“I live here. I know the locals. Are you from Toronto?”
“From London,” I said.
“London, England, I assume.” The swashbuckler’s droll Englishness made it unclear whether he was speaking in jest.
“I’m moving here.” I opted for ambiguity. “I act for, talk for, live for this world now.”
“Robert Browning!” the bearded man said. “Don’t tell me you’re a writer?”
“I’m a lawyer,” I said. “A lawyer with a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Bombay.”
“And you’re moving here?” the hostess said. “You and I must get to know each other.”
She made room for me next to her at the head of the long table. I sat down, conscious that these were the sort of people who would prize my picturesqueness as evidence of what Canadians referred to as their tolerance. They greeted me with uncertain smiles, undermined by a half-fearful condescension. The hostess, who introduced herself as Millicent Crowe, poured me a glass of one of the finer Châteaux.
We clinked glasses. Our bond was sealed.
We talked until the others had left for Toronto in their Mercedes and BMWs. They lavished Milly with hugs and kisses, and proffered me handshakes. Milly’s husband slid back the French door and disappeared into the house. “He writes best after a couple of drinks,” she murmured. The fountain splashed behind us. “I hope you appreciate that you’ve been in the company of some of Canada’s finest writers.” As she spoke the words, going on to retail the names of each of her guests, her voice made clear that she was offering me a gift and it was incumbent on me to feel gratitude for her bounty.
“I’m grateful,” I hastened to say. “I must confess that I’m more acquainted with Dickens or Trollope …”
“I’ll write down their names. You will need to inform yourself if you’re to join us. Don’t stop reading Victorian literature, though. Your ability to quote Browning is charming.”
Milly and I spoke until evening crept in, and her husband returned to the yard with a distracted air to turn off the fountain. Milly, I learned, was an immigrant, too, albeit of a more subtle shade than I: she was a professor from the southern United States who had come north with her husband fifteen years earlier out of opposition to the Vietnam War. She told me she was related to the family of John Crowe Ransom.
I drove back to London in the dark. The next day I went to the public library, looked up John Crowe Ransom, and learned that he was a literary critic who had belonged to a group called the Fugitives. They had styled themselves agrarian aristocrats. As I read these words, my breast filled with warmth. I had found my home, my community, as my cousin would have said. The communities that mattered, I thought, imagining myself at long last winning an argument with him, were those you chose rather than those that were mandated by a language, a religion, or a shade of skin. I visited a bookstore and bought novels by two of the writers I had met in Milly’s garden. I was mildly disappointed to learn that they were not agrarian aristocrats. They wrote books set in cities or in far-away countries, such as mine. The paperback editions of their novels attested to their fame. A tremor strummed my chest. Never before—not even with Esther’s parents, and certainly not with my Lakehead paramours had I felt closer to my new country’s core. As I prepared to return to the village that held my future, a hovering heat unsettled me, like the crowding sensation I had felt when I first desired Esther. As I thought about Milly, a pool of desire, promising fulfillment, spread before me. As nervous as an adolescent, I lifted the receiver of my phone and rang her number. Her husband answered like a gruff parent. I asked for his wife.
“Who the hell are you?” the husband asked.
“This is R. U. Singh, attorney at law.”
Milly took the phone. We arranged to meet for coffee late in the afternoon. Milly was a vice-president at a university in a small city half an hour away. She would return to the village only at three-thirty.
I drove up in the morning. By noon I had rented a spacious flat that overlooked the river. It was on the second floor of a bakery that also contained the village’s most popular riverside café. The warm sweet-bread smell from below softened the susurration of the rapids. The mid-morning light spun into the living room in swirls that reflected the gyrations of black water as it was expelled from the rapids and sloughed towards the weir. I was a lawyer now, and, almost its half rhyme,
a squire, possessed of a dwelling of rural splendour, if not of land. My flat had a private entrance by way of an outdoor staircase.
Wandering the streets, I found a hardware store that made signs. I ordered a sign that would read: R. U. Singh, Attorney at Law. B.A., M.A., LL.B., Q.C. My success at law school and on the bar exam having redeemed me, a point even the left-armed fast bowler conceded, I saw no reason to suppress my maligned M.A. It was in an M.A. seminar, for which I had neglected to hand in the essay, that I had memorized a few lines of Browning’s “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” In the most direct way, my M.A., failed or not, had transported me to this place that would complete my destiny. Failures, too, can become successes: the successful man may claim them, in their inverse identity, as the foundations of his education.
Milly and I met in the bakery café by the river; the other customers were visitors from Toronto who had driven out for the day to savour colonial Ontario. Without having spent my first night in the village, I was already able to distinguish tourists from locals. The tourists looked around with curiosity at the limestone walls and the woven wall hangings; the locals read the copies of the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail that the owners scattered over the tables. I counted myself among the rustics as I sat in a corner where the wainscotting had been stripped away to expose pitted limestone.
The blue-jeaned waitress brushed past a batik-patterned rectangle of fabric to emerge from the kitchen. I was contemplating this scrap of Indian culture adopted by the West, seeing in it a banner that announced my own good fortune, when Milly came in the door. Her thick hair billowed on her shoulders like that of a younger woman, conveying vigour and conviction. Having arrived straight from the university, she was dressed like a vice-president: a navy blue skirt and matching blazer over a white blouse, low-heeled black pumps, a discreet gold necklace. The owner, who looked like the waitress’s father, greeted her with subdued respect. We ordered green tea and what, in childhood, I had learned to call a sticky bun. When I told Milly that I had begun to read her friends’ work, her eyes concentrated on me in a way that made them look smaller.
“You can be of value to those people, R. U. It would be in my interest and very much in yours.” Her smile belonged to a goddess who requires no sustenance from humans. “You have to understand, they’re Canadian—”
“I have been trying to decipher the riddle of Canadianness for many years,” I said, with a smile that I hoped was serene.
“Well, I’ve solved it, and you’re part of the solution.” As she spoke of her dismay that those qualities the United States had ranked as her best—drive, ambition, outspokenness—were seen in Canada as social gaffes, I perceived all that Milly and I had in common. Her allusions to the Deep South, which stirred memories of my assiduous reading of William Faulkner, made clear that in that society of encrusted social distinctions she had inhabited an echelon near the top. I spoke of the Academy and of my father, giving her to understand that I, too, came from the pinnacle of a caste society. Like her, I was an immigrant who knew himself to be socially superior to the people whose favours he must earn.
“Isn’t it rich that they decide our fates?” she said. “In Canada, R. U., you must always be cautious. The United States and India are big enough for people to disappear into other lives. In Canada anyone you deal with will cross your path again, so be careful how you treat them. And they are all needy.
They need to be seen as open, liberal, and worldly, yet they’re terrified of leaving their little cages. If you drag them out int
o the open, they will finish you off.” I realized that she was speaking of her friends. “Canada has shifted beneath their feet. They need multicultural friends but don’t know where to find them. Without them, they’ll look out of touch—”
“You have taken it upon yourself to save them,” I said, eager to confirm that I was a fellow who was not slow on the uptake. I laid my hands on the oak tabletop, where, next to Milly’s bony, manicured pallor, they looked not only dark, but of a meaty thickness.
“As I told you,” she said, with a briskness that betrayed impatience, “it will benefit you and it will benefit me.”
“It will benefit you by consolidating your friendship with famous writers?”
“I like to have literary friends …”
Surprised by her uncharacteristic hesitation, I asked her: “You’re a writer?”
A long pause. She pursed her mouth, throwing into relief half-submerged wrinkles. “When I was young, I thought I would be a writer. Growing up in that atmosphere: John Crowe Ransom, the Fugitives … I married a writer. But my own writing, well. Then I thought I would write literary criticism like my illustrious relative. I got a Ph.D., but I never published as much as I should have. It turns out that what I’m good at is organizing programs, getting people to do what I want by giving them what they think they want, being a dean and a vice-president. But I can’t face being just that. I need to be in the thick of literary life. That’s how I was reared.”
Her head peered into her earthenware coffee mug. “I have similar feelings,” I said, hoping to soften this moment of discomfort.
“You know you’re special, R. U.? I don’t tell everyone these things.”
Her wide mouth appealed for allegiance. Her eyes measured my reaction, assessing whether she was gaining full benefit from her confession. Milly was truly an expert in inducing people to feel what she needed them to feel. I sensed her calculation, even as the obligation to cherish her moment of weakness as evidence of our intimacy, and to be loyal to her, enlisted me as her follower.
I admired her ability to make me feel what she wanted me to feel. There was undeniable art in it.
“My husband and I are accustomed to a certain
style in our life,” she murmured. “Yet I’m the sole breadwinner. Without style, you don’t attract eminent people. I need that fountain in my yard!”
“Your husband is not employed?”
“He writes and he drinks. His books earn very little. He’s too American for Canada, and he’s been away from the South for too long for folks down home to remember him. He makes a little money by travelling around and giving readings and picking up his reading fees.” She put down her mug. “I just wish his fees were all he picked up!”
Sensing another difficult moment, I remained silent. The maw of that terrifying beast, the long-term Western marriage, gaped before my eyes. Esther had recounted the rise and fall and rise again of her parents’ union. She remembered their playfulness when she was a child, the tension and distance (and, she suspected, affairs) of her teenage years, the reconciliation, and then a kind of leathery endurance that was a fossilized skeleton of love, ingrained with the harsh knowledge, droll understanding, and pragmatic financial partnership of incipient old age. She had held up this portrait to me as though it were a yardstick
against which to measure our future.
No matter how Canadian I might become, I would never understand this sort of marriage. I knew I did not want the other sort of marriage, which my cousin and roommates in the towers had sought in their quest for devout virgins who, with a discreet hand from ultrasound machines and willing doctors, would give birth to male offspring only. More Indian sons! The thought chilled me.
Esther, with her frankness, had made me more worldly. Yet there are conversations in which a man born in Bombay does not participate. Discussing the extramarital affairs of a woman’s husband with the lady herself is one of them.
“I don’t want you to think,” Milly said, as my silence grew uncomfortable, “that I let him get away with it. Sometimes when he comes home from one of his gigs and what happened is written all over his face, that hangdog face of his gets one hell of a slap!”
I winced, as though I were the recipient of her blow. “Does that cure him?”
“When it doesn’t,” she whispered, “I go to bed with another man!”
This was a marriage? I felt relieved that my romance with Esther had not led to matrimony. Yet I could see that Milly and her husband were inseparable. Inscrutable Occidentals! Who can fathom their opaque depths?
Milly’s smile tightened. “Do you have affairs, R. U.?”
In what I hoped was a composed tone, I said: “I have had a number of affairs. At law school, I had a Canadian girlfriend whom I nearly married.”
“I’ll keep you in mind the next time I need to get my revenge.” She smiled to signal that this was a joke: a smile whose predatory mirth showed, at the same time, that it was not a joke. I was anxious to hold complications at bay. “What I seek from you is a different form of solace.”
She leaned back in her chair. I glimpsed a shadow of hatred in her resignation. Millicent Crowe did not accept rejection. Even if she did not wish to go to bed with me, she required me to hunger to go to bed with her. In every relationship, it must be she who held the upper hand: every relationship except, perhaps, her incessant struggle with her husband. Yet I did not wish to be an exotic conquest, swiftly discarded. I refused to be relegated like a faltering football team demoted to the fourth division. I wanted my presence in her life, my availability to receive her social favours, to be eternal. Our relationship must remain unresolved: it must be a flirtation that always promised but never delivered, a climax that was forever coming but never came. I must never allow the tension between us to dissipate.
In a throaty voice, Milly asked: “What kind of solace are you looking for, R. U.?”
“In reality I place no limits on it. Only on the temporal boundaries in which it may occur.”
She gave me a long, cruel, appreciative look. “Maybe it’s better if I don’t have an affair with you. You’d be more unbearable than my husband.”
She gave my hand a long caress, as though to show that she could. I felt like her mascot, her son, her adolescent boyfriend.
Whenever she chatted with me on the phone, I knew that her high-spirited garrulousness was for the benefit of the brooding husband who listened in the next room. While I prolonged the tenure of my inclusion in her social circle, she teased her husband with my interest in her, and hers in me. I kept talking, confident that in its tensed equilibrium, this conversation would nourish me for years.
seven
the way we live now
Once my sign had arrived, and I had hung it at the bottom of the staircase, my life paused. No clients appeared; no income entered my chequing account. My historic mill town already had lawyers: a crusty old gentleman who had completed every local property transfer in the last thirty years, and a drunken middle-aged wretch who did divorces and threats of lawsuits between sparring neighbours (rumour claimed that he preferred to represent both parties). Between them, these two colleagues absorbed the bulk of the village’s legal traffic. For all the beauty of its colonial architecture, my new home was not large enough to support what my law-school classmates referred to as a boutique firm. My days were spent reading the books of my new literary acquaintances; the nights were harder. I asked myself how I would pay the rent in three months’ time.
I wondered whether not marrying Esther had been a mistake. I longed for company such as I had enjoyed in my capsule-like dormitory room. I wondered whether Seema had married. My loneliness instilled lethargy, sapping me of the energy that might have allowed me to go out and drum up business, had I been so inclined. To tell the truth, I was not much inclined. Drumming up business sounded like a struggle. Having successfully completed law school, I’d had
my fill of struggle.
Milly saved me. She delighted in aiding cases like mine, those of cultured layabouts, particularly those who promised to enrich her friends’ multicultural credentials. I had begun to understand that in Canada, as I supposed the left-armed fast bowler would tell me was also the case in Bombay, knowing the right people brought money within reach. Milly asked me if I would be willing to serve as the trustee for donations to a literary prize that her friends were organizing in Toronto. My work would be pro bono, but my photograph would appear in the newspaper.
Cheques arrived in the mail. I held them in escrow, then drove to Toronto, my Lada barely able to complete the journey. At a meal with dinner jackets and flashing cameras, I announced the total that had been donated, and handed a cheque to one of Milly’s smiling writer friends. The evening’s program announced that the prize money was held by “R. U. Singh, Q.C., a southwestern Ontario lawyer.” The swashbuckler and the woman with the gravel voice smiled with satisfaction as certain well-dressed white people stopped short at the sight of the southwestern Ontario lawyer. They revelled in their superior knowledge that a person described in this way might be a brown man in a turban, whose black beard contained flickers of grey resembling fire tamped down into ash. With proprietary nods the writers assumed the new sheen I had brought to their reputations. Their admirers beat a path towards me. Among them were various journalists.
Following the practice I had adopted in law school—now my Canadian education came to my aid—I avoided risky declarations, turning questions back on the questioner with avuncular irony. I threaded my declarations with references to my reading. I told one journalist that I felt like one of the outsiders who flock to the heart of Victorian society in late Trollope novels, such as The Way We Live Now. The interviews were my contribution to literature. The next week, Milly brought me clippings from newspapers and magazines in which my photograph appeared and my words were cited. “You were magnificent,” she said, gasping from climbing my stairs.
Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives Page 4