Love & Courage Page 2

  While the British were successfully pushed out of South Asia, they left collateral damage in their wake. The departing British, as they did nearly everywhere in the world, drew up on the backs of napkins arbitrary lines for countries, creating divisions and conflict. The same centralized power structures used by the British continued, so minority languages, tribes, ethnic communities, and spiritual traditions continued to be marginalized. Once again, the rights and dignity of the many diverse populations, languages, and spiritual traditions of the subcontinent were an afterthought.

  Those one hundred years of British rule were culturally, socially, and politically devastating to all South Asians. The impact of that century is still carried, felt, and remembered to this day. It’s a scar that has healed, to a degree, but the mark remains nonetheless.

  My father, Jagtaran Singh Dhaliwal, was born in the city of Barnala, Panjab, in 1950. His father, Shamsher Singh, had served in the military as an engineer before settling into a quieter life as a farmer. Shamsher Singh enjoyed farming, but he wanted his children to get educations. They could help tend the cows and harvest rice, wheat, and cotton, but they were never obliged to do so, and only after doing their homework.

  My grandparents encouraged my father to break from the family’s military tradition. During my father’s childhood, through a combination of poor management, bad business decisions, and a lack of government policies to support local farmers, my grandfather had lost a lot of his inherited land. The possibility of building a secure future as a farmer diminished with each passing year, so my grandparents encouraged my father to find another path. They felt that a career as a physician would provide a more stable and financially rewarding future than farming or the military ever could.

  My grandmother Jaswinder Kaur never went to university, but she had a formal education in Panjabi literature. She’d stay up late to help my dad with his homework. Whenever his eyelids got heavy or he grew bored with the material, she’d bring him back to the books. “Son,” she’d say, “this is the only way to a better life.”

  My father took those words to heart. He attended medical school in the royal city of Patiala. He wasn’t the first in the family to make their mark on the city. Walking through the streets of Patiala, my father often passed by a statue of his grand-uncle Sardar Sewa Singh Thikriwala. Sewa Singh was a renowned freedom fighter and activist who championed greater civil and legal rights for the under-represented in Panjab. He advocated for more democratic representation, and he insisted that the Sikh places of prayer—known as Gurdwaras—that were controlled by the British at the time should instead be run by the local community. Sewa Singh’s actions eventually drew the ire of the local king and his British supporters. The king imprisoned him, but that didn’t stop my great-grand-uncle’s efforts. While in jail, he went on a hunger strike to protest the mistreatment of the less fortunate around him. The hunger strike cost him his life, but his efforts for democratic reform and social justice were memorialized in the statue that the city built.

  Sewa Singh’s advocacy against British rule, though, was unusual in his family. His brothers served in the British Indian Army. For many Sikhs—who at one point made up more than half of the British Indian Army—this was a pragmatic decision. Soldiers got up to fifty-five acres of land for their service after they retired. Favoured officers like my great-grandfather, who rose to lieutenant, earned even more.

  My grandfather Shamsher Singh had followed my great-grandfather’s footsteps into the military. Even after he settled in the outskirts of Barnala not far from his lands near his village of Thikriwala, he never shook the regimented military lifestyle. Every day he woke, showered, polished his shoes, and went to work—either driving the tractor or supervising the workers. After lunch, he had to have his nap. And every evening, he drank from the same shiny teacup, feet up.

  My father’s family was better off than most, but my dad still struggled with contentedness. He felt ashamed about broken furniture at home that they were unable to repair or replace, and that he couldn’t afford a bicycle to ride to school. He felt embarrassed by what he perceived as his father’s failures, each of which resulted in less and less land for the family to farm, meaning the family had less and less income.

  Sikhi—or Sikh teachings, practices, and the Sikh way of life—should have helped my dad avoid focusing too much on these worries. But at the time, my father didn’t give spirituality a lot of attention, nor did his parents give it much emphasis. He hadn’t walked very far down the path—not yet.

  Some of you reading this may have a clear picture of what Sikhi is, but some of you may not. It’s one of the world’s youngest religions, started in the fifteenth century. The founding principle is a belief in oneness—or Ik Oankar. It’s a belief that deep down we are all connected. In fact, it’s a belief that everything is connected: each of us human beings alongside the life forms and forces we share this planet with.

  A common analogy used to understand the principle of oneness is to see yourself as a drop of water in the ocean. Individually, you are unique and separate, but together with all the other drops, we become an ocean. The goal isn’t simply to understand this connection but to live and experience it through love—love for the universe and all things in it, love for yourself, and love for others.

  According to Sikhi, if others suffer, you suffer with them. When you help others, you’re helping yourself as well—because we are all connected. A belief in the oneness of humanity means ensuring everyone has justice and fairness in their lives. If we are all connected, then injustice against one of us is injustice against all of us. This is why Sikhs categorically reject inequality. The belief in oneness in Sikhi also promotes pluralism and respect for different beliefs, spiritualities, and religions. Sikhi doesn’t ever seek to convert. We can all be different, equal, and connected.

  One particularly pernicious form of inequality that continues to persist in the South Asian subcontinent is the caste system, a system of inequality based on race and class. People of a higher caste, often people with lighter skin, have access to more resources, while those of a lower caste, typically those with darker skin, are denied those resources. At one time, this meant that only higher castes could learn to read and write. Today, some lower castes are still denied the right to access the local village well, and they experience significant barriers to attaining work, education, and other necessities of life. One of Sikhi’s goals is to abolish the caste system.

  The names Singh and Kaur replace family names that might otherwise divide society by class. Singh, a title of royalty, is given to men, while Kaur, another title of royalty, is given to women. While in some cultures, women’s family names are omitted from history as they marry and take their husband’s surnames, in the Sikh tradition, women keep the title Kaur throughout their lives. This practice represents the belief that women are sovereign and complete regardless of age or marital status.

  All of these Sikh beliefs were familiar to my father when he was young, even though he and his family were preoccupied with their struggles rather than the teachings. They were losing more and more and more land. My grandmother was worried that their financial security was in jeopardy. She needed to make sure my father had a bright future. She believed that the only path to a secure future for her son was by him becoming a doctor. At first, my father accepted his mom’s belief that becoming a doctor was the surest way to achieve financial success. It literally came with a title and access to a promising career. Later on, though, my father embraced medicine not only as a ticket out of insecurity but as a ticket out of India itself.

  His determination to leave his homeland only deepened near the end of his medical degree. More and more, the ever-present corruption that penetrated almost every aspect of daily life in India was wearing on him. In the Indian bureaucratic system, you had two ways of getting ahead: paying someone off, or becoming a sycophant.

  “If you wanted to get posted in a city, you had to bribe someone to do it. Sometim
es a bribe wouldn’t be enough and you were also expected to lick someone’s feet,” my dad said. “Why get stuck in this nonsense or waste energy on asking why things had to be this way?”

  After he graduated in 1976 with his MD, my dad purchased an ad in the English-language newspaper The Tribune that combined his two priorities—leaving India and getting married—and kept his posting brief:

  Young Panjabi physician looking for a woman living outside of India.

  When my mom, Harmeet Kaur, first arrived in Canada in 1976, the thing that struck her the most was the freedom of women. She grew up in a place where women had to think twice about taking a bus. You literally had to weigh the risk of getting sexually harassed with the need to get to your destination. Walking down the street or being out after dark alone were calculated risks women had to make daily. Sikhi’s feminist tenets had fought hard against this injustice, but misogyny was still alive and well in South Asia.

  Given where she’d grown up, the first time my mom stood in a grocery aisle in southern Ontario, she was amazed to see women carrying sanitary pads in plain view of other customers. Coming to Canada gave my mom access to a freedom she had never experienced and probably never even imagined.

  My mom had arrived in Canada on a family visa. She was sponsored by her brother, who was sponsored by his sister, who was sponsored by her husband. On it went and would continue to go, uniting relatives in their adopted home. In the decades to come, the number of Panjabi-speaking Canadians would grow to be one of the largest minority groups in Canada. While the majority of Panjabi-speaking people clustered around the greater Toronto and Vancouver areas, they had a presence in every province. My mom’s family, like so many others, built their community one person at a time.

  Unlike my dad, my mom had grown up on a multigenerational farm where the children were expected to contribute to the family business on top of their schooling. All of the work—picking cotton, husking corn, harvesting wheat—was done by hand. Luckily, there were four generations living in their two-storey farmhouse at the time.

  My mom’s parents, Sarup Singh and Gurbachen Kaur, loved farming, but they knew the future was bleak. They didn’t have the means to buy any more land, and while the land they did have was incredibly fertile, twelve or so acres wasn’t enough for the eight children to divide up and establish their own families on. My grandmother was ambitious and, like my paternal grandmother, she taught herself to read and write in Panjabi and Urdu, a rarity among women in their working-class farming community. My grandmother enrolled my mom and her siblings in the local village school and encouraged them to pursue education as a path to a brighter future.

  My mom was probably the first woman in her family to get a university education. She graduated with not one but two degrees: a bachelor of arts and a bachelor of education. Despite my mom’s credentials, though, it was tough for her to find work in India. There were limited opportunities. She found a part-time teaching gig, but it wasn’t enough to earn a real living. Her siblings in Canada told her she would have a better shot there. They sold the land of opportunities and my mom bought in.

  To her surprise and disappointment, though, when my mom got to Canada, she found that job opportunities weren’t quite as plentiful as her relatives had advertised. Though she was educated in English, she, like so many other new Canadians, was told that her degrees weren’t recognized. She looked into getting recertified, but when she found out how expensive it was, she knew there was no way she could afford it.

  Hearing the stories of my mother from this time, I always thought of one word: resilient. My mom is pretty much always content. Whatever the weather, no matter if she’s hungry or full, tired or rested, she is almost always happy. It’s what has allowed her to overcome so much in life. My mom was a young woman in a new country who had just found out that her hard-earned education was effectively worthless. For many people, that would be cause to lose hope. But not my mom. In fact, my mom’s story isn’t unique. So many new Canadians arrive with so much hope, only to find that none of their education or international experience is recognized in Canada. I’m in complete awe of all the people who persevered and never lost hope despite the odds.

  My mother found a job in a factory that made curling irons. After working there for a couple of months, she started taking an IT course on the side, hoping it would help her land a job at a bank. She finally got the job, an entry-level clerical position, and joined the throngs of commuters working downtown. Sometimes, when we drive through downtown Toronto, my mom turns to me and says, with a shy touch of pride, “See that tall building over there? That’s where I used to work.” And when she thinks my siblings and I can’t hear, or that it won’t get back to us, she’ll say the same thing about us: “See those kids? I raised them.”

  Later that year, my mom’s sister went back to India to visit family.

  “I will find you a suitable boy,” my aunt told my mom, almost in passing. Oh no big deal I’m going to find you your life partner take care, talk soon. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine the different world our parents come from and the completely separate realities they experienced. There were no telecommunications between Toronto and the family farm, and my mom couldn’t afford to fly back with her sister. All she could do was give some broad criteria for what my aunt should look for: well-educated, good-looking, a practising Sikh who, obviously, didn’t drink or smoke, and was willing to live in Canada.

  In Panjab, a couple of weeks later, my aunt opened up a newspaper to the classified section and found my dad’s advertisement. She sent a letter to my dad, and a few days later, he arrived for a visit. As a physician, he was considered a good catch. He had received letters with marriage proposals from families in the UK and the US, but found that Canada’s multiculturalism appealed to him most. And when he saw a photo of my mom, with her smiling eyes, he knew his decision was made.

  When my aunt returned to Toronto two months later, she gave my mom a picture of her new husband. It could have been anyone. But my mom found the positive, just like she does in any circumstance. (I’m probably being a little generous when I say “any” circumstance. I mean, I would have loved for her to find the positive in me receiving an 80 per cent on my eighth-grade geometry exam instead of a 90 per cent, but I guess I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of geometry tutoring after school.) She was content with what she saw: a serious face, strong nose, sharp turban, and classy suit. She took the picture to the immigration office and filled out a sponsorship application.

  The guy who arrived on my mom’s doorstep four months later, in April 1977, wasn’t quite the man in the picture. Though my dad struck a strong figure in a turban, he had transitioned to wearing it only occasionally during his last couple of years at medical school, and he had cut his hair, which meant he wasn’t a fully practising Sikh. Instead of a proud mane, his beard was also cut short.

  My dad certainly didn’t behave the way my mom imagined a doctor would act. Her first impression was that he seemed a little gruff and abrupt. Maybe it takes a while to start liking him, she thought.

  My parents had a small wedding ceremony and moved into their apartment in Scarborough. My dad immediately got busy studying for the Medical Council of Canada exam and its US equivalent, which would allow him to recertify in Canada and practise there. Every day, he’d pack a bologna sandwich and board the bus to the University of Toronto library to study, while my mom went off to her new job at CIBC. It was supposed to be temporary. In a few months, my dad assured her, he’d pass the exam, find a residency, and they’d be living more comfortably.

  But my dad failed his first attempt at the MCC exam. He was educated in English, but a second language is a second language. The rigidness of multiple-choice tests—something he wasn’t accustomed to—stumped him.

  They continued to scrape by on my mom’s modest monthly salary. To help make ends meet, my dad worked as a security guard. He would study by day and then pull twelve-hour night shifts on weekends and evenings, t
rying to cram in study sessions during his breaks. It was a demanding schedule, and more than once, a supervisor fired him for sleeping on the job.

  “I’m a doctor, but I can’t use what I’ve learned to help people,” he’d lament to my mom. More than just a blow to his self-esteem, it was a blow to his sense of self.

  My dad thought he’d have better luck passing the American medical exams, so shortly after I was born, he went to New Jersey for a three-month course. When he returned, my dad was certified for a US residency. But both he and my mom were still determined to live in Canada, close to my mom’s family.

  To do that, though, meant saying goodbye to me for a time. That was when my parents made the decision to send me to Panjab to live with our family there.

  “It will only be for a little while,” my mom explained to me, my one-year-old mind unable to understand. “And when you come back, we’ll have a beautiful new home.”

  Whenever my mom recalls our separation—even now, decades later—all her nervous tics come out. My mom, who fluctuates between being bold and opinionated or warm and fuzzy, instead goes quiet and softly taps her moccasins on the floor. She smiles awkwardly out of the side of her mouth, a thing she does to lighten the stress in her life. Over the decades, I’ve caught her making this expression a lot. Back then, when she’d first said goodbye to me, she thought it was the hardest thing we would have to do as a family. But she had no idea just how bad things would get.

  Chapter Two

  CHARDI KALA—RISING SPIRITS

  The eight months without me were some of the longest in my parents’ lives. My dad channelled his intense ability to focus and was single-minded about passing the exam to recognize his medical degree. He had a deep desire to succeed. In his mind, passing the exam would give us the financial security he had pursued for so long. But he also felt the pressure of proving himself, proving that he could make it. “It’s okay if your medical degree doesn’t work out,” his in-laws would say. “You can always get a job in a factory.”