Everything’s forgettable. Strange how that is. I had the loveliest, most exhilarating three weeks in Toronto, which ended only last night, but it’s a struggle now to remember the specific incidents that made it so wonderful. This bothers me.

And this makes being here, being in Vancouver that much more difficult.

Oh well, it’s still early days. I’ll get over this, and start remembering again.

Kitsilano is one of Vancouver’s most expensive neighbourhoods. It’s where I live here.

And I have felt safer in innercity Toronto in the dark hours before sunrise than I do walking here after the sun has set. I’ve loitered on my own in empty playgrounds in Flemo at midnight and had lone men watch me swing on the swings and felt no fear, while here I sometimes steel myself before walking through these leafy streets, past these quiet and polite houses.

It’s 11PM and I go out for a walk. I stay close to the main street, try to force myself to avoid the alleyways, to stick where the lights are, try to force myself to trust this city, the way it goes dead still with the night. And here, where there are five pet salons in the space of two blocks, the insides of the entrances to the clothing boutiques are people’s homes. You always see the shopping carts first. Then you see the rugs encasing legs, except at first sight, the form is unformed, so you could mistake them for dogs curled up under blankets, and you still often do. And tonight I see the shopping cart and I see the blanket and I’m hoping, as I draw nearer, that he’s asleep, but he’s not. He’s awake, eyes open and mouth closed, sitting up with his back against the door, toque pulled low over his forehead and scarf up tight below his chin. And his hands — why must this one detail, above all the others, hurt most — are folded over his chest, like at the end of prayer, after you’re done asking for impossible things, in resignation or patience, surrender or hope. It’s grown colder in Vancouver than in Toronto, and it’s a deep physical hurt.

So I keep walking, trying to pretend like he doesn’t matter, like the fact of my seeing doesn’t matter, and I shoulder my way through a crowd of drunk boys, and there isn’t a single car on this street, but the stoplights blink green yellow red anyway, diligent and irrelevant. And I think against my will of yesterday, of being in court, under-dressed and over-invested. I think in colours, of the white walls and the brown benches and the orange jumpsuit.

In the daytime, the men — in this neighbourhood, the homeless are always male — mostly disappear, or else they stick to the back streets, like the one I walk through to get home. So we stay close to the thinnest capillaries of this place, away from the surface, where we conflict with the decor.

This neighbourhood is eerie. I do not trust it. I can never put my guard down here. It is too clean, too calm. It is artificial; no one can smile this steadily and this constantly without being a liar. Continue reading this entry »

• It’s true, people are nicer in Vancouver than in Toronto: cars will stop for me when I attempt to jaywalk; this never fails to disconcert me and is substantially upping my chances of ending up in an ER.
• Even the hipsters here are chill/er. My hatred for hipsterism has now become largely academic; in Toronto it was existential.
• Vancouver is also, as a whole, a thinner city.
• As a whole, however, Torontonians are sexier.
• The combined population of all of the Greater Toronto Area boasts fewer white people with dreads than my 10-minute morning bus ride to school.
• On any given day, I am liable to see more piercings than I am appendages.
• On that note, there are more noserings here than there are brown people in Brampton.
• My heart gives a little leap every time it sees a vintage VW van. I’m probably sporting a vehicular-induced arrhythmia right now.
• My roommate and I made incredible first impressions on landlords. I’ve never in my life heard the words You look like such nice girls so often. We had our pick of basements. More enterprising souls (read: ones less lazy) would be able to make money off this.
  Then I cut my hair really short.
• Vancouver Public Library’s central branch trumps every extant library in Toronto.
• Nowhere else in Canada except on southside Main can you be confident that a bus driven by a middle-aged white guy will make a grudging halt between scheduled stops because the bus is full of irate elderly Sikh be-turbaned uncles who are about to incite a riot about a missed stop. Sat Sri Akal.
• In Vancouver, in the Punjab Market, Cornershop feels aboriginal — and you can’t even say that about Scarborough, because this isn’t about quantifying brownness, but how it feels different to be brown here. I love/d Cornershop in Toronto, but it didn’t fit there the way it does in some places here.
• They use the same currency here. That was seriously off-putting for the first three days.
• Here mountains serve as landmarks.
• And going to class involves sauntering by the Pacific.
  Or rushing, or trudging, or wading, as the case may be.
• At least once a day I have to repeat my name five times, after which point I generally concede defeat and spell it out. Sometimes I’ll say Like the saint and then silently ask her forgiveness.
  (Check the Portugese pronunciation — except that no one except Muslims (and people I’ve browbeaten) seem to say it that way.)
  (Today I learned that Fatima derives from the word “to wean.” This is the benefit of living with an Arabic prof.)
• In Vancouver, a confidence in straight lines will avail you of nothing.
• Neither will a confidence in numbers: Vancouver public transit officials think nothing of naming divergent bus routes the same number.
• This city was put on earth by god to try my non-existent navigational skills.

The day drags. I manage to do some of the things I had to do today, but doing them gives me no sense of satisfaction, leaving me with no desire to do the more pressing things I haven’t yet done. Like writing, or processing pictures. Or reading the things that it scares me to read.

I spend the morning and then the afternoon flitting between my novel and my laptop, computer screen and blotted typefaces alternating until my head hurts and a thick-clotted frustration begins to settle itself, heavy-haunched and maudlin, behind my eyes.

I’ve been in the country, been in Toronto for three weeks now. Sri Lanka is at once at the forefront of everything I talk and think about, and also somewhere so far back in the recesses of my memory that I cannot believe that I was there less than a month ago, that I was there for longer than I’ve been back in Toronto. It is at once the central point of interest around which I am constructing lifeplans and also some place, some history that I am not quite sure exists. There is so much to say — so much to say, in fact, that I’m overwhelmed. I cannot put words to paper, cannot write about Sri Lanka. There is too much preamble, too much of Toronto to wade through first.

So anyway, I’ve been in Toronto for three weeks and have yet to walk through this city, really walk through this city: on my own, with no destination, where the point is the streets you find that you’ll never find again and the people you meet who you’ll never speak to again. When I was in Sri Lanka and thinking of Toronto, sick with longing for and dread of this place, it was of those solitary walks I’d think with relief, the way you can spend days entirely anonymous in public places, how people talk to you when you know you’ll never see each other again.

Continue reading this entry »

Fever Ray – Keep The Streets Empty For Me (mp3)

For going on nearly a year now, I have been writing and have been trying to write about home. I was trying to write about the spaces we construct between walls and behind doors, what we name them, and how we allow specific people into those spaces and call them blood. I was trying to write about the cities that we occupy, the ways we live in them, the way the shape of a particular street can inform a worldview. I needed to write these things because it was, after a certain point, a matter of sanity.

I wrote the post below in July. I’m still thinking about home, but more quietly now, with less of my heart in my throat.

—-

The first sentence of the last paper I wrote for school was this:
If we could reduce truth to its most literal elements and if we could be sure of the black and white markings of it, we could rightly argue that it is not so far from “here” to “there” – the distance just a solitary letter, nothing more than a trifling lowercase “t.”

Six weeks after I wrote that sentence, I punched in my final period and emailed the essay off, ending my academic career with a characteristically sprawling and inconsistent piece of melodrama. It was half-decent, just good enough to pass, just insane enough to mark it mine.

When I wrote that first sentence in June, those words meant something important to me. And naively I hoped that I could maybe put that important something down into coherent words, if not in this paper, then maybe elsewhere. In the intervening month and a half that it took me to write that paper, weeks punctuated with long days of sleep and nights of writing every other conceivable thing I could sit down long enough to focus on, that particular obsession faded away. The importance of figuring out how it is that we negotiate change in the cityscape and how and why we continue to love places and people when everything is caught in a perpetual flux waned with the summer heat. I grew nostalgic for the cold and for snowed-in beaches and for the stifling clasp of ill-fitting cheap wool coats, the way those things demand and encourage solitude.

I can’t remember now what it was that I was hoping to resolve when I finally typed up that first sentence after having had it float in my head for days. Naively, I started off every academic paper I wrote this last year with the hope that when I finished it, it would say something to me that I could hear, something important that had nothing to do with the text in question, something comprehensible to me.
Not a single paper ever did end that way.
Continue reading this entry »

Moving west the names of Toronto’s subway stations take on a decidedly romantic turn. Even Jane station, nestled between Old Mill and Runnymede, makes me think, for some reason, of Camelot. It helps that here the train moves through ravines and over water. Even in the winter, the light here cuts shallower and brighter than elsewhere in the city.

I have no reason to be this far out west, except that the green is different here and that is a good enough reason and has been for several months now. So one afternoon, I get off at one of the subway stops and make my way to the park and the river that runs below the tracks. At first I think I’m lost, but then I sight the underbelly of the bridge. More precisely, I see the bridge and see the water reflected along its underside, the wind making ripples of silver on the sturdy concrete, well before I arrive at the river bank.

Continue reading this entry »

I accidentally took the bus to Sunnybrook Hospital the other day. It’d been several weeks since I’d been there last, when my mother had asked me to go with my father in case the meds made him too drowsy to drive home. So I went with him though I hadn’t driven in months. That was his first visit to Sunnybrook in about a year, his appointments having taken place at other hospitals in the city. When we got there, my father somehow recognised the parking lot attendant as the same man who’d been there the last time he’d parked here. After leaving the car in the underground lot my father went to say hello, while I waited for him at the hospital entrance. Later, while we waited for the test results and I fell asleep in the waiting room, he bought the man coffee and donuts.

It’s a late summer morning, not quite noon. The bus is mostly empty and not many more people get on here. I hadn’t expected the route to be so circuitous, have already made three transfers to get this far. The loosely planned morning I’d plotted out is beginning to fall to pieces and I begin to feel tired. With an hour and a half to go still, I already know I’m going to be late for a class I’d rather not attend anyway. This morning I’m headed to Glendon. I’ve never been before and am as yet unprepared for how lavishly green York’s second campus will be, how extravagantly peaceful. For now, rolling through the hospital grounds, all I note through the bus windows are varying shades of grey. Metal everywhere, reflected over in the glass and in the mirrors. In the wheelchairs and the pavement. Even the cars, machines that generally make superficial sense to me, seem to dissolve into naked exoskeletons.

Both my parents were in their thirties when my mother had me, their first child. The fact of their ages meant shifting things to me growing up. It has come to mean very specific things to me these last few months, three years. Continue reading this entry »

It’s strange, how much I love this city. It’s not like I even know it very well, or have called enough others ‘home’ to justify how much I love this particular city, but the snow is all gone outside, this weekend the temperature is flirting with double digits, and the thought of spending my summer here wandering these sticky streets gives me butterflies. I will disavow socks for the next six months, and come home with the city grime lacing my feet. The heat will give me pounding headaches and my windows will be perpetually open. Yesterday, they were doing construction across the mall and the air was thick with dust.

“Toronto is,” said a friend, “where I am when I’m nowhere else.”*
Which sounds dismissive, the way you’d talk about the people you know will always wait for you, and therefore you leave.
Except I don’t think he’d meant it that way.

I wouldn’t have described my love that way. And though something about them makes his words stay with me so many months later, I sill can’t describe it to myself in those terms.
For me it’s this simple, in this many words: Toronto is home to me.

It’s strange, how much I love this city. How the thought of it gives me butterflies in my stomach. Is it possible to have a crush on a place? I love: the lake in winter; the stalking geese; the sheep in the Village; the squat, dark lowrises; the brooding ravines; lowslung cars with tacky paintjobs.

It’s strange, that I go so far as to even call this city ‘home.’ I must love this place very much, more even than I know, to have reached this level of comfort, to forswear all the other cities I have been and have not been and one day will be. This city occupies pride of place in my heart. And why? I don’t understand. Not even the lists I construct – public transit; concrete bridges; graffitied cement; vast and empty grey skies – capture fully, justify enough how deeply in love I am with this city.

I haven’t left yet, am still here, which is another reason this love is strange, because it is also deeply nostalgic. What does it mean to miss the place you live in, the place you call home even as you live in it. It’s as though my definition of ‘home’ requires a temporal disconnect, as though I practise diaspora in ways that permeate even my stasis, and therefore, the only way I can both be here and be home, is if a part of me has left already, is always looking back, is always aching for a return to something straight-forwardly beautiful.
Continue reading this entry »

It’s a small place. There are four tables, with two rickety chairs each, set against the chipped and whitewashed walls. On the right wall, they’ve hung two blown-up newspaper articles featuring the place, one from The Star, another from Now. An off-white bust of Gandhi looks impassively past the enlarged headlines and inset quotations. There’s a telephone nailed to the left wall, its loosely coiled extension cord hanging flat against the greying plaster and underneath it, the cash register. They’ve set a tray out, holding a canister of water, another of coffee, and some mugs.

The phone rings. “Hello Gandhi,” says the owner. There’s almost comma in there somewhere in his greeting, but not quite.

We order our lunches and sit down. The food’s good, spicier than we expected. Surreptitiously, we dab at our noses with our napkins, feeling like failures for having not only taken but also warranted the advice of the white girl who, sniffing, had told us to be careful as she left.

“Next time,” says the owner, from behind the counter, amused, “order mild-to-medium. It’s too hot, huh. Even our chef is saying order mild.” The man in the kitchen waves at us; he looks vaguely Filipino, vaguely Spanish. “You’re finishing all my water,” he continues dryly. “Water’s expensive.”

I seize the opportunity, have in fact been waiting for this moment. “Thanni expensive ah?”
He nods. “Thanni expensive.”
I wait.
And then he looks at me again. “… Thanni expensive?”
I grin, satisfied.

The man wheeling in crates stops to join us. “How did you know we spoke tamil?”
“I heard you.”

One of them is from Tamil Nadu, the other from Jaffna. Since I can’t just be from the island, I am from the city I was born in and the towns my parents called home.
“Pottuvil. Near Batticaloa – and Gaul.” I have a sudden memory of the bridge to Gaul, the jeep, the sand dunes, the paddy fields.

We talk about the trouble. “The trouble,” which is the standard euphemism for the war. Other translations from the thamizh word include suffering and distress.

When I get home that night, my father is at the computer. I stand in the doorway, watching him. It’s a tamil website, advertisements all over the page and it hasn’t finished loading. My father is peering at the screen, one hand enveloping the mouse. There are two computers in the living room, but my father’s sitting at the monitor we’ve had for a decade now. The one behind him, surrounded by the paraphernalia of my brother’s sketches and notes, looms anorexic thin and cool, and I can’t understand why my father is sitting at the old one. That seems an important point to resolve, why my father chose this computer, with its painfully bad colour controls, over the one we’d bought last week.

“There was a bombing,” I say, leaning against the doorframe. “In Colombo. Forty people died.”

He nods. It’s the kind of website I avoid, with flashing headlines and animated images. “There’ll have a lot now these days. Today was the independence day. They always do things around this time.”

It feels, momentarily, like an important point to resolve.
But I can think of several reasons my father chose this computer over that.

What I can’t reconcile is the fact of my father’s reading thamizh websites with the silence of this conversation. The door is still open behind me, I still have my jacket on and my bag weighs heavy on my shoulder. In my father’s room, beside his bed is a stack of thamizh newspapers and magazines, bought at grocery stores where my father buys wadas in brown paper bags. A few of them are in English, printed in Sri Lanka and always a few days out of date. I’ll occasionally skim through those papers, trying to piece together a politics and a present history that escapes me. I cannot reconcile those inky sheets of newsprint, the fact of them sitting beside the phone in my parents’ bedroom, with the casualness with which my father agrees with me.