A decade in Toronto - 29

Tahir Gora and Haleema Sadia have been successfully running the multicultural television channel TAG TV now for nearly five years. I have had the privilege of knowing them ever since I was involved with the Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts; Munir Parvez introduced me to them.

I found Tahir to be a soft-spoken, decent human being with strong convictions on human rights and civil liberties. He openly supports the Conservative Party of Canada and holds hawkish views on religious radicalisation and is critical of those he considers are apologists for such forces in developed societies of the west. However, he is also a thoroughly professional journalist and never lets his personal political views come in the way of the news coverage on his channel.

In 2015, at a get together that I organised when Kumar Ketkar came visiting, Tahir suggested that I should do a program on his channel. He suggested a name, Living Multiculturalism, to the show and said I should interview authors and poets in Toronto who live and create in the multicultural milieu. It was exciting and I at once agreed. 

I figured I could run the show at least for a year just talking to my friends. And that’s how it turned out – I did most of the interviews in 2016 and then took a prolonged break before recommencing in 2017. Unfortunately, my health concerns prevented me from doing more than 25 interviews.

I interviewed the following creators

• Diana Tso, playwright, actor
• Dawn Promislow, author
• Danila Botha, author
• Amatoritsero Ede, author, poet, editor
• Sang Kim, chef, author, curator, tutor
• Farzana Doctor, author, curator
• Katherine Govier, author, activist, Rasha Elendari, Camila Uriona, Shoe Project participants
• Loren Edizel, author
• Mehdi Rezania, musician, professor
• Jael Richardson, author, curator, artistic director
• Michael Fraser, poet
• Haniely Pableo, musician
• Lisa de Nikolits, author 
• Banoo Zan, poet
• Jasmine D’Costa, author
• Ali Adil Khan, curator
• Andrea Thompson, spoken word artist
• Safia Fazlul, author
• Meena Chopra, poet, artist
• Ravi Naimpally, musician
• Sid Sawant, actor
• Tahir Gora, author, journalist
• Daisuke Takeya, artist
• Tushan Unnadkat, curator
• Mariam Pirbhai, author

Through these interviews, we attempted to create space for voices that are generally ignored by the mainstream Canada. In retrospect, I think it’s attempts such as these that truly make multiculturalism in Canada meaningful and while I don’t claim that Living Multiculturalism was able to encompass Canadian multiculturalism in all its complex facets, it was a small step in that direction.

The entire series is available here: Living Multiculturalism

My interviews on TAG TV assisted in creating a buzz around the launch of my debut novel Belief. Mawenzi House quietly announced it in July 2016 on twitter. TAGV TV and Tahir created a special program for the launch of my debut novel Belief on TAG TV and invited prominent authors and poets from the South Asian community to discuss the novel.

Haleema, who’d actually read the book, conducted the interview and asked incisive questions. Then, she opened up the session for discussions. Many participants discussed several aspects of the theme of the book – the turmoil that a family experiences when their son is involved in what the west describes as a terrorist plot.

It was important for me to have this platform that Tahir created for me because I was able to reach out to a religious minority (both in Canada and in India) that is stigmatized and often ostracised for no other reason except that they belong to a religion.

And to my satisfaction, I realized that I’d succeeded in portraying a recurring phenomenon in our societies from a different perspective that at least compelled some readers to look at it more as a human tragedy rather that from a binary prism of good or evil.

In 2016, the same year that my debut novel was launched, there were a number of great books that I read. Three that stood out were Andre Alexi’s Fifteen Dogs, Tahir Gora’s Rang Mahal, and Ruchira Gupta’s Rivers of Flesh.

Alexi’s novel was published in 2015, but I read it only in 2016. It is, in my humble opinion, one of the best novels of this decade. At a particularly poignant moment in the novel, Majnoun, one of the 15 canines who has developed humanlike faculties of thought and speech, thanks to a wager between Hermes and Apollo, describes to Nira, his female human friend, what to a male canine is a perfect dilemma: to choose between two compelling desires of sex and hunger.

– Do dogs have stories? Nira asked him one day.

– Of course, said Majnoun.

– Oh, Maj! said Nira. Please tell me one.

Majnoun agreed and began.

There – There is the smell of bitch, but I am before a wall. The smell is strong, and I am going mad. I can’t eat. I can’t drink. The wall is too thick to knock down and it goes for miles in this direction and for miles in that direction. I dig under and I dig and I dig. The master cannot see my digging, so I dig until there is air beneath the wall and the smell of the bitch is stronger than it was before. I call to the bitch but there is no answer. But there is air beneath the wall. Should I go on digging? I don’t know, but I dig even though I can smell the master’s food from his house. The smell of bitch is stronger and stronger. I call out, but now I am hungry.

Here Majnoun stopped.

– Is that it? Asked Nira.

– Yes, said Majnoun. Do you not like it?

– Well, it’s…different, said Nira. But it doesn’t really have an ending.

– It has a very moving ending, said Majnoun. Is it not sad to be caught between desires?

Tahir’s Rang Mahal is equally pathbreaking. I read the Hindi translation of the original Urdu; it deserves to be translated into English and other languages.

Rang Mahal challenges common precepts of fiction on all its fundamentals – there is no plot, there is no linearity, no continuity and no conclusions; there is a cinematic depiction of the external surroundings that at once stimulates one’s senses – the reader experiences smells, colours, taste and touch in all its sensuousness as well as its coarseness.

The narrative also dwells deeply into the thought processes of the characters, revealing a subliminal depth and liminal uncertainty. The characters are sophisticated and yet raw, uncouth, seething with passionate anger. Their anger is directed more against themselves rather than at the world. This anger has its roots in the utter hopelessness that they experience as individuals (not necessarily as immigrants) who find themselves in situations that they help create but also wish to quickly and permanently escape from forever.

Activist Ruchira Gupta compiled a collection of Indian short stories on the theme of sex workers. Rivers of Flesh and other stories: The prostituted women in Indian short stories. The unifying theme of all the stories is the inherently exploitative relationship that prostitution imposes on the woman.

Ujjal Dosanjh’s memoirs Journey After Midnight was also launched in Toronto in 2016. It narrates the harrowing attack on him for speaking out openly against Khalistani terrorists. I also read the phenomenal The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. It is quite simply a masterpiece.

“Jay toon bakvaas bund naa kita aseen tenun sodh diangay”

'If you do not shut up, we will straighten you out'

Separatism in Punjab was and is a complex issue, and it is impossible to contextualize it in black and white binary. The Indian state’s record of human rights violation for a prolonged period has to be juxtaposed while understanding the rise of separatism in Punjab especially from the late 1970s.

It took hardnosed ‘counterterrorism’ measures (led by the controversial supercop KPS Gill), resulting in further human rights violations, to force peace in the troubled state. Today, the embers of separatism may not be glowing as sharply as they did in the past, but the sense of injustice continues to linger, especially among the global Sikh population.

And there is justifiable anger over the absence of justice to the victims of the anti-Sikh carnage in Delhi following Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984.

The demand for justice continues to figure sporadically in Canadian public life. For instance, just last month NDP’s Member of Provincial Parliament Jagmeet Singh had introduced a private members’ motion, reading, “That, in the opinion of this House, the Government of Ontario should recognize the November 1984 state organized violence perpetrated against the Sikhs throughout India as genocide.” Despite the tacit support of the Progressive Conservatives, the Liberal government ensured the NDP motion’s defeat.

On the other end of the political spectrum is Ujjal Dosanjh. He has consistently opposed resorting to extremism and terror as a solution to the many and vexatious problem that the state of Punjab faced, and its fallout on the Sikh community globally.

Dosanjh is among the most prominent contemporary Indo-Canadian leaders, who have had a long, illustrious and chequered career in serving the people. Unafraid to voice his opinions on fighting the scourge of terrorism, he has had to face consequences.

Dosanjh has ceaselessly and strongly spoken out against the Khalistani separatists operating from Canada. He has fought them British Columbia, the province where he has had a fruitful life as a public servant and an elected representative both in the provincial legislature and as a representative in the federal parliament.

Dosanjh’s memoir Journey After Midnight India, Canada and the Road Beyond was released in Toronto this afternoon at a well-attended event organized jointly by the National Council for Indo-Canadians and the Canadian Thinkers Forum.

Dosanjh was accompanied by his wife Raminder. Speaking at the event, he said his father words “One may walk fewer steps in life, but one must always walk with dignity,” has been his personal credo that has sustained him throughout his life.

I’m reproducing an extract from the memoir that describes the attack on him that nearly killed him. There have been many more attacks on him subsequently, but this one made front-page headlines in India. 

Friday, February 8, 1985, was a morning like any other. I made lunch for the children. Rami had already fed them breakfast. She left for work earlier than I did. I dropped the boys at school, and the law office was busy as usual. Meb and I had five staff, so it was a lively place. I had a five-day personal injury trial scheduled to begin the following week in the Supreme Court of British Columbia; between seeing clients, I prepared for the trial. Sometime during the day, a man called our office and asked the receptionist what time I would be leaving. Upon being told 5:00 PM, he hung up. I thought someone had probably wanted to come and see me. That was not uncommon; some immigrants had not yet figured out that they needed to make an appointment, and many clients simply dropped by my office. I accommodated them whenever I could.

I packed two briefcases full of work for the weekend. Dave Barrett, Mike Harcourt, Wally Oppal and a couple of other friends were invited for dinner the following evening. Since my press conference in August of the previous year, I had spoken privately with them and many others. But fate would deny me the chance to welcome a former and future premier along with a future Attorney General to my house. I was about to confront its more ominous plans for me.

I left my office via the stairs at the north end of the building that led to the parking lot. From our office windows west, we could see our cars, but the stairs were poorly lit. Walking down those stairs I never felt the door would open to light.

It was dark out. Parking lots are never places that warm hearts, but this one was at least outdoors, and it rarely felt lifeless, since kids played in the alley after school. Across the alley were homes people by ordinary folks. I walked the width of the lot to my second-hand orange Renault Le Car. Unfortunately, Khalistanis had turned orange from the colour of sacrifice, of detachment from greed and fear, into a symbol of terror, fear and the intent to dismember India. I put my two briefcases on the ground and was fumbling in my pockets for the car keys when I heard footsteps running toward me. I wasn’t alarmed. I assumed it was a child playing in the alley. But then I heard the footsteps stop next to me. I turned my head and saw a tall, large, bearded man standing next to me with his hands raised over his head. In them, he clutched a thick iron bar.

The man pummelled my skull several times in quick succession. Instinctively, I put up my right hand to protect myself; it too got pummelled. I heard yelling, and then Meb was running toward us, his briefcase raised like a weapon. The man paused, tilting his head, and in that moment I picked up one of my briefcases and lunged at the man. He turned and ran into the alley, turning to look back as he escaped. I ran behind him a few steps, until Meb stopped me. There was a doctor in the same building as our law office, and Meb walked me there. As I lay on the doctor’s table, a threat from the day before, left in Punjabi on our home answering machine, flashed through my mind: “Jay toon bakvaas bund naa kita aseen tenun sodh diangay” – if you do not shut up, we will straighten you out.

Rami was unpacking the groceries she had brought home for dinner when the phone rang. It was Meb telling her I was hurt. She immediately called Bhaji. When she arrived, I was sitting up on the edge of the doctor’s table. She remembers me with the bloodied head, face and clothes, telling her, “I am okay.” Doctor Tam had cleaned and iced me as much as he could before the ambulance arrived to take Rami and me in Vancouver General Hospital.

I was wheeled into emergency, where a doctor stitched up my head wounds. He told me I was lucky to be alive. It took eighty-four stitches to sew my skull up. The gashes from the iron bar had formed deep Xs and Ys on my skull. If they had been any deeper, the doctor said, they would have threatened the integrity of my brain. Many of the cuts required two layers of stitches to close.