Ramya's Treasure

by Pratap Reddy

  “We” meant Ramya, in Prakash’s vocabulary, especially when the chore promised to be a thankless grind. She took the fat book from him, and spent an hour or two trying to decode it. Later, they looked around their neighbourhood for a resource centre — a place that provided word processors and reference books for newcomers. Such spaces were often sponsored by organizations like the YMCA, or some enterprising group which saw profit in a completely not-for-profit activity. Once they found such a place, they had to visit it many days in succession as they were allotted only one hour of computer time. The résumés took a long time to finish. While Ramya worked hard at it, Prakash would wile away his time reading the Times of India or the Deccan Chronicle online. (Later he would feed her with tidbits of news from India, like a know-it-all.)

  They applied for jobs everywhere: responding to helpwanted ads in newspapers; visiting employment agencies, at their offices or kiosks at job fairs; dropping off unsolicited résumés with receptionists of various companies; handing them over to acquaintances (friends were really hard to come by in Canada). All this amounted to playing what she called Canadian roulette: scattering their résumés in the wind, hoping one will be picked up by a serious employer.

  Nothing worked. Maybe, Canada is no match for Russia, its Arctic neighbour. Their famous roulette worked on occasion. But one day, they were on their way to an IT firm to drop off yet another unsolicited résumé — what else? While waiting for an elusive bus, Prakash felt thirsty. There was a filling station at the street corner nearby with a convenience store attached to it. Prakash nipped across, leaving Ramya behind in the bus shelter. As usual she was on tenterhooks, until at last he returned. Empty-handed, without even the envelope containing his résumé.

  “What took you so long? Didn’t they have bottled water or pop?”

  “What they had was a job opening, love. I gave them my résumé, and they offered me the job then and there. I start from tomorrow. Sorry, I all but forgot about the water.”

  “Never mind, I’m not feeling that thirsty. You mean they just handed you a job on a platter, without asking you any questions?”

  “They did ask a couple of questions. But the most important one was: Are you willing to work in the night?” Prakash chuckled. Prakash had that quality — he inspired confidence, however misplaced, the very first time you saw him.

  They went back home, feeling pleased. A job was a job, even if a person who was a high-placed executive in India had to work as a cashier in a petrol bunk on the graveyard shift. The job did not assure them of a cushy life, but at least it staunched their seemingly unmanageable expenses. Once they were home, they slaked their thirst, raising a toast to their good fortune with tap water.

  Within a few weeks, Ramya too was offered a job as a nighttime security guard in a condominium building in the Lawrence-Finch area. The neighbourhood was a hotbed of crime, and it took more than two hours to get there, so Ramya turned it down. All the jobs available for immigrants were hard or unsafe and required them to work at night.

  New immigrants were truly the children of the night …

  If looking for a job was hard, getting published was even more so. The first few months Ramya was too preoccupied with the challenges of settling down in Canada — job search, housework, grocery shopping — to even think about writing, let alone actually sitting down to write. She kept a small notebook she bought in a dollar shop, naming it “Cauldron of Ideas,” where she would jot down themes for poems, or the germ of a notion for a short story. None of those hastily scrawled entries came to fruition. Now and then she’d try to fan the small spark of an inspiration for a poem, but after the first couple of stanzas, it invariably ran out of steam.

  It was only after she started working full-time, when she really felt she had a toehold in the new country, that she applied herself seriously. While she managed to flog her poems — which had been left for dead for so long — into rising unsteadily and trotting with halting steps, the going was tough.

  How amazingly busy the literary scene was in Canada! She’d heard of many internationally famous Canadian writers even before she came to Canada — Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Michael Ondaatje, not to mention authors of Indian origin like Rohinton Mistry and M.G. Vassanji. They were all churning out books and stories, busier than the proverbial beaver. There were so many places offering creative writing courses, so many publishers, so many awards, so many grants, and so many avenues to get published — mainstream magazines, literary magazines, community newspapers, online sites, ezines, blogs and what have you. Yet, for a new writer to see his or her work in print, let alone be suitably remunerated for the effort, seemed next to impossible.

  One day Ramya decided to flesh out the jottings in her notebook into a full-f ledged poem. Calling it “Karma’s Daughter,” she sent it out to the many literary magazines whose names and addresses she’d gathered from the local library. The poem, she thought, had an ethnic appeal, something which might be appreciated in a country boasting multiculturalism:

  With hope in my heart, and a prayer on my lips

  Like a grain of sand I lie on the rocky bed of Karma

  Giant waves of trials and travail

  Lash as I buffet against them to no avail

  Predator sharks of ego and greed

  Widen their menacing jaws to feed

  As hope dwindles and prayers go waste

  Wild winds soften breakers abate

  The Orange-robed Boatman, in a divine state

  Arrives, and a new hope kindles in the heart

  Alas, he only passes by, while I wait

  I know now, it will be eons before I can earn His grace.

  Not one of the periodicals found her worthy of publication. While she wasn’t sure about the quality of her own writing, she did become aware that the concerns and preoccupations of the editors weren’t the same as her own. An immigrant deemed a “visible minority,” and the “establishment,” which was predominantly white, couldn’t see eye to eye. When will the twain ever meet?

  Rather than indiscriminately accuse people of racism, Ramya never lost sight of the need to refashion and improve her sensibilities to suit her new country of choice.

  So she rewrote her piece “Karma’s Daughter,” giving it not just a thorough makeover but a new title:

  Karma’s Child

  I lie belly up on the sands of Time,

  beside the Ocean, whose incessant waves

  tirelessly murmur, Aum, Aum, Aum

  Beyond the knife-thin horizon,

  where the sea meets the sky,

  in a lover’s embrace,

  there circles a school of sharks,

  baring their sword-sharp teeth

  as if smiling …

  No laughing matter,

  when I’ve to step into the water —

  a fleshy tidbit I’ll be,

  for those gigantic, masticating Jaws

  O, Sun! Helios, Ra, Savitr, or whatever,

  forgive me my many transgressions.

  But the day of judgement’s near —

  Is there room for plea bargains?

  In my declining years, adrift and bereft,

  my stash of good deeds has come to nought.

  A thousand prayers die on my lips.

  For the throat is parched, sore for a dose

  of something spiritual, of something sublime.

  A tall, icy glass of coke and rum!

  No! A modicum of amritam —

  the heavenly nectar of immortality.

  Shame! So degenerate has become

  My tongue, so steeped in banality.

  Shadows lengthen, as the day darkens

  as if blinds are being drawn along the horizon.

  Plangent notes emanate — like incense smoke,

  Suffusing the world with sadness —

  Music of the spheres! No, it’s a dirge,

  the strains of Nirvana.

  And then I hear — Knock! Knock!!

 
“Who’s there?”

  It’s Yama with his noose.

  No minion, no Myrmidon,

  The Lord of Death himself.

  Let me stay a while longer

  On this Earth — this dome of pleasure.

  But Yama says,

  Whirling his lariat in the air:

  “No, I’m your master —

  for now and Hereafter”

  Only one year more! I implore.

  How about a week? I entreat

  A day? An hour? A minute?

  “Not a moment more will you get.

  Pack your bag and say your adieus.”

  When it’s time to board the caboose,

  nothing in the world matters:

  No piety, no supplication

  No tears, no medical intervention

  No revoirs, no till-we-meet-agains.

  Hey! Where have all my playmates and partners gone?

  There’s no one to hobnob with on this road.

  It’s a journey I’ll have to undertake alone.

  She sent out her piece, expanding the list of addresses to include even minor periodicals. To her intense delight it was accepted by the editor of a small privately produced magazine of poetry. But when the only payment she received was two copies of the magazine, she was scandalized. How could poets subsist on this kind of remuneration? It looked as if society was making monkeys out of writers by paying them peanuts.

  Even so, from then on Ramya was always on the lookout for themes that would resonate with the editors and readers who lived in this cold, sparsely populated country north of the 49th parallel, unlike the tropical, riotously passionate country she came from.

  On a chilly Sunday morning in early May, when Prakash and Ramya went for a stroll in a nearby park, they came across a tree which Prakash said was cherry. It had shed all its short-lived blooms, making a carpet, verily of floral design, on the ground. Ramya pulled out her pocketbook and pen, and made a couple of entries — an idea for a poem inspired by the fallen pink petals.

  Curious, Prakash asked: “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” Ramya replied.

  That very night, when Prakash had gone to bed, his snores rising like rumbles of a geyser priming to erupt, Ramya was busy at her computer, writing, and revising profusely, a poem called “Pink Snow.”

  That year, winter lingered

  well into May —

  Like an uncherished guest

  Who has overstayed his welcome.

  Slivers of ice were entrenched

  In the crevices of the roofs.

  Dirty snow, like frozen surf,

  took refuge in shady nooks

  The sky was rumpled and grey

  like an unwashed hoodie.

  The park was cold and unsmiling,

  where birds refused to sing.

  The leafless trees huddled together,

  trembling in the wind.

  And as I walked, the ground

  Was soft and alive beneath my feet —

  a reminder of last night’s

  needle-sharp rain.

  When the trail turned —

  all of a sudden,

  blindsiding me,

  was the mystical vision:

  Drifts upon drifts of pink snow!

  Two cherry blossom trees

  Standing gauntly on a rise

  Have shed their flowers,

  making an eiderdown of petals,

  to comfort the shivering earth.

  She sent it out, hoping time and again that it would catch the attention of at least one editor, but it wasn’t to be — the publishing world had clammed up. There was no response whatsoever. Not even peanuts were cast in her direction.

  Karma’s Child must have been just flash in the pan. A fluke. A false dawn. Ramya bitterly assumed that she wasn’t cut out to be a writer, at least not in Canada. At least not for now.

  On a whim, having nothing better to do, Ramya decides to attend a meeting of a writing group which she learned operates at The Beaches. Purposeless living is grating on her nerves. She needs to do something, something to put meaning back in her life.

  She’s beginning to shake off her lotus-eater’s life, taking baby steps … she made a sortie to the grocery shop, visited her hairdresser, did the laundry, and even attended meetings with the consultant.

  Yet, she recoils from the prospect of completing the long overdue EI forms. More daunting than filling in the form online is the need to cook up an excuse for her tardiness. She realises that the more she delays, the more difficult it’ll get. She has unwisely allowed the situation to snowball … Ramya peremptorily dismisses the pointless train of thoughts, a train with no destination.

  She doesn’t want to dwell on unpleasant things. Attending the writing group meeting, by comparison, seems a more pleasurable alternative. Like a picnic. Though this’ll be her nth attempt to resuscitate her aspirations to be a writer, she sees writing as a lifeline that could lead her out of the morass her world has become. Hope springs eternal … even in Ramya’s breast.

  The trick is to cling on to the lifesaver long enough to be rescued. Will she have the perseverance? The stamina? Or will she let her habitual lethargy, something that has grown to monstrous proportions of late, take over?

  She found the writing group by surfing the internet. When she emailed a tentative enquiry, she received an enthusiastic reply. But that was long ago, just after her layoff, when she was still smarting from the insult, and she still had spirit left. She wanted to hit back at her company for treating her like dirt. She would write, get published, become a bestseller and show them! Like that mystery writer who wrote novels about the detective Aurelio Zen. The author had lost his tenure at a university, so he decided to write a book to cock a snook at his previous employer. In the event, he cocked more than a snook — he snagged the Crime Dagger award for his debut novel.

  Was writing an antidote for sagging self-esteem? Was it something with which to bolster your amour prop? Was wanting to become an author one big ego trip?

  No wonder there was such a demand for self-publishing!

  The writing group meets in a tavern at 6:30 pm the first Wednesday of every month. The tap house is called Denny’s or Benny’s, she can’t remember clearly now. She’ll have to look it up again, and send an email to the group, alerting them of her impending visit. Authors don’t like surprises; they reserve them for their readers.

  In the evening she leaves for the meeting. Though cold, there’s light, as the days have begun to grow longer, if ever so slightly. The rush hour traffic is petering down.

  Why is she going to this damn fool meeting? Wouldn’t she be better off completing the EI forms? She was supposed to submit them within a fortnight of being laid off, now it’s more than a month. How many more days does she need to complete it? Why has she developed this incorrigible habit of putting things off? Could anything be more urgent than submitting forms which will guarantee a sizeable income for eight months or so? Though not comparable to what she’d been earning, it wasn’t chickenfeed either.

  She enters the restaurant. She divests herself of the heavy winter jacket, an indecisive cream with darkish faux fur around the neck. She hangs it on a tree-like structure with stumpy branches. There aren’t many coats hanging there. Neither is there anyone to greet and conduct her to a table.

  Ramya scans the place. Most of the customers are legitimate diners, in ones and twos. In the far end, there’s a group of four people, the biggest congregation in the thinly populated restaurant. They’re in a huddle; she can hear their chittering faintly from where she’s standing. Ramya was told the group was eight-member strong.

  As Ramya walks up to them, four disparate faces look up — two brown, one white, one yellow. They offer uncertain smiles of varying warmth, from sub-zero to a toasty thirty degrees Celsius.

  “You must be Ramya,” one of the women says, beckoning her to the empty chair they’d kept for her.

  “I was expectin
g a larger group,” Ramya says, planting her backside gingerly on the chair.

  “Not everyone can make it every time,” the only man in the group says. “Especially on a day like this. I’m John.” He’s wearing a shabby jacket and has brindled hair and moustache. And three days of stubble. Maybe he finds time to shave only once a week. Must be a busy writer.

  They make introductions. Apart from John, they are Jeannette, Brenda and Chantal. They’re all on the older side, in their late fifties or early sixties. Ramya isn’t yet fifty, but she’ll soon be. The ladies have tried to conceal their age with the aid of hair colour, but when she stood over them she noticed the telltale roots showing on a couple of heads.

  “Why don’t we begin?” Jeannette, who Ramya learns is Chinese, says.

  The one who calls herself Brenda, (her given name Ramya discovers in due course is Vrinda) reads from a story set in an office on Bay Street, in Toronto’s financial district. She’s got all the particulars of an office setting correct, right down to the reception counter, the cubicles, the photocopier, and the coffee machine. The story opens with a scene in the lunchroom, the employees sitting in clusters with their friends, opening their lunch boxes. The contents are different depending on the nationality of the employee. The piece is two thousand words long and takes nearly thirty minutes for Brenda to read.

  “Brenda, the atmosphere is so authentic. It’s amazing,” Jeannette says.

  “The introduction is really good. But it would be nice if you could bring in some action and more dialogue early on,” John says.

  Brenda jots down this input from her fellow members assiduously.

  “It’s a nice beginning for a novel,” Ramya says.

  “It’s actually a short story,” Brenda says.

  “Brenda, Ramya’s reaction is proof that the introduction is taking up too many pages,” John says. “If you can introduce plot details, rather than beating about the bush, you’ll be able to sink your hooks into the reader. Otherwise you’ll lose him.”

  “Or her,” Jeannette says.

  “What’s the story about, if I may ask?” Ramya says.

  “It’s about a group of friends in an office who collectively buy lottery tickets every month. The time they get lucky, one of the members hadn’t bought in because she’s on mat leave. This leads to bad blood, litigation and so forth.”