Love & Courage

by Jagmeet Singh

  Still, without my parents’ support, I found it hard to make sure I was taking care of Gurratan properly. Before, I could go out to a restaurant or pick up a new pair of jeans any time I wanted. Now, I had to think twice about every expense. We were just barely making ends meet, but we were fortunate to have help from friends who offered to feed us.

  Despite the new difficulties, we were lucky in many important ways. We were tight on money, but we were safe and healthy and remained far away from the trauma. I could have packed up, sold the condo, moved back to Windsor to save money, and found the same low-paying jobs there. But I didn’t want to disrupt Gurratan’s life. Despite our parents’ turmoil, the loss of our uncle to a senseless murder, and our financial problems, my brother had just lived the best year of his life. Could I really take that away from him? No way. I decided we would stay in London until he graduated high school. Instead of talking things over with my mom, who had enough to worry about, I sought Manjot’s advice and talked things over with her. We agreed that keeping Gurratan in London made the most sense for him.

  With that solved, I turned to my other dilemma. I’d just finished my bachelor’s degree after three years, but I had no clue what to do next. If my dad remained unemployable, that would leave me, as the eldest son, to be the breadwinner. My job at Aldo was paying the bills, but obviously it wasn’t going to cut it for the long term. I had pulled a lot of overtime throughout the summer, so I had a little bit saved up to help get through the school year. My mom and I had some extra money to supplement what I had earned over the summer as well. That addressed the short term, but I still needed to figure out what I was going to do in the long term. I gave notice to Aldo that I would be going back to school in September. When September rolled around, I registered at Western for some science courses and philosophy courses, as I wanted to bump up my average.

  I was still considering writing my MCAT and applying for medical school. But when I thought about how long it would take, and how much it would cost for me to reach the point where I could support my family, I knew I needed something quicker. But I still didn’t know what that was.

  It was a philosophy of law elective that unexpectedly opened up a new career path. The professor offered to meet with each student to discuss our most recent paper and ways to improve for the next. I took up the offer and scheduled a meeting in his office.

  We started by chatting about my course load.

  “Are you pursuing a degree in philosophy?” he asked.

  “No, I’ve just finished up my science degree. This year I’m taking some courses to upgrade my marks and cover off a couple of prerequisites to keep my options open for grad school.”

  I felt a little embarrassed about mentioning grad school specifically.

  “But I’m also taking a couple of philosophy courses as electives,” I said.

  “Have you ever considered law?”

  A career as a lawyer was probably the last thing I ever imagined.

  “Not really,” I said. “But I do enjoy your philosophy of law class.”

  “I can tell,” he said. He rested his chin on his knuckles and leaned in intently. “Why do you like my class?” he asked.

  I thought for a moment. “I suppose because laws make up some of the bonds that hold us together,” I said. “Good laws can hold us together while bad laws can tear us apart. I like exploring how we form bonds with each other to build a framework for cooperation, but I’ve never thought about practising law.”

  He handed back my past paper, with 90 per cent on it. “You should consider it,” he said.

  At the end of my fourth year, I still wasn’t sold on law school, so after a lot of reflecting, and seeing the rapid growth of the digital sector, I enrolled in summer school to complete the first-year computer science prerequisites. I decided I would start my second year of computer science in September 2001, convinced it would be the fastest path to stability. That summer, when I wasn’t in classes, I worked at a call centre for TD Bank. It was the first time I worked full time and went to school full time as well. And it was brutal. I still managed to score decent marks in my classes, but I learned that cramming a year of computer science prerequisites into a couple of months doesn’t work well with evening and night shift work.

  In quieter moments, I felt a shadow of doubt. Ever since I was a kid, I’d believed that becoming a doctor was my future. The path had always seemed clear. Now I had no direction, and limited time and money to figure things out. Would this new route actually be the quickest and best path to providing security for my family?

  We weren’t having any luck selling the downtown office so we finally accepted an offer far lower than we should have, which meant we were still carrying a big chunk of debt from it.

  “Okay,” I told my mom, “now we’re going to sell the house.”

  “Thank God,” she said.

  I gave the renters at the Santo Drive house their notice and prepared to move my parents back to our childhood home. But, again, the market quickly punctured any sense of relief we might have had. Not many jobs in Windsor were recession-proof except, ironically, those of doctors, so there was little interest in an upper-market property.

  We’d learned from our failed first attempt to sell the farmhouse in 1997, shortly after we’d moved in, not to set our asking price too high. But even with our lowered expectations, we were disappointed. With Windsor in a full-on recession, the highest offer we got wasn’t even enough to make back the mortgage. But what choice did we have? It was a fantasy to hold on a little longer, thinking the city could go back to being a boom town overnight.

  So we did what was necessary. We sold the house on Disputed Road. On the day we moved my parents out, I thought about how the farmhouse was supposed to have been our family’s dream home. It had never lived up to that ideal—for Gurratan, it was more of a nightmare. Leaving wasn’t hard at all. I had lost any notion of happiness coming from the size or beauty of the house. I knew that happiness comes only when you feel peace and security in your home. Manjot, Gurratan, and I were experiencing what that meant. I hoped that one day my mom could as well.

  Chapter Twelve

  A NEED FOR JUSTICE

  The World Trade Center attacks were horrific, and on that day and every one that followed, our thoughts and sympathy went to the victims and their families. Closer to home, the attacks also ramped up the racism of my youth all over again. The racism my brother, friends, and I confronted after September 11, 2001, made all the “Paki,” “diaper head,” and “dirty” insults of our youth seem innocent by comparison. Still, I often preferred the physical assaults to the laughter and mocking. I could block their blows, but their laughter always cut through my defences.

  Shortly after the Twin Towers were destroyed, I saw a picture of Osama bin Laden on TV and the first thought that popped in my head was, I will never be able to wear a white turban again.

  Of course, avoiding white head wraps wasn’t deterrent enough. The image repeated regularly in the media was brown skin, young male + beard + turban = terrorist. No one seemed to understand that I hated al-Qaeda as much as them—the crimes and violence committed by them were horrible, and they should rightly be condemned and denounced. I often heard “Osama” or “terrorist” yelled at me with hatred from passing cars. Other times, people simply walked up to me and said “Boom!” before walking away. It happened wherever I went—no place was immune to the power of indiscriminate hate.

  Later that school term, while Walid was visiting me in London, we were standing at an intersection, waiting for the light to change, when a truck pulled up beside us. The truck’s passenger window was rolled down, and I could see the people staring at me. Walid and I kept chatting, trying to ignore their looks, but I had a feeling something was going to happen. They were looking toward me and laughing. When the light turned green, the passenger yelled, “Watch out, Osama has a bomb!”

  I gestured with my arms, challenging them to stop their vehicle, but they sped
by, shrieking with laughter.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Walid, wide-eyed with disbelief. “I can’t believe you’re being harassed for being a Muslim. I’m the Muslim.”

  “Some things never change,” I said with a forced laugh, trying to lighten the mood. “It’s been getting worse since 9/11.”

  Walid was right—it was ridiculous. But it was reality for me and countless others. Throughout my life I had learned what it was like to feel like I didn’t belong, but I was also learning that I wasn’t alone in that feeling. The more I looked around me, the more I saw all sorts of people who were being made to feel they didn’t have a place in society, whether that was because of the way they looked or how much they earned or where they were from. But at the time, I didn’t have the language to express my concerns. That changed when I met Anton Allahar.

  In my last year of university, Manjot and I had registered for Anton Allahar’s class the Sociology of Minority Groups. I could tell immediately this wasn’t going to be like any other course I had taken. Professor Allahar walked into class with a mixture of confidence, style, and a little bravado. He was West Indian, from Trinidad, and dressed sharply. I liked him immediately.

  He introduced himself and posed a question.

  “What is the largest minority group in Canada?” he asked.

  I smiled because I’d done my research. The week before class, I brainstormed what groups we would talk about. I knew there was a large South Asian minority group in Canada, but I figured that recent immigration from Hong Kong and mainland China probably tipped the scales. I raised my hand and he signalled for me to respond.

  “The Chinese are the largest minority group,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  Others answered: South Asian? Caribbean? Black?

  To each answer, Professor Allahar simply said, “No.”

  Finally, when we lapsed into silence, he said, “The largest minority group in Canada is women.”

  I was confused. Women weren’t a minority group, were they? Based on what definition, I wondered, because it can’t be based on population.

  Women, Allahar explained, were not a minority in terms of numbers, but they were in terms of power. He cited economic and political representation disparities as evidence to support his claim.

  As Allahar spoke, I saw the paradigm from a lens I hadn’t considered. As the understanding began to dawn on me, I thought about my mom. I sent her a silent thank you. She’d always said we were all connected, and even in this, I saw that she was right. I was part of a minority group, but right in front of my eyes was an enormous group—women—who were a minority group still fighting for equal rights. We are all truly one, I heard my mom say.

  I thought a lot about my law professor’s suggestion. I needed to decide about how I was going to support my family long-term, and a career as a lawyer certainly presented a degree of much-needed stability. Our family funds were dwindling. My parents were settled back in our childhood home now, but without my dad’s salary, they could barely pay the bills. I was hardly making enough to support myself, let alone Gurratan. There was only so much time left before I’d have to earn real money. Each week, I watched our family funds wither away a little more as we tried to pay off our debts. As our bank account grew steadily smaller, I reflected more seriously on law school.

  The October 31 midnight deadline to apply was fast approaching. I was so unprepared that I hadn’t even written my LSAT. Nobody applies to law school without knowing their LSAT score—that’s crazy. Without one, your application is incomplete. If I had any sliver of a plan, I’d have already taken the test and hopefully earned an impressive score. But I’d already missed my chances to write the exam in the summer. The next round of tests was in December.

  Halloween arrived, and I was ready to let the application deadline pass. All my friends were making plans for parties. Halloween has always been one of my favourite times of the year. I loved dressing up. I even saw Gurratan walking around the condo trying out different costumes. One of my friends called up and said they knew about the best party for Halloween.

  “So are you in?” he asked.

  “Obviously, I’m always down for a Halloween party.”

  As I sat there figuring out what my costume would be, my thoughts drifted back to my law professor. If I was being honest with myself, I couldn’t really see myself as a computer programmer. I wanted to become another kind of professional. I needed some job security and the ability to earn a good salary to support my family.

  My family had fallen way behind financially, paying less than half of what we owed each month. My mom routinely fielded calls from creditors, and the pressure stressed her out. I couldn’t ignore my duty to her any longer.

  On a whim I decided to do it. I called up my friend. “Hey, man, sorry but you have to count me out for the party.”

  “Oh no, why?”

  “I’m going to fill out an application.”

  “No way! That’s awesome, so you’re going to do it?”

  “Yeah, man.”

  “Okay, brother. Do your thing.”

  “Thanks, have fun!”

  I opened up the link to a law school application only to receive a 404 error.

  “Weird,” I muttered to myself. I tried to find the application page a few different ways, but every time, the site blocked me. It dawned on me that I’d missed the online deadline. The only way I could still apply on time was to get a hard copy of my application to an office in Guelph before midnight. But it was too late to call a courier. If I was going to meet this deadline—the last one until next year—I’d have to fill out and drop off my paperwork in person at a location an hour away.

  I printed the form and filled it out as quickly as possible, checking “n/a” next to anything referencing the LSAT. I paper-clipped the form to my university transcript, jammed it in an envelope, and raced to the car.

  It was close, but I managed to get the application to the office before midnight. Now all I had to do was write the LSAT, and I had six weeks to do it. No big deal, I thought on the drive home, congratulating myself on a job well done.

  I bought a used LSAT prep book and scheduled my test date in December. Over the next few weeks, I casually flipped through the book. My overconfidence didn’t serve me well. The day before the exam, I woke up and wandered downstairs to grab breakfast, telling myself I’d read through the book that afternoon. As I was walking down the stairs, though, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t the day before the exam—it was the day of the exam.

  I ran out the door without a jacket, jumped in the car, and rushed to the examination room at Western. I sprinted to the entrance, snow clouding around my feet as I threw open the main doors, and ran up and down the hallways looking for the right room. I finally entered, panting and covered in snow from the knees down. I noted the eyes of two dozen aspiring lawyers staring at me.

  The exam facilitator approached me as quietly as possible. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m here . . . to write my L . . . SAT,” I said between breaths.

  “Are you Jayg-meet?” she asked. “I’m sorry, but it’s a timed test. You’ll have to reschedule.”

  “That’s okay, you can just deduct my time. I’m okay.”

  She had to suppress her laughter. “It doesn’t work that way. I’m sorry.”

  The next available date was February, long after the acceptance letters would go out. I had no choice but to reschedule my LSAT for two months later.

  When I got home, the first thing I did was circle the date on my calendar. Then I wrote out the date in big letters and taped it to my bedroom door. This time I actually studied. I read the prep book and did one practice test. The day of the test, I made sure to wake up hours before the real thing and work out, psyching myself up for the LSAT like I was Rocky Balboa facing Apollo Creed.

  Unlike Rocky, I walked out of the exam room victoriously. I knew they couldn’t turn me down.

  My fifth year at W
estern was also my brother’s last year at high school. I helped Gurratan apply to universities. He applied to a number of schools across Ontario. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to go, but he definitely didn’t want to go to Western. Not that he didn’t like Western or London. In fact, it was the opposite. Those three years in London were some of my brother’s best years of his life. In fairness, they were some of my best years, too.

  To this day, my brother and I reminisce about the good times we had. The stability and comfort of our condo in London was better than the years in the farmhouse or even the times in our home on Santo. The fun and relaxed vibe was a stark contrast to the painful trauma of living at home with my dad. Those three years included endless summers of weekend beach getaways to Grand Bend on Lake Huron, barbeques with friends, and walks along the Thames River in the “Forest City,” as London is often called. Gurratan had hung out with me at Western so often that everyone knew him as my little brother. Now, Gurratan wanted to spread his wings a little and make a name for himself, a name other than “Jagmeet’s little brother.”

  Gurratan quickly decided on McMaster University in Hamilton. We packed up our place in London so that I could rent it out for some income. He was going to be starting school in September and was planning on living on campus in a dorm. I had my fingers crossed that I would get into law school.

  I had finished writing my last exams during the middle of April. So for the past two and a half months I was basically in limbo waiting to see if I was accepted to law school. If I wasn’t accepted, I had no idea what I was going to do in September.

  I finally received a letter from Osgoode Hall in the beginning of July. I was nearly overcome with anticipation and fear. I opened it. It took me a while to register what it meant. I was accepted! I was elated and filled with a sense of purpose.

  After that, my brother and I moved back to Windsor. Gurratan was going to McMaster and I was going to law school. I spent that summer preparing for law school and applying for student loans.