many revolutions; one of them is the reawakening of some semblance of fortitude in India’s Godi[4] media outlets.
Over repeated trips to India, you observed that people did not want to talk of major issues like availability of potable water but wanted to discuss issues like the eroding culture among the diaspora. Why do you think this has happened? Is there a way to change this mindset?
Human mind is an amazing thing; it seeks engagement but when the immediate is painful to observe and feel, it finds solace in contemplating the scenes afar; for sheer survival in its troubled and troubling milieu it develops numbness; such numbness shields it from the immediate while thinking about the distant problems, imagined or real, offer it a sense of engagement. Such is what I thought happened to many in Punjab.
Another troubling thing was that much beyond the essential human pride a sense of chauvinism and superiority, at least among its rich and powerful, has plagued Punjab for a long time which has blinded it to the need for change and progress—one didn’t need to improve what one believed to be perfect and hence superior.
Punjab has significantly slipped in the Human Development Index. That this humbling fact is now quite widely acknowledged in intellectual and political circles gives me some hope that things may improve.
“There are massive water shortages across the country. There’s a crisis in health care…Under the weight of crippling debts and droughts, small and marginal farmers are killing themselves. There aren’t enough jobs being created for the millions of youth joining the job market every year. The human-rights record of the Indian State inKashmir, the Northeast and other parts in the grip of insurgency is horrific and shameful. Dalits and Muslims are lynched with impunity by Hindutva-inspired mobs for skinning dead cows, or being in the vicinity of meat that may or may not be beef.” Do you see a way out? What can India do to step out of the condition you have described so accurately?
I have argued for some time that what India needs is a new freedom struggle, a Values’ Revolution, to rid itself of corruption—rishwat[5], unethicality, religious and cultural fanaticism that impinges on many Indians’ right to life, dignity and liberty. In arguing this I am aided by Gandhi’s dictum—that I have always alluded to in my own writings—that he was engaged in not creating a new India but a new Indian; my reading of what he said has led me to conclude he meant a caring, humane, compassionate, egalitarian and an ethical Indian. To create an India with 1.4 billion ethical and progressive Indians requires a mammoth revolutionary change in our values; hence a Values’ Revolution.
At the moment I see the country’s civil society under constant attack by the forces of social division whereas in fact social solidarity and cohesion are sorely needed. A Values’ Revolution will require giant leaders; I see none on the scene today but I’m not disheartened because once begun the Revolution itself may, as do all revolutions, throw up the necessary giants.
You are an immigrant who has lived out of India for almost half a century. Do you think as part of the diaspora living outside India, we could all act together to heal a region broken by its own inability to live up to the vision created by those who wrote the constitution of the country? What would be your vision of India?
The diaspora coming together to even slightly nudge India forward is an emotionally compelling and noble thought; many of us constantly dream of doing something for the country we have left behind. Some of us do so while others revel in its imaginings only.
A major stumbling block to the diasporic unity on this question has been the ideological divisions amongst the Indians abroad which usually mirror India’s domestic political fault lines and unfortunately those difference have been only rendered sharper by the way elements of the diaspora have recently been employed in aid of India’s domestic political machinations. The old diasporic divisions now seem and feel more rabid; it is as if the political battles of India now rage equally actively in the diaspora itself.
I always dream of India as a caring, compassionate, egalitarian and ethical India. One that values all its citizens equally and brims with social and economic justice.
That is such a wonderful thought with which many of us agree wholeheartedly. You have written: “If humanity isn’t going to drown in the chaos of its own creation, the leading nations of the world will have to create a new world order, which may involve fewer international boundaries.” What is the world order you suggest?
For starter no order can be imposed by the so-called leading nations, no matter how powerful. It may take a significant amount of nudging and cajoling by them to change anything.
When I wrote my autobiography, I was imagining the world moving, at least to begin with, in the direction of regional groupings like the European Union. We saw that as the number of member states of the United Nations trended upwards, Europe witnessed the opposite where many countries dared to create the EU practically erasing borders; granted Britain rebelled – but even within its borders a referendum held today would most likely approve it re-joining the EU.
As a possible beginning for the rest of the world, our best hope lies in grand imaginings such as a South Asian Common Market at once reducing the expense of standing militaries staring angrily at each other across the borders; Southeast Asia, Africa, South America could follow; North American Free Trade Agreement already exists creating at least an economic union.
If to begin with the countries regionally moved toward the free flow of human beings along with the necessary and more convenient local trading, one could foresee the international will and desire developing toward a world populated by fewer borders and more freedom. Hopefully that would move humanity toward more international egalitarianism, prosperity and fewer wars.
Hopefully, the vision materialises. Thank you very much for giving us your time and wonderful books that make us think and emote.
Title:Journey After Midnight: A Punjabi Life from Canada to India
Author: Ujjal Dosanjh
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
50
A variation on the common Indian expression “Mullan de daur maseet taeen,” which roughly translates as “An imam’s ultimate refuge is the mosque,” sums up my relationship with the world: India is my maseet. I have lived as a global citizen, but India has been my mandir, my masjid, and my girja: my temple, my mosque, and my church. It has been, too, my gurdwara, my synagogue, and my pagoda. Canada has helped shape me; India is in my soul. Canada has been my abode, providing me with physical comforts and the arena for being an active citizen. India has been my spiritual refuge and my sanctuary. Physically, and in the incessant wanderings of the mind, I have returned to it time and again.
Most immigrants do not admit to living this divided experience. Our lack of candour about our schizophrenic souls is rooted in our fear of being branded disloyal to our adopted lands. I believe Canada, however, is mature enough to withstand the acknowledgement of the duality of immigrant lives. It can only make for a healthier democracy.
Several decades ago, I adopted Gandhi’s creed of achieving change through non-violence as my own. As I ponder the journey ahead, far from India’s partition and the midnight of my birth, there is no avoiding that the world is full of violence. In many parts of the globe, people are being butchered in the name of religion, nationalism and ethnic differences. Whole populations are migrating to Europe for economic reasons or to save themselves from being shot, beheaded or raped in the numerous conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. The reception in Europe for those fleeing mayhem and murder is at times ugly, as is the brutal discrimination faced by the world’s Roma populations. The U.S. faces a similar crisis with migrants from Mexico and other parts of South America fleeing poverty and violence, in some cases that of the drug cartels. Parents and children take the huge risk of being killed en route to their dreamed destinations because they know the deathly dangers of staying. Building walls around rich and peaceful countries won’t keep desperate people away. The only lasting solution is to build a peaceful world.
Human beings are naturally protective of the peace and prosperity within their own countries. A very small number of immigrants and refugees, or their sons and daughters, sometimes threaten the peace of their “host” societies. But regardless of whether the affluent societies of western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and North America like it or not, the pressure to accept the millions of people on the move will only mount as the bloody conflicts continue. Refugees will rightly argue that if the West becomes involved to the extent of bombing groups like ISIS, it must also do much more on the humanitarian front by helping to resettle those forced to flee, be they poverty-driven or refugees under the Geneva Convention. With the pressures of population, poverty and violence compounded by looming environmental catastrophes, the traditional borders of nation states are bound to crumble. If humanity isn’t going to drown in the chaos of its own creation, the leading nations of the world will have to create a new world order, which may involve fewer international boundaries.
In my birthplace, the land of the Mahatma, the forces of the religious right are ascendant, wreaking havoc on the foundational secularism of India’s independence movement. I have never professed religion to be my business except when it invades secular spaces established for the benefit of all. Extremists the world over—the enemies of freedom—would like to erase both the modern and the secular from our lives. Born and bred in secular India, and having lived in secular Britain and Canada, I cherish everyone’s freedom to be what they want to be and to believe what they choose to believe.
I have always been concerned about the ubiquitous financial, moral and ethical corruption in India, and my concern has often landed me in trouble with the rulers there. Corruption’s almost complete stranglehold threatens the future of the country while the ruling elite remain in deep slumber, pretending that the trickle of economic development that escapes corruption’s clutches will make the country great. It will not.
Just as more education in India has not meant less corruption, more economic development won’t result in greater honesty and integrity unless India experiences a cultural revolution of values and ethics. The inequalities of caste, poverty and gender also continue to bedevil India. Two books published in 1990, V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now and Arthur Bonner’s Averting the Apocalypse, sum up the ongoing turmoil. A million mutinies, both noble and evil, are boiling in India’s bosom. Unless corruption is confronted, evil tamed, and the yearning for good liberated, an apocalypse will be impossible to avert. It will destroy India and its soul.
On the international level, the world today is missing big aspirational pushes and inspiring leaders. Perhaps I have been spoiled. During my childhood, I witnessed giants like Dr. Saifuddin Kitchlew of the Indian freedom movement take their place in history and even met some of them. As a teenager, I was mesmerized by the likes of Nehru and John F. Kennedy. I closely followed Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy as they wrestled with difficult issues and transformative ideas. I landed in Canada during the time of Pierre Trudeau, one of our great prime ministers. Great leaders with great ideas are now sadly absent from the world stage.
The last few years have allowed me time for reflection. Writing this autobiography has served as a bridge between the life gone by and what lies ahead. Now that the often mundane demands of elected life no longer claim my energies, I am free to follow my heart. And in my continuing ambition that equality and social justice be realized, it is toward India, the land of my ancestors, that my heart leads me.
Extracted from the revised paperback edition of Journey After Midnight: A Punjabi Life from Canada to India by Ujjal Dosanjh. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2023.
About the Book: Born in rural Punjab just months before Indian independence, Ujjal Dosanjh emigrated to the UK, alone, when he was eighteen and spent four years making crayons and shunting trains while he attended night school. Four years later, he moved to Canada, where he worked in a sawmill, eventually earning a law degree, and committed himself to justice for immigrant women and men, farm workers and religious and racial minorities. In 2000, he became the first person of Indian origin to lead a government in the western world when he was elected Premier of British Columbia. Later, he was elected to the Canadian parliament.
Journey After Midnight is the compelling story of a life of rich and varied experience and rare conviction. With fascinating insight, Ujjal Dosanjh writes about life in rural Punjab in the 1950s and early ’60s; the Indian immigrant experience—from the late 19th century to the present day—in the UK and Canada; post-Independence politics in Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora— including the period of Sikh militancy—and the inner workings of the democratic process in Canada, one of the world’s more egalitarian nations.
He also writes with unusual candour about his dual identity as a first-generation immigrant. And he describes how he has felt compelled to campaign against discriminatory policies of his adopted country, even as he has opposed regressive and extremist tendencies within the Punjabi community. His outspoken views against the Khalistan movement in the 1980s led to death threats and a vicious physical assault, and he narrowly escaped becoming a victim of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985. Yet he has remained steadfast in his defence of democracy, human rights and good governance in the two countries that he calls home—Canada and India. His autobiography is an inspiring book for our times.
About the Author: Ujjal Dosanjh was born in the Jalandhar district of Punjab in 1946. He emigrated to the UK in 1964 and from there to Canada in 1968. He was Premier of British Columbia from 2000 to 2001 and a Liberal Party of Canada Member of Parliament from 2004 to 2011. In 2003 he was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honour conferred by the Government of India on overseas Indians.
Refugees landing at Lesbos. Photographs by Michael Honegger
Memories of Lesbos, 2016.
Sunrise over the Mediterranean. The island’s hills brighten as the chug of boat engines can be heard over the lapping waves. These aren’t your typical Greek fishing boats returning from a night at sea, but a flotilla of black rafts, nine total carrying some 400 refugees to land on the north coast of Lesbos Island. Under five miles off the Turkish coast, Lesbos has become a beachhead for a flood of refugees that has come as unannounced as a tsunami, and for which local communities are even less prepared.
There has always been a trickle of refugees across the narrow channel. In the ten years that I have been coming here, every week I would find one or two rafts abandoned on the beach with ten or so life jackets or paddles. Until recently, most had been young men from Afghanistan and Iraq, escaping wars they didn’t want to fight, who would later be spotted on a road walking the forty miles or so to the island’s capital, Mytilini, to be processed and transferred to a camp in Athens. In the whole country, the number of such migrants has increased five-fold over the same period last year; but for the islands offshore Turkey, the numbers have risen far more dramatically. On Lesbos, the count has gone from a few dozen a month to over two thousand in one three-day period alone.
A surge in Taliban-led violence in Afghanistan, the rapid spread of the barbaric Islamic state in Iraq, and Syria’s devastating civil war have sent millions fleeing for their lives. Over half of the Syrian population has been displaced, and now accounts for half or more of the new arrivals. Often members of the middle class—teachers, IT specialists and engineers—more often Syrians come as families, forced to leave when their children’s school was bombed; or if from Aleppo, when their neighbourhood was razed. On the whole, Syrians have more money than others, but that doesn’t mean much when they have nothing else but the clothes they are wearing.
Refugees in Lesbos. Photographs by Michael Honegger
Some Afghani refugees have walked from as far as Kabul, taking weeks to hike over Iran’s mountains and cross the length of Turkey to its west coast. The odd Syrian has flown to Istanbul, and taken buses to where, even if he or she has money, still has to hide in forests, waiting for days until his turn for the ‘trafficker’ to bundle him aboard a rubber raft. With the craft’s captain (usually one of the refugees) given an hour of training, they are launched for Greece with nothing more precise nautically than a pointed finger.
It’s a harrowing journey for everyone, not the least because of the real risk of capsizing their overloaded rafts even in light seas—sometimes purposefully. The traffickers instruct them to slash their pontoons if the Greek Coast Guard approaches to keep from being turned back to Turkey, which inevitably tosses forty-some non-swimmers into the sea with a crew of only four frantically trying to save them. Ironically, the Coast Guard’s mission is not to turn them back, but to ensure their safe arrival.
Ahead of them, the journey will still be hard. They don’t know it yet. Their dream—their safety—is their first footstep in Europe. It’s only one step in a perilous journey that will take them to processing centers, overcrowded camps, and force them into the hands of other traffickers, more malevolent than anyone else they have met on their way, who, for extortionist prices, promise to get them to Germany or Austria—the current popular destinations.
That emotional first step on European soil can’t be overestimated. As their rafts slide ashore, it’s a celebration. The journey has ended and they have arrived safely. Regardless of their wariness of what’s next, they scramble ashore, some feeling the need to run a short distance from the water; but others, overcome with their first sense of security in years, weep, embrace each other, believing—rightfully—that they have made it to a better place. Certainly a safer one.
It’s different, too, from what they imagined. There is little officialdom at this northern point of the island. No police to register them, no information other than the latest rumours that their rescuers—sometimes the Coast Guard, sometimes local volunteers—can pass on. Frequently they don’t know where they landed, only that they need to register with the police to get in the long line to be processed.
Where are the police?
Seventy kilometers away.
Will there be a bus?
Maybe.
Maybe?
Probably not. But maybe. It changes daily.
What do we do?
Walk.
Walk? My wife is pregnant. My boy is three years old.
I’m sorry. Walk.
The rules, and the probability of a bus, change daily. It’s not because of some great inefficiency by Lesbos’ government, though the elimination a few years ago of village mayors to create a central authority in Mytilini has complicated providing services as essential as portable johns at the bus park where people are often stranded for several days. Earlier this week, that meant thirty persons crowded into a bus shelter on a chilly and rainy night; among them, eight children and five women—two of them pregnant.
While it was foreseeable that the Syrians would mass in camps just over the border in Turkey, it was far less predictable that they would become such a massive wave of refugees headed for the West. If someone saw it coming, that message never got to frontline Lesbos. It might not have mattered if it did. The country is bankrupt. Local officials can hardly provide basic services, let alone cope with an explosion of refugees. International NGOs haven’t caught up with the crisis either.
Local volunteers are making extraordinary efforts to meet the rafts on arrival, and ensure that they have food, water, clothing, shoes, and even Pampers because there are so many infants. Of course, not everyone agrees on what assistance, if any, should be provided.
Most refugees don’t plan to stay in Greece. Some will, of course, but the locals, seeing first-hand the dimension of what is happening, are starting to ask the bigger picture questions: What does it mean for Europe? Who are these people, coming from war-torn countries, possibly armed because in war zones people have weapons? How many refugees can be absorbed before fundamentally changing the culture of Europe itself?
Closer to home, the concerns take on an economic aspect. What if tourists stop coming because they don’t want to be confronted with the plight of refugees, as some reports suggest has started to happen on other islands? No one denies they need water and food, but what beyond that might actually encourage the next groups to make Molyvos their destination? Tents? Toilets? The worry is that if the refugees, using their cell phones, report back to those following in their footsteps that they are being helped, even more people will come here.
The refugees expect to be met and confronted in some way. The lack of even one policeman in my village, or the absence of a bus to take them to Mytilini, puzzles them. A couple of days ago, a few staged a sit-in, blocking traffic on the road in the village, demanding to be arrested and taken to Mytilini. It lasted only as long as it took to convince them that there really was no one in authority who could arrest them.
One of the young men asked me why not a policeman? Why not a bus? I told him that Greece was a poor country, but he didn’t buy it. His was poorer.
I tried the argument: There are too many of you. The village can’t cope. You are sending messages back that here you get water, food, and until a few days ago, we had a small camp where you could sleep. Now too many people are coming.
He shook his head sadly at my obtuseness.
Mister, they’re coming anyway.
Photograph by Michael Honegger
Timothy Jay Smith, writer, wanderer and philanthropist, has traveled around the world many times collecting stories for his novels, screenplays and stage plays.
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May I be so bold as to claim that I travelled in the footsteps of Sir Stamford Raffles? That agent of the East Indian Company’s visit to Calcutta (as it was known then, and for much later, till it resumed the phonetic spelling of its original name), led him to set up Singapore as an English trading settlement in 1819. “Footsteps” would be the wrong metaphor, of course. “Seasteps” would have been accurate, since Raffles travelled to Calcutta by sea and arrived water-borne to Singapura (as it was known then). In my case, however, I arrived in Singapore sky-borne, in an aircraft that conveyed me from what was then home to what would become home. Footsteps, seasteps or airsteps, I arrived in Singapore. The year was 1984. I was 27.
Today, at 65, I remember my passage from back home to this home as if it occurred yesterday. I had worked in Hong Kong briefly in 1984 and had been exposed to life in a successful British colony that was in the throes of its return to Chinese rule. Singapore was different. It had merged with the Malaysian Federation in 1963, had separated from it in 1965, and had gone on to carve out an extremely successful space for itself in the international sphere.
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was a household word in Singapore. Not everyone loved him, but no one could deny his singular agency in having created a magnificent city-state that could sustain its independence in spite of its lack of natural resources. To arrive in Singapore was to embrace the possibilities of time.
Calcutta, too, was a historical city par excellence, but its rundown buildings and potholed streets, to say nothing of its potbellied children living on homeless streets, belied the promise of the future. To arrive in Singapore, it appeared, was to have exchanged failure for success.
That was an illusion, of course. All expatriates suffer from a global disease: They latch on to what they love in their countries of arrival by trying to erase what had loved them in their countries of departure. Take the potholed streets of Calcutta, for example. They had conveyed me to College Street on that glad day in 1974 when I joined the English Department of Presidency College. Without that first footfall in the corridors of the greats, I might never have come to Singapore, never got my Chevening Scholarship to Cambridge, my father’s university, and never won the Fulbright to Harvard. The potholes of Calcutta are not as numerous as the culturally blind allege them to be. Nevertheless, they led me on the way to be myself, wherever on earth I would ultimately be.
The way I see it, no matter how far or close wanderings might lead, one migrates ultimately to oneself. Hence, when I left my Calcutta for what would become my Singapore, I did no more than search for a version of my selfhood that would extend my material and imaginative boundaries. In the course of my journey, I discovered that the only borders lie within, borders between being and becoming. In the process of becoming by winnowing the unwanted aspects of being, one returns to a renewed if only autumnal sense of being. Time passes. One passes with it, letting go of the distant past as much as one does the receding immediate past. To live is to gather the passage of time within oneself, hoping that all borders will merge into a lasting apprehension of oneself in the expanding fullness of a single world.
Calcutta and Singapore are two sides of me. These two great imperial cities have outlived their provenance. Calcutta was once the capital city of colonial India: Today it remains the nation’s cultural capital but political power resides in Delhi (naturally) and there are at least two economic capitals, Mumbai and Chennai. This is why I, along with many of my hapless fellow-Bengalis, suffer from an incurable cultural fetish for the past. That was when the Almighty spoke Bengali – He appears to be switching increasingly to Hindi – and was busy creating top-class poets and formidable social reformers in Bengal. The divine supply of poets and composers has not ebbed but the demand-side having moved to Mumbai, many of the best composers have shifted there and to make a name for themselves. Never mind. Their names remain Bengali, and their fame spreads the vintage mystique of Calcutta like a lingering perfume in India and beyond. I feel happy for the Calcutta part of me.
Singapore, a great trading post, is a now a city-state. Statehood has allowed the nascent nationalism of the colonial era to flourish and grow into a genuine sense of political self. Sovereign Singapore was not expected to survive, but it has done so with a definitiveness that makes the prognoses of the 1960s laughable today. The national self-confidence of Singapore gives me confidence in my decision to take up Singapore citizenship in 1999. It had not been an easy decision, but I took it when I realised that I would be giving up my Indian citizenship but not my Indian-ness. My Singapore Identity Card records my race as Indian. I could keep the Calcutta part of me intact while adding to it a new Singaporean me.
So, yes, I am grateful that Raffles travelled to Calcutta to set up Singapore. Obviously, he did not do so with my fortunes in mind, but the umbilical connection that he created between the two great port cities has made it easier for me to migrate from India to Singapore. Ultimately, I have done nothing more than migrate to me.
I suppose it is politically incorrect to say that I was somewhat under the influence of the movie, Out of Africa (1985), which featured European expatriates living the colonial life on a coffee plantation, or that my do-gooder impulse had been activated by other films such as Cry Freedom (1987) with Biko in it. I had decided that after I graduated from college, I would join the Peace Corps as a volunteer.
I had wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl growing up in Michigan. I have especially always wanted to write fiction. However, by the time I became a student of English literature in college, I realised that it would be difficult to make a living as a novelist. My plan upon graduation was to travel the world through teaching English as a foreign language. In this way, I would accumulate life experiences which would become fodder for my stories and novels.
Earlier, as a junior, I had spent a semester in Avignon, France, on foreign study, somewhat following in the footsteps of my older brother, who’d spent a year in Germany while we were in high school. I’d been inspired by his letters telling of his adventures abroad, sleeping on Spanish beaches, skiing down Austrian slopes. When he came back home, I saw how living abroad could transform a person. I wanted that for myself.
The interview for the Peace Corps was gruelling – a four-hour grilling, sometimes quite personal. They asked me if I had a boyfriend. I winced, because I had recently broken up with someone I thought I wanted to marry. “No,” I said. They told me that the most common reason for leaving a Peace Corps posting early was a boyfriend or girlfriend back home.
In the meantime, my brother, who’d majored in business, and who was concerned that I would be working for free, sent me a newspaper clipping about something called the JET Program, a fledging one-year scheme for “native speakers of English” to work as assistant language teachers in Japanese public schools. The position came with a salary that was decent at the time. I applied to that, too, as a back-up, in case the Peace Corps didn’t want me.
To be sure, I had an interest in Japan. At t the time, its economy was thriving and Japanese companies were buying up iconic American buildings. It seemed as if Japan was about to take over the world, and that it would behoove me to know something about the country. Also, I had taken a course in Asian history, and developed an interest in Heian Court poetry. I loved the idea of a country where people had communicated by passing poems to one another. And I was intrigued by the futuristic images depicted in the movie, Blade Runner (1982) the kitschy aspects rendered in Jay McInerney’s novel, Ransom (1985).
Anyway, I was accepted into the Peace Corps and told that I would be sent to Cameroon. After some consideration, I decided that I would go to Japan for one year, and then enter into a two-and-half stint in the Peace Corps. But then once I arrived in Japan, I found that I wanted to stay a little bit longer. Just one more year. There was still so much to learn, so much to explore. I hadn’t yet climbed Mt. Fuji! I hadn’t been to Okinawa! I renewed my contract. In my second year, I fell in love with a Japanese high school teacher. And, yes, dear reader, I married him. I stayed in Japan and started a family. I have never been to Africa.
As I write this, I have been living in Japan for well over half of my life. From time to time, I wonder how my life might have turned out differently if I had gone to Cameroon as originally planned. Would I be working for an NGO in Africa? Or what if I had gone back to the United States after one or two years? Would I be living somewhere in suburbia, working nine to five at a company?
However, I also often consider what Japan has given me. Living outside my country has opened my mind, and has given me countless opportunities, including fodder for the stories that I write. And thanks to my writing, I am now employed at a small university where we have many students from around the world. I continue to nourish my heart and mind by reading literature and watching films from and about other cultures.
I find that we are not so different after all.
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Suzanne Kamatawas born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Proshno or Question was written by Tagore somewhere between December 1931 and January 1932 and later published in 1932 in a collection called Parishesh[1]. The poem with its poignant overtones continues relevant to this date.
Art by Sohana Manzoor
Almighty, over eons, you sent emissaries
To this ruthless world,
They say: “Forgive everyone”, say, “Love only Love —
From deep within, toxicity purge.”
In these cataclysmic times, I turn them away with a shamed bow
For they now remain only as ideals to be revered, remembered.
I have seen the helpless persecuted by
Violence in the shadows of deceitful night.
I have seen unprotesting truth victimised,
Justice weep secretly in plight.
I have seen passionate young men driven wild,
Beat their heads on rocks and tortured, die.
Today, I am voiceless. My flute is stilled.
In the moonless night, who have filled
My universe with nightmares?
That is why cleanse with tears —
Those that poison the air, extinguish the light. O God,
Have you forgiven them? Have you given them your love?
One of the interesting things to note here is the reference to the flute player. Is he the same one who was evoked in his poem Ebar Phirao More (Take me back) written in 1894? That poem[2] starts with:
While the world moves busily
You play the flute, like a truant boy,
Leaning under a shady tree in a field with
The fragrance of the forest floating on
A tired breeze. O, arise — there is a fire!
Is it the same flute player whose flute has been stilled?
I saw her again. She was wearing dark slacks and a loose top she was blowing leaves off her lawn and into a corner with a blower. I had been seeing her daily for almost six months now, mostly in her front yard or her porch, or sometimes slowly driving to or from her house. She also seemed to be of Indian descent, as I could make out from her features, and as was confirmed when once her Amazon package that was wrongly delivered to our house. When I had gone to return it, she had been pleasantly surprised, telling me that it was an expensive coffee maker she had ordered, and not everyone would have sought out the rightful owner.
That’s how we got talking. After that, I would always wave to her — when I saw her doing her yard work, on my evening walks or when either of us drove by, on our way to get groceries. In the spring she would plant colourful flower beds, and could often be seen cleaning and watering them. On sunny days, she would be mowing her lawn or talking to the college kids who sometimes came to do her yard work. In autumn, I saw her raking out leaves, putting the garden waste into large brown disposal bags and decorating her porch with colourful wreaths of maple leaves and berries. Winter saw her blowing fresh snow off her porch and lawn and clearing and salting her driveway, so that the garage pathway would be clear for her to take out her car. She would often be seen driving to and from the local grocery stores, where I met her at times. Gradually, as we got friendlier, she invited me over for tea and then later for potluck lunches and sometimes just for sharing something special she had made that day, or a new recipe she had tried.
I had a hectic schedule, with frequent out of town work trips. She would often tell me, “Tara, you eat very less! You should take care of yourself; you should put on a little weight.” and more along the same lines. My usual replies were, “Mrs. Sen, I can’t cook yummy food like yours!” or “I don’t usually have time to cook!” accompanied by an indulgent smile. Of course, these reasons were true, but there was also the fact that I really did not enjoy cooking. I would much rather spend my time reading a good book or indulging my leisure time activity of writing poetry, than slaving over a hot oven or cooktop! She, on the other hand, was an excellent cook and baker, having picked up various tips and tricks for making the most mouth-watering dishes out of almost the most basic ingredients. She shared these with her book club members in their weekly meetups as well as with some lucky neighbours, me being one of them.
One day, as we sat talking on her porch, surrounded by the sweet smells of the lush lavender growing in one of a flower beds, she shared, “I came to Canada with my husband, after my marriage in 1988. Two years later, my brother and my uncle shifted here to, along with their families. Those early years were beautiful. Although we didn’t have much back then, we were happy, happy to have each other in a new land. Many of us were not fluent in English, coming from rural Indian backgrounds. We practised with each other, to gain confidence in social interactions as gradually we enlarged our social circles. Once everyone started on their respective jobs, they also shifted to other places. One of my sons is now in California, the older one. The younger one is in Vancouver.”
We were interrupted by the barking of her tiny wire-haired terrier who was fiercely protective of her. Mostly, he was almost like a therapy dog, sitting on her lap, or somewhere near her, where she could reach out and pet him often. Right now, he had seen a delivery guy approaching the house. She took a parcel from him, offered it to Mickey, her tiny self-appointed protector, to sniff and judge okay, for that was her practice, which she said made him feel included in all her day-to-day activities and interactions.
Placing it aside, she thanked the delivery guy with a smile. Sitting down on one of the two cherry red Adirondack chairs on her porch, she told me, “Nowadays I prefer having as much delivered as I can: it’s easier, particularly for the stuff not readily available at Costco or Home Depot.” I could only imagine how difficult it must be for a lady of advanced years living by herself.
“I go to Toronto almost once a week and also to one of the farmer’s markets nearby. If you want, you could come along if you have some work or want to buy something from there. I could even bring it for you if you so wish.”
Although it was not my intention to cause her any kind of pain, what I had said had seemingly touched her, for as she looked up at me, she had tears shining in her eyes. “Thank you, my dear, I can’t tell you how much it means to me. It has been more than five years that I have been by myself now. Usually it’s okay, but some days are just harder. When Sudhakar passed away I lost my best and oldest friend. He used to tell me – Maya, you should make more friends; you should have your own life too.”
I do have friends here, my book club people too, plus some relatives living in Toronto and some other nearby places, but it’s not the same.”
“I understand”, I could only pat her hand helplessly, wishing I could do more. Going with the change of mood, we picked up the tea things as the breeze turned colder and went inside. It was nearly autumn again and the October evenings were getting quite chilly. The red, orange and yellow autumn foliage had its own grace and beauty, but I would miss the long summer evenings, when I could just sit out on the patio or enjoy working in the backyard garden or water the front lawn barefoot. Not to mention, the beautiful flowers summer brought. Mrs. Sen, or rather, Maya, as she had instructed me to call her, had beautiful gardens, both at the front and back of her house. These she tended meticulously, taking care of her perennials through the change of seasons and making sure to plant various varieties of seasonal flowers and shrubs. She had two gorgeous Japanese maples in her front yard, and had a beautiful weeping willow in her back yard that fascinated me. The flowerbeds were populated with multiple herbs like lavender, thyme, sage and rosemary, as well as flowers like peonies, roses, pansies, violets, lilies, hydrangea etc. She also had some beautiful shrubs and flowering trees like lilacs and magnolias. It was a veritable dream for the most discerning of botanists, at the very least!
As we entered the house, I realised that this was the first time I had been inside her home. Somehow, most of our conversations till date had been outside, on our patios or in one of our backyards, while one of us worked in the garden. She had successfully transmitted her enthusiasm for flora to me too. This was a first for us. As I placed the tray of biscuits and cookies on the kitchen counter, I noticed the wall next to it filled with lots of pictures — pictures of Tara with her family and of her visits back to India and their travels to various places. I could see pictures in front of the Taj Mahal, the Notre Dame, the Sydney Harbour and more.
“Oh, these are so beautiful! It seems you travelled quite a bit!”
“Oh yes, when the children were young, we travelled during the winter and summer breaks. Mostly to India, sometimes to America and Mexico, sometimes to more exotic places like Egypt, Bulgaria etc. It was only when the children started their own careers and moved away that we stopped our frequent travels.”
She went quiet for a bit, looking off into the distance, reliving the past perhaps. Maybe a past that brought back bittersweet memories. I felt a little guilty for having asked her about the pictures. Some moments later, I took her leave, wishing her well and promising to meet her soon after having mastered the new biscuit recipe she had shared.
As fall turned to winter and I returned from some work-related travel, I thought of her as soon as I had settled back into my regular routines. I decided to meet her in the evening, but being severely jet-lagged, had to postpone it a little.
I finally went after three days. I noticed that her driveway was freshly shovelled and salted. As I rang the bell, I admired the beautiful wreath on her door, with her trademark red winter berries and green ribbons. I knew that nearer to Christmas, she would add some striped candy canes to it.
I heard some shuffling steps and she came to the door.
“Oh hello Tara! It’s been quite a while! Were you out of town?”, came her cheerful greeting.
She did seem a little frailer to me, and I noticed her favouring one leg more than the other.
“Hello! Yes, I came back from a ten-day work trip three days ago. Sorry I couldn’t visit earlier. How have you been? Is anything the matter with your leg?”
“Yes, I fell down and hurt myself. There was a patch of black ice in the driveway. Although I had cleared and salted it, there were more flurries that day, followed by some rainfall. When I came back from visiting a friend, who dropped me back to my place, she had to hurry back as she had received a phone call, and I got down from the car and had barely taken a step when I slipped and fell. I hurt my leg and my back. Worse was that after the fall, the ice was so slippery that I couldn’t get back up. I walked like a four-legged animal for a few steps till some neighbours who had seen me fall rushed out and helped me back up and took me inside the house. This was two days ago. Since then I have been resting. Yesterday I got groceries delivered here, once the snow stopped.”
Feeling bad that I had not been there for her at such a time, I escorted her inside and shut the door. I gave her a little Reiki healing and made her a little tea after the session. We sat and chatted for a little while, and then I came back.
As I was on the way back her word echoed in my head, “No one knows what life might bring. I had never thought I’d be alone at this age. Back in India, people say that a lady who has sons is very fortunate. Well, I have two sons. When I called them, they said that they were sorry to hear about my fall, but they would not be able to come till the weekend. For the first two days, during which it snowed heavily, the neighbours who had seen me fall were kind enough to bring food over, two times a day. I am fortunate to have good people around me.”
I reflected on my own situation. I was separated, with no chances or desire of a reconciliation. Having decided that I did not need anyone in my life who had the power to hurt me, I had walled myself off, interacting briefly with people and that too, only to the extent needed. Very rarely did I venture out of my comfort zone; letting people within my walls was a risk which I could not bear to take. Maya was the first person in the last three years that I had spoken to with such an open heart. Maybe it was because I felt such comfort in her presence and understood subconsciously that she would never hurt me.
When I thought about her, I remembered all her acts of kindness – the food drives for the homeless, the collection drives for clothes for refugees she ran, offering to collect all the donated clothes at her house and later on sort through them for distribution, her gardening and plantation drives etc. This year, on Canada Day, she had gifted many trees and plants to her neighbours, as per their choice and need. I had received a beautiful Japanese maple, a sapling from her one of her own trees. She had said that the trees were saplings created from the tree that she had planted in her first home in Canada. The sapling she gave me looked very promising and would definitely turn out to be a beautiful and healthy tree, vibrant with its deep red leaves. Whenever I looked at it, I was reminded of Mrs Sen’s spirit and her welcoming smile.
Through the next few days, I kept a regular check on Mrs. Sen. She recovered quite well and was soon back to her usual tasks.
One day as I came to her place to meet her before going away on another work trip, she opened the door with a big smile. I smiled and asked her, “Wow! You are really glowing today! What’s up?”
“I am going to visit my son in California. He is coming over the next week for some work to Canada. After that, I plan to take him to see our beautiful Niagara-on-the-Lake, then I’ll accompany him back to California. I plan to stay there for almost a month.”
“That’s great news! You haven’t meet him for such a long time!”
“Yes! I’m so excited I will get to meet the grandchildren again!”
The rest of my visit passed in discussions of her upcoming trip. I promised to take care of her mail and plants while she was away, then left.
When I came back from my office trip, she had already left for California. I dutifully collected her mail, laying it aside on my hall table to give to her once she was back. I took special care of her two red maples, knowing that she was especially fond of them. They stood to either side of her driveway, forming a delicate arch over her garage door.
The season changed again and spring blossomed, bringing with it fresh leaves on all the plants. The Japanese maples sprang fresh with vibrant leaves. I liked overseeing her yard work, paying the college students who came to clean it every week from the fund she had left with me when she met the last time.
Sitting there on her porch, reading a book while waiting for the boys to finish, I often looked at the trees, which seemed like two sentient sentinels. Now lush, they merrily waved their branches with their cherry-red leaves in the spring breeze.
“How happy Maya would be when she comes back and looks at them again!” She had shared some photos of her son’s house in California; it was a condo — no garden or even house plants; ‘they didn’t have the time for frivolities’, as her son had said.
“That is the one thing I’m really going to miss when I’m there — my garden. These plans that I choose every year with care and the perennials are like my children too. I love them all — the daisies, the sunflowers, the weeping willow at the other end of my lawn, the many seasonal flowers I like to keep in my window planters, all of them! I’m really going to miss them all!
“Don’t worry, you’re coming back before spring will have passed. You’ll still have your lilacs in bloom when you come back, and your begonias, petunias and lilies would all be in full bloom too.”
She smiled but seemed a little unconvinced.
That day, she was supposed to return. She had been in the habit of brining me warm meals the days I returned from one of my trips, so that I would not have to cook immediately after having journeyed, and also to ensure that I ate well. Taking a leaf out of her book, I thought I would return the favour and cooked a hearty soup, along with some homemade pasta. Balancing the bag with the food, I rang her bell but receiving no reply, thought maybe she was sleeping and came back, thinking that I would try again a little later, or maybe the next day.
The same thing happened the next day and the next; no reply to the doorbell. I had tried calling her cell phone, but it always went to voicemail. The three messages I had sent were delivered but not answered. Now I was truly worried, but there was little I could do except wait. Maybe she had extended her stay, because she certainly didn’t seem to be in the house. Although the lights turned on and off, I knew it was the automated system I had helped her install before leaving, so that the house would not seem empty.
I continued the upkeep of her garden in the meantime, hoping that she would show up any day and sit blissfully once again, in her lovingly created garden. I missed her more than I thought I would. She had taught me a lot, even without my knowing.
Feeling a little bit like a stalker, I went to her Facebook profile and also the profile on the neighbourhood app, and found her sons’ profiles and dropped them both messages related to the wellbeing of Mrs. Sen. After a week, I still hadn’t received any replies. Almost a month passed. One day, I saw a ‘For Sale’ sign put up in her garden, right in front of one of the maples. Shocked, I called the agent’s number written on the board and was told that her son had made the decision to sell the house. All her stuff would be going to Goodwill as both her sons had no intention of coming back there to live.
I was broken-hearted that they cared so little for the place hey had grown up in, and which was so loved by their mother. She would never again get to see her garden. The flowers were all there; the garden still bloomed, but its creator had gone.
Two days later, I got a letter from her in my mailbox. It was dated a month and a half ago, so as per my calculations, must have been written mere days before she passed away. In it, she had thanked me for taking such good care of her garden in her absence. Showering me with love and blessings, entreating me to take good care of myself, she ended her letter with something that surprised me. She mentioned that there was a key enclosed; indeed, there was a small but intricate key in one corner of the envelope, that must have slipped back when I pulled out the letter. She had written that it was the key to a post office box in her name. She had said, “If I do not return, please collect whatsoever is there and distribute it to all our neighbours. It is nothing that my sons would value, as I have set aside all else for them, except this mail box and its contents, that I will to my neighbours, who have loved and supported me through my last years.”
With tears in my eyes, I clutched the key to my heart and remembered her love for all her neighbours, sent across the border, across the bounds of life itself.
The next day, I went to the post office to collect the gifts. To my surprise, they were heirloom seeds, along with carefully collected and preserved flower bulbs, both of which she had painstakingly collected over the years. I remembered her getting some from as far as Vancouver and Montreal; some were tulip bulbs from Holland. Coming back home with the precious living gifts, I framed a message to post on the neighbourhood app. Hitting send, I looked out of my window. My beautiful Japanese maple was dancing in the breeze; her blessings and legacy would live on, spreading to the four winds.
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Shivani Shrivastav is a Reiki Master and Osho sannyasin. By profession she’s a UK CGI Chartered Secretary and a Governance Professional/CS. She loves meditation, photography, writing and French jazz.
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