THE IMMIGRANT Read Online Free PDF Page B

loan section, showed him the layout of Dalhousie University, this time on foot. With each day Ananda felt more beholden. Because of his uncle he would be in a place where there were no rickshaws, where if truck drivers were rash, they were caught and punished. With so few people an individual life must mean something. ‘If God shuts the door, he opens a window,’ remarked the uncle periodically.
    In India many of his fellow students had yearned after these doors and windows, spent time and money trying to get them open. The brightest of futures anyone could think of was going abroad to study, then staying on somehow.
    ‘Look at me,’ Dr Sharma often said, pretending Ananda had a choice of where to place his gaze, ‘look at me. I am a citizen of the world.’ In other words, every summer they went to Europe. In Rome, Florence, Paris, Venice, London, Amsterdam, Munich, in art galleries, theatres and museums he exposed his family to the finest artefacts of Western civilization. The uncle looked mystical as he pronounced these evocative place names, and Ananda saw his future dotted with similar alluring stars.
    Once Ananda, thinking more of his own situation than intending any criticism of this highly successful man, ventured to ask why his uncle did not visit India more often. Were Lara and Lenny not curious about their father’s birthplace?
    ‘Arre, beta, last visit, ten days out of three weeks were spent being sick. Such bad diarrhoea—we all had to go on antibiotics. The whole country is crawling with disease, filth, flies and beggars. The children were horrified. How can they be proud of their ancient heritage if they see nothing of it? Very disappointing—and from what I hear the country is practically a dictatorship. One should take the best of one’s country and leave.’
    ‘Ji, uncle.’
    Ananda had been dyed in a lifetime of study, and such habits were not difficult to return to. The dental course was rigorous, but he welcomed hard work. Long hours in the library stood between him and his memories. In the old wing of the Dental School, he could dawdle, read, feel himself king of the silence, the large windows, the high ceilings. He often returned to work after dinner.
    Occasionally he wandered over to the vending machines in the basement. There he drank coffee, ate sandwiches, candy bars and chips. He felt a great fondness for the black, glass-cased monsters. Like his parents, they always gave, never asked. Come ten or eleven he would walk out onto Robie, down the mile to Young Avenue. Meanwhile, this new country was sinking into his heart.
    He watched darkness fall earlier and earlier, till night came at four. By February he had joined others in grumbling about the snow and the cold. But in his heart he had not yet had enough, he only complained because everybody else was doing so. And look how efficient the snow cleaning, how manifold the pellets of salt, how pervasive the central heating.
    This was the country to live in, despite the cold, the darkness and the never-ending winter.
    Diwali and Holi. Every year their dates change, but around the beginning and end of winter come the festivals that make Indians think with longing of celebrations in the mother country.
    Halifax was no exception. Home to four hundred Indian families, home to the India Club whose main aim was to ensure that expatriates did not feel deprived during festive occasions and to expose the next generation to Indian traditions.
    Ananda would have preferred not to know when Diwali and Holi fell. With his parents he had eaten special foods on fast days, prayed with them before the gods on Janamashtami, Dussehra, Diwali, Ram Navami, Holi and a hundred other smaller occasions. There was no way he could replicate any ceremony on his own; he preferred complete rejection.
    On November 5th of his first year in Canada, Ananda finds himself in the basement of the Equador Hotel. Curtains give the illusion of windows. Tiny coloured winking lights are