Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives

by Stephen Henighan

  Milly’s announcement that she had news had made me nervous even before we had ventured into this disorienting building. I laid my hands close to hers on the table, then withdrew them, fearing that in this environment it might be unseemly for a man to touch a woman’s hand.

  “You can hold my hand if you like,” Milly said. “They think you’re a woman in drag.”

  “My family thought I came to Canada because I was that sort of man. That is my news: I am going to make a trip home. My brothers know now that I am a man of the world …”

  “So it’s safe for you to go back without a wife in tow. So much the better for you, R. U. Spouses can be a pain in the ass. It would be much easier if we could make them appear when we need them and disappear when we don’t.”

  She raised her glass; we clinked. “Cheers, R. U. You and I have brought each other good luck.” Without awaiting my affirmation, she went on. “I’m going to ask you a favour. I’ll pay you for it, but it’s still a favour because I want it to be done by you and only you. I’m going to need utter, absolute, fucking discretion.”

  “Milly …”

  “I want you to prepare a separation agreement for me.”

  “From your husband?”

  “Is there anyone else I can be separated from? Not from you, that’s for sure. You and I will always be buddies, R. U. But I’ve reached a stage where I need to get him out of my hair.”

  “You’ve been through so much together.”

  She leaned forward, modulating her voice as meticulously as she had an hour earlier during the panel discussion. “R. U., I’ve had an interview for a job as president of a university. A second interview. I can’t tell you the name of the university, but you can see that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  I remembered her husband’s prediction that Milly’s next move would be a big one. Did he suspect her plan to leave him? “Congratulations, Milly. I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more. But why can’t your husband accompany you? I’m sure he’d be pleased to—”

  “He’s always pleased to have me support him. But I can’t afford him any more.”

  “Is his drinking so expensive?”

  She smiled. “His talking costs me more than his drinking. R. U., my husband isn’t like you and me. He’s more like that cousin of yours. He doesn’t want to integrate into Canada; he just wants to sit around thinking about where he was reared and writing stories about it. I am about”—she raised crossed fingers— “to become the president of a Canadian university. I am being hired from my present university on the assumption that I am a Canadian with years of experience in the Canadian university system. Every time my husband opens his mouth, he exposes me as a foreigner. We’ve been here for more than twenty years and he still sounds like he’s walked off the set of The Beverly Hillbillies! It hasn’t mattered much until now because we haven’t been living and working in the same town. Most of my colleagues at the university have never met my husband. They know he’s a writer, and that’s fine. They don’t have to deal with him. They don’t have the Deep South thrown in their faces every time he opens his mouth. It won’t be like that when I become a president. A university president has an official residence close to campus. She hosts dinner parties at which everybody has a drink yet no one drinks to excess.”

  Against my will, I wanted to defend the husband. Milly’s urge to cut him loose was an upheaval I wished to quash. This sort of instability put my connection to her, also, at risk. “I’m sure he’ll learn—”

  “I’m sure he won’t.” The tinny music made Milly’s ferocity twice as frightening. A willowy waiter ducked through the darkness and asked us in French if we wanted another drink. I hadn’t noticed that our glasses were empty. “Oui. Encore une fois,” Milly said to the waiter. When he returned with our second round, she resumed in a less challenging voice. “R. U., imagine if you had come here with a traditional Indian wife from Bombay. Imagine what a burden she would be in your present life.”

  I tried to imagine this. It was nearly unimaginable. Certainly the thought was unpalatable. Seizing on my hesitation, Milly continued: “I cannot afford to have my husband getting drunk, I can’t afford to have him reminding everyone that I’m an American every time he opens his mouth, and I especially can’t afford to have him seducing undergraduate women at a university of which I’m president.” She let this sink in. “Believe me, all of those things will happen. Unless my dear friend R. U. draws up a separation agreement for me.”

  “A separation agreement,” I said, “is an agreement. Both wife and husband contribute to the conditions.”

  “Well, I’m very sorry, but my husband isn’t going to get that chance. Since he doesn’t have an income, he doesn’t have any leverage. As soon as the job’s confirmed, I’m presenting him with a fait accompli. He will receive a small income from my salary as payment for not coming with me. He can go back down home or he can stay in Canada.”

  “Stay in the village,” I murmured.

  “No. The house in the village will be sold.”

  “Oh, Milly.”

  I was terribly sad. It was the end of an era that had brought me most of what I had wanted in life. I mourned the lustre the village would lose with Milly’s departure. I would roam the vacant streets like Marcel bereft in a Paris abandoned by the Duchess of Guermantes. My brilliant hostess would be far away. I would never again hear the fountain tinkling in Milly’s garden, or, if I did, other, coarser people would be sitting at the long oak table: not artists concerned about the fate of the world, but ordinary louts who swilled beer and talked about American football. How could I be a country squire without a country society at the level to which I aspired?

  “We’ll still be friends, won’t we?”

  “We’ll be better friends than ever, R. U. The higher you and your friends climb, the more vital your loyalty to each other becomes.” She sipped her drink. A pair of very tall women sat down at the table next to us. They glanced in our direction from beneath thick false eyelashes. One of them pointed at my turban and said something in French.

  “Once I’m a university president, I’ll have a certain pull. For example, I’ll be able to nominate people for the Order of Canada.”

  “You will appear particularly enlightened if you nominate someone who is a visible minority.” I lifted her hand to my lips. The wine had gone to my head. I imagined myself being introduced on television as a Member of the Order of Canada, a man who had risen from distributing flyers to automobile windshields to shaking the hand of the Governor General. Few distinctions could do more to confirm my aristocracy and consecrate me as the public representative of Canada’s ethnic communities.

  “It will be good for both of us. And I’ll do it, I promise you I will, R. U. As long as you have my separation agreement ready the second I get the phone call confirming that I have the job.”

  I returned her hand to the table, imagining myself alone in the village, the fountain silenced. In compensation I would have a new sign hanging at the bottom of my staircase: R. U. Singh, Attorney at Law. B.A., M.A., LL.B., Q.C., O.C. I closed my eyes. The final two letters would be concrete testimony that I had joined the upper echelons of people who mattered. How many immigrants had attained such heights?

  “It will be a pleasure to write your separation agreement, Milly.”

  “Good. I’ll send you a list of the conditions I want included. You can write them up in legalese.” An anxious look pinched her face. In these moments of overt calculation, when the skin around her eyes wrinkled, she looked her age. “Do you think you can do it before you leave for India?”

  “Of course.”

  What would I not do for my Milly?

  eleven

  bleak house

  The next evening I returned to the village. When I woke in the morning to the gurgling of the rapids, I went downstairs and found a letter that had been mail
ed express sticking out from the ruck of morning mail. Milly, as always, was efficient. I opened the envelope and surveyed the points she wanted included. If he signed this agreement, her husband would receive a basic income that Milly reserved the right to terminate if he came within twenty-five kilometres of the city where she was working, or if he discussed her or their marriage in comments that were recorded on radio, television, or film, or were printed in a book, magazine, or newspaper.

  I sat down at my desk. I turned on the computer

  I had started to use for legal work a few years earlier. I began to cut and paste the set phrases of separation agreements, arrange them on the screen, and enter the details that Milly had given me. My stomach churned. The clauses I was editing made me ill. I was dismantling the foundations of my life, divorcing myself from my own existence. But I could not refuse Milly this favour. Even if she had not dangled the Order of Canada before my eyes, I would have provided this service with the enthusiasm of her most loyal servant—and, naturally, without sending her a bill.

  Milly and I would always be in drag together: migrant fugitives dressed up to blend in, sharing the secrets of each other’s disguises. Yet she was so much more effortless and elegant than I, so much more ruthless, behind the smile she never allowed to falter, so much better at passing for a Canadian. I would never cease to worship and be intimidated by her. If she left, if she ceased to be securely bound in her marriage, the tensions that held us together in a force field in which we were never truly apart yet never became too close for comfort, in which titillation was eternal and jealousy was unknown, would rupture, spilling us apart like apples rolling off in opposite directions, getting bruised and battered on the way.

  As the morning light climbed higher, casting shadows over the far side of the ravine through which the rapids ran, I saw that the dissolution of Milly’s marriage would explode the triangular tensions that held us together. I was not worried that she would fail to carry through on her promise of an Order of Canada. As I stared with a blank gaze at the screen of my computer, my malaise ran deeper. As a single woman, Milly would have no husband to bore and exasperate her, or to drive her to take refuge in my company. She might have affairs: precisely targeted affairs, I was certain, that would weld passion to ambition. These events would displace our tender understanding, our perfect, unending, never-to-be-consummated-yet-never-to-be-broken dalliance of mind and soul. I did not want her marriage, our marriage, to end. I did not want her to leave the village.

  I could not refuse to write this agreement. And I could not write it.

  I paced my room. I dragged my suitcase out of the closet and began to pack for my trip. I packed only clothes and a few books. I refused to play the role of the munificent Western relative, in which I had seen my cousin’s friends and their wives indulge by returning to India with boxes of unaffordable electronic baubles intended not to delight relatives at home, but rather to dazzle them with the giver’s foreign-gained wealth. The givers then spent most of the year paying off their aggressive generosity. Though better off than any of them, I was returning home on a register of restraint. I planned to be remote, dignified, and moderate.

  I told myself that Milly was my friend, that I should do this promptly, as she had asked, and send it to her office at the university by registered mail. Yet as I sat down, driving myself on with this motto of obligation, I was stymied. My fingers typed nonsense full of spelling mistakes. I could not bear to see the standard clauses that I had saved on my computer punctuated by the name “Millicent Crowe.” Unwanted, a memory surfaced of a conversation I’d had with that disagreeable professor who lived in the village. He had told me that among the university faculty Milly was known as “Militant Cow.” I caught myself typing the words “Militant Cow” in place of my dear Milly’s name. I deleted the error and laid my head down on my desk. I turned off my computer, went out for a stroll along the water as far as the old mill that was being converted into condominiums, and stared into the turbulence of rapids and tiny black-water whirlpools. I went home, turned on the computer, then got up to continue packing. By evening my suitcase was nearly ready. But Milly’s separation agreement remained uncompleted.

  I left for home. Or so, imitating the diction of my cousin and his friends, of S. A. Singh up in Thunder Bay, I insisted on thinking of India. I knew that now my home was a southwestern Ontario village, or a Toronto television studio; yet, lapsing into an impulse that I reprimanded in other immigrants, I fed myself the myth of an idyllic place of ancestral origin. That old place would spare me from the travails of the present. Except, as I would discover over the next three weeks, I was not going home. I was going to a country which, like the country I had grown up in, was called “India.” There the resemblance ended. The India I visited had been purged of the phantoms of Rudyard Kipling; no one dreamed of being a country squire. Buildings I remembered had been demolished, the smog was impenetrable, everyone spoke on cellphones, the electronic toys my cousin took home in triumph were available in every shopping centre, and even gentle Hindus had become fundamentalists. Everyone spoke of prosperity, yet I saw only the fraying of an ancient culture. And the traffic! It made me vow to never again complain about the 401.

  I was received as an object of curiosity. Unable to perpetrate the charade of being a Sikh on my native soil, I had left my turban in the village. My beard had been trimmed to a close-cropped greyish fuzz, and my hair cut to just below my ears. I looked like an Indian mimicking Western bohemianism, a Dickensian gentleman dyed brown. As I observed myself in the mirror of the plane’s toilet on the flight from Toronto to Hong Kong, I realized that this was the role it fell to me to play. I must satisfy the belief that I was returning in triumph from a world that my family could not hope to understand. I stopped off for a few days each in Hong Kong and Singapore, then went on to Bombay. Even the city’s name was about to change. In order to extirpate the colonial heritage that was my most cherished tie with the place, Bombay was going to be renamed Mumbai. My horror at this decision made me an object of ridicule. Even the left-armed fast bowler, a compendium of reactionary opinions, regarded the change of name as progress. My days in Hong Kong and Singapore enabled me to understand this changed India as part of a continuum of Asian success.

  To my frustration, rather than being awed by me, my family found me quaint. “Are you my son?” my father said, crumpled in the garden chair where he spent his days attended by servants. “You look like a man from my parents’ generation. I would expect you to be my grand-uncle, not my child.”

  “I take that as a compliment, Father.”

  I was less demure when my nephews and nieces found me old-fashioned. At the very least, I would have expected them to confront a paradox in the sight of a man who had returned from the First World steeped in traditional learning. But, to my astonishment, my quaintness fulfilled the young people’s expectations. It corroborated their view of North America as yesterday’s modernity, one step behind their own.

  I took notes on their comments, thinking of columns I would write when I returned. This was the only time that thoughts of Milly entered my head. I remembered the unfinished separation agreement and told myself that Milly would not mind, and that I would complete it as soon as I got home. Because, I was now certain, a colonial village in southwestern Ontario was my home.

  When I returned, my mailbox was full of imperious-looking letters and telegrams. Ignoring them, I went to sleep. In the morning I bound my head in my turban, feeling like myself for the first time in three weeks. I left for Toronto, where I was due to make a television appearance. The lights of the CBC studio on Front Street were hot. The gasping, humid heat of India had depleted me, but this familiar baking invigorated me. My home and native land was not simply Canada; it was the Canadian mediascape: this was my habitat.

  I revelled in my panel discussion, illustrating my points with examples from my recent trip. I was a worldly, well-travelled fellow, a cosmop
olitan authority in addition to being a native informant from one of our land’s multicultural communities. Recalling the sensation of being seen as a man in drag with Milly in the mansion in Montreal, I felt reconciled with myself. I was myself, and I was also “R. U. Singh,” who incarnated multiculturalism on television. My journey to the home that was no longer mine had laid to rest my unease at the thought that my core reposed

  in a phantom of the airwaves. As I shook hands with the host and my fellow panellists at the end of the taping, I knew that from now on I would enjoy my accidental occidental career as never before.

  I was on my way out of the CBC building, walking through the glass atrium, when a reporter I’d met once before, a rough-edged fellow who wore baggy suits and covered Ontario politics, flagged me down. “What’s this I hear about the Law Society investigating you? What’s going on?”

  “No one is investigating me,” I said, more amused than startled. “Who told you that?”

  “I’m told there’s a deposition.”

  “Rumours started by friends of our former prime minister, I suspect.” I mustered my most urbane smile. I clapped him on the shoulder. We shared a laugh.

  I retrieved my car from the underground parking lot, then crawled through snarled traffic all the way to the Gardiner Expressway, where I entered hordes of swerving, demented drivers. I was well outside Toronto before I had time to reflect on my encounter in the atrium. I acknowledged a certain unease. My law practice had provided me with steady work after my confrontation with the prime minister. Having no place for a secretary in my flat, I had continued to keep track of my correspondence myself, which meant I did not keep track of it well. An accountant down the street straightened out my finances at the end of the year, but I had no one to file my letters. I opened letters when I had time, choosing those whose return addresses indicated that they were connected with matters that were on my mind, or those that looked as though they contained a cheque, or a promising invitation. The others piled up on my desk. The pile, to be honest, was voluminous. Most of it was junk mail, but I supposed it was possible that I might have missed something important.