A decade in Toronto - 31

With Mahrukh at
The Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD)
May 2017

I return to A Decade in Toronto after a long gap. 

The story of my decade has reached the ninth year - 2017 - and life in Canada became predictable, routine, mundane.

The publication of my debut novel in 2016 was a turning point. I was invited to many readings and the one that I enjoyed the most was chatting with Saima Hussain at the Mississauga Central Library. Saima edited a collection of personal stories by Muslim women The Muslimah who fell to earth, which Mawenzi House published in 2016, along with Belief.

I bought table space at the Word on the Street in the hope that I’d be able to sell my book, but – unsurprisingly – didn’t sell enough copies to justify the steep price I paid. Undeterred, I also took a table space at Brampton Book Bash (organised by FOLD) and sold nearly two dozen copies.

In 2017 spring, after I was featured at the Festival of Literary Diversity, my friend Gavin Barrett – who came to nearly all my readings, and who couldn’t make it to FOLD – wrote to me about an idea he had of organizing a reading series. Without a moment’s hesitation, I agreed.  

Gavin named it the Tartan Turban Secret Reading Series (Tartan Turban is the logo of the advertising agency Barrett & Welsh – where Gavin is the co-founder, partner and creative head) and we started in May 2017 (18 May 2017).

Gavin had obviously put a lot of thought into what he wanted the series to be and evolve into. In his own words, “The Tartan Turban Secret Readings celebrate and support writing by multicultural/visible minority Canadian writers with a special focus on those who self-identify as black, indigenous or people of colour, who have few such platforms.

“At the same time, all writers who want to celebrate Canada’s multiculturalism, diversity and indigenous heritage, and have talent to share are warmly welcomed. Please feel free to bring any of your friends of every minority whether "visible" or otherwise - non-minorities are warmly welcomed too.”

When we launched the series, we planned to do a few readings during the summer of 2017 and then when the season changed, to bring down the curtain. However, the series caught on with the literary community and there was no way we could just stop.

Two years later, it continues to grow. I believe the main reason for its popularity is that Gavin invites an author/poet to curate the series, and then she invites six other authors/poets to read. This brings variety to the series.

I must shamefacedly admit that I share the credit for an immensely impactful, relevant, and popular program for which my only occasional contribution is to suggest names of authors who may be invited to read or curate.

Gavin does everything – including arranging for wine and samosas – and all I do is just show up for the readings.

Our lives are strange in many ways and the strangest is the way we make friends. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, someone becomes a friend and even when one doesn’t meet or interact with this person for long periods of time, or even consistently, s/he remains a friend that one thinks of first on a special occasion or when something important happens in one’s life.

Gavin Barrett is that friend. I have written extensively about him here and if you are interested, you may read all about Gavin on GAB here:

When Gavin met John

o-o-o-o-o

2017 was an important year because it was the seventieth year of India’s independence. It was the centenary year of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; also, the centenary of Indira Gandhi (To read the post, click here: She knew India’s heartbeat).

It was 50 years since Che Guevara was murdered in Bolivia (and 20 years since his remains were discovered); also, 50 years of India’s Maoist Naxalbari movement.

Many who contributed to our culture passed away into history. Among them were actors Shashi Kapoor, Vinod Khanna, and Om Puri. All great actors and stars. Shashi Kapoor was a bit more special to me than the others and I couldn’t help but blog about him (To read the post, click here: Shashi Kapoor).  

Musicians Girija Devi (Hindustani classical vocalist), Gord Downie; journalists Gauri Lankesh (murdered by Hindutva terrorists) and Piroj Wadia (a dear friend. To read the post, click here: Piroj Wadia). Poet Eunice de Souza, who I had the privilege of knowing briefly when I worked at the Indian Post with Veena Gokhale, among others, and Eunice was the editor of the literary page.

We also lost authors Robert Pirsig and Bharati Mukherjee. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (To read the post, click here: Zen) is an important book that I read two times – first when I was in my late teens and then in my late twenties – and it was only upon the second reading that I understood it.

Winter morning in Brampton 

In 2017, I gifted the book to my then colleague, who in jest told me she needed Zen more than Yoga.

I want to briefly segue into an issue that is misinterpreted often deliberately by newcomers to Canada. Nearly all newcomers to Canada feel that their qualifications and experience are ignored because they lack what is euphemistically termed as “Canadian experience”.  

Now let me narrate the experience of my former colleague’s husband (the colleague to whom I gifted Pirsig’s book). He is a Caucasian Canadian, born and raised in Canada, studied to become an engineer, and served in the Canadian Armed Forces in the Balkans and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One would imagine than upon his return to civilian life, he would be welcomed by our people and would easily get a job matched his engineering qualification and incredible experience of having served the nation.

However, that is not what happened. Neither does his present job reflect his qualifications, nor his abilities and experience.

If our system cannot take care of our veterans, there will be many who will legitimately ask, “Why should then Canada give favoured treatment to refugees and immigrants?”

Until we don’t have a satisfactory and logical answer to this question, the issue of immigration will continue to be polarising and it will always turn ugly and emotive.

During my days as a journalist, I’ve seen exclusivist political formulations demand protection of the rights of the native people (sons of the soil). In today’s context, the forces that oppose immigration globally represent the same values.

However, unless there is a real solution to securing economic opportunities for the native people, the ire against immigrants and refugees will rise, not dissipate.

A decade in Toronto - 11

Che and Mahrukh returning from Pune to Bombay

By the time 2011 began, both Mahrukh and I were missing Bombay rather desperately. It’d been three years in Canada, three years away from what we still considered ‘home’, three years that had been unexpectedly harsh, hard and unrelenting. We were happy that we survived, but also tired. We needed a mental rejuvenation. And what better way to get that than to go home on a vacation? In August 2011, we took Swissair and reached Bombay.

Our city had changed, transformed into a giant construction site. The number of skyscrapers under construction was evidently spiralling out of control; the Mumbai Metro had started from Ghatkopar to Versova, but the project would become altogether more ambitious in the next few years. The Bandra Sea Link had been completed and looked every bit the architectural marvel that it was envisaged to be.

We were ecstatic to be back, but not for long. Something had changed inside us. Bombay no longer felt like home. It’d changed, and so had we. Yes, the monsoon was at its peak, but - unexpectedly - the humidity was unbearable. And we were ashamed to admit that because we'd lived in that humidity for all but three years of our lives. 

After a few days of being cloistered at home, working on my manuscript, I ventured out and met some friends. They were all universally welcoming, affectionate and delighted to see me. However, their lives had inexorably moved forward, as had mine (although their lives seemed to have moved faster and far ahead as compared to mine). 

What remained was just a shared past. I wasn’t a part of their present and that changed the relationship into something that was somehow lesser than what it’d been; somewhat incomplete, static; somewhere directionless, uprooted.

Suddenly, my city was no longer my own, my people had become distant. It was then that the irony of my existence became obvious. I guess it's the fate of all immigrants – neither belonging to the city that had become one’s home, nor to the city that had been one’s home. I would never become a Torontonian, and I was no longer a Bombayite.

I was in an in-between world, belonging nowhere, condemned to be an outsider even in my own life. The relationships that one makes when one is young probably last longer because these relationships are not need-based; they are what one wants. As one grows older, and especially in the case of an immigrant like me, who emigrated at an old age, it’s almost impossible to form genuine relationships that one wants; and the only relationships that seem possible are those that are need-based.  

My relationships from the past had turned to fossil and my relationships of the present were transactional, based on mutual needs. No doubt, there have been (and hopefully there will be) exceptions, but perhaps they only prove the rule; or am I being too cynical and morose?

Mahrukh shared this feeling of being uprooted perhaps more acutely because she had (and still has) her family in India. If there is one thing that she has in great abundance it is resilience.  Immigration changes everyone, and everyone manages these changes differently. In Mahrukh’s case, the changes were too drastic and it took a tremendous effort for her to emerge from the trauma of displacement.

Being an outgoing and amiable person, she was able to make friends easily, bond with people not too different from us. However, she worked on transforming herself. The result was not manifest when we went to India in 2011, but within a few months, when 2012 began, Mahrukh joined Home Depot, which changed her so completely that she is no longer the woman she was when she left India.

We returned to Toronto after a month’s stay in Bombay. Somehow it’d felt strange to go home on a vacation, but when we returned, it didn’t feel strange to return to what wasn’t yet home.

A decade in Toronto - 9

Becoming Canadian, and showing it!

2010: I return to what is turning out to be a sanitized version of my memoirs, after a long gap of nearly three weeks. I say sanitized because I’ve focused only on the positives of the last decade, and also, I’d rather not dwell upon the many unpleasant experiences that I’ve encountered during that time.

I’m sure all newcomers have such unpleasant experiences that may vary in their content but not much in the form, but when one looks back, one realises that such small irritants don’t amount to anything significant, and shouldn’t be given undue importance. This is because the positives overwhelmingly outweigh the negatives.  

Confidence & contentment

2010 began on a positive note for all the three of us – I finally had a secure job and Mahrukh was doing great at her social worker program at Medix. Che was out of middle school and into high school, having chosen York Memorial at Keele and Eglinton. With a secure job, I focused on my writing, and meeting and making friends with the community of authors and creative people in the Greater Toronto Area.

I began participating in reading sessions in Toronto and Mississauga. My circle of friends grew rapidly and I continued to develop my manuscript. I met Farzana Doctor, who significantly influenced my writing; and a couple of years later, she read my manuscript and recommended substantial modifications. I also participated in Meena Chopra's book launch in Mississauga. Meena is an artist I admire; she's also a poet, Her husband, Bhupinder, has a wry sense of humour, both are family now.

My attempt at writing fiction was turning out to be rather challenging and difficult. To write continuously and to develop a story are not among the easiest of things to do. I’d never done anything like this before and there were many missteps.  I didn’t have a name for the novel – that came four years later when I was rewriting the passages about Rafiq’s religiosity.

All I had was a first chapter, which started as a short story, and then I decided to continue working on it because it seemed adventurous to something that I’d never done before. I was in that sort of a state of mind – to boldly go where I’d never imagined I’d go, and writing fiction was definitely adventurous and challenging. I was elated that Diaspora Dialogues had accepted my short story and it was to be published in the fifth edition of their annual collection TOK: Writing the New Toronto.

But the journey from writing a short story to writing a full-length novel was not a natural progression even if it seemed so. I tried to adapt the story to an earlier attempt at novel writing (A decade in Toronto – 7) but soon realised that my characters were based in Canada and what I’d done earlier could, at best, be a back story and that, too, of just one of the four main characters. I didn’t know how to develop characters, build a narrative, and was too dependent upon dialogues, which tended to dominate the narrative.

I knew I needed guidance and when I learnt that MG Vassanji, who had been my mentor at the Diaspora Dialogues program, was a writing coach at Humber College’s creative writing program, I wrote to Antanas Sileika and started the program to work on my manuscript under Vassanji’s guidance. 

It was not easy working with him. He was painstaking, methodical and thorough. I think I must have worked on my first chapter over two dozen times and yet he remained dissatisfied. In July, when the creative writing program’s term ended, I continued for another six months, preferring Vassanji’s guidance rather than venturing on my own. I learnt the hard way that all writing was rewriting.

There was a slow build up in excitement as the launch of TOK 5 approached. But nothing had prepared me to e invited to participate as a panellist at a discussion during the launch event. I was overwhelmed when I got an email from Julia Chan of Diaspora Dialogues in April 2010 asking me whether I’d be interested in being a panellist and also read from my story at the launch event that was scheduled in May 2010 at the prestigious Bram and Bluma Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library.

Marjorie Chan moderated the panel discussion and the panellists included Shyam Selvadurai, Emma Donahue, Marni Van Dyke, Michael Fraser, and me. The discussion was interspersed with five-minute readings from each remaining writer.

Reading at the Toronto Reference Library

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I was overawed to be participating in a panel discussion with such prominent and talented authors and was justifiably nervous. I think I gave adequate responses to the questions Marjorie asked me, generally thanking the Canadian immigration system to be so generous and well attuned as to give a newcomer like me an opportunity to be an author. Shyam who was sitting beside me had a diametrically opposite view and was resolutely critical of the system. I read the first part of my story – from the beginning to the passage from the email that ends with Rafiq’s mentor seeking war on Canada.

Chan, Fraser, Donahue, Van Dyke, Selvadurai and I

Dawn Promislow and Leslie Shimotakahara, who were also featured authors in the volume, were present at the launch. Mahrukh, Che and Durga were excited to be at the venue, as were Joyce and Yoko; others who participated became great friends subsequently – Sanjay and Rizvana, and Pratap (who’d been a mentee in the program). Gavin Barrett was, of course, there. He managed to make it to nearly every public reading that I gave since this one.  

Following the release of the book, Diaspora Dialogues arranged for a joint reading by all the emerging authors featured in TOK 5 at the rock at Yorkville. It was an unusual experience, more of a photo-op than a real reading, but a few bystanders did come forward to hear us read. 

Niranjana Iyer reviewed TOK 5 on her blog (Brown Paper) and found my story “well-written but predictable.” I wrote to her protesting slightly, but she became a good friend and subsequently invited me to the Karma Reading series where I heard and met Rohinton Mistry (the only time I saw and heard the reclusive author read a short story).

All the emerging authors of TOK 5 with Nala Hopkinson

Jasmine D’Costa, whom I’d met in 2009, now announced the launch of Canadian Voices Volume II that she’d be editing and Robert Morgan’s BookLand Press would publish in 2010. I submitted a chapter on Ruksana, the mother, in my work in progress. She accepted it and even accepted another chapter for Indian Voices that she was editing and that CP Thomas, a former colleague turned publisher would publish under the 42 Bookz banner. 

Jasmine continued to play a significant role in my efforts to build my profile as an author. She published my work and also introduced me to authors and editors, among them  Fraser Sutherland, who edited my work initially and with whom I'd spiritedly argue over small and big issues. As an editor, he was softspoken but firm and generally succeeded in convincing me to come around to his point of view.

Canadian Voices Volume II was launched in September 2010 and Indian Voices was launched in 2011. I had the honour of having MG Vassanji and Nurjehan Aziz participate in the launch.

A decade in Toronto - 3

September 2008 - Che begins school

What is home? What makes a house a home? 

Home to me is a space that gives me the luxury to be myself, without any restrictions. Home is being with my family, enjoying their closeness in an unaffected, unpretentious way; the liberty to be quiet while being together. 

Home is the aroma of cooking, home is that little corner that is mine, where I can sit and read, write, or surf the net. Home is where Mahrukh and Che are. 

Over the last 56 years, I’ve lived in six homes. The fifth in my life and the first in Canada – 1117-1440 Lawrence Avenue West – is the one that we remember with great affection.

Our minds have an incredible and infinite ability to remember and recall places and people we love. We effortlessly edit unsavoury episodes and focus on the more pleasant experiences. Our first home in Toronto was apartment # 11 on the 11th floor of 1440 Lawrence Avenue West – at the intersection of Keele Street and Lawrence Avenue West.

It was the first time we were living in a skyscraper, with a view that was stunning, breathtaking and one that we just fell in love with. We’d stand in the postage stamp sized balcony for hours, and took hundreds of photographs on the ever-changing colours of the skyline at different times during the day and during the year. (This post has photographs of Lawrence Avenue West taken from our balcony at different times in a day and across four seasons). 

The home itself wasn’t much to talk about. It was functional at best. The saving grace was the large windows in both the living and the bedroom. The kitchen was small but separate. The washroom had a bathtub (the first bathtub we had in our home), and another first was the wooden flooring.

When we moved in, we had no furniture. On the first day, after moving in our luggage, we’d to go look for mattresses and took the route 41 TTC bus to Stockyards from Keele Street and got off at West Toronto Street where we saw a sign advertising ‘Cheap Mattresses’.

A Pakistani origin woman helped us get the right sized mattresses at the right price. We bought two mattresses and looked for a taxi to get them home, but being new to Toronto, we didn’t know what number to call.

Finally, an Indian Punjabi cabbie drove up to us and brought us back home. When he learnt that it was our first day in Toronto, he refused to charge us the cab fare. He told us that he worked in a factory and made good money but had been laid off and had since turned a cab driver.

This help from strangers became the theme of our lives for the next few years. In fact, it’d begun when we were in Mississauga. A Brampton Transit bus driver (a turbaned Sikh) took a detour just to drop us off near the place we wanted to go. The place wasn’t on the route, but neither he nor other passengers seemed to mind that he took a detour.

Soon after moving in, Maggie, who I introduced in the previous post, and who brought us to the new apartment, also introduced us to some families who lived in these two buildings. Mahindra and Nisha and their daughter; Mahesh and Sunita and their children; Royce and Reena and their children included us in their group and have remained Mahrukh’s friends over the last decade. Other families who came subsequently to 1440 or 1442 (Sati and Kamalnandalan, and their daughters; and Selvi and Ishwar) also became Mahrukh’s friends. 

Unbeknown to us, our new home turned out to be in a South Asian ghetto, albeit a vertical one and not a horizontal one that we'd seen (and lived) in India. I first realised it when I saw a sign in Gujarati script inside the elevators requesting residents not to spit. Each of the 13 floors (although for superstitious reasons the buildings didn’t have a 13th floor) had over 25 apartments ranging from one bedroom to two bedrooms.

A majority of the families living there were from South Gujarat (south of Ankleshwar up to Vapi) and spoke a dialect of Gujarati that my grandmother spoke. Surprisingly, the families were both Hindus and Muslims and in 1440 the Muslim families had even turned an apartment into a prayer room.

In the summer months, nearly every senior person who lived in these twin buildings came down to enjoy the temperate weather and gossip. There’d be a few hundred people on the green lawns between the two buildings. It was community interaction like I’d never seen before, and it made me uneasy. I never mingled with my neighbours. I hadn’t flown a few thousand kilometres for this, or so I thought, little realizing that there really was no escaping them.

In cold Canada, where living spaces have to be kept airtight, the aroma of Indian cooking remained trapped forever on all the floors and permeated everywhere. Our clothes and bodies reeked of spicy Indian food.

Initially, I was unaware of it, and then when I did realize it, was briefly embarrassed, and then turned defiant. Food was part of my culture. I didn’t have to be defensive or apologetic about my culture; that was the whole point of being in Canada, wasn’t it?

Living in Canada also meant sharing responsibilities at home for all the unending chores. Mahrukh took charge of cooking, and I took charge of doing the dishes and the laundry. For laundry, I’d have to take our clothes every Sunday morning to the building’s basement to giant washers and dryers. It was an unpleasant task because the laundry room was always crowded.

Che's first day at school

Towards the end of August 2008, the three of us walked to the Amesbury Middle School to inquire about Che’s admission. Unlike in India, where you’d find someone at a public institution (such as a school) even when it’s closed, there was nobody at the Amesbury Middle School. I called and left a message seeking information about the admission process. The residents in our building had misled us into believing that Che would have to repeat a year in Canada.

When the school began after Labour Day in September 2008, the three of us went again to complete the admission procedure. He was placed in Grade 6. He looked smart in his new school uniform and confident to face new challenges in a new land. Slowly and gradually, we were settling into a new home, and Che was the first one to hit the ground running. His parents had yet to find jobs, but he was already in school. In many ways, he became a better integrated Canadian sooner than his parents. 

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Thank you: Yoko Morgenstern, Debra Black, Farzana Doctor, Yogesh Sharma, Haresh (Mike) Mehta, Anita Shiwnath

A decade in Toronto - 1

2018 is a milestone in our lives – it’s our tenth year in Toronto.

Applying for immigration - March 2002

In 2001, we decided to immigrate to Canada. In March 2002, we signed up with an immigration agent. We were promised that we’d be in Canada in 18 months. Mahrukh, with her Master’s degree, had a better score, so she became the main applicant, and I became her accompanying spouse. Che, who was all of five-years-old, was excited as all children are when they see their parents are happy doing stuff together that keeps them excited and smiling.

However, after 18 months when nothing happened, we decided to change the agent. Another 18 months went by and nothing happened, and it seemed like nothing would happen forever. You can’t live in a limbo or stop living. Our hope of ever leaving India receded and we reconciled to our life in Bombay. 

At the Pearson Airport 12 July 2008, just after landing.
Our first photo in Canada

The wait continued, and by 2008, we'd all but given up hope of ever coming to Canada. By then, we'd set our roots in our new home in Powai, where Mahrukh and Che made new friends. Then in March 2008, six long years after we'd applied, we got our landing papers, and by July we were all ready to permanently leave India.

But, leaving India permanently is impossible. An Indian can never leave India. As they rightly say, you can take an Indian out of India, but you can’t take India out of an Indian. As it turned out, while we physically left India, spiritually we never could. Emotionally, we remain in India even today. Paradoxically, our bond with India is stronger now, after being outside for ten years, than it was when we were in India.  

First grocery bill
12-07-08

I have often asked myself why I wanted to leave India. The answer is straightforward and therefore complex. I wanted to live in a world where our son would be able to decide what he wanted to be without any pressure or unnecessary influence. I wanted to live in a world where I could start afresh in my relationship with Mahrukh. When we applied to immigrate, our marriage was young. Today, we are a few years away from celebrating our 25th anniversary.

Did I achieve my objectives? I believe so.

Toronto has changed our lives for the better. There are obvious and tangible benefits of living in a developed city that is looking at the future without being shackled by the past. It is fun to be in Toronto at a time when it is firmly anchored to the future and is investing all its resources to ensure that it will continue to be among the best places in the world.

As everyone who knows me knows I don’t own a car (and never have and never will). While in Bombay, I dreaded the commute from home to work and back on the city’s famous suburban trains. The experience of using public transit in Toronto and across the GTA is so much more pleasant, and it promises to get better.

But I don’t want to make this into a comparison about my former and present home. This about my decade in Toronto. I refrain from calling it my decade in Canada because I've not been anywhere outside of the GTA in the last decade, except on a short five-day tour of Montreal, Ottawa, and Quebec City.

I've become a Torontonian, or so I’d like to believe. I know some parts of the city through its public transit, and through TTC’s extensive network of bus routes. I say some parts because it’s impossible to know a city completely in geographical terms. But one can live in a city and become one with its ethos. Toronto’s philosophy is acceptance. 

A new home - March 2013

Yes, there is a glaring absence of equality in terms of opportunity, and there is unacknowledged but evident racism in many spheres. But, by and large, I live in a city where a majority of its inhabitants try to warmly embrace the new and the unfamiliar, despite stray incidents of intolerance. In these ten years, I'd like to believe that I've attempted to become more accepting of differences than before, less prejudiced, less intolerant and less bigoted. 

It's also the tenth year of this blog. I launched the blog in December 2008 just to create an avenue for myself to write. In the last decade, I've blogged every week and never felt that it was a chore.  

We're Canadian citizens - August 2014

Today, I also want to acknowledge a few friends who made our lives easier in Toronto. They are: MG Vassanji, Nurjehan Aziz, Puneet S. Kohli, Asha Luthra, Satish Thakkar, Helen Walsh, Jasmine D’Costa, Joyce Wayne, Gavin Barrett, Tahir Gora. There are many more, and I’ll acknowledge them in 2018 as I’ll be writing about my decade in Toronto frequently this year.

Visit to Niagara

When you are face the enormity of nature, in its exquisite beauty, there’s nothing that you can do but stand dumbstruck and gape in wonder.

You do that when you are at the Niagara Falls.

There couldn’t have been a better way to celebrate my 47^th birthday – first in Canada – than at the Niagara Falls.

The journey was impromptu – as most things are in my family. We decided to take the Via Train because Che was keen to go by train. Unfortunately, it turned out to be an Amtrack train and Che was distinctly displeased because it, as he said, looked like Mumbai’s local trains from outside.

The journey wasn’t too long – just a little over an hour-and-a-half. Then a quick taxi ride and we were at the falls. 

I had expected many people. Any tourist place in India would have at least a few hundred thousand tourists from both across India and across the world. At Niagara, there weren’t. Half the shops at the shopping mall near the falls were closed. The reason: It was bitterly cold even though March 20 was the first official day of spring.

The first impression I got of Niagara at the railroad station was that I was in a small town in Uttar Pradesh. Mahrukh felt the station resembled Lucknow railway station; except that there weren’t any people present. Lucknow's railway station is grand. 

Niagara's railroad station, I felt, resembled Bahedi, a small town on the foothills of Nainital that I visited twice in the early 1980s when I was trying to fulfill my father’s unfulfilled ambition of becoming a chartered accountant.

Thankfully, after a few years I gave up trying to do something I didn’t want to, and to his credit, Meghnad supported me wholeheartedly as I became a journalist.

I’m sure Bahedi must be a much bigger and bustling town today. But in the early 1980s it was a sleepy one-train town that probably grew near a sugar factory.

Sorry for that digression. I'm getting old and I reminiscence more than I should. 

The falls are the force and fury of nature in all its untamed violence. We had seen nothing like this before. 

The closest that I can think of are the the Dhaundhar falls on the Narmada. Mahrukh quickly pointed out that I was merely being India-obsessed and not real. She’s right. Niagara is incomparably amazing.

You’ve seen the video along with this blog entry.  Even in an amateur video the magnificence of the fall is all too evident.

Then we sat in a 50-meter high Ferris wheel, which got Mahrukh all excited and then we went a few miles out of Niagara Falls into the US territory – not crossing the border – but the cell phone service switched over to the US and reached the butterfly conservatory. 

I’ve already put some of the photographs on the blog (the right panel). This was an unexpectedly wonderous experience. Tropical butterflies from across the world in a climate-controlled transparent dome - a sort of a hothouse.

Our barometer of whether a place is good or not is how Che reacts to the place; and after initial diffidence, he got involved and loved every moment we were there.

A cab driver – from Newfoundland – took us to the conservatory and brought us back to the railroad station. He found my fascination for our apartment at the intersection of two of Toronto’s busiest streets – Keele and Lawrence Avenue West – quite odd. That's not surprising. Most Canadians prefer quieter areas to live. 

We spoke about the Sikorsky helicopter tragedy last week that killed 18 Newfoundlanders.

The return journey was also by Amtrack. We’re already planning a trip to Montreal. Che says Amtrack can’t be going there! He’s keen we do the Toronto-Vancouver trip. Maybe in a couple of years.