A decade in Toronto - 20

Che

A number of global legends from diverse spheres passed on into history in 2014, among them were Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Richard Attenborough, Robin Williams. 

All of them contributed to deepening our understanding and appreciation of the arts. Marquez is unquestionably one of the best novelists of all times. 

If you’re interested in reading about what I wrote when he passed away, click here: Marquez

Similarly, Attenborough contributed to a better appreciation of Mahatma Gandhi achievements and contributions to making the world a better place. Attenborough’s Gandhi was a cinematic masterpiece and deservedly swept the Oscars in 1982 (unfortunately, Spielberg’s ET lost out). Gandhi the movie introduced the Mahatma to a global audience especially to a younger demographic. 

Che and Mahrukh

Attenborough was also a consummate actor and admired by the discerning moviegoer for his portrayal of General James Outram in Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977).

Robin Williams acted in too many good movies, making it difficult to pinpoint his best. But I believe that he will be remembered for his portrayal of John Keating, the English teacher, who adopts unusual methods to teach his students' poetry and understand life better in Dead Poets Society (1989).

The list also included two individuals who were well known in their spheres and who I could claim to have known personally – Chelva Kanaganayakan and Vasu Chanchlani. Coincidentally, both passed away at a relatively young age of 62 and both were immensely active.

Vasu Chanchlani was among the most prosperous Indo-Canadians and a person deeply committed to philanthropy. His prosperity hadn’t changed his innate decency. He approached me to do a write-up on his nomination for the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award.

Che and Durga

What I found endearing about him was that he never let his wealth determine his relationships, or his identity. He’d happily accompany me to an ordinary Indian restaurant near the Chamber’s office and agreed to take turns to pay.

I got to know Chelva because of my association with the Festival of South Asian Literature and Arts. We were both members of the core group that worked to organize the festival curated by MG Vassanji and Nurjehan Aziz.

Read about him here: Chelva Kanaganayakan

With Mahrukh

Asghar Ali Engineer made a name for himself for his resolute opposition to religious fundamentalism. He passed away in 2013. As a journalist in Bombay, I’d come in close contact with him. On a couple of occasions, I’d gone over to his modest home in Santacruz East near Golibar to discuss current affairs. 

In the mid-1980s, his Centre for Study of Society and Secularism had published a report of the unstated but obvious bias against Muslims in finding jobs in the private sector. I’d taken views of a cross-section of influencers on the report. 

The best reaction had come from Datta Samant, the fiery trade union leader, famous for the textile strike of 1982. Samant looked at me quizzically when I asked him whether employers discriminated against Muslims. “They will exploit everyone. They don’t care about their workers’ religion.”

Engineer continued to be active, but we lost touch when I quit journalism in the late 1990s. 

When I went to Bombay in 2014, I made it a point to visit his Santacruz office. I took Che with me to introduce my son to the significance of a person such as Engineer and his contribution to ensuring that fundamentalism is challenged.

As a matter of principle, I have not told my son what dogma (religious/ideological) he should follow (I'll be happy if he doesn't follow any). I believe every human being has the right to choose, or better still, not choose at all. I believe that every human being has the right to not be indoctrinated, especially by family,  culture, upbringing and rigid family values. 

Where I make an exception is to tell him to be on the side of the oppressed. Engineer and his kind always stood (and stand) with the oppressed.

Unfortunately or fortunately, Che doesn’t remember that we visited Engineer’s office and met his son Irfan Engineer who has continued to do all the good work that his father initiated, and in his efforts, he’s been joined by Ram Puniyani, a former IIT professor, who even during his teaching days, was a resolute activist fighting the good cause of secularism.

Read about Asghar Ali Engineer here: Striving for Peace and Harmony

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My journey to discover authors and poets continued and I assisted  Meenakshi Alimchandani in organizing the South Asian component of the first (and last) Inspire Toronto International Book Fair. It was a great event, where the who’s who of Toronto’s literary world congregated to discuss what they know best – reading, writing, and books.

Meenakshi had her favourite South Asian authors for the panel discussion and included friends such as Jasmine D’Costa, Manjushree Thapa, Anirudh Bhattacharya, and the effervescent Pricilla Uppal, who succumbed to cancer earlier this year. 

Read about it here: Inspire

My friends Yoko Morgenstern and Joyce Wayne published their debut novels in 2014. Yoko’s Double Exile was released in July when I’d left for India. Joyce’s The Cook’s Temptation was launched at our common friend Sang Kim’s restaurant Wind-Up Bird Café (named after Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Joyce’s second novel, Last Night of the World (published in 2018) is one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

With Yoko

Read their interviews:

Yoko Morgenstern

Joyce Wayne

For a brief while, Sang’s restaurant became a hotspot for literary dos and attracted an esoteric group of people all of whom shared their love for great food and great books. Sang, an award-winning author, is these days pursuing his passion for creating exquisite cuisines. 

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Except the last photo with Yoko, the other photos are not connected to the blog. I've just placed them here because they were clicked in 2014, and Che looks smart in them.

Last Night of the World – Joyce Wayne

Joyce Wayne and her new novel Last Night of the World

The relationship between the West and Russia has remained troubled for over a century. Both are unable to overcome deep-rooted animosity that is based on an unwillingness to understand the perspective of the other side.

Winston Churchill, who had termed Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” at the height of World War II, realised that the compromise of befriending Stalin to defeat the Nazis was a mistake and quickly made amends.

The ensuing Cold War that lasted for a better part of the 20th century caused the world to be divided into two distinct camps, inimical to each other and one that precariously co-existed (with stockpiles of nuclear weapons aimed at each other) in the maniacal Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

The collapse of Soviet Union in the 1990s did bring about a temporary truce and cooperation, but that didn’t last long, and Russia under Vladimir Putin has taken the relations to a new nadir. If it was the annexation of Crimea some years ago that brought the two on the verge of a war, it is the poisoning of a former spy that has caused an unprecedented diplomatic row. The West and Russia always find a reason to bicker.

Communism is dead everywhere, and it’d be hard to find a serious defender of the October Revolution a century later.  Although one is pleasantly surprised to find a strong and sizeable section of the millennials who prefer socialism to the inherent indecency of a form of government where the government appears keener to defend a corporation's right to profit rather than defend the rights of a human being to live.  

For a considerably long time, there were many across the globe who were convinced that the communism represented the best and the most representative form of a government that was of the people, by the people and for the people, and that only the communists ensured a true form of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Stalin’s murderous excesses shattered those illusions quickly and decisively in the developed world, and the socialist fantasies harboured by the elite in West were abandoned hastily. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s classic Gulag Archipelago exhausted the last remaining illusions about communism, although it was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon that became a precursor of the narration of disillusionment with the communist dream.

And yet, in large parts of the developing world in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the communist ideology successfully took strong roots and flourished for many decades after the West flushed it out and came down heavily on its sympathisers. The exile of Charlie Chaplin is a stunning example of this reappraisal. 

The cruel fate of the communist sympathisers in the Western societies has not found adequate representation in popular culture or literature. Yes, the excesses of the McCarthy have been periodically portrayed in Hollywood films because Joseph McCarthy, the philistine, had a blacklist of Hollywood personalities branded as communist sympathisers.

While reading Joyce Wayne’s Last Night of the World (Mosaic Press, April 2018), I couldn’t help but think of the swift and sudden extinguishing of the communist dream. Joyce’s second novel evocatively brings alive the story of the post-World War II Soviet Spy Scandal, which rocked Canada and ushered in the Cold War.

The novel combines the racy pace of an espionage thriller with a mellow unfolding of love and loss. It’s a gripping narration of the inner and outward journey of Freda Linton, a young Jewish woman, who flees the Soviet Union to escape the Nazis, and works for the Communist cause only to be used and disillusioned; Freda is a survivor who sacrifices all and gives everything that is hers in return for chimerical longings.

I was unaware of the spy scandal that rocked the Canadian public life in the 1940s. The novel was, therefore, educative. It recreates a murky and sordid world of comrades who are spies and is centred on Freda, the spy who is used by the Canadian Communist Party on behalf of the Soviets to ensnare highly placed public figures in the Canadian establishment to get hold of secrets that would assist the communist cause. Freda is a true example of naïve commitment to a lost cause.

Nikolai Zabotin, Freda’s boss and lover, and a charming functionary in the high-powered world where diplomacy and politics meet, dispatches her to the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories to get nuclear secrets that would assist the Soviets in building nuclear weapons. Zabotin has to decide on which side of history he wants to be and guide Freda accordingly. 

What they decide will determine their future and the future of the world.

The novel brings to life an era that saw large sections of the Canadian establishment branded as anti-national and how it is permanently banished into oblivion even though nothing concrete was ever proved about their alleged involvement. 

The tragic case of Fred Rose is a classic example of how public mood can be and is swayed away from the truth to grievously harm people who don’t necessarily subscribe to the prevailing dogmas of the day.

Donald Trump is re-enacting McCarthyism in America right now, and nobody is able to stop him. Paraxodically, he is Putin's friend.

Last Night of the World also recreates the world of Jewish newcomers fleeing the Nazis in East Europe. The section that describes the Nazi cruelties on the Jewish people are terrifying and one has to stop reading and take a break. The pathos is palpable in the compromises and adjustments that Freda has to make in the brave new world where she has to sleep unwillingly with men (invariably much older) for what is considered as greater good.

The book is structured as tightly woven, breezy spy thriller. And it retains its momentum and pace throughout. However, the climax, set in Chernobyl, is really the pièce de résistance. Joyce’s imagination, as well as creative prowess, take flight here while depicting the desolation of the place devastated by the nuclear disaster; she creates imagery that has the quality of ethereal otherworldliness.

Last Night of the World is an important book because even though it is about an era long gone in Canadian history, it is a stark reminder that we are never too far from facing such hostilities suddenly and for no logical reason.

Read an extract from the book here: Extract

Buy the book here: Last Night of the World 

A decade in Toronto – 6

2009 was our first new year in Toronto and it began with a lot of promise. I started my program in journalism at the Sheridan College in Oakville. I was returning to school after a gap of over 25 years. The journalism class comprised students who were just like me – practising or former journalists from across the world who were trying to get a toehold in the profession in Canada.

It was ironic that after nearly two decades in journalism, both as a working journalist and as a teacher, I was returning to journalism as a student. But I was keen to learn and unlearn. The Sheridan college campus at Oakville was as impressive as any that I’d seen or imagined, and the most interesting part of it all was the daily commute from Toronto to Oakville on the GO train.

With Yoko, Nelson and Mike at Sheridan

The class comprised students from South America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Japan, and Africa - an interesting bunch of highly talented individuals, who were extremely independent-minded and like most journalists were not natural team players. 

Some became great friends during the duration of the course of the program. Yoko Morgenstern and Nelson Alvarado Jourde are friends I dearly miss.  Yoko is in Germany and visits Toronto infrequently, Nelson is back in Peru, and I haven’t met him in years.

With Yoko, Nelson, Mike and Joyce Wayne

The teachers were all equally interesting; Teenaz Javat is now a friend. She is a Bombayite who has had the privilege of working as a journalist in India and Pakistan. I have fond memories of Patricia Bradbury. She made the classroom come alive with her engaging, animated teaching. She also introduced us to Katherine Govier, the renowned and accomplished author, and now an activist for swifter, seamless integration of immigrants into the Canadian mainstream.

Of course, the hero of the program was Joyce Wayne, the program coordinator of the Canadian Journalism for Internationally Trained Journalists. A veteran professor, extremely well-read, a true heart liberal, with a permanent glint of mischief in her eyes, Joyce propelled the program to great heights and constantly challenged its participants to strive to do better.  One of my regrets (and I have many) was not to have done English literature at the university. With Joyce at Sheridan, I finally found a mentor who was as interested in literature as I am.

It was an evening program, so I had to change my shift timing and I returned to the night shift at the condo. After a while the hectic schedule became strenuous, and by April 2009, it was impossible for me to get enough sleep during the day, go to Sheridan in the evening, and then do the night shift at the condo. On a couple of occasions, the patrol who roamed around in a vehicle at night caught me napping.  I decided to quit my job as a security guard.

I was confident that at the end of the Sheridan program, I’d at least get an internship placement somewhere. A major lacuna in the Sheridan program was the absence of a design component. To complete that gap, I joined the Yorkdale Adult Learning Centre’s web designing program; a free program meant for newcomers.  It was an enriching experience. I was now spending several hours at a high school had both eager adult newcomer students and regular school students who were my son’s age.  

Yorkdale group

At Yorkdale, I met a bunch of fun-loving group of Latinos from South America. The classroom had students of all ages and from everywhere – Africa, South Asia, South America, Eastern Europe – all of us sharing a sort of desperation: of getting a proper job. I wrote about my encounter with two religiously devout fellow students.  Click here to read: Question of identity.

Around the same time, I also joined a memoir writing workshop conducted by Allyson Latta at the North York branch of the Toronto public library. After quitting my security guard job, I had the entire day free for myself. Latta’s class was a perfect fit for me; the sessions taught me to look inside myself for stories. Click here to read about Latta’s memoir writing sessions: Allyson Latta.

When Che turned 12, Mahrukh began working at a telemarketing company but was inexplicably laid off, despite doing well. Then, she worked as a data entry operator but the two-people company, operating from a basement on Dufferin and Lawrence disappeared when it was time to pay wages. She was singularly unfortunate in getting steady, sustainable employment; it caused her immense frustration, but she remained cheerful despite the adverse circumstances.

We didn’t let these reversals deter us from exploring our neighbourhoods. On weekends, we’d get into the GO bus or the GO train and go to different towns near Toronto. Even when we were still to know the lay of the land, we did an open-top bus ride in Toronto, within a month of our arrival. On my first birthday in Toronto, we went to the Niagara Falls; it was all that we thought it’d be, and then some.  The most memorable part of our trip: The butterfly garden; we’d never seen anything as exotic and exciting as this garden.  

For me, there can be nothing more exciting than riding the streetcars in the rains. We’ve done the Queen Street streetcar ride more frequently than we’d care to remember – all the way from Long Branch to Neville Park. That year (2009) we went to our first Toronto Auto Show and continued doing so for the next few years. 

When I recall the number of road trips that we did in our early years, the one that stays etched in my mind is the one to Stouffville, ON, to take rides on the model trains.  Click here to read about it: Day trip. Some years later, the federal government used extracts from this blog in its booklet for newcomers.

I was increasingly veering towards writing and started working on freelance assignments for the Canadian Immigrant and the New Canadian magazines. I had also begun work on improving and updating my short story that I’d written in December.  In May 2009, I sent the short story to Diaspora Dialogues, a Toronto not-for-profit that promotes creative expressions in diverse people. This simple act of courage (courage because rejections can be depressing) was to change my life.

The Cook’s Temptation - Joyce Wayne

Joyce Wayne

My friend (also teacher, mentor) Joyce Wayne’s first novel The Cook’s Temptation is being published by the Mosaic Press, Canada early next year. She worked on the book for the last five years.

Set in Victorian England – an era that Joyce finds fascinating – the novel is about Cordelia Tilley, a strong-minded Jewish woman’s dilemma: to be true to herself versus her desire to be accepted in the English society.

“It’s a story of an outsider trying hard to adjust and be a part of her new environment,” Joyce explains. “In that sense, the novel will find resonance with immigrants who experience such transition. The adjustment is easy initially but becomes difficult as time passes, and this is because the society is unwilling to go beyond superficial acceptance.”

The Cook’s Temptation brings to life the complexities of Victorian life, first in County Devon and then in London’s East end.

“I’m fascinated by the Victorian era and especially fiction from that era. George Eliot is one of my favourite authors. I also like Sarah Walters and Michael Cox, both of whom wrote about the Victorian era. And you tend to write what you read,” Joyce says.

The novel portrays one woman’s life, class conflict, religious intolerance, suspicion and betrayal. Cordelia is the daughter of a Jewish mother and an Anglican father. Her mother has groomed her for a life in English society while her father, a tough publican, has shown no tolerance for his wife’s social climbing or the conceits of their perspicacious daughter. 

Cordelia’s mother dies from typhoid fever, she tries to run the family’s establishment, she falls prey to a local industrialist, she gives birth to a son, she is tormented by her husband and his family. Finally, she is rescued by suffragette friends and sets off to start a new life in London.

“The idea of the novel came when I visited a graveyard at Holsworthy village north of Devon and I saw a grave with the name Cordelia on the stone. It was then that I decided that I’d write about Cordelia,” Joyce says. 

“The book is also about the many layered British society, the complicated relationship that an outsider has with a society. It also explores the not-so-subtle antisemitism of the British society in that era.”

The Cook’s Temptation is about one woman’s life, class conflict, religious intolerance, suspicion and betrayal. It’s about a woman who is unpredictable, both strong and weak willed, both kind and heinous, victim and criminal.  It’s a genuine Victorian saga, full of detail, twists and turns, memorable scenes, full of drama and pathos.

According to Joyce, “Cordelia isn’t just one woman, she’s many women.”

After reading the manuscript of The Cook’s Temptation, author Jasmine D’Costa, who has been instrumental in turning many newcomers to Canada into writers, publicly applauded Joyce. She wrote: “Reading books written by people I know is always a shock. I read Joyce Wayne’s manuscript of The Cook’s Temptation soon to be out in print, and discovered a new person. Wow what a story she wove! And from where did all those sex scenes come from? I am hoping it is purely from imagination.”

Joyce has an MA in English literature and has taught journalism at Sheridan College, which is where I met her in 2009. She revived my interest in literature, and for the first time, under her guidance, I formally studied literature. 

We argued intensely over what constituted good literature, and I remember an especially intense argument over Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes. She was convinced the book was a modern Canadian classic, and I was niggardly in praising it because I felt it was similar (in theme) to Alex Haley’s Roots. 

I re-read Hill’s novel recently when my son Che said he enjoyed the book. And I must admit Joyce was, indeed, right. The book is uniquely Canadian. I didn’t get the quintessential 'Canadian-ness' of the novel when I read it in 2009 because I wasn’t familiar with Canada.

Joyce is a winner of the Diaspora Dialogues contest for fiction, and has been awarded the Fiona Mee Award for literary journalism. She is the co-writer of the documentary film, So Far From Home in 2010, a film about refugee journalists persecuted for their political views, and various of her other works have been published in Parchment, Golden Horseshoe Anthology, Canadian Voices, TOK6.

TOK 7 Writing the New Toronto

Diaspora Dialogues released TOK 7: Writing the New Toronto yesterday at Gladstone. 

TOK 7: Writing the New Toronto
below covers of TOK 1 to TOK 6

This is the last TOK of the series, and has short fiction and poems from a new bunch of emerging writers and mentors. Helen Walsh, president of Diaspora Dialogues and the editor of all the TOK books, moderated an interesting panel discussion between three mentees – Zalika Reed-Benta, James Poputsis and Yaya Yao – and two mentors – Olive Senior and Moez Surani – who are among the contributors to the new collection. The discussion was interspersed with readings by Zalika, James, and Yaya. 

The TOK launches annually also serve as an alumni reunion with several mentees, some mentors, and Diaspora Dialogues staff in attendance. The indefatigable Natalie Kertes, working quietly to make sure that the launch was perfect. 

The launch It’s time to get and give updates, and share notes. Leslie Shimotakahara, Joyce Wayne, Brandon Pitts were among the many friends who were at the launch. 

I was in TOK 5 (in 2010) and therefore is the best of the seven books.

From 2012, the Diaspora Dialogue’s mentoring program will focus on full-length manuscripts. For more details, click here: DD 2012 Mentoring

Yaya Yao recited her poem 'where you’re going'

It’s reproduced here:

where you’re going

one ocean one
continent
from the place you were
born you are
dying, suspended
over university and elm
in February

with expert hands
chang ping aims into flesh long
needles
the tip connects to
the point opens
into the pathway and you
follow, she drapes a thin silk scarf
over your trunk
leaves the room for a
tea from timmy’s

she says to family, 3 to 5 a.m. the body
is weakest, it will happen
then, he is
tired his body is not
holding water call me
tomorrow

the path
you have taken:
shanghai to hong kong
hong kong to montreal
montreal to

toronto
parkdale to little portugal
little portugal to university and elm
university and elm to

3 a.m.
to 5 a.m. tides withdraw
from each meridian, that ocean
here to claim you, now as always in
between.

Canadian culture

Recently, I attended a splendid lunch and learn discussion organised by Diaspora Dialogues where a writer (Joyce Wayne) and a literary agent (Dean Cooke) gave great insights into the process of writing fiction, and getting published. 

I was there to understand the process because I, too, hope to get my novel published some day. 

And I wondered whether I would be a Canadian writer or an Indian when (if) my novel is published? 

I don’t know; both, I guess.  

How much of a Canadian can an immigrant become, especially a first-generation immigrant. Then, what is it to be a Canadian? And, what is Canadian culture.

There are many interesting theories to these questions.

As a student of journalism at the Sheridan College in (2009), I was introduced to Canadian literature in English, and read Northrop Frye’s “garrison mentality” definition of Canadian culture.

“...I have long been impressed in Canadian poetry by a tone of deep terror in regard to nature, a theme to which we shall return. It is not a terror of the danger or discomforts or even the mysteries of nature, but a terror of the soul at something that these things manifest. The human mind has nothing but human and moral values to cling to if it is to preserve its integrity or even its sanity, yet the vast unconsciousness of nature in front of it seems an unanswerable denial of those values. [...]

“If we put together a few of these impressions, we may get some approach to characterising the way in which the Canadian imagination has developed in its literature. Small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological “frontier” separated from one another and from their American and British sources; communities that provide all that their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet confronted with a huge unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting – such communities are bound to develop what we may provisionally call a garrison mentality. In the earliest maps of the country the only inhabited centres are forts, and that remains true of the cultural maps for a much later time. [...]

(Conclusion to Carl F. Klinck’s anthology Literary History of Canada – 1965)

Of course, for John RalstonSaul this is a manifestation of the “colonial mind”.

In A Fair Country, he argues:

“Even the way we represent our literature tells us something about the colonial mindset. Roy MacGregor laid this out with perfect intellectual clarity in Canadians. Why is John Richardson’s less than mediocre nineteenth-century novel Wacousta so relentlessly pushed forward as the founding statement of our sensibility? What is its message? That the nature and climate of Canada makes it a place to be feared. That the First Nations are violent and to be feared. That settlers must dominate in every way in order to assuage their fears. This deeply European view – steeped in the discomfort of the outsider – helped to set the pattern for a colonial interpretation of Canada. Ours was to be a place in which white Christians must be constantly ill at ease, uncomfortable, living far from their true civilizational inspirations. At the same, they must also imagine themselves as cut off from the gigantic, uncontrolled nature all around them. They must struggle to survive, dependent on the originality of those fortunate enough to live at the centre of great civilizations. They must marginalize, weaken, if possible destroy, the local Indian civilization. Christianity, in its various forms, would be a safe, rigid structure to protect these Europeans from this uncontrollable, frightening place. Theirs was to be what Northrop Frye called a garrison mentality – a “closely knit and beleaguered society” existing with a “deep terror in regard to nature.”

Some questions don’t have easy answers, and some answers lead to more questions.