I came back from school one afternoon to find my dad in the living room, on his hands and knees, begging Ma to take him back. I stood in the hallway, out of sight, listening.
“No, no more,” Ma was sobbing, “you’ve put me and these children through too much. You haven’t even worked for two years. You have no job, you drink, and you’ve tortured us year after year. I’m finished.”
“Please,” my dad interrupted, “I don’t want to lose my family! I’m sorry! I see now how bad I’ve behaved. I went to jail, do you hear me? They put me in jail! I’ve changed, I promise, I’ll find a job.”
I couldn’t take it any longer. I turned the corner and walked into the living room.
“No, Ma! Don’t listen to him! He says this all the time.”
“I know, darling; I know,” Ma said, her voice trembling as she wiped away tears.
“No, mahan, no; I promise,” my dad cooed. My stomach was turning. He put his hand on my shoulder and I violently pulled it away, crouching down to plead with my mom, who was seated on the couch with her head in her hands.
“Ma! Please! Don’t let him come back here—he’ll just start drinking again. How many years have we gone through this, Ma?” My voice was breaking as I fought back tears. “How may times has he done the exact same thing, huh, Ma?”
“No, please—I promise—” my dad said over me.
“Ma, don’t; don’t listen to him. This happens year after year—you fight, he goes away and you say you’re getting a divorce—and then he comes back and starts drinking again.” I was full-out sobbing now. “It’s just a pattern, Ma.”
“I know, darling; I know,” Ma cried.
“No, I won’t!” my dad interjected, leaning in for Ma to look up at him. Then he turned to me. “Go to your room; leave us alone,” he said, softly.
“Fuck you!” I spat.
“Mahan!” Ma looked up. “Don’t say words like that!”
I looked my dad straight in the eyes. Knowing he was sober, and that he’d remember my words, I spoke slowly. “You are dead to me. You don’t exist anymore. And if you think she’s going to forgive you and let you come back here . . . you’re completely stupid.”
My dad just stood there and stared back at me, his eyes empty and his bald head beading with sweat. If it were legal to kill him, and I had a gun in my hands, I would have pointed the barrel right at his big, flat nose and shot him right in the face, and I would have enjoyed it—seeing his brains explode all over the white living room walls.
I went up to my room and fumed for a while longer, then my door opened and it was Ma, and my dad was standing behind her. She had a solemn, stern look on her face—the look of reluctant acceptance, of resolution.
“He said he has really changed . . .” she started.
“No, Ma!” I shouted.
She raised her voice. “Mahan, listen. This is the last time, the last chance I’m giving him.”
“No, Ma!” I burst out in tears. “No! How could you do this? We were going to move on, you were going to sell the house.”
My dad piped up quietly from behind Ma. “It’s just going to take time for him to be okay with it.”
“Ma, please, no.” I had grabbed Ma by the shoulders and was shaking her, desperate to convince her to see the reality of this situation.
“Mahan, it’s okay.” she said, frustrated, sternly, almost as if she were convincing herself, too.
“No, Ma, it’s not! You’re crazy if you think he’s changed!”
I was crying so hard I couldn’t see. I grabbed my wallet from my desk and pushed past my parents. I ran out of the house and down the street. It was early October and although it was probably only five o’clock, it was already dark. I kept running. I ran all the way to the bus stop and waited. It was a cold night and all I was wearing was a ratty Superman T-shirt. I was alone; this was the stop where the bus route ended and started again. The bus arrived and I got on. I had no idea of where I was going; I just rode that bus to the other end of the line.
I was numb. I was a zombie, aimlessly moving forward.
Two hours later, I was standing on the front porch of my pioneer village mentor, Kate Rosen.
She had invited me over for dinner the week before, when she introduced me to her husband, Eric, and their two kids. Now this was the only place I could think of going. I was trembling in my T-shirt on their front porch. I could see them through the white lace curtains, just finishing dinner.
A light flicked on above me.
“Rajiv?” Kate whispered, incredulous, “what’s the matter?”
She pulled me into the house and took me to the dining table. Through sobs I told them what had happened at home, and then apologized for coming, but she and Eric interrupted and assured me that they were honored to help.
They put me in their guest room—in an old wooden spindle bed with a linen and wool coverlet on it that was woven in 1870.
“Rajiv, listen to me,” Kate said softly, sitting on the foot of the bed as I nestled under the covers, “you come here whenever you want. And you can stay here, forever, if that’s what you need.”
I started crying again.
“You hear me? Whenever you want, okay?”
I nodded my head and wiped away my tears. “I hate that man, Kate.”
“He sounds just awful . . . . crikey.”
“He is awful.”
“Well, you’re safe now. Try not to think about it.” Kate pulled out a tissue from the box on the painted pine table by the bed and handed it to me. “Nighty night.”
I slept like a log. There was no noise in the house. No maniac to fear.
The next morning, Kate was setting the breakfast table while Eric toasted challah and the phone rang.
“Hello?” Kate answered. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Surendra.” She pressed the speaker phone button and put down the receiver. The night before, Kate asked whether she should call my mom to let her know I was there—I shrugged; it didn’t matter to me.
“The child belongs at home, Kate.” There was an edge to Ma’s voice.
“Well, he’s very upset, and Eric and I are happy to have—”
“The child belongs at home. This is his home.” No one said anything.
“Can I speak to him, please?”
I silently waved my hands across my chest and shook my head.
“He’s in the bathroom; I’ll tell him to call you.”
“Yes, please. That child needs to come home, today. I will come and get him.”
Ma drove her white Buick out to Thornhill and picked me up later that day. I got in the car and we said nothing to each other on the drive home.
It didn’t take long for my dad to fall back into his drinking routine. I didn’t say one word to him for the remaining years we lived under the same roof. Ma and my sisters continued in the drunken shouting matches with him, but I would stay in my room— or I’d leave the house.
I rebelled and spent many weekends and holidays with Kate and Eric. Their daily lives were relaxed, but also immaculately ordered, and I craved the sanctuary of their peaceful home. I’d go over to their place and we would embark on road trips that took us into the country. We’d spend hours at antique warehouses, looking for treasure. They liked collecting primitive painted furniture, Persian rugs, and ironstone soap dishes. I would look for old boxes of pen nibs for my calligraphy, and Georgian silver—forks, spoons, and knives from the early 1800s that I’d add to my little section of the cutlery drawer at home (my sisters were revolted by the idea of using a fork that someone used two hundred years ago—I quivered with excitement at the same realization).
My dad couldn’t help himself. He wasn’t the only alcoholic in his family. He was broken and didn’t know how to make the fix. This is how they coped, or how they tried to cope. Psychiatrists weren’t really a thing in Ceylon. Neither was divorce. It took Ma twenty-two years of torture to break free of the cultural taboo that had bound her to my dad.
I guess my complete dis
interest in a love life of my own had something to do with my parents’ twisted relationship. For me, dating was a non-issue—it was never an option. Although Ma never came right out and said we weren’t allowed to date, there was an unspoken cultural understanding (applicable to every Tamil household in Scarborough) that while we lived at home, our efforts were solely to be focused on productivity and success. The few times I did bring classmates home, to work on school projects, Ma’s back would go up at the girls.
“Hi, Mrs. Surendra, nice to meet you,” they’d say sweetly.
“Hello,” Ma would snap, not looking up from whatever she was doing. She wasn’t like this to my guy friends—and I knew exactly why; she didn’t want me running around with girls, mixing with a “bad crowd,” and doing “those things these Canadian kids get into.” Based on the template of my older cousins, we were just expected to announce to our parents, in our late twenties, that we were ready to be married and had someone in mind—and this was a celebration—the union being a “love match,” a rare contrast to the traditional arranged marriages that took place in Ceylon.
I was never bitten with the love bug, in any case. So, I found intimacy in my own way—in a love I expressed by pouring my heart and soul into my hobbies and the worlds that I had been escaping to since I was a child.
In fourth grade, pharaohs, pyramids, and mummies completely took over every aspect of my life during a unit on ancient Egypt. I painted the entire surface of my bedroom walls with hieroglyphics one weekend. Ma walked in, yelled, “What’s the MATTER with you, child?!” and threatened to confiscate my art supplies. Little did she know that the hieroglyphics weren’t just decorative, but I had painstakingly copied a protection spell from a book on ancient Egyptian ceremonies, so the walls, in a way, now held a sort of purposeful power. Lying in bed at night, surrounded by my tomblike walls, I imagined myself as a young Tutankhamen, secure under the Eye of Horus. This gave birth to the formation of an Egypt club with my cousins in which we’d have secret ceremonies with papier-mâché idols I had made of Isis and Osiris—we lit incense, chanted magic words while dancing and reciting ancient Egyptian poetry.
In sixth grade it was Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena:Warrior Princess. When it was warm enough outdoors, my best friend, a Trinidadian kid named Reshad, would meet me every day after school and we’d set off on our horses (bikes) with swords (plastic) strapped to our backs, traveling the countryside (suburban Scarborough, made up of cookie-cutter-type subdivisions) looking for battles that needed our help (these were completely made-up and usually took place in an obliging park or field). On one of our epic journeys, Reshad and I rode our “horses” to the local Canadian Tire hardware store where I bought a metal stove-burner ring and a small bottle of bronze automotive touch-up paint, which was used to paint the characteristic designs onto my new chakram, making it look as close as I could to Xena’s iconic round throwing blade. We luckily also happened to have a rare lapidary store in our neighborhood, the only one of its kind in Toronto, that sold rocks, minerals, and precious gemstones. Our horses carried us out there one evening and I found tiny round abalone paua shells from New Zealand, which I glued onto the stove ring to finish it off (this was a detail I had read about in an article published on the props used in the show). My chakram was complete. We threw that thing around all over the damn place. It hit trees and houses and sometimes cars, but a very worthy cause in our attempt to bring order to a war-torn world of despair.
And all this eventually led to my career as an actor. I had never given much thought to why I felt so compelled to make it as an actor. It took someone else to point it out to me; on my way back from India, I had made a brief stop in London to take a week-long acting class in Covent Garden. The instructor, a graying theater director, began the class by asking us why we were actors. “Just think about it for yourselves,” he offered. “I don’t want you to answer out loud.” After a few seconds of silence he said, “My opinion is we’re all in this for love. I think that somewhere in each one of our lives we were denied some aspect of love that we craved and needed. And that’s what we seek from this profession. To be loved . . . to be wanted . . . to belong.”
The realization of this was, to me, kind of twisted, but I admitted to myself that in my own case he was right. The prospect of playing the lead role in a story that had such a deep resonance with my real life would be the legitimization that my existence was worth something.
Just before I left for India, Ma left my dad and, this time, it was for good. They sold the house and parted ways. I vowed to never have anything to do with him again—to me, he was now a ghost. Ma found us a new, smaller home even closer to the zoo.
With my dad out of the picture, I no longer felt like I was running away from something, in pursuit of my dreams.
Life of Pi, the movie, was now the big-picture challenge, but swimming was currently the only thing in clear focus. I could now swim a half pool’s length in front crawl while holding my breath. The whole breathing-while-swimming thing was light-years away. The pool was divided into three sections—slow, medium, and fast. I always made sure that I swam in the slow lane along the edge of the pool wall so I’d have something to grab on to while I came up for air (a frequent occurrence).
There were regulars who frequented the pool during lane swim, and I gradually became one of them. I slipped into the meditatively calm slow lane one afternoon and eventually passed the geriatric row of turtlelike swimmers, holding my breath and pushing myself to go as fast as possible so I could swim the entire length in one breath. Victory! Then, as I bobbed up for air, I noticed the lifeguard slowly descending the ladder of her elevated plastic white throne with feline grace. Oh, shit, I thought as I caught my breath, she’s coming over to me.
“You should be swimming in the medium lane,” she advised, leaning down to me.
I held my breath and slipped under the white-and-red buoyant pool dividers. I no longer had the wall to depend on, which made me nervous, but I somehow held it together, pretending like the wall was beside me while I swam two lengths of the pool, medium speed. It was a small triumph.
There was a lean, tanned, older lady who swam ahead of me in the conveyor belt of people that sequenced their way through lap after lap. Whenever I needed a break, I’d pause at the end of the pool and wait for her to reappear, using her as my benchmark for where I’d slip in again. She was in her sixties, and every now and then she’d join me at the end of the pool, making small talk.
I’d push myself to keep up with her and would manage to remain behind her for a few lengths, but as my arms and legs grew tired and my lungs were pushed to exhaustion, I’d start lagging as the other swimmers overtook me.
I was resting in the corner of my lane one afternoon, when the tanned lady displayed a water skill that I instantly coveted—an impressive flip and turn, an underwater somersault in which she pushed her feet off the wall to propel her through the water at the beginning of each length.
“You’re getting better!” she noted a few months after we first met. “Are you ready to try a flip turn?”
“Oh, no!” I objected, “No way—there’s no way I could ever do that!”
She somehow convinced me that it was easy and then demonstrated as slowly as she could manage. I couldn’t exactly understand what was happening, but she talked me through the steps and then hypnotized me into trying it.
I swam to the other end of the pool as she followed behind. Catching sight of the wall nearby, I tucked my head into my stomach as she had instructed. I pushed. I turned. Having had no idea what direction I was facing or where my body was in space and time, I panicked, opened my mouth, and it filled with pool water as I pushed my head up, freaking out and blindly searching for the wall with my hands. I found the edge, came up, and then, still frantic, swallowed my whole mouthful of water.
“Oh my God!” I screamed, noticing the lifeguard jump down from her plastic throne and run over to me. She stood at the edge of the pool wit
h the tanned lady to my left, as I continued to shriek out in shock, squeezing my eyes tightly shut, “Oh, no!” I cried. Most of the other swimmers continued to swim their lengths but a few of them had bobbed up to take in what was happening.
“What’s the matter? Are you okay?” the lifeguard gasped.
“I—think—he . . . hit his head,” the tanned lady stammered, her hand on my back.
“No!” I shrieked. “I didn’t hit my head!”
“Then what’s the matter?” the lifeguard repeated.
“I swallowed it!” I yelled. “I swallowed the pool water!”
The tanned lady and the lifeguard had matching puzzled looks on their faces.
“So? It’s fine. Happens all the time. It won’t kill you . . .” the lifeguard offered flatly before turning and walking back to the elevated platform.
“It’s full of horrible things,” I lamented to the tanned lady.
“We’ve all swallowed some of it. You’ll be okay,” she whispered. She nodded to me. I nodded back.
“I’m sorry I pushed you,” she said, concerned. “I should mind my own business.”
“No,” I interjected, “I need to be pushed. I’m glad I tried.”
Another nod of consolation from her, and then she was off, swimming breast stroke.
I remained at the side of the pool, shivering as I held on to the edge with my fingers. It was now a part of me. I had swallowed it. The poo, the flaking skin, the toe fungus. No one else seemed concerned as they continued to swim in soldierlike motion, back and forth. I took a deep breath, plunged my head back into the water, and propelled forward.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: A winner!
Date: 16 Apr 2006 11:27:27
Dear Rajiv,
Alice and I just got back from an Anglican Easter service. It was for families, so lots of screaming kids and Jesus-baby-talk. Not quite my thing. I like my religion a little more sober. But still a good thing.
The Elephants in My Backyard Page 12