Archives for the 'Shorts' Category

It hit me today that I’m in a profession where very few people are even allowed to read what you write. Ach.

“Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.”
– Arundhati Roy, Nov 30 2011.

“It reminds me that I am glad to have washed my hands of my sister Ifat’s death and can think of her now as a house I once rented but which is presently inhabited by I do not know. I miss her body, of course, and how tall she was, with the skull of a leopard and the manner of a hawk. But that’s aesthetic, and aside from it, Ifat is just a repository of anecdotes for me, something I carry around without noticing, like lymph.”

– Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (1987)

He was the Number 14, a bus ride
down Hastings one way, strung
with blinking lights and sparks
of trolleys unhooked, headed
to Arbutus, the salt lick of ocean,
tongues swollen to lap up the whole thing.

He was chain-links around the marina,
winches loosed by wind, rigging
played against spar and mast like chimes
frothed into a frenzy. He was the main stay
snapped and boom slammed into the dock,
light splintered on black water.

– Rosnau, Laisha, from “He was the Number 14,” Lousy Explorers, ©2009, Nightwood Editions.

I read this literally on the bus today. It was the 14. It had the expected effect: my jaw dropped open a little, I stared, and I blushed a little.

Sometimes I read news articles that forcibly remind me why I want to be a defence lawyer at all. Sometimes it’s caught up the memory of faces I know.
Love and strength — and limitless respect to you.

thinking about good friends and allies about to be incarcerated [...] and the many many more behind prison bars and caged in detention centres who are criminalized for their very existence. till all the walls fall.

“I would hate to be cross-examined by you.” Last mock trial of the year. Law school teaches you to relish what in other realities would be, at the very best, on the sunniest of days, a back-handed compliment.

The last two months of school were incredibly stressful, for some reason more stressful than any previous semesters that I could remember. But everyone tells you that third year is supposed to be a breeze. Now with deadlines for papers approaching, I suddenly realised I’m incredibly on track — with assignments complete not just on time, but in time. With time enough for multiple edits and fact checks. It feels good to go into exam season without the panic-stricken sleepless nights that usually characterise this time of year.

It hasn’t even been three months since I got back, but this semester, not yet over, has proceeded like a series of rapid system shocks. After a gruelling and unsuccesful set of job interviews at the summer’s close, I flew back to school and to news that my father’s cancer may have returned. He thought he was dying, my once-indomitable once-towering now-melancholic now-hypochondriac father, with the rest of his children around his bed. In fact, it was that internal stitches from a previous surgery had come loose, an unspooling of thread inside him. Meanwhile, I was doing too many things at once, a frenzy of too many simultaneous deadlines, a struggling to remember all these things were doable and negotiable. And then I watched one of the most beautiful relationships of my life wane to a tired, unhappy end.

It can leave you a little breathtless, how life happens to you, just as it does to everyone else. We watch our parents grow old, we watch our lovers shift shapes. We wait for things to die, bide our time until goodbyes.

Today, it’s late when I get on the bus home. It’s dark and it’s stormy, and I think suddenly of the stories we have amassed between us, of the phenomenally rejuvenating force of narrative. I think of how in one of the first conversations we had, away at the beginning of this year, you said that your impending departure would not limit your care for me. And I, past master of long-distance not-quite relationships, stiffened. Then I curled into your arm, thinking I had nothing to lose, thinking maybe this is what courage looks like. Coming home today, I think of how wondrous it is that when so many months later, my mother told me that my father was in too much pain to speak to me, I had your body to convulse my sobs against.

Those stories would have been impoverished by your absence. When it’s not so late, I will have the proper words to explain what about that catches my breath in something that resembles this time, not grief, but gratitude.

i love you so much, and it bothers me that i’m not certain of my ability to write for you something that doesn’t sound trite, that won’t help. through all this mess, it’s so easy, isn’t it yaar. its so easy to see that This is what makes us human, this unfathomable capacity to love, and to feel–to feel so intensely, even when it hurts us so much. [...] who was it (ugh, please don’t say rumi, although shittt, most likely right. credit where credit is due i suppose.) who said that the heart is like a vase. intact it can only hold so much, a consistent amount every time, right? but once hurt, broken, its shards lay exposed. the vase can now hold the sky, the possibilities of the heart become infinite.

– my friends are the best writers.

The Canadian Council for Refugees Youth Network (with whom I am not affiliated) has put out a video on how Canada detains (i.e. essentially jails) children.

With regards to the MV Sun Sea, the ship whose arrival arguably triggered the public unveiling of Bill C-4, the video has this to say: “In 2009-2010, Canada detained 330 minors for immigration purposes [...] Over 40 Tamil children who arrived on BC shores by boat in the summer of 2010 were detained. Over 4 months later, some of them were still in detention.”

The provisions in Bill C-4 run close to my heart, at a principled level because the bill is blatantly inhumane, and more personally because I come from Sri Lanka, so the issue of refugees fleeing that particular war hits close to home for me.

The photograph that you see in this video of children waving behind bars came from the weekly noise demos of Tamil music that No One Is Illegal had outside the jail. You can see more photos of the demos on Flickr, including the huge Tamil signs we made to welcome the children. You can’t, however, hear the Tamil music that we blasted loud enough for them to hear across all that distance and through all that concrete.

And we know that they could hear the music and that they were glad to see us there week after week, because a few of us got a chance to meet those children. It may sound counter-intuitive — and nauseatingly cheesy! — to say that it is possible to find love and gratitude within the walls of jails, but to date, getting to meet those kids was one of the most inspiring and moving moments of my life. I am grateful that I had that chance to make what might otherwise sound like an abstraction of political and legal theory a matter-of-fact and face-to-face consideration of the basic right of children to live lives free of violence.

Going forward, the Conservative government remains committed to passing this Bill and all its human rights violations. So I’m sharing this video and my story as proof of the ongoing, committed, and beautiful work that people are doing despite the machinations playing out in the political arena.