Expo 67

Landing in Montreal days before the closing of Expo 67, I was asked by the immigration officer the rote question: What are you bringing into Canada? Not much. Clothes, books, and $150 — or was it $200? — the maximum foreign exchange allowed out of India in those days.

That, however, wasn’t the whole truth, now that I think about it five decades later. I was also bringing my cross-cultural Indian genes and my family DNA. Both were to prove decisive in Canada, especially after 9/11 when I was turned overnight from a columnist who happened to be Muslim into a Muslim columnist whose only job was to apologize for my faith and condemn fellow Muslims. Being an Uncle Tom wasn’t part of the family ethos — several ancestors had stood up to the sultans of their day. My second column after 9/11, “It’s the U.S. Foreign Policy, Stupid,” evinced much abuse, as would dozens of others in the following months and years, including the ones opposing the war on Iraq under false pretences and the endless war on terror.

I was labelled an apologist for terrorism, Saddam Hussein, and the Third World. Any terrorist incident anywhere and I’d be asked: “What do you have to say about this?” I was deemed personally responsible. Dinner invitations dried up. Those who used to woo me because of my position stopped calling. Acquaintances avoided eye contact. There was social media bullying. Poison oozed out of the nearly 40,000 emails and other responses to my columns, even as a majority of respondents by far remained quintessentially Canadian

— polite, fair, open-minded, and committed to the idea that Canada became a light unto nations not by imitating the United States or Europe but by setting its own high standards.

Having never faced outright racism in Canada, this hatred seemed un-Canadian. Perhaps it wasn’t. Japanese Canadians, like Japanese Americans, were interned during the Second World War. Post-9/11, Canadian and American Muslims were similarly burdened with collective guilt and made to feel psychologically interned.

With Islamophobia being the new anti-Semitism, old anti-Jewish tropes have been applied to Muslims: Islam is incompatible with secularism, just as Judaism was said to be; Muslims can’t be trusted, just as Jews couldn’t be; Muslims harbour dual loyalty, just as Jews did and ostensibly still do; Muslims wield too much influence, as did the Jews and still do; and sharia is seditious, just as Jewish religious law was alleged to be. Sure enough, polls confirmed that religious antipathy toward Jews ran not that far behind hostility toward Muslims, especially in Quebec.

For columnists, criticism and excoriation come with the turf. We develop thick hides. Still, the post-9/11 hysteria was potent, combining religious bigotry with racism. Internet bullying was in its infancy, and I was accorded the dubious distinction of being among its early victims. Yet I didn’t lose sleep over it.

What sustained me was not some grand ideology or a heroic act of courage but simply the “baggage from back home,” an ethos of rolling with the punches and a reflexive recoiling from the American imperial proclivity of pulverizing weaker nations and the Western habit of abandoning minorities exactly when they most need protection. Those instincts helped make me a more useful Canadian, as they also did during such reporting stints as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

So there’s something to be said about immigrants who are well anchored and arrive brimming with self-confidence, a sense of self-worth, and a view of the world different than that of the native-born. They resist admonitions to “do in Rome as the Romans do.” They follow the law, of course, our common holy parchment. Anything beyond that is subjective, often a tool to lord over newcomers. Immigrants are delighted to come, having chosen this land. But they don’t necessarily feel “grateful” for being given immigration — a contract of mutual benefit. They feel little or no need to apologize for their racial, religious, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic identity in deference to majoritarian mores. They don’t pretend to develop amnesia the moment they arrive in Canada. Nor do they want to reinvent themselves, as did those who escaped the Iron Curtain and other hellholes and did very much want to forget what they left behind.

We, on the other hand, want to retain as much of our pasts as possible. In my case, a strong sense of self-identity born of an indulgent upbringing of unconditional love, and as an inheritor of thousands of years of Indian civilization as well as 1,500 years of Islamic religious, cultural, and literary heritage, I didn’t feel inferior to anyone. I could go anywhere, knock on any door, walk into any room, meet anybody. My past was my pride and part of my present and my future.

Yet this valuable commodity counts for little on the point system by which Canada chooses immigrants based on education, skills, and proficiency in English or French. Nor is it properly acknowledged in the narratives of those who tell tales of having come with $5 in their pockets and made themselves billionaires by their own brilliance. ***

I hadn’t heard of Toronto until I got to college where an eclectic English lecturer had us read a book published by the University of Toronto Press in 1945 — Some Tasks for Education by Sir Richard Livingstone. How and why he chose that book, we had no idea. Canada wouldn’t loom large for me until a few years later when I worked at the Press Trust of India, the national news agency in Bombay (since renamed Mumbai).

To break the monotony of the midnight copy-editing shift, the chief editor, a crusty yet kind old man, agreed to let a colleague and me get some reporting assignments. There were diplomatic and trade events galore that the agency didn’t bother to cover, but we could and did file a few paragraphs. That appealed particularly to my old classmate and roommate, Syed Hyder, who was always looking for a free drink. We’d turn up at various consulates, no matter their insignificance or geopolitical affiliation. India was a non-aligned nation and so were we. It was for one such get-together at the plush Taj Hotel at India Gate by the Arabian Sea that Roland Michener, the Canadian high commissioner, flew in from Delhi. That proved to be a fateful encounter. In the chitter-chatter of the reception, he said, “Young men like you should go to Canada.”

With youthful irreverence, I responded, “Why would anyone want to go to Canada. It’s so cold there, isn’t it?”

Not long after that I had to quit my job and go home to Hyderabad when my father, abba in Urdu, had a heart attack. As the older son, I was soon looking after Abba, his business, and the family. ***

A Canadian immigration officer was coming to Hyderabad to interview candidates. I got in on his roster at the last minute. He intimated that I’d make the cut. The bar to qualifying was low then. The offer lay dormant for a year — I had responsibilities — but I was granted an extension to enter Canada by the end of October 1967. I was caught between staying or leaving India: for Syracuse University where I had admission for graduate work in journalism; England where some college mates had gone on an easily obtainable work voucher; Australia where some cricketing friends, Christians mostly, had migrated; or act on the lucky accident of Mr. Michener’s advice.

Staying a few days in London en route to Canada, I had the rude shock of having to get up in the middle of the night to feed shillings into a heat meter. This was the centre of the empire? But Westminster Bridge, Big Ben, and the parliamentary precincts seemed familiar, so etched had the landmarks been in our heads even in post-colonial India.

Montreal was exhilarating. People were swept up by the spirit of the Canadian centennial and Expo 67. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome was more dramatic than the geometric onion domes of great mosques and Sufi shrines. Moshe Safdie’s Habitat housing complex came across as a dramatic, cleaner, multi-storied update of the dense shantytowns of Bombay.

The icing on the cake, though, was the homemade Indian food served by my host, a fellow Hyderabadi, Ali Hussain. He had come to study at McGill

University, stayed, and established himself as a chartered accountant. In the best Indian tradition, he had received the new arrival at the airport. Similarly, in Toronto, another fellow Hyderabadi, Siddiq Burney, was waiting at the bottom of the staircase at Union Station. He lived in a Thorncliffe Park high-rise that had an indoor swimming pool, a novelty for those of us from the tropics.

At the immigrant settlement centre downtown, the officials were helpful and generous — offering money for rent, winter clothing, and groceries unasked. Embarrassed, I wanted to find work quickly. I made my way to the Globe and Mail to meet Clark Davey, the managing editor. Cherubic, cheerful, chatty, welcoming. But he was emphatic in saying no to a job: “Go get some Canadian experience elsewhere first.”

“But I already have experience,” I replied.

He wasn’t persuaded. “I had a bad experience with two fellows from India who couldn’t write English.”

“Are you penalizing me for your own bad hiring?”

“Yes,” he said unapologetically. “But I can phone the owner of the Brandon Sun in Manitoba. It’s a good paper.”

“Why would anyone want to go to Manitoba? Isn’t it even colder there than here?”

I emerged onto cold King Street determined to prove him wrong but at the same time with a vibe of warmth from him — a gruff uncle dishing out tough love.

The quickest available job was in sales at the Simpsons department store at Yonge and Queen Streets. I promptly applied and just as promptly got rejected. A fellow Hyderabadi, Desh Bandhu, working there couldn’t believe it. “No one gets rejected around here,” he told me. “You must’ve been awful in the interview.” He soon got to the bottom of it. “Why the hell did you say you have two degrees? That makes you overqualified, you idiot! Go back, apply again, and say you only have matriculation.”

“How can I do that?”

“Didn’t you matriculate?” He then counselled me to wait a day or two before reapplying and to “make sure the lady who rejected you isn’t there.”

Selling men’s clothing in the basement of the store was a good gig at around $85 per week plus commissions. Soon we were among the best dressed, thanks to our supervisor, Mr. Thomson, an early exponent of clearing out the inventory once enough profits had been made. He’d frequently discount leftover overcoats, suits, pants, whatever. If the items still didn’t move, he’d let the staff buy at $20, $10, even $5.

He was an easy boss as long as we stayed on our toes and adhered to his two ironclad edicts: “Answer the damn phone” and “Customer is king, customer is never wrong,” mottos that have long since been systematically set aside by both the private and public sectors. I’ve thought often of Mr. Thomson and also of the shoppers at Simpsons who were friendly, talkative, and inquisitive, especially about India — an invaluable orientation to Canadians for a new immigrant.

The only complaint about our Indian-ness that I overheard was by a gentleman in an apartment building where some friends lived. He wondered why Indians visiting each other lingered so very long in the corridors, elevators, and lobby: “Why can’t they say their damn goodbyes inside the apartment and just leave?” Because they’re Indian — relaxed about rules, exuberant yackety-yacks whose old-world protocol dictates they escort guests back to their cars.

Across from Simpsons, the lunch counter at Woolworths served hot pea soup. That lasted only until the revelation that it contained bits of bacon. Hot dogs not being our cup of tea, it was down to grilled cheese on white bread with fries and ketchup, bland and sweet, unlike the salty Indian variety with the zing of red chilies.

There were plenty of cuisine challenges. No lamb, no goat, only beef that I didn’t grow up consuming. No yogurt, only something called sour cream, a blob that bloated the tummy. Very few fruits, vegetables, and spices. No guava, no mango, no papaya. No brinjal, no okra, no gourd. No coriander, no cloves, no cumin, no cardamom, no saffron, purportedly procurable only in some Ukrainian neighbourhoods around Easter. No basmati rice, only the short, stubby, parboiled kind that took forever to soften and came out clumpy, no doubt because we didn’t know how to cook it.

Apprised of the sad state of affairs, my mother (amma in Urdu) in India said, “In that case, son, you’d better come back home.”

There were other drawbacks.

No cricket. Nor any news about it, even in sports page statistics — this former dominion had failed to pick up the very best of England. Evenings were dull, barren of visible human activity except for people going pubbing, an alien concept for us. Sundays were deader — shops shut, roads deserted. Silent streets sans human beings took some getting used to.

A culture shock of another sort was to hear some men routinely refer to women as “bitches” — vulgarity I associated with the uncouth back home. Another was to see cheer girls in skimpy clothes perform for mostly men at televised football games. But one woman commanded reverence, the queen, whom we in India had gotten rid of long ago along with the maharajahs. One man who evinced frequent homages from Canadians was Winston Churchill, the racist. He who had labelled Indians “a barbarous people,” “a beastly people with a beastly religion” (Hinduism), “the beastliest people in the world next to Germans.” He had exacerbated the 1943 Bengal famine that had killed millions by insisting that Indian rice exports for the Allied war effort not be interrupted. He who had called Gandhi “a naked fakir” whom he wanted “bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled by an enormous elephant with the new [British] viceroy seated on its back.”

The Orange parade on Yonge Street reminded me of the annual Shia Muslim mourning processions back home that raised sectarian Sunni-Shia passions, especially when one side took perverse pride in needling the other. I was told Toronto was the Belfast of Canada.

Yet I didn’t feel out of place in Canada, perhaps because of the still-prevalent British accents — Ron Collister of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) sounded comforting. Politics seemed thrilling. A former prime minister, John Diefenbaker, was toppled just like that in a vote at a party convention in 1967. A year later, the Liberals elected an exciting leader, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His rally at Nathan Phillips Square not far from Simpsons was more fun than the ones of Jawaharlal Nehru. I recall attending one with Abba. Tens of thousands turned up not so much to hear him but rather for darshan , viewing the great man. His speeches in Hindi mostly went over their heads in our part of the country. But it didn’t matter.

Canadians were working their way out of a parochial, prejudiced past and learning to let immigrants, including non-white, non-Christian ones, keep their identity and dignity. They let me be. No one violated the core of my being. This Muslim from polyglot India could be at home in Canada.

A job in journalism remained elusive. The rejections piled up from the CBC, the Toronto Star, Toronto’s Telegram , the Hamilton Spectator, and all the way down to the Perth Courier. No Canadian experience, which couldn’t be acquired without a job, which couldn’t be obtained without Canadian experience. A rigmarole that didn’t apply to arrivals from Fleet Street who were welcomed by newspapers the way colonial outposts ushered in those from the head office.

The public relations department of Toronto Hydro said no, too. Just as well in retrospect.

It was time to swallow my pride and go back to Clark Davey. He was gracious. He called Brandon.

Arriving close to midnight at the isolated, dimly lit train station way north of Brandon, the four disembarked passengers were driven in a battered limo into darkness. No light in sight for kilometres. Then, a faint glow in the distance — ah, the town did have electricity! I felt stupid for having thought otherwise.

The next day, walking into the deserted weekend newsroom, I found a stout, bald, bespectacled gentleman who thrust his hand out. “I’m Garth Stouffer, news editor.” He was quick to come to the point. “Do you know what frontage foot is?”

“No idea. Never heard of it.”

“You better learn. You’ll be covering City Council starting Monday.”

“I will, but please, no chasing ambulances and cops.”

“Okay,” he said, and showed me to a metal desk.

Covering City Hall wasn’t like covering cricket matches that were full of tamasha , the circus-like atmosphere of tens of thousands clapping and screaming. At Brabourne Stadium in Bombay, Garfield Sobers, the great West Indian cricketer from Barbados, had instantly fallen in love with a budding Bollywood actress, gotten engaged, and just as quickly called it off.

A stylish Indian batter, the handsome Abbas Ali Baig, a fellow Hyderabadi, inspired a young woman to bustle down from an elite stand and run onto the ground to plant a kiss, leaving him flushed and the stadium stunned. Now I was at a near-empty Brandon City Council chamber late at night, taking notes on a debate about the mill rate.

But soon there was the thrill of covering the 1969 Manitoba provincial election that brought about a revolution, a first-ever New Democratic Party (NDP) win under the dynamic leadership of Ed Schreyer. That was followed by a battle royal over the introduction of public auto insurance. It triggered the biggest-ever demonstration at the Legislative Assembly in Winnipeg, with dire warnings of socialists killing capitalism. Its noisy intensity and passion unnerved many a Manitoban. To me, it felt lively, very Indian. Schreyer faced a more mundane challenge: anti-monarchist Dippers were needling him about hosting Queen Elizabeth II for the 1970 Manitoba centennial. At his sprawling suburban bungalow, Cabbage Patch, he explained that Her Majesty’s visit had been in the works for years and that he couldn’t un-invite her. Making no headway, he snapped, “Look, my mother loves the queen, and that’s good enough for me.” He wasn’t going to waste any political capital on the issue.

I was less prudent on the protocol with the queen. During that trip, I got too close to her at Canadian Forces Base Shilo as she signed the guest book “Elizabeth R”; I was shooed away by crusty Prince Philip. A few years later, I was in my office when the phone rang, with owner Lewis D. Whitehead summoning me to his office upstairs. He looked unusually grim. “I hear you didn’t get up yesterday at the singing of ‘God Save the Queen.’”

It had been at a Rotary lunch or perhaps the Lions Club. “Yes,” I said sheepishly, “but you know, I’m not a monarchist and you’re a skeptic yourself.”

It didn’t matter. “As long as she’s the queen, you get up for the royal anthem.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mercifully, I hadn’t had to publicly pronounce allegiance to the queen to become a Canadian. Those coming from a Commonwealth country didn’t have to. We could sign a silent pledge on the citizenship application form, which I did and mailed the papers and received confirmation that I was a certified Canadian. Since then, the requirement has been standardized for all immigrants.

I had gone to Brandon with the intention of getting a year or two of experience but stayed 10 glorious years. The minus 35 cold was conquered after one or two debilitating experiences that made me cry — an immigrant’s rite of passage to Canada. My yogurt supply had been engineered — Kala Gopinath, a friend, had gone to India and brought back a few spoons of culture, and once her first batch turned out well, the dozen or so Indian families were all set.

I might have been the first Muslim in Brandon in the contemporary era, though the Muslim presence in the Wheat City dated back to a SyrianLebanese family in the early 20th century. They were part of the first wave of Muslims to the Maritimes in the late 19th century from the Levant. There was no jum‘ah, the Friday congregation, which like the Jewish minyan , requires a quorum — not 10 but at least three. No halal meat, which could only be found in Winnipeg, a two-hour drive. However, there was a Qur’anic alternative: “The food of those given the Scripture is lawful for you and your food is lawful for them” (Qur’an 5:5).

Ramadan in summer meant that the dawn-to-dusk fasting lasted 16 to 17 hours — the lunar calendar being 11 days shorter, Ramadan rotates through the seasons. Muslims in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories faced even longer fasting days. Guidance was sought from back home. One fatwa suggested that we follow the clock in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Another was more pragmatic: divide the day in half and fast for 12 hours — God having commanded the believers to make religion easy, not difficult. “Allah intends for you ease, not hardship” (Qur’an 2:185).

The Brandon Sun had a custom of distributing free turkeys for Christmas. In India, such freebies were given to the poor. I was quickly straightened out. I took mine and quietly passed it on to a neighbour, having never tasted the bird and not wanting to. No sooner had that awkward moment been dexterously managed than office colleague John Mayhew, a kindly Englishman, insisted on serving a leftover dinner on Boxing Day. I avoided the rubber, ate the alien trimmings.