Diaspora Dialogues

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Book 5

Gaugin’s Chair

by

After I spent the summer working at a bookstore on Queen Street, my return to York University, for my third year, filled me with dismay. The university’s hideous grey buildings were scattered about a windswept landscape and reminded me of large boulders that a glacier had abandoned as it drew back. York had been erected in the 1960s and ’70s and held relics of the era’s worst architectural excesses—massive, starkly functional, a paucity of windows, a predominance of concrete facades. York had been established during a period of great student unrest and so the campus was designed to keep us on the move with very few places to congregate—lots of corridors and hallways, few common rooms and courtyards. The centre of the university, if indeed there was a centre to this haphazard scattering of edifices, was the Ross Building, a lumbering mass built in the style of Brutalism, its inner and outer walls exposed cement. With its tiny slits of windows, it resembled the secret service department in some fascist country, where unspeakable things were done to people. It was impossibly depressing that this campus would be my milieu for the next nine months.

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Toronto locations referenced in this piece

“With the intention of broadening young minds, York University required that arts and humanities students take one science course. I decided to face the inevitable and registered for Man and Nature . . . ” —York University

“When I went to Kensington Market, I would often try on an outfit—a tuxedo shirt, some smart jackets with tassels and epaulets (I had particularly fallen for a red marching band jacket, with gold trim), an interesting bowler hat or a fedora with a feather . . . ” —Kensington Ave.

“I had not been alone with my mother since that incident. The next afternoon, being Friday and our regular shopping time, we set out for Bridlewood Mall. As we walked along, I could feel the tension between us . . . ” —Bridlewood Mall

“What was commonly referred to by South Asians as Gerrard Street was actually a few blocks devoted to Indian stores. Since it was Saturday and the weather still warm, the pavement was crowded with families who had come to shop or have a meal . . . ” —Gerrard St.

“On Sunday evening, I got home from the Toronto Reference Library to find that James had called to say we were to meet the next afternoon for coffee at the Ainger. I should have been angry with him for this long silence but, instead, I felt only relief an . . . ” —Toronto Reference Library

“The wedding hall was a grey, squat, windowless building in Markham, the suburb north of where we lived. It was surrounded by a parking lot and, beyond that there was a wasteland covered in goldenrod and grass, which had taken on that scraggly, charred . . . ” —Markham

“‘Various ones on Isabella Street, perhaps? ’ She nodded and smiled at my shocked expression, as she blew out smoke. ‘My best friend in Guelph is gay. I can spot one. Besides, you’re too nice to be straight. And too good looking.’ . . . ” —Isabella St.

The House on St. Clarens

by

Daddy tears at the Styrofoam cup, making snowflakes. I stare out the window at the real snow, longing for the bite against my cheeks.

“How have you been sleeping? ” he asks.

“Every night, out like a light,” Granny says.

“That’s not what the nurse told me. She says you’ve been waking up, screaming out. Like you did when I was a child. Do you remember, Mom? ” He wanders over to the dresser and begins examining her bottles, messing them up, clinking glass.

When I see Daddy get like this, I feel protective of him, as though I’m seeing him through the eyes of a social worker. A neglected child screaming out for attention. Now that I teach grade one, it’s particularly weird. I wish I could help him, but I know from experience it’s best to leave him alone.

“I’ve always slept well,” Granny says.

“That’s not what I remember.” Daddy laughs. His salt-and-pepper hair looks bristly as a scouring pad. “What did you dream about after Kaz was gone? Did you imagine that he was still alive, chasing you around the house? ”

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Toronto locations referenced in this piece

“We drive past the yellow signs of Caribbean restaurants, a Goodwill and a wig shop. The dark blockaded front of the House of Lancaster Gentlemen’s Club looks like a mausoleum. “Lansdowne. The old neighbourhood. Want to get out, walk around? ” . . . ” —Lansdowne

“‘Where’s St. Clarens? ’ I asked. ‘It’s a slummy neighbourhood, full of strip clubs, near Lansdowne,’ Daddy said. ‘A lot of Japanese Canadians lived there after being released from the internment camps.’ . . . ” —St. Clarens

Death at Number Sixty-Nine

by

On a Saturday morning Mulla Jamaluddin was explaining a dakhila, an example, to his young pupils in a classroom in the grand new Salam-e-din Mosque in Toronto’s Rosecliffe Park neighbourhood.

“One day in Baghdad, a notorious robber was finally captured after a great deal of effort by the sultan’s police,” Mulla went on in his dry, modulated voice, gesticulating with his arms, and the children at their little desks all leaned forward, eyes sparkling with curiosity, and surely mischief in the pressed smiles of some. “He was called Yusuf the Robber and he was hanged at the public square, where many people from the city came to watch and cheer as the scoundrel died. Whereupon, the great mystic and man of God, Abu Junaid, pushed his way through the crowd and kissed Yusuf the Robber’s feet . . . ”

At this point my master knew he had picked the wrong sort of example to narrate, one not easily comprehensible to the tender minds of his audience—for he paused and looked up briefly above them at the framed picture of the Kaaba as if for guidance.

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

underwater city

by 

It’s spring. The sparrow dies instantly. Quick 
bang, the streetcar suspended. Small black 
body. You can still see white, speckled, small 
grains of rice across the back, twittering youth. 
You insist on a proper burial. Together we glide 
through the city, bird cupped in our palms. The 
concrete, post-rain, bleak and lunar. We speak 
elliptically, sleep-talk about death, wings 
immobilized in flight. The air thickens, we 
breathe out. Our hulls contain us, solemn as 
prayer, our delicate shells of bone . . .
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Dear Monsters, Be Patient

by

The news of your birth disturbed and excited the city. For weeks afterward, the grainy surveillance featured on local and national news broadcasts. A still from the footage appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail and on posters displayed in post offices, subway stations and grocery stores. The chief of police stood for the cameras before a blue velvet curtain and asked the public to come forward with any information regarding the identity of the woman in the video. “Or the baby she bore and left in Union Station,” he mistakenly reported.

According to reports, the last person to see your mother was a VIA Rail ticket agent who, arriving early to his morning shift, came upon a woman standing at the foot of a stairwell as she dropped you, face down, onto the cement floor. At first the agent mistook you for a toy doll because you were small and naked and soundless. When blood began streaming out of your nose, the guard called out for help in the empty corridor and the woman ran up the staircase. When asked to give a description of the woman, the ticket agent said, “It was dark so I couldn’t make her out all that well,” and then added, “she moved like she was either young or scared.”

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Toronto locations referenced in this piece

“The chief of police stood for the cameras before a blue velvet curtain and asked the public to come forward with any information regarding the identity of the woman in the video. “Or the baby she bore and left in Union Station,” he mistakenly reported . . . ” —Union Station

Going Home

by

“We’re going back to Barbados,” my mother announces. She says this as she stands in her kitchen, wearing beige capris, black t-shirt and slippers. She is suburbia incarnate. She says it surrounded by dishes my dad has dirtied but refused to wash. She says this as the radio, which has been tuned to one station for the past 21 years, blasts the CBC news at six. She says, “We’re going back to Barbados,” with a big smile on her face, as her hand rhythmically lathers her homemade concoction of diluted dish soap and freshly squeezed lemon, specially made to “cut the grease” on the dirty dishes.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table, eating fried bakes with cheese, pulling the gooey dough apart, popping it in my mouth. I’m sitting there eating and my mother is so distracted by her thoughts of Barbados, she makes no comment about the food in my mouth. She doesn’t stare at me with her large round eyes, she doesn’t peer at me slowly, letting her eyes roll over me up and down. She doesn’t poke or prod me, shaking her head and saying what I already know—“You really need to lose weight.” She doesn’t pinch my waist or lean toward me to whisper, “See, you’re jiggling, you really REALLY need to lose some weight.”

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Toronto locations referenced in this piece

“I would wait for her to appear and smile. More often than not, she wasn’t there. “Those people are crooks,” she would say referring to the airport parking authority . . . ” —Pearson International Airport

“They always wanted the best for us. It’s what led my mother to convince my dad it was a good idea to buy a house in Jane and Finch . . . ” —Jane & Finch

“We would wait and wait for an opening, because there were no traffic lights in front of 2901 Jane Street. Then we would run across the street as fast as we could, to wait for the bus that would take us to the Wilson subway station . . . ” —Wilson Subway Station

“From there, it was on to Union Station. At Union the doors to the double-decker train would open and our adventure would begin . . . ” —Union Station

“And so my parents picked up and moved to Vaughan, close enough to Jane and Finch to still be a part of it, but far enough away to never have to be . . . ” —Vaughan

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