THE IMMIGRANT (3 page)

From the moment of his birth Ananda had been surrounded by the rituals of his caste. Before he left home, his parents did their best to reinforce the practices of a lifetime. He was a Brahmin, his body must never be polluted by dead flesh. Low caste boys in the college hostel might try and tempt him towards non-veg, cigarettes and alcohol. Should he deviate from the pure habits they had instilled in him, his mother’s heart would break. She assured him of this with her disturbed, devoted gaze.

Ananda was put in a room with three boys who, including the other Brahmin, all smoked. The air was blue with the haze of constant indulgence. He breathed deeply and smelled liberation.

From cigarettes he graduated to alcohol. As he moved from first to second to third year at King George’s he found parents allowed their sons a certain autonomy if they were doing well. So, freedom went hand in hand with success. He absorbed this lesson.

Most of his classmates aimed to go abroad. Were they to labour like donkeys for the measly sums Indian doctors commanded? No, never, not while they had wits to fill in applications and patience to endure the year it took to get admission. They would have to qualify again once they were abroad, borrow money for tuition and living expenses and put in even more years if they wished to specialise, but the eventual reward dwarfed these sacrifices.

If the love of his parents meant that Ananda’s ultimate destination lay no further than the small town he had lived in all his life, he was son enough to accept this. His parents found him an internship with a reputed dentist in Anstley Hall on Rajpur Road. His future was such a well understood thing between them that discussion was not considered necessary before this was settled.

Ananda worked with Dr Chandra for two years. His hand was deft, but with patients, strangers after all, his conversation was hesitant, his demeanour bashful. Dr Chandra thought he would gain confidence with time, you can’t be awkward around people’s mouths. Dentists have to be skilled at putting patients at ease, especially since they feel vulnerable as they recline, mouths open, saliva gurgling in tubes stretched across their chins. Each file had to have notes about the client’s profession, background, interests and family, so that small talk could be generated, empathy exhibited.

Two years later Ananda felt he had learnt enough to be on his own. His parents broke their fixed deposits to help him set up a dentistry practice further down on Rajpur Road. They applied for a one lakh loan from the State Bank of India with their house as collateral to help finance the office equipment.

This done, they insisted it was time for him to marry, he was already twenty four. Marriage brokers were contacted, the family grapevine alerted, advertisements scanned. Photographs with attached bio-datas began to appear and were judiciously scrutinised before being offered to the son for comment. It would take a few months for her to be found, assessed the parents, but before a year was over they expected to have a daughter-in-law. In anticipation of this, they bought a second-hand car, a Premier Padmini with only thirty thousand miles on it.

Ananda wanted to keep a driver but the parents insisted such expense was unnecessary. They hardly went anywhere; the driver would sit on their heads the whole day and steal petrol. When the bride came and his practice was more established, they could consider it.

‘My practice is established,’ countered the son, ‘and surely you need the car more than my wife, whom nobody has yet seen.’

‘May you live forever, may you always be happy,’ murmured his mother.

The boy felt baffled. It was not a question of his happiness but theirs. ‘No arguments, I am keeping a driver. He can get the fruit and vegetables if nothing else.’

The young were so headstrong. What did they know about preserving the life of a car, rationing petrol or saving the salary of a driver? The minute they earned they started to spend. That was not the way, the way was to save, to conserve; how else had they managed all those fixed deposits which had supplemented Ananda’s one lakh bank loan? Besides who could trust food bought by hired hands?

The driver was not kept.

Ananda took the car to his clinic, and as always, the parents went for their evening walk to Gandhi Park, stopping on the way back to buy fruits and vegetables, selected only after they had been prodded, smelled and haggled over, piece by piece. One fateful day their rickshaw was hit by a truck speeding through town. They died instantly.

Relatives came. Relatives commented. His parents’ karma, his own karma, what could anybody do? If only they could have seen to his marriage, he needed a wife to cushion such a tragedy. His sister kept crying and pointing out that all he had was her.

The son’s tears finally came after everybody left. It was his fault, his fault. Why hadn’t he forced his parents to keep a driver? Why were they so paranoid about money? Look where it had led them.

He flipped through the Gita his brother-in-law had left him. Do your duty, never think of the consequences; life is full of suffering—that he liked. Every time he read life is full of suffering he felt a mournful resonance deep within him.

Meanwhile his sister took up from where her parents had left off. He was now an even more ideal candidate for marriage: own house, own practice, no parents-in-law to mar this perfect scenario. Offers flowed in, but Ananda had lost the desire to marry. He was marked by fate, happiness was unattainable and he wanted nothing of life.

Destiny though had other plans. His mother’s brother, the doctor uncle settled in Halifax for the past twenty years, urged him to come to Canada. In India he would be constantly reminded of his loss, whereas if he wanted to make a fresh start, this was a country filled with opportunities. He sent one through the post: admission forms for the Dalhousie University Dental School.

His sister did not want to lose him to the West. ‘I will never see you. You are all that is left of Ma and Baba.’

Her husband scolded her for her foolishness. There was nothing in this country, and how often did they meet anyway? He strongly advocated his brother-in-law’s departure. His own luck came through proximity to The Family, and could not be shared. For most of the middle class even the basic things—a phone, a car, a house—took a lifetime. Now this golden chance had landed uninvited on Ananda’s doorstep.

Opportunities are very insistent. If you neglect them they promise to retaliate by filling you with regret for the rest of your life. A lost opportunity refuses to hide, it pops out at every low moment, dragging you even lower.

It took six months to settle things. Clothes and household goods were dispersed among people in order of their importance to the Sharma family. First Alka took her pick, then relatives, then friends and neighbours, and lastly the servants. Nothing was thrown away, nothing wasted. The practice was sold, and tenants found for their former home.

His sister came from Agra to see him off. ‘Remember if you don’t like it, you can always come back,’ she repeated many times. Ananda was mostly silent. His situation had changed so much that he already had the mind-set of an immigrant, departing with no desire to return.

Ananda landed in Halifax on the 15th of August, his country’s day of independence, as well as his own liberation from it. His uncle, waiting to receive him at the small and dazzlingly empty airport, remarked on this in a distant, nostalgic way.

During the twenty three mile drive from the airport, the uncle expanded at great length on Ananda’s goals. The orphaned boy needed to get ahead, brooding was not going to help. He had made a smart move in coming, even though it meant more years of study. Take his own example: hard work and the right profession had made him worth half a million dollars. ‘Why do you think there is such a brain drain in India?’ he demanded. ‘India does not value its minds—unlike here. Otherwise you think we are not patriots? But there even the simple tasks of daily life can bleed you dry.’ The uncle shook his head sadly, while his expensive car slid smoothly along the road as though greased with butter. In the undulating landscape, lakes gleamed for a moment, then vanished. Ananda had never seen such empty spaces.

‘Where are all the people?’ he asked.

‘They will come—once we enter the city. But don’t expect many, the whole country has barely twenty million—and Halifax only eighty thousand.’

Now eighty thousand and one.

‘There, there we are,’ said the uncle, pride in his voice as they rose slightly onto a hill which offered a momentary vista of the city sprawled before them. His tone implied that this was the first of many gifts on offer to his nephew. Then came pretty wooden houses, set in green gardens, followed by the high-rises of downtown, all strangely deserted.

‘Where are the people?’ repeated Ananda.

‘Always the first thing to strike our countrymen,’ laughed the uncle. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

Again the spread out generosity of the residential areas, and finally Young Avenue. As they approached, the uncle switched conversational gears; this was one of the poshest areas in town, the Olands, liquour barons, lived right across the street in a huge mansion that made his own place look like an outhouse, but neighbours, nevertheless, neighbours. He could afford to live here because one plot had been divided into three.

The car drew upto its companion outside a garage attached to a yellow house with a black roof. They climbed the steps, Ananda’s eager gaze registering the large picture window, the smaller windows, one strangely set just above a flower bed. The uncle unlocked the front door to reveal four more steps that led up to a carpeted expanse, filled with lamps, deep sofas, silk cushions, shining wooden tables, gilt edged pictures. All this belonged to a doctor like himself.

His first cousins, Lara and Lenny, fifteen and sixteen, were introduced. He was to share the basement with Lenny. The den or the open area between the laundry and Lenny’s room had a pull-out sofa which was to be his bed. They had prepared it for him, they thought he might need to rest. Would he like something to eat first? Ananda accepted, and as he ate a dry and tasteless tomato sandwich his uncle told him this was lunch, and everybody made their own.

Too tired to register anything more, he sank into the soft foam of the sofa bed. Against the crispness of the cotton sheet and the fluffiness of the comforter he felt cocooned as though in a fortress.

He slept for hours, through dinner, through half the night. Three o’clock found him rambling in a strange house, too scared to make a noise that might disturb, longing for a cup of tea, unable to even find the bottles of drinking water. He was alone, all alone, with relatives who did not wake with the fall of his feet on the floor, the blood that joined them diluted with the waters of an ocean. The glossy magazine house felt cold and alien. Tears gathered and fell silently as he sat huddled on the soft yellow silk love seat, shivering with grief and cold in his new pyjamas.

The family awoke finally. He was taught how to make tea, he was told of tap water clean enough to drink, he was shown where breakfast materials lay. His helplessness reminded the uncle that boys fresh from India needed to be guided in every step they took.

Breakfast over, Dr Sharma and wife Nancy continued with their explanation of Western domestic arrangements. Everybody had to do everything themselves. They both cooked dinner, but breakfast, lunch, tea, snacks, each one made according to their needs. Washing, ironing, bed making, similarly all on their own. ‘You will learn soon, beta,’ said the uncle gently. Here Nancy stubbed her cigarette butt into an ashtray and carefully picked a speck of tobacco from her painted mouth, creased by faint wrinkles scratched into her upper lip.

The tightness in Ananda’s chest increased. Not even one day had passed and they were giving him rules to live by—presupposing he was an ignorant, good for nothing freeloader. All his life he had been praised for being a good boy. He had assumed responsibility, performed well in exams, done his duty by his parents, met every expectation placed on his shoulders. Carefully he put on a pleasant expression to mask his humiliation.

The uncle and aunt got up. Lenny would show him the ropes downstairs. He must make his bed and get ready. Then, it being such a beautiful day, they would drive out to Peggy’s Cove, and follow this with a special Indian lunch in his honour at the Taj Mahal restaurant on Spring Garden Road.

‘No, no,’ said Ananda politely, trying to convey that he didn’t want the familiarity of Indian food so soon after he had left it. He wanted something Western and exciting.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Nancy, ‘it will be a treat for all of us. We love Indian food.’

So Ananda went down into the basement to have a shower, carefully moving the curtains outside the tub so they didn’t touch him. Water streamed onto the floor. His first lesson on how to bathe in the West and how to clean the bathroom afterwards, followed. As Lenny watched, he mopped the floor, and wrung the dirty water out into a bucket. He felt soiled and desperately in need of another bath, but he grimly ignored these feelings. He could live with an unclean body, he had lived with so much else. Now, said Lenny simply, here is the toilet cleaning stuff, here, you use the brush like this, and he proceeded to attack some brown stains that Ananda, to his mortification, had not registered as his responsibility.

Then the bed had to be remade, yes it had to disappear every day, so people could sit in front of the TV. This was the den (ie not Ananda’s room), explained Lenny as they folded the bedding inside the sofa and replaced the cushions.

‘In India we had a maid who did all this, I mainly studied,’ explained Ananda in turn.

‘Lucky man, I could do with a few servants picking after me.’

‘It was not quite like that,’ said Ananda. He had never felt particularly pampered. Rather they were the struggling ones, always anxious, always trying to make ends meet, clinging dearly to their standard of living through toil and sacrifice. The single servant was an ancient, bucktoothed, grey-haired woman, who had to be supervised into proper labour, who chatted relentlessly the whole time she worked and minded if you didn’t listen.