Love & Courage

by Jagmeet Singh

  My dad grew up in an antisocial home with a small support network. My grandfather was a bit of a shell after his first wife died, so he kept to himself and interacted little with my dad. Meanwhile, his mom pushed away relatives out of paranoia that they’d try to exploit the family’s modest wealth. As a result, I think, my dad’s loneliness led to stress and depression. But, like his own father, he muted his sadness. He had never learned to talk through his problems or look for any other healthy coping mechanism. Some of us decompress by binge watching YouTube. Others run or read or write rhymes. Personally, I cook—as late as three in the morning if I need to relax (the delicious meal a welcome bonus). But my dad’s stress relief was the bottle, and he only tightened his clutch on it when the pressures got more intense.

  He started drinking in Panjab during medical school, but only in social settings with professors and classmates. On those nights, he’d drink more than anyone at the table and need help getting home. But those nights were rare. His determination to become a doctor as fast as possible limited his youthful drinking. Similarly, when he first arrived in Canada and lived in Scarborough, he couldn’t afford the time—or money—to get drunk regularly. Even in St. John’s, when money wasn’t as tight, he might unwind with a glass of cheap vodka but he didn’t have the time to drink heavily what with his fifteen-day work streaks at the hospital and his assistant professorship.

  After his residency, my dad’s schedule allowed for more time to drink. The more structured days at the Grand Falls hospital gave him back his weekends for the first time in fifteen years. Still, he was self-conscious about consuming alcohol. My mom, especially, hated it—she, like most Sikhs, was against the use of intoxicants. My dad would never drink openly; he’d hide himself away. When he was done, he’d even hide his bottles in random places—in the washroom under the sink or behind the cleaning supplies in the laundry room cupboard.

  My mom knew what was going on before she discovered the open bottles of Alberta Pure vodka tucked away with the Lysol and Vim. She smelled it on his breath. Saw it in his stumbles. Heard it in his mumbling.

  She must have feared the worst when he got the job in Windsor. Barely making ends meet and a busy schedule had protected us against my dad’s worst tendencies. Now, he’d have more time and money than ever, but there’d be more pressure on him than ever, too. To my mom, it seemed a dangerous combination.

  The work would have been challenging for anyone. My dad felt the harshest judgment from patients who wondered aloud why a foreigner was looking after them. At the end of his days, all too eager to forget his frustrations, he drank heavily. Soon after we moved into the house in Villa Borghese, he built a bar for the basement. I don’t remember what else he stocked it with, but I do remember his preferred bottle, Russian Prince vodka. There were always two or three bottles of that vodka in the cabinet. The label mascot—an unfriendly, bearded man in a tall bearskin hat—looked extra menacing to my childhood eyes.

  As a kid, it seemed to me that my dad drank Russian Prince like water. So, I wondered, what if we could fool him into actually drinking water, not vodka? I hatched a plan with my siblings one day while we were messing around in the basement.

  I positioned my brother at the foot of the stairs. “Watch the door, Gurratan,” I said. “Manjot, come here—hurry.” She followed me to the bar, where I took bottle after bottle of clear liquor from the cabinet and handed them to her to pour down the drain.

  “Do you think it will work?” she asked, as she refilled each empty bottle right to the lip.

  “Maybe he’ll think, Oh, it’s just not working, and give up,” I explained.

  What did I know about the taste of vodka? It smelled like hairspray, that much I could tell, but I couldn’t imagine my dad would drink something that tasted as putrid as it smelled. All I knew was he’d drink the stuff and that made him act crazy. So I figured we were getting rid of the problem, making the home safer, and probably helping him, too.

  It didn’t take long to realize how wrong we were. We were in the living room when he arrived from work. I heard him hang his coat in the closet and drop his keys in a bowl on the console. The basement door creaked open and his footsteps softly echoed downstairs. Seconds later, I heard his footsteps thumping upstairs again.

  My dad entered the living room wearing his blue suit with an unbuttoned shirt collar and loosened tie. He held two bottles by his side. His lips were wet. Water overflowed down the Russian Prince’s menacing face. I slowly gazed upward, expecting an angry outburst. My dad’s look, however, was one of embarrassment. As a father, he should be entitled to parental authority and moral authority—the wisdom and power to tell kids what’s right and wrong. But he knew he couldn’t reprimand us for what we had done.

  “Dad, you’re mean when you drink it,” said Manjot.

  “We want you to get better,” I said. “What you’re doing is wrong.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You’re scary,” Gurratan said.

  “I’m know, I’m sorry,” my dad said with a big exhale. Despite the apology, he grabbed his overcoat and walked out the door. The Mercedes backed out of the driveway and returned twenty minutes later. Through the windows, I watched my dad walk over to the passenger side and lift two plastic bags off the seat. He came inside, and I heard the glass bottles clang together as he kicked off his shoes. The basement door creaked. His footsteps faded as he walked farther down the stairs.

  “I wanted my mind to slow down,” he’d later tell me. “I’d come home, take my medicine, and have a good night’s sleep. Then, the next day, wake up and prove I’m better than the others. But why did I have to prove I’m better than others?”

  My dad’s balanced perspective was years away, though, and after our failed attempts to replace his vodka (we tried several times), things remained the same. Nobody was immune to his drunken outbursts. No one was safe from the airborne objects he’d throw, the insults he’d hurl. The man had everything: good house, good car, good pay, smart and obedient kids. A country that gave him a chance to thrive. Yet he was impossible to satisfy. A clean-freak who was himself a mess. A perfectionist who was profoundly imperfect.

  He took it out on my mom the most, constantly nitpicking about her cleaning abilities and appearances.

  “You don’t dress properly,” I overheard him yell at her in their bedroom one Saturday afternoon. “Put on something nice for once,” he shouted.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” I told Manjot and Gurratan. I gathered my siblings and took them to our favourite spot, a little ledge at the top of the basement stairs that we would often sit on and dangle our legs off of.

  I closed the door to the basement, dimming our parents’ voices to a muffle. I tried to act like nothing was happening.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” I said. I helped Gurratan off the ledge and led him and Manjot into our basement, where we sat cross-legged on the vinyl flooring. We arranged ourselves in a triangle facing each other. We started meditating together, repeating “Waheguru.” After a while, I pulled out a book of Sikh poetry, unwrapped the cloth binding, and read it out loud. We were far from enlightenment, but in that moment, the three of us were connected, which was good, because it felt like we were all each other had.

  Looking back, I recognize that this time was tough for my mom. Things were scary and we were all trying to figure it out.

  As a kid, escape was the only protection I could see. But I vowed to myself that one day I’d be tough enough to protect my family from my dad.

  “When will I be stronger?” I asked my mom for the umpteenth time.

  “Do you want to learn how to be stronger?” she asked.

  “Yes!” I exclaimed.

  “Maybe we can sign you up for tae kwon do.”

  The next week, my mom drove me to a plaza in a commercial part of town. The gym was sandwiched between a nail parlour and a tailor, with a plastic sign over the door that read TAE KWON DO. The dojo in a plaza reminded me of the Cobra
Kai Dojo in The Karate Kid.

  My mom dropped me off in front of the glass door and told me she’d be back in about an hour. I opened the door to a wide-open room decorated with Bruce Lee posters and framed photos of fighters kicking and punching through bricks and wood. There were different-size punching bags dangling from the ceiling by chains, and stacks of wood boards, which immediately excited me—I thought I’d be smashing them with my fists in no time.

  A man in a white uniform—the baggy pants and shirt of Korean martial arts—greeted me with a handshake.

  “You must be Jagmeet,” he said.

  “Jug-meet,” I replied. “Hi.”

  “Jug-meet, you’re early. I like that,” he said. “I’m your instructor, Mr. Reginald Neilson.”

  Mr. Neilson wasn’t the tae kwon do master I expected. To me, he looked like a bald old man with barely noticeable grey hair behind his ears. When he showed me to the change room, I noticed he had a limp. But he did wear a black belt, so that was something, and there were pictures of him smashing bricks on the wall outside the washrooms.

  He opened a locker. “What size are you?” he asked.

  “Medium.”

  He pulled a folded uniform halfway out the locker, sized me up, then returned it and searched for another. “You look like a small,” he said, handing me a uniform and rolled-up white belt. “This is how it starts,” he said, tightening his black belt.

  He left me to change. It felt powerful as I pulled on each piece of the uniform, like I was piecing together armour. I returned to the main room and sat on the hardwood floor as other students trickled in. They all noticed me sitting cross-legged on the mat, waiting for class to begin. I remember a muscular guy with big glasses and an Afro, a chubby teenager with long hair, and James.

  James was the last to arrive, wearing a Lycra shirt and shorts. He carried an angular bike helmet under his armpit as he pulled the Velcro straps on his cycling shoes and placed them against the wall. The rest of us were suited up and standing shoulder to shoulder by rank, a dozen young men, a few young women, a couple of high school–age guys, and me at the very end—the lowest in rank and size.

  “Sorry,” James said, panting. “Police pulled me over. They said I was riding too fast. They almost gave me a speeding ticket!”

  He quickly changed into his uniform and returned, taking his position at the very end of the line. His red belt had a stripe, meaning he was one level away from his black belt.

  We stretched and mimicked Mr. Neilson’s movements together—front stance, back stance, leg swings—poised with our fists in front of our chests, ready for combat. I kept glancing over at the highest-ranking students, trying to imitate them and change positions with the same slow-motion gracefulness they used. Mr. Neilson started calling out movements and strikes to practise with more force and guttural releases.

  “Front kick.”

  “Side kick.”

  “Vertical punch.”

  We practised the different forms—series of strikes and blocks that simulate a fight—that would carry me through the ranks. The most basic white-belt forms were simple turns, steps, and strikes that I mastered quickly. It only took a couple of months for me to get a yellow stripe on my belt, and then I earned the yellow belt itself. With each upgrade or each new piece of armour I strapped on—like boxing gloves and shin guards—I felt a sense of accomplishment. Most of all, I felt more powerful.

  I trained more intensely than the other students because I could release all my might without hurting the other, bigger club members. My sparring partners saw me as the kid brother of the tae kwon do club, so they treated me kindly, letting me punch and kick as hard as I wanted. It was great practice, but what I really wanted was to break boards like James did. During his black-belt test, I sat cross-legged on the sidelines, rapt with attention. I admired how fluidly he pounced through the air before doing a jump kick and chopping the wood with his fist, and how straight the broken edges of the boards looked by his feet. He had to spar with all of us at once to earn the highest ranking. He moved with speed and grace.

  That’s the kind of skill I need, I thought to myself as I watched him.

  James was a superstar who crushed opponents at tournaments. I didn’t have to compete to earn my coloured belts, just learn the forms and self-defence techniques, and pass the exams. While belt examinations were formal, Mr. Neilson was relaxed about levelling up. What mattered more to him was our dedication to the martial art. I spent a lot of time at home practising my forms, which got more complicated with each new colour and stripe.

  Forms force you to visualize mock fights, like playing out a match in your mind. I remember once practising in my bedroom as my mom leaned against the doorway watching. I didn’t mind the audience, and she appreciated me doing anything physical or academic with my time. My arms glided from reverse punch to outer forearm block, reverse punch and knife-hand strike, moving in slow motion but delivering strikes with enough force to give my uniform sleeves a satisfying snap. I blew exhales with each strike, trying to stay focused, but her smile distracted me. My stone face broke, and I started fighting my mock opponent with a huge grin.

  Over the next couple of years, I graduated from yellow belt to orange to blue. I was eleven years old and four levels from black belt. Finally, I was ready to start breaking stuff.

  “I’ll grab a board,” I exclaimed the first time Mr. Neilson mentioned it.

  “Hold on,” he said. “I don’t want you punching through wood just yet. It’s too hard on your knuckles, and your bones are still developing.”

  I liked the way Mr. Neilson appealed to science and biology with his lessons, but I was disappointed—I kept thinking about James’s black-belt test and how mesmerized I’d been. Mr. Neilson must have sensed my impatience, because he eventually relented and laid a thin board down across cinder blocks, like a bridge. He walked me through the method, showing me how to hammer through the board with the blunt side of my fist. It cracked under my force like an eggshell.

  I couldn’t wait to show off to my friends. That weekend, we scavenged the neighbourhood for construction materials and collected sturdy branches around the ravine. My friends held them out for me to break with my feet, elbows, and hands.

  “Let me try,” said Walid. I held up a branch, and he hit it with all his might. The wood barely cracked. Walid yelped and fanned his hand in pain.

  We all laughed, and as we left the ravine, I snapped the branch over my knee. I really was getting stronger.

  My training in the dojo carried over into the streets, and the more I trained in tae kwon do, the more my fighting style changed. Before, if kids tried to shove me or pull my hair, it devolved into an unsophisticated scrap—headlocks, kneeing, rolling on the grass, and pulling at each other’s jackets. Now I had technique.

  One recess, toward the end of fifth grade, a kid started ridiculing my patka again. “What’s that bandage on your head?” he taunted. “You get hit in the head? Are you covering a lump? I’ll rip that thing off your dumb head.”

  I marched right up and challenged him. “If you’re going to do it, do it, then.” As soon as the boy grabbed me by the bun, I channelled my inner Jean-Claude Van Damme. Normally my instinct would be to get his hands off my head, but I let him have my bun. It meant I had two free hands and he only had one. While he tried to tear my patka off, I threw a reverse punch to his solar plexus, then a straight punch to the same spot. I landed a couple of side kicks, and the boy crashed to the floor.

  My fifth-grade teacher, Mr. V, barrelled toward us to break up the fight. But there was nothing to break up. I stood still as the other kid lay on the floor, holding his stomach and gasping for air.

  Mr. V helped the boy to his feet, then grabbed hold of me by my arm. He took me to “the wall” and ordered me to stand against it until the bell rang. I stared at the wall, unblinking. I looked around to make sure no one was looking. I then turned back toward the wall as a couple of tears slid down my face. I wasn’t
hurt and the other guy had started it. But picturing the older kid on the ground gasping for breath, I felt bad about what I had done. I didn’t want to hurt him. I quickly rubbed my eyes with both hands and slipped my tough-guy mask back on. The recess bell rang. I was free to go. As I walked back to class, kids who’d seen the fight looked at me with more respect. I gave them the barest hint of a nod and continued on my way to class.

  After recess, Mr. V marched me to the office, where he called my parents and asked them to meet with him after school.

  I thought I was going to be suspended. But when my parents and I walked into Mr. V’s classroom that evening, he acted very warmly. Mr. V lived in our neighbourhood and was friendly with my parents. Whenever my dad saw him washing his red Mazda Miata in his driveway, he’d walk over for a quick chat.

  Mr. V offered my parents coffee from the staff room. They declined and squeezed themselves in two little kid desks on either side of mine.

  “Jagmeet is an exceptional student,” Mr. V said. “He always has the right answer. Always. He throws his hand up so often I worry he’s going to hurt it. Maybe we should get you a little buzzer, like Jeopardy!, hey buddy?”

  I blushed.

  “So what is the problem, then?” asked my dad.

  “The problem, Dr. Dhaliwal, is that I’m worried about Jagmeet wasting his potential. He has a great appetite for learning, but he’s distracted by all these fights.”

  My mom and dad spoke a few words to each other in Panjabi.

  “Perhaps things might be better if Jagmeet was at a different school?” my dad said. “We’ve heard of a good school in Detroit. A few of my colleagues send their kids there.”

  “A change of scenery might not hurt,” Mr. V said.

  “What do you think, Jagmeet?” my mom asked.

  “Let’s see what it looks like,” I said.

  The next day, my mom picked me up from school early so that we could tour Detroit Country Day School together. The name was a bit of a misnomer; the hundred-year-old preparatory school was actually in an affluent suburb of Detroit called Beverly Hills. It took my mom forty minutes to drive there, across the Ambassador Bridge, north on the I-75 and continuing north on the M-10.