A Canadian Immigrant Story Part II
Brian Sankarsingh weaves a tale of a Canadian immigrant
Even now, decades later, I remember this as if it was yesterday. The fear, hate and disgust rise in me now just as it did that night. I was barely aware of climbing down the tree. I felt its rugged bark tugging at me. “Don’t go Imran” I imagined it saying. “Better to stay here where it’s safe.” My notebook slipped out of my hand and reached the ground before I did. I felt that all my senses were hyper-vigilant as I crept to my mother and father’s broken bodies. In the natural course of life, children will most often bury their parents, but there was nothing natural about what lay in front of me. These lifeless bodies were not Ranjit and Kareema. I stood there, fingers curled into tight fists, my jaw clenched until it hurt. Why had I not run to their aid? Why was I such a coward to hide while they were victimized and brutalized? I hated myself in that moment and with that hate came a clarity I have seldom had before. In one violent act by nameless faceless beings, I became an orphan and a nomad. Often people describe losing a loved one like experiencing a hole in their heart or life. In my current circumstance, I did not have the luxury to experience either of these. My shame was complete.
The next morning, in the gang’s sadistic wake, villagers started burying and burning the dead. I felt nothing. My mind was numb, and the bodies of the two people being put into the ground seemed unfamiliar to me. These were not the two people I loved. These broken, bloody bodies wrapped in cloth and covered in dirt were just empty shells. People I didn’t even know were crying and moaning and I could not understand why.
I saw the accusation in everyone's eyes.
“How are you still alive Imran?”
“Why aren’t you crying for your poor parents?”
A few weeks later a small group of villages decided they had enough and were going to Afghanistan. The journey was uneventful but hard. Most of it was through mountainous terrain and fraught with danger of being caught in the middle of petty tribal wars or become victims of bandits on the trail.
At the age of 20, I fled Afghanistan and came to Canada as a refugee. This was not easily done, and what I write in just a few sentences took many sleepless nights and stressful days to happen. But I was determined to do right by my parents. I refused to accept a mundane life. One filled with chances never taken, races never run. Like my grandfather, I was now in a place where I could start afresh. Would the bane of my caste haunt me here as well? Would my story end in the same tragedy as my grandfather and his son? Or would this new land give me an opportunity to redefine all that I knew and believed about myself?
Yet even as I tried to change the course of my life, I felt that all roads led uphill, in the dark, without a map. Nothing I set my hands to would succeed. No opportunities to pounce on. No chances to take. No potential to live up to. The status quo was suffocating me into a meaningless existence. Every new day, eclipsed and obscured by the same old, same old. I had a religion but did not have Faith. I dreamed a dream but lacked aspiration. I hungered for an opportunity but could find no purpose. I realised that if I were to continue the meaningless meandering the singular purpose of my life would be creating carbon monoxide from oxygen. I knew that I would never forgive myself if I let the price of my parents’ death be wasted on the purchase of such an existence. It weighed heavily on my mind and crushed my heart. Their sacrifice demanded it. I had answered the risky yet powerfully luring call to leave the place I was born but now I needed to do more.
At the time, I was living in the Parkdale community of Toronto. I lived in what I learned was colloquially called “a hole in the wall.” The Parkdale community was a cultural melting pot. Although I was just learning English as a second language, I felt at home in the sea of brown faces. My single room attic overlooked Ontario’s Lakeshore. The continuous hum of the Gardiner Expressway soothed my soul to slumber most nights. Everything was new and as with such things I stared in wide-eyed amazement. A person's home is their castle, and my one-room hole in the wall, was that indeed. From my tiny window, I would surveil my kingdom wide. As cars hummed by on the Gardiner, I would wistfully imagine the lives of the occupants. Their homes. Their love. Time would slow down as I quietly tiptoed through these imagined lives. Coming home to their family. Getting ready for work the next day. What to them represented the humdrum of their existence, was the reason for mine. What they took for granted, I daydreamed about.
Such were the reveries of my tortured mind. I escaped from a place where I had a target on my back for being neither good enough for the untouchables nor Muslim enough for my mother’s family. But, where did I escape to? While in my Parkdale neighbourhood, I felt safe, Toronto was a different experience. There I would have to carefully navigate the neo-Nazis as they patrolled the streets looking to victimize people who looked exactly like me. I spent many days and nights thinking about the extreme level of hate I would often encounter. This led me to surmise that racial hatred is fuelled by two emotions – ignorance and arrogance. The racist is wilfully ignorant of many things. They are ignorant of the fundamental fact that we are all human beings. They choose to ignore that skin colour is superficial and that it is the content of the man’s heart and mind that counts. They are intentionally uninformed of the circumstances many are fleeing from when they come to Canada. They are purposefully oblivious of the fact that the person who comes to Canada to live, although they may not look like them, can also love this beautiful country. Furthermore, they are tenaciously uninformed about what it means to be a good human being. Their determined ignorance is born out of arrogance. The belief that one race – ANY RACE – is superior to, better than, more productive and chosen to rule over another.
I was labelled “Paki” for the colour of my skin. This was ironical because the land I fled refused to give me a label – neither untouchable nor Muslim; the place I fled would label me “Paki” or “sand-ni&&er” or “towel head.” There is a certain degree of ignorance even in their choice of derogatory names as it showed they could not even bother to understand what they were hating. Paki was short for Pakistani, a former resident of Pakistan. Surely not a derogatory name, but spilled from their lips, double coated with their hate it became a spear that pierced the heart of many brown people. The second name was compounded with another pejorative to show the level of their contempt for the brown man and to let him know that beyond a doubt in their eyes he was no better than the black man. Finally, the last label showed the depth of their idiocy for they could not be bothered to understand that the turban was Sikh in origin and part of their religious cultural tradition.
But in spite of all this negativity, this place and its unique charm changed my entire worldview and perspective in life. Here, I felt truly challenged to think about my past, present and future life in a different way. Canada was a pathway to a better life. For me it was an opportunity to truly reinvent myself. Here I could start building a new life, with new aspirations. Here I could grow new friendships and maybe, I would begin to feel like I belonged. There are times in our lives that we can point to when we come to a crossroads. Our choices in that place can either be filled with regret, repentance, shame, guilt and grief or joy, elation, contentment and pleasure. This was such a place where I found myself. Where would this road take me? I imagined myself in the branches of the old tree that sheltered me that fateful night. Whatever happened now, I deserved it.
Stay tuned for the continuing story…
Bio: BRIAN SANKARSINGH is a Trinidadian-born Canadian immigrant who has published several books of poetry on a wide range of social and historical themes including racism, colonialism, and enslavement. Sankarsingh artfully blends prose and poetry into his storytelling creating an eclectic mix with both genres. This unique approach is sure to provide something for everyone.
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