A decade in Toronto - 4

Time to shave off the beard

In our second month in Canada, we moved to a new home. However, Mahrukh and I were still unemployed. Our neighbourhood family friends helpfully guided us in our efforts to settle in Toronto and get jobs.

Completing Costi's Employment Readiness Program

We’d go walk down south on Keele Street to an internet café called unimaginatively Keele Computers to surf the internet, check emails and apply for jobs. We also went to the Lawrence Mall at the Career Foundation, a provincial employment and settlement centre, to meet employment counsellors and to look for jobs. By now, we were looking for any kind of work. We also enrolled in an employment readiness program at Costi. Again, Mahrukh’s amiable personality helped her make friends.

In August, I went to meet an employment counsellor at Access Employment in Mississauga. Mary Rose De Luca, the counsellor, turned out to be a young Filipino-Canadian who looked at my resume and the commented that I should consider shaving off my beard. “It (the beard) makes you look older than your age, and you’ll have a better chance getting a job without a beard," she said.

By now, I was desperate. The funds that we got from India were quickly depleting. The cost of living in the developed world was steep, steeper than what we thought it’d be, and what had seemed like a small fortune in India that we got with us to Canada was nearly over. 

Incidentally, I’ve often wondered about immigrant success stories where a newcomer lands in this land of opportunities with next to nothing in his (always a ‘his’, seldom a ‘her’) pocket, and then makes millions in next to no time. We came with what I thought was a fairly respectable sum of money by Canadian standards, and we had reached rock bottom in two months.

Before arriving here, I’d made a pledge that I’d always maintain reserve funds to buy our air tickets back home for the first three years, just in case we’d have to leave in a hurry. And by August-end, we’d reached that level.

I took Mary Rose De Luca’s advice seriously and one evening in August 2008, I shaved off my beard. I continued to keep the moustache for a couple of weeks but subsequently shaved that off, too.

With or without a beard, employment continued to be elusive. I continued to meet Canadians of Indian origin who’d been here longer and were established in their professions. Two of them have become lifelong friends – Gavin Barrett and Sunil Rao. Sunil invited me to write for the newspaper he edited – South Asian Focus and published my news report on car insurance in GTA. Sunil also got me on South Asian Focus television. This was an extremely morale-boosting experience.

Michelle Mendonca, a newcomer we got to know when we were attending a settlement workshop in Bombay, introduced me to Gavin. I’ll remain forever thankful to her for that introduction. Gavin is an archetypal good guy. He helps everyone and makes strangers his friends. There aren’t too many like him in our world. If there were, our world would be a better place.

He introduced me to his friends in advertising and marketing (Ramesh Nilakantan, Ishan Ghosh, Albert Yue and others), and told me about the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce (ICCC), a local bilateral trade promotion organisation that was looking for an Executive Director.  I immediately applied for the job. Gavin also introduced me to Nick Noorani, the publisher of Canadian Immigrant magazine (I’ll write about Nick in the next post).

Meeting Gavin was serendipitous. We share many interests such as our love for our hometown Bombay, and our love for literature. Gavin is a fine, sensitive poet and a decade later, we came together to launch a reading series that he’s transformed into a vibrant platform for creative folks to come together and share their creative expressions. Read a previous post about Gavin here: When Gavin met John

However, by September 2008, after we had celebrated Che's first birthday in Canada, and he'd started his middle school, I had no option but to look for a survival job and I examined the two easily available options – telemarketing or security guard. I preferred the latter because I couldn’t imagine myself trying to talk to strangers on the phone and sell them stuff.

I enrolled in a security training institute – Iron Horse Security – and got myself a provincial licence to work as a security guard. The agency also found me a job at Paragon Security, where I was put through a two-day training session again and then I was appointed as a security officer at Village Terraces, a condo on 260 Heath Street West, near St. Clair West subway station.

This was a life-changing experience. I began working in September 2008 and continued until April 2009. In that span of seven months, I discovered Canada. As a middle-aged person, I was put on the night shift, which began at 11:00 pm and ended at 7:00 am. Shawn Foote, a much-younger man, was my supervisor, and Thomas Menyoli, a newcomer from Cameroon, was my other colleague. Shawn did the morning shift. Thomas the second shift, and I was assigned the night shift.

My duties were simple. I had to sit at a concierge desk at the main entrance of the condo and greet residents and visitors coming to the building. Every hour, I was expected to step outside and walk around the condo, every three hours or thereabouts, I was to walk all the eleven floors. 

Early morning at around 3:30 am, the newspaper distributors came in to deliver the newspapers. The superintendent, Franka, a warm-hearted but tough woman, drove up at 5:00 am and Shawn reached the condo about 15 minutes before his shift began to relieve me.

The only difficult part of the night shift was the keeping awake part. I think one of the biggest paradoxes of life in one’s middle ages is that when you want to sleep, you can’t, and when you want to stay awake, you can’t. It’s difficult to stay awake between 3:00 am and 6:00 am.

However, in about two weeks, Shawn changed my shift to the evening one. I began at 3:00 pm and got off at 11:00 pm. He told me that he found me better at interacting with the residents and that those skills could be better utilized during the evening hours, which is busy. He also got my pay hiked to $12 an hour (from minimum wage).

Many homeowners and residents of the condo became my friends. Many would stop by on their way home, or on their way out to walk their dogs and chat with me. Many shared their hobbies, some gave lend me books and magazines, and nearly all of them treated me with the kind of respect that one has for a member of one’s family. All of them perhaps knew that I was doing this job because I had nothing else in hand.

The condo had a library that stacked with books. This library introduced me to Canadian authors. I’d heard (like every book lover in the world) and read some of the big names such as Margaret Atwood,  Alice Munro, MG Vassanji, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaatje, but this library introduced me to such exquisite writers as Isabel Huggan. The condo also had a gym in the basement an outdoor swimming pool. It also had an electric barbeque which the security guard was to switch on and off. 

It was while I was on duty at the condo that a resident – Rita (I forget her last name), who taught at Ryerson – came down one evening and told me to accompany her outside. As we stepped out of the building, I saw everything swathed in white.  She wanted me to experience my first snow in Canada. It was a mesmerising experience. We stood quietly for some time and then walked back hurriedly because it was cold.

I’ve written and spoken about my experience at the condo on different occasions. Here’s a link to a piece that I did for the Diaspora Dialogues (I’ll write about DD, a little later): My first Christmas in Toronto.

This is how I concluded the piece (which was originally published in the Canadian Immigrant magazine; I’ll write about CI a little later):

Within three months of working as a security guard, my home had furniture I hadn’t paid for and a TV set. I had learnt soft skills that I wouldn’t have learnt even if I had paid a handsome fee. But more than all this, I had a large and caring family of over a hundred residents.

They didn’t know each other, but they all knew me, and they all cared for my wellbeing. Six months ago, when we had landed in Toronto, we didn’t know anyone. Now, I had a family.

The first year is the most difficult one for a newcomer in Canada. Thanks to all the generous and large-hearted people at 260 Heath Street W. Toronto, my family managed to survive the first year in style.

Howard Karel, Myrna Freedman, David and Jane Raymont – all residents of the condo have continued to exchange emails occasionally even though I’ve ceased to be a security guard at the condo. In 2016, when my debut novel was published, I gave my first public reading at the condo, which the Toronto Star covered and published on the day the novel was launched. Read about it here:  An immigrant security guard's triumphant homecoming

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Thank you: Antanas Sileika, Yudhvir Jaidwal, Katherine Govier, Neena Gupta, Imtiaz Seyid, Aditya Jha

The Elizabeth Stories

The best period of one’s life is from childhood to adolescence. There’s no care in the world, and everything’s just fine. 

As we grow older, we tend to romanticize that period of our lives and create myths and mythologies around that period of our lives to make it seem more interesting than it really was.

This is especially so when we narrate that period of our lives to our children when they are of that age.  Most of the times, the stories that we remember of our childhood are either completely fabricated or at least partially, with the more tantalizing bits either added or deleted from the narrative.

The reality of everyone’s life is never ever as exciting as it is made out to be. Quite often we are just too embarrassed to talk about our childhood because of some deeply disturbing events that may have occurred which we try rather desperately (and unsuccessfully) to hide, even from ourselves.

I just read Isabel Huggan’s The Elizabeth Stories, which I borrowed from the library at The Village Terraces, the condominium where I did my first job in Canada.

I'm unlikely to return to that place though I’ll certainly return the few books that I have borrowed. 

In addition to some wonderful people that I will sorely miss, and I'm sure they'll miss me, too. I’m also going to miss the library – I wish all condos in the world had such libraries.

Huggan’s book is a thinly veiled autobiography. Her words bring alive the themes of childhood that we all experience only to forget.  Elizabeth’s stories are about her childhood, and Huggan remembers them in excrucating details. They are larger-than-life on occasions and insignificant at times; but always compelling told.  

These are stories that leave us feeling that childhood injustices have no dénouement; they turn into stinging memories that haunt us for the rest of our lives.

Mid-way through the book, you begin to identify with Elizabethh. Whether you’re a man or a woman, as a child growing up you’re bound to have experienced what Elizabeth does. You could’ve grown up in Garten (somewhere in Ontario) or in Pune (in India). We’ve all experienced those little hurts from which we think we will never fully recover, and the little joys that we want to last for a little bit longer.

Elizabeth realizes – or imagines – that her parents are just too embarrassed about her clumsy ways. She says about her father, “I clearly and absolutely saw how much he wanted me to be a son. And what he had was a daughter who wasn’t even very good at being a girl.”  

She never outgrows her separateness from her parents, felt by all children of that age and felt more acutely by Elizabeth. Yet she equally acutely realizes what an odd mixture she is of her parents... “thinking how much I sounded like my father but how like Mavis (her mother) it was to go and lie down. I could never escape them.”

The stories reach out and touch us in an indescribably mellow manner and leave us exulting at having rediscovered something about our own past howsoever mundane it may have been. Elizabeth’s life is all about the plain and ordinary business of growing up.

The three stories that really stand out in the collection are Into the Green Stillness, Sorrows of the Flesh and Secrets. The characters that stand out are Jerry Wheeling, the hyperactive teacher and coach for whom Elizabeth develops a mammoth-sized crush, and who turns out to be a wife-beating misogynist; Esther Bauman, the Mennonite ‘Girl’ who gets so scared when Elizabeth kisses her smack on her lips that she immediately resigns and leaves their home, and of course Mavis – Elizabeth’s mother.

The Elizabeth Stories is a charming book, in a different sort of way; it's not The Wonder Years. 

Among the Cities

Howard Karel is a rare kind of advertising professional – he’s well read, articulate and a thinking person. There’s not an iota of vacuity in him that generally proliferates in a normal advertising professional. He’s a board member at The Village Terraces, the condominium where I worked as security officer. 

Sometime ago, I was talking to him about my assignment on multiculturalism in Canada and he gave me Jan Morris’s book Among the Cities (Viking 1985, Penguin 1986). “Read the chapter on Toronto,” he said, “It’ll explain many issues you’ve been grappling with.”

Jan Morris is a legendary British (Welsh) writer who is unfortunately better known not for her writing but for her sex reassignment from a male to female.  Morris’s piece on Toronto in Among the Cities is titled Second Prize. She wrote the piece in 1984 when Toronto celebrated its 150th year (its celebrating its 175th year in 2009).

The piece was originally published in Saturday Night and it was titled Canadians are nothing if not fair… 

Morris describes Toronto in many different and varied ways, touching upon issues of multiculturalism, ethnic enclaves, people, places, habits, behaviour and all that is characteristically Torontonian (I’d say to an extent that applies to Canada, too, but I don’t know Canada well enough to make that claim).

I hope you enjoy reading the selection as much as I did compiling it.

• “… (Toronto) is the emblematic immigrant destination of late 20^th century…which is nevertheless one of the most highly disciplined and tightly organized cities in the Western world.”
• “Toronto has come late in life to cosmopolitanism…and as a haven of opportunity it is unassertive. No glorious dowager raises her torch over Lake Ontario, summoning those masses yearning to breathe free…”
• “The promise of Toronto was promise of a more diffuse, tentative, not to say bewildering kind. On a modest building near the harbor-front I happened to notice the names of those entitled to parking space outside: D. Iannuzzi, P. Iannuzzi, H. McDonald, R. Metcalfe and F. Muhammad. ‘What is this place?’ I inquired of people passing by. ‘Multicultural TV,’ they said, backing away nervously. ‘Multi-what TV?’ I said, but they had escaped by then – I had yet to learn that nothing ends a Toronto conversation more quickly than a supplementary question.”
• “Multiculturalism! I had never heard the word before, but I was certainly to hear it again, for it turned out to be the key word, so to speak, to contemporary Toronto. As ooh-la-la is to Paris, and ciao to Rome, and nyet to Moscow, and hey you’re looking great to Manhattan, so multiculturalism is to Toronto. Far more than any other migratory cities, Toronto is all things to all ethnicities. The melting-pot conception never was popular here, and sometimes I came to feel that Canadian nationality itself was no more than a minor social perquisite, like a driving licence or spare pair of glasses. Repeatedly I was invited to try the Malaysian vermicelli at Rasa Sayang, the seafood pierogi at the Ukrainian Caravan, or something Vietnamese in Yorkville, but when I ventured to suggest one day that we might eat Canadian, a kindly anxiety crossed my host’s brow. ‘That might be more difficult,’ he said.
• “…multiculturalism, I discovered, did not mean that Toronto was all brotherly love and folklore. On the contrary, wherever I went I heard talk of internecine rivalries, cross-ethnical vendetta…there turned out to be darkly conspiratorial side to multiculturalism.”
• “…this is not the sort of fulfillment I myself wanted of Toronto. I am not very multicultural, and what I chiefly yearned for in this metropolis was the old grandeur of the North, its size and scale and power, its sense of wasteland majesty…now and then I found it…names such as Etobicoke, Neepawa Avenue, Air Atonabee or the terrifically evocative Department of North.”
• “…the pursuit of happiness is not written into the Canadian constitution…”
• “Toronto seems to me, in time as in emotion, a limbo-city…It looks forward to no millennium, back to no golden age. It is what it is, and the people in its streets, walking with that steady, tireless, infantry-like pace that is particular to this city, seem on the whole resigned, without either bitterness or exhilaration, to being just what they are…”
• “Among the principal cities of the lost British Empire, Toronto has been one of the most casual (rather than the most ruthless) in discarding the physical remnants of its colonial past…Nobody could possibly mistake this for a British city now…one the other hand there is no mistaking this for a city of the United States, either…Torontonians constantly snipe at all things American…(but) it is not a free-and-easy, damn-Yankee sort of city – anything  but…even its accents are oddly muted, made for undertones and surmises rather than certainties and swank.”
• “Toronto is the capital of the unabsolute. Nothing Is utter here, except the winters I suppose, and the marvelous expanse of the lake. Nor much of it crystal clear. To every Toronto generalization there is an exception, a contradiction, or an obfuscation.”
• “Toronto preoccupations can be loftily local…”
• “In many ways Toronto appears…even now…almost preposterously provincial…yet it is not really provincial at all. It is a huge, rich and splendid city, metropolitan in power… (and) why not? Toronto is Toronto and that is enough…it has all the prerequisites of your modern major city…yet by and large it has escaped the plastic blight of contemporary urbanism, and the squalid dangers, too.”
• “If ‘multiculturalism’ does not key you in to Toronto, try ‘traditionalism’…the real achievement of Toronto is to have remained itself…”
• “…if fate really were to make me an immigrant here I might be profoundly unhappy. Not because Toronto would be unkind to me. It would be far kinder than New York, say, or Sidney down under. It would not leave me to starve in the street, or bankrupt me with medical bills, or refuse me admittance to discos because I was black. No, it would be subtler oppression than that – the oppression of reticence. Toronto is the most undemonstrative city I know, and the least inquisitive.”
• “Sometimes I think it is the flatness of the landscape that causes this flattening of the spirit…sometimes I think it must be the climate…could it be the permanent compromise of Toronto, neither quite this or altogether that, capitalist but compassionate, American but royalist, multicultural but traditionalist.”
• “This is a city conducive to self-doubt and introspection. It is hard to feel that Torontonians…share in any grand satisfaction of spirit. I asked immigrants of many nationalities if they liked Toronto, and though at first, out of diplomacy or good manners they nearly all said yes, a few minutes of probing generally found them less than enthusiastic…never because the citizenry has been unkind or because the city is unpleasant: only because, in the course of its 150 years of careful progress, so calculated, so civilized, somewhere along the way Toronto lost, or failed to find, the gift of contact or of merriment.”

Image: Photoshop filters on image taken from:
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