A decade in Toronto - 15

Truly, the better half

Debra Black interviewing me for the Toronto Star was one of the highlights of 2012. Joyce Wayne, who had temporarily moved to a condominium on Queen Street W, introduced me to Debra, the immigration reporter of the Star. Debra and Joyce were neighbours. And all of us were a part of the group that Joyce had started – published, soon-to-be-published and aspiring authors – at Depanneur, a restaurant that specialised in artisan cuisine, in Little Portugal on Dundas Street West.

The original group comprised Joyce, David Panhale, Dawn Promislow, Jasmine D’Costa, David Cozac, and Leslie Shimotakahara. The group moved away from Depanneur into different restaurants along Dundas West when it began to grow, when Sang Kim, Ava Homa and Debra Black joined.  Unfortunately, with all such impromptu writers’ group, it disbanded without a murmur.

Debra interviewed me because I guess she found my experiences as a newcomer to Canada fascinating. The story created some waves – giving me my Warhol-adjudged 15 minutes of fame. I reread the interview while writing this blog, and I think Debra has done a great job getting me to talk in details about things that I'd not have talked about if she hadn't asked; things that a decade later seem sort of significant. 

If you’re interested in reading it, click here: Star write-up.

My association with the MG Vassanji's and Nurjehan Aziz's Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts had widened my circle considerably. By now, I had a growing circle of writer friends and from other creative spheres such as theatre, the arts. These included Jasmine and Nitin Sawant, the husband-wife team that runs the SAWITRI theatre, producing some of the best South Asian theatre in Canada.

I’d met them the previous year at Rang Manch Canada’s multilingual theatre festival, and since then our camaraderie had grown. One of the most memorable performances that I’ve attended which SAWITRI produced in 2012 was Saree Kahaniyaan.  

Meena Chopra, the artist and poet, organised the launch of MG Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song’s Hindi translation called Qatil Ke Geet under the auspice of the Hindi Writers’ Guild. The highlight of this well-attended program was the literary critique of the novel by Shailja Saxena and Sharan Ghai, the stalwarts of the Hindi Writers' Guild.

Munir Parvaiz, who was one of the committee members of the Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts, gave me a Hindi translation of  Noor Zaheer's Urdu memoir about her father Sajjad Zaheer, an active member of the Communist movement in India, and one of the founders of Progressive Writers' Movement in India. Munshi Premchand presided over the first convention of the progressive writers in 1936.

Munir's Writers’ Forum organised a phone chat with Noor Zaheer, based in India. It was a fascinating conversation. Listening to Noor Zaheer speak about her father touched my heart – his simple message to his daughter was that there is no hardship or sacrifices in doing something you believe in. Sacrifice is only when you do something you have to, but don’t believe in.

VI Lakshmanan (better known as Lucky Lakshmanan) sent me through S. Kalyan Sundaram, a copy of the Prosperity and Peace for the Twenty-First Century by APJ Abdul Kalam. It is a compilation of the former President of India’s speeches.

I mention this here for two reasons – the first is I now work at the Canada India Foundation (CIF) and of course, the main reason is Kalam. He epitomizes the best of what India stands for and what it offered – a scholastic mixture of the science and culture, heritage and progress, inclusive ethos and forward thinking.

Kalam – the soft-spoken and the unassuming scientist – has given India and Indians a vision for the future – something that the country and its people could aspire to achieve if Indians put their mind to it. Read a passage from the book here: Tolerance.

Humber lecture

Two friends – Murali Murthy and George Abraham launched new ventures. Murali turned into a motivational coach and published several books. Murali supported me immensely during my initial years of struggle with the right sort of motivation.

George, who I’d known since our time together in Bombay as journalists, launched the New Canadian Media, an online news outlet that focused on the news of by for newcomers. It is one of the most significant contributions to Canadian media in recent times. Unfortunately, it's in dire need of funds and George is busy finding ways to keep it afloat.

Humber College invited me to address newcomers and give them career guidance. This was completely surprising. I was being considered an immigrant success story. 

In 2012, I also went to the reading series of the Shoe Project, a collection of memoirs of women immigrants about the shoes they wore (or brought with them) when they came to Canada. Katherine Govier, the novelist and activist, started working on the project in 2011 and produced the first reading series in 2012 at the Bata Shoe Museum. Two friends - Teenaz and Tanaz - were part of the project.

Those who have known me know that I’ve always admired MJ Akbar. I became a journalist reading non-stop Akbar’s Sunday magazine, his reportage, his coverage of the Hindi heartland of India, his books. In more ways than one would care to admit, he shaped journalism in India since the 1970s.

Anurag Chaturvedi, who’d worked with Akbar, had observed when Akbar launched the Asian Age that Aroon Puri (publisher of India Today) and Vineet Jain (publisher of Times of India) had proved that a publication doesn’t need an editor, and Akbar had proved that an editor didn’t need a publisher.

Akbar remained a must-read for me for over three-and-a-half decades, and this was despite the disquiet over his increasingly pro-BJP stance for many years. But my adulation ended abruptly and turned into an embarrassment when he formally joined the BJP as a spokesperson and then as a junior minister.

But before his saffronization, he visited Toronto to launch his book Tinder Box – The Past and Future of Pakistan. He delivered a talk at the Rotman School’s India Innovation Institute. He still came across as an unbiased historian (albeit who narrated history from an Indian perspective). 

I was to meet him again at the Munk Centre and got an opportunity to talk to him after his - expectedly - erudite lecture. I asked him to explain his pro-Modi stance.  He quoted the Qu'ran, and said the holy book of the Muslims identified three types of people - the believers, the non-believers and the hypocrites - the munafiqun, the group that is decried in Qu'ran as outward Muslim but who are secretly unsympathetic to the cause of Muslims and actively seek to undermine the Muslims community. Although he didn't explicate, it was clear to him where I belonged. And I was equally clear that given his newfound affection for the BJP, it was perhaps more applicable to him. 

That year, I also participated in a book discussion and launch of Rajiv Malhotra’s Being Different. Rajiv Malhotra is a controversial figure, standing resolutely to the right of the debate on India and all things Indian. His critics have accused him of plagiarism, and his supporters have hailed him as a saviour. I had the opportunity of talking to him briefly at the book launch held at the North York Centre’s city facility. He is a soft-spoken person who is convinced about his scholarship. But I found his book jargonic and unnecessary pedantic. 

With Che at the Malton bus terminal

2012 was also the centenary of Charles Dickens. There is no novelist greater than Dickens. The best novel ever is unquestionably Great Expectations.

And one of the most memorable events in our lives occurred in 2012. 


There are many reasons I'll remember Harpreet Sethi, but the number one reason why I will never forget him is that he invited Mahrukh to a program.

While inviting me to the launch of a fashion show that his entertainment company was organizing, and he insisted that my wife should accompany me. This was for the first time that anyone had invited Mahrukh. Ali took a photo of us together - it's one of the best of the two of us together. 

In September, while celebrating Che's birthday, we went did what we normally do - go on long bus rides. While waiting at the Malton bus terminal, Mahrukh took a photo of me and my son, which is one of my all time favourites. My son looks cool.

Interview with Veena Gokhale, author

Q: Your novel Land for Fatimah has excellent reviews, and reviewers have focused upon is your ability to turn issues that everyone is tired with and wary about – underdevelopment, dispossession, poverty – into an incredibly interesting story.  How did you weave such an intricate story from a subject that is so dry and academic? 

A: I didn’t even realize these were subjects that people found unappealing! Ah well. I have always had great respect for subsistence farmers, who have fed the world, often working against odds, even great odds, since humans took to agriculture. Commercial, large-scale farming is relatively new if you take the long view of human history. So when Fatimah, the subsistence farmer who has been thrown off her fertile land and forced to leave the little village of Ferun, along with members of her ethnic group called the Aanke, visited me from Storyland, I was delighted!

At the start of the novel all the Aanke relocate to different parts of Kamorga, an imaginary, east-African country that the story is set in. It is a heartbreaking process and Fatimah is determined to find new land so that her community can be united and farm together again. So there you have “the quest,” so fundamental to story building, and the stakes are high. 

Migration, forced or otherwise, is something everyone gets, especially nowadays. That is one of the key themes in the novel. On the one hand, readers want to know what will happen to Fatimah and her people. On the other, we have another person out of her comfort zone. Anjali, the heroine, is an Indo-Canadian, international development worker who is posted in Kamorga from Toronto. She represents the urban, professional expat, and though she has moved of her own volition, she too faces challenges. For one thing, she has dragged her 10-year-old son along, and he is not happy about the change.

Because of certain events in Anjali’s past, events that affected her powerfully, Anjali also identifies with Fatimah’s quest and now there are these two women, in an unusual friendship, on this quest together. So, we are into some familiar tropes, aren’t we? Anjali, though an outsider in Kamorga, knows the world of international development and grant writing and is a good ally for Fatimah. So they have this quest, but soon their quest is threatened, of course!

And there’s the villain or vamp, an interesting and complex one, in the form of Grace, Chair of the Board at Anjali’s NGO, who opposes Anjali. They have a tense relationship. And Anjali has a maid called Mary, a very sympathetic character, who has a challenge as well, a big one. The dilemmas of these characters, the revelation of their inner selves, as well as their joys, keep readers involved.

The landscape of fiction is so rich, lush and evocative, where you can show the complexity and the contradictions between characters, situations, systems. And motivations. Human motivations are always so fascinating, don’t you think? While at the same time there is play and humour and dream sequences. If you find your subject interesting you can make it interesting for the readers.

Q: It’s also obvious that your own experience of working as a journalist in Bombay and then working as a developmental worker in Tanzania has had a deep impact on you and it has transformed the novel; how much of is derived from your life, if at all.

A: I was passionate about my work in journalism and then my work with NGOs and I’d say the broad socio-political themes that the novel tackles come from real life. My frustration and anger at all the injustice, land grab, systemic inequality, greed, corruption, fuelled the narrative. You used to live in Bombay and will remember well the era of slum demolitions. The prologue of the novel, in fact, starts with the demolition of a slum in Bombay, the city where Anjali was born.

There’s an authorial voice coming through at the beginning of the novel which says: Some stories cannot be contained. They refuse to remain confined to a particular place, whispered by a select group of people. These stories must get out and wander, make themselves known, grab this ear and that. Such was the story of Fatima and the Aanke from Ferun.

Did I ever meet a Fatimah, a resilient, subsistence farmer who practices a made-up form of Sufism and lives in a compound with her many relatives? No. For that matter, I never witnessed a slum demolition either, though I read about them. My work in international development in Tanzania helped me portray the expat. milieu for sure, but my own NGO and its work was very different. I did have a nice maid called Mary, but the fictional Mary is way larger than life and ninety per cent made-up. And her intriguing son Gabriel is 100 per cent made up!

I also have this big question about what is the best way to bring about social change. Welfare state and policy change and slow evolution or a people’s revolution? Anjali is essentially liberal and represents the former view, while Hassan, the Marxist academic is for revolution. They argue, and they are also drawn to each other.

Q: Your short story collection Bombay Wali & Other Stories is about a Bombay that only lives in the memories. Would it be difficult for you to describe contemporary Bombay in a work of fiction because you don’t live there anymore?

A: I don’t actually agree that the Bombay evoked in Bombay Wali is so passé. Since the stories are either character driven or try to dive into the depths of a character, even if the plot is important, I feel there is a universal and timeless aspect. Also, there’s the cliché about India living in several eras at the same time, how the past is never quite erased and yet every new global trend gets reflected very quickly. I think it’s rather true.

Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, mostly set in a peak drug and prostitution area of Bombay, in the 1970s, got nominated for a Booker and Hilary Mantel won two Bookers for her literary works set in historical periods in Britan. I believe fiction can remain relevant for reasons quite different from non-fiction.

But to come to your question, I would not set a novel in Bombay/Mumbai or India now. A short story maybe. That ship has sailed and may even land in North America next!

Q: In both Land for Fatimah and Bombay Wali, what stands out is the remarkable finesse with which you develop characters. Grace in Fatimah and Feroza Billimoria in Bombay Wali stay etched in readers’ mind because of the way their character is developed. How do you do it?

A: Feroza in Bombay Wali was a popular character, going by what readers said. She came to me from Storyland, as did Grace; the literary gods are benevolent. At the same time, both are also inspired by real life. Many of us know a Feroza, in that she is the ageing sibling who is left behind to look after even more ageing parents while the brothers and sisters have gone off and made a life more centered on themselves elsewhere. So it’s quite a generic character, universal, but then Feroza is also very much a particular person with her professorial love for history and the fact that she takes a chance on real love, that of a professorial man. She goes to a jazz concert when a friend asks her, even though it’s not really her milieu.

I don’t know how I do it exactly as these folks appear and take hold of me and I do some reflection, sometimes a lot of it, and write a backstory sometimes and take character notes, at least I did for Grace as she was going to be with me through an entire novel. Often the characters arrive as “whole” people and all of them become “real” for me. Maybe it comes from observing life and people acutely and asking that question about motivation.

Grace has been remarked upon too, maybe because she is not one-dimensional, as villains can sometimes be. People working in NGOs, particularly leaders, tend to be idealistic, dedicated, opinionated, passionate about a cause. Grace is all that, but she also has her biases and blind spots. That makes her compellingly human.

Q: The writing process is obviously important to you because you are a painstaking author. Describe the process of constructing both a novel and a short story collection.

A: Wow! That’s a BIG question and I don’t know if I can do justice to it. I started writing the stories that made up Bombay Wali, which incidentally means a woman from Bombay, in the early 1990s. I had just come to Canada for the second and much longer time, to do a Masters. You know what a compelling city it is, and this may have been a way of reliving the experience and re-imagining it and also of letting go. I wrote my first story around age 8, so writing fiction has always been with me, sometimes in the background and sometimes in the foreground.

I keep rewriting, the most important part of being a writer, and then those rough edges smoothed out and the at times chaotic narrative acquires a flow and it all slowly comes together. Some stories come in flash and don’t change much, others evolve over time. And there’s always that obsession with words/language!

By the way, there was a novel in my 20s set in Bombay that I did not pull off and a second in my 30s set in a haunted house near Bombay that I did not pull off either!

I have belonged to writers’ groups and taken a course or two. I own and read books about the craft of fiction writing and it’s all helped, including being a journalist and writing to a deadline and to word count and getting edited and editing other people myself. For the novel, I got good, in-depth feedback from 4 people about the whole narrative and a couple of others on particular chapters. It was a complex plot indeed and required moving the sections and chapters around and of course a lot of editing. The plot itself came to me towards the end of 2016 (I was in Tanzania from 2015-2017) and though it was just a skeleton and it took a hell of a lot of work over three years to flesh out, it did not change in essence.

I am also very stubborn, and you need that. Writing fiction gives me a lot of pleasure. I would not do it otherwise as the rewards are not exactly worldly and it’s a strange life for sure!

Mirage – the Musical

Mirage – the Musical was a bravura performance of three talented artists – Enakshi Sinha, the dancer, Parag Ray, the singer and Nadeem Ali, the musician – who came together to produce a dance ballet depicting a woman’s love as expressed by four eternal lovers from Indian myths and mythologies, both modern and traditional.

The lovers were Heer, Chitrangada, Chandramukhi and Yogini – the selection of these lovers was eclectic, and the depiction of their angst was aimed at appealing to the diverse audience at Mississauga’s Living Arts Centre.

The story of Heer and Ranjha is the mainstay of Punjabi folklore across both sides of the artificial borders of Punjab.

Chitrangada is a character from the epic Mahabharata (Arjun’s wife when he is exiled). She is raised as a man by her father and is adept at warfare, but falls in love with Arjun and begs the god of love – Madan – to transform her into a beautiful woman.

She succeeds in enticing Arjun to love her. She has to reveal her skills when her father’s kingdom is attacked, and Arjun is so impressed by a complete woman that he insists on marrying her. The denouement is tragic in the original epic, with Chitrangada’s son defeating Arjun. But what we know of the story is through Rabindranath Tagore’s eponymous play. Tagore’s interpretation of Chitrangada is of a woman who knows what she wants and knows how to get it.

Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay gave us an epic in Devdas, the story of star-crossed lovers Paro, Devdas and Chandramukhi. Bimal Roy immortalized the epic on celluloid in 1955 with Dilip Kumar enacting Devdas’s role and Vyjayathimala performing Chandramukhi’s role and Suchitra Sen playing Paro.  Chandramukhi’s love for Devdas is unrequited, but she doesn’t give up hope.

Yogini is woman mendicant who eschews the material world for the spiritual solace.

Traditional Odissi involves four distinct stages of story narration – invocation, nritta, nritya, moksha. The depiction of these four characters follows this sequence, although Enakshi Sinha interpreted the stories and the dance to suit the narrative that was suffused with traditional, folksy ghazals, ballads folk songs, soothing remixes of film songs originally composed by the maestro AR Rahman.

Parag Ray’s singing was a tour da force; she sang from the pit of her gut, and her throaty rendition of the songs was so stunning that she compelled attention, which was divided almost equally between dance, singing and music. Wisely, the performance included Rahman’s classic from Bombay (1995) Tu Hi Re and Amir Khusro’s all-time classic Chaap Tilak.

The musical interludes by Nadeem Ali and Avengers were superlative throughout, and the musicians succeeding in not be carried away throughout the performance, which is not always easy. Srijan Chatterjee’s recorded music, which formed the backdrop during Chitrangada segment, was robust, strong and pulsating.

The performance remained engaging throughout as the concept aimed at creating a synthesis between classical and popular artistic expressions. Enakshi Sinha conceptualized, choreographed and directed the performance, with Srijan Chatterjee developing the concept. Nivedita Bhattacharjee’s script and Krishnakali Sengupta’s narration holds together the performance that is four stories that are distinct if not disparate. Neelay Sengupta designed Enakshi’s costumes, and Enakshi’s students joined her in the performance.

Golgotha

Guest post by Kevin Lobo

Kevin Lobo

It’s a freezing, wintery Good Friday morning in Toronto. The forces of evil – Satan’s army – are preparing for one more attempt at grabbing and destroying the one remaining thorn, from the crown of thorns that Christ bore. The one thorn that stands in the way of Evil taking over the world.

When the 'end-of-world’ and repentance preaching mad-man is suspiciously struck by a speeding truck and dies in Daniel’s arms, he passes on the mantle of the Thorn Bearer to Daniel. Suddenly a beautiful quiet day is transformed into a war zone as a massive car pileup is followed by riots, shootings, cops and zombie-like mobs that seem totally possessed by some kind of evil. The chaos reaches a peak when an assassin becomes a reality with even a cop gunned down bringing in a highly trained swat team.

Daniel is sure that the hooded man, a sinister presence is behind the rapidly escalating chaos. In the midst of it all, he discovers his own allies that will fight by his side. The forces of evil sensing another defeat let loose a spate of shootings, burnings and riots. Between Yokatherine, whose long past and a brush with the same evil is now coming full circle, and Ezekiel, a teen battling his own moral issues, the three realize that their destinies are closely tied with a final battle of the day.

Before Daniel can deal with any of that he must first fight the deadly charm of Amanda, a stunningly beautiful, dark-haired young woman, a down in the dumps photographer who gets hired for a second time by the hooded man to shoot the events to unfold that Good Friday. Daniel knows that he must put an end to the instant attraction that magnetically brings the two together in the midst of the chaos. Neither Daniel nor Amanda, know how closely their destinies are tied together, yet, not in the way they could imagine.

Between murdered cops, pregnant teens, human sacrifices to the evil one and a day that must face a final reckoning so deadly, that Daniel slowly discovers a world that has lived on the edge and which he must now protect from Satan’s forces. From the slopes of Calvary, where the Son of Man conquered Sin and Death, to this day 2000 years later, the battle has been ever raging.

A battle between the Kingdom of God and the forces of evil, and a victory so critical to all that is good in this world.

Buy Kevin's first novel, click here: Golgotha