Travel Thali

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Cape Cod is a peninsular that juts off the coast of Massachusetts. It is shaped like an arm that is closed fisted and raised the way a person does to show their biceps.

The Cape is iconic in the American consciousness, and its towns and the personalities of its locales has shown up in many pieces of American fiction, as a simple Google search will reveal, since before the thirteen colonies were inaugurated into the new nation.

Plymouth, where the Mayflower is believed to have docked, is just north of Cape Cod. The nations – collectively known today as the Wampanoag – who lived there and who greeted the pilgrims and provided them with the skills they needed in order to survive - live primarily at the top of the Cape, in and around the town of Mashpee. Boston is an hour-and-a-half drive from Mashpee. Provincetown, widely known as a queer-positive summer vacation spot, is at the tip of the peninsula. Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys vacation in the summer, is on Cape Cod. Martha's Vineyard is just off it.

I've been to Cape Cod four times over the last twelve years, and, unusual for me, none of those trips had anything to do with what actually went on in the cultural context. I own a time share and was there in a context in which I had traded in my week for a week at one of the many resorts on the peninsula.

My main reason for going there was for the ocean.

I went to Cape Cod when I hadn't been around the ocean for some time and needed to be near it. It was the closest place I could drive to where being by the ocean was easy. One of those four times, I went by myself. Twice I went with my children.

Once, the first time I went there, I was still married and my daughter wasn't born yet. It was February 1998. That was the only time I've actually explored the Cape as much as one could in a week. We did a day's trip down Highway 6A. Highway 6 was the main highway that went down the Cape to Provincetown. Highway 6A was a semi-backroad route that took us past barns where artists threw pottery and into tiny towns with tiny galleries where local painters displayed their work.  I bought a few pieces of art from the people who had made them. On other days we visited places like Beatrix Potter's house, now a museum, in the town of Sandwich and the Pairpoint Glass Factory in Sagamore. There was a ton of stuff to do on the Cape, and we did our fair share of it, but my sense was that, even given the significant presence of the Wompanoag and, something I later learned, a history of Portuguese seafarers establishing communities there, overall it was culturally an Anglo-American space, which is not a culture I have any particular interest in.

I have a friend, who is half-Wompanoag and who lives in Mashpee, who gave me a good understanding of the history and geography of the place from a First Nations point of view, which helped me care about it a little more about it.

But what I liked about the Cape was how pretty it was. And, of course, the ocean.

There was one town that we discovered on that trip that I did like and that I have returned to on every trip: Wood's Hole. It's known primarily for the Marine Science Center that does extensive research on the very complex eco-systems that exist in that peninsular, but it is also a place from which fishing boats still operate and parts of it are enchanting for that historical aspect Cape Cod is beautiful up and down its length and breadth, but Wood's Hole was the one place I actually found charming.

The time I went there by myself was in December 2008. I had had an extraordinarily difficult few months that preceded the trip. An old friend of mine, someone I'd known my entire life, passed away ihat September. Much more positive, but also emotionally demanding, was going through the parallel processes of my full-length play, "Margaret in Search of Herself", being reworked and refined for a staged reading in November and preparing for three of my plays, including "Margaret", to be published in a collection coming out in December. My spirit was spent by mid-December and I needed to be near the ocean to replenish it. I spent that week on Cape Cod - at a resort in the town of Yarmouth - watching movies when I was inside and staring at the ocean when I was outside. The only place I ventured afield to visit was Wood's Hole.

The second time I was on there with my children, my most recent trip, was in April 2011. We barely wandered off the resort except to go to the beach.  As far as my children were concerned, since the resort had miniature golf, a swimming pool and all the TV channels their hearts could desire, they were content. We did make an afternoon trip to Wood's Hole, however, where we re-visited the Nobska Point Lighthouse, which we had first visited on a trip we dedicated to visiting lighthouses six years before.

Duirng that trip, I went to Boston by myself to see my play, "Margaret in Search of Herself", being staged by the New African Company, which was extraordinary as thrilling experiences go. Another of my plays, "Philomena Across Time", a short piece, was also staged that weekend by the same theatre company.

The first time I was on Cape Cod with my children was in February 2005. My daughter was twenty months old. My sons were 12 and 8, respectively, and they and I decided on planned trips off the resort based on the theme of lighthouses, of which there were several on Cape Cod. We did our research together, we planned each day's trip to one or two lighthouses together.

In many ways, that was my most delightful trip to the Cape.

After one of those trips, we happened to drive by a graveyard. My sons were of the Harry Potter fans and graveyards held a particular place in their imagination. They asked if we could stop. My daughter was asleep in the back seat. and I saw no reason why we couldn't.

The graveyard was on a hill. It had a paved road in an upside-down U-formation around the grave sites. I parked at the bottom of one end of the road. My sons got out of the car and began wandering among the graves. We were the only people there.

Within minutes, a police patrol car entered at the other end of the road, crept up the hill and parked at the top where the road completed its curve. Its nose was pointed at my car.

My immediate instinct was to get out of the car and tell my sons to get back in it so we could get out of there. My more reflected response was to not corrupt their adventure with what could beparanoia on my part. Whoever was in the patrol car stayed inside. I stayed in my car.

When my sons were done wandering through the graveyard, they slid back into the back seat chatting with each other about specific graves they'd seen.

I pulled out of the graveyard and took a right on the road that would lead me to our resort. I drove slowly so I could watch the patrol car in my rear view mirror. Immediately after I left, it rolled down the hill, past the point where I'd been parked, and took a left out of the graveyard.

Once it disappeared from my rear view mirror, I turned to my sons. “Hey, I think you guys just got racially profiled.”

They both gave me a brief, baffled look before turning to each other and smacking hands in a high five.

*JG

 

Nuevo Horizonte

The thirty-six year civil war in Guatemala has been written about extensively and is easily researched. In fact, I would highly recommend reading up on this topic. Both the history of that war and the complexity of the peace process in that tiny Central American country were, for me, breathtaking journeys into portraits of humanity at its best and at its worst.

Here, however, it is necessary to understand the war and the Peace Accord as background.

When the guerillas handed over their arms as a clause in the Peace Accord in December 1996, some of them in the eastern part of the country, known as the Peten, chose an option made available to them: they bought haciendas that were on the market with the intention of turning them into agricultural cooperatives so they, and their families, who had been displaced during the war, many to Southern Mexico, would have a place to call their own where they could live in reasonable peace. They had few financial resources among them, so the properties were heavily mortgaged to local banks.

Through a social justice initiative at my son's high-school in Toronto – the initiative primarily funds scholarships in two locales in Guatemala - I had contact with one of those cooperatives: Nuevo Horizonte.

The person I was put in touch with was a woman named Sandra, whose father, Don Tono, I would learn, ran the tourism project on Nuevo Horizonte.

In the summer of 2009, when I was spending a month travelling through parts of Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, I spent three days on Nuevo Horizonte.

I travelled first from Belize City to the town of Flores in the eastern part of Guatemala. I arrived late at at night.  When I left my hotel room early the next morning in search of food, I was greeted by a flock of rickshaws lined up by the curb outside my hotel. I burst out laughing. I soon learned that they were called tuk-tuks, but, as one of the drivers would explain to me, Guatemala had imported them from India. My own research confirmed that Bajaj Auto in India was the exporter of the tuk-tuk

I had woken up that morning completely famished, having survived on snacks the previous day. I had no quetzales, the Guatemalan currency, on me, and the banks weren't open yet. As I wandered the sleepy streets of Flores looking for a way to feed myself, I came across a high-end hotel, the Sábana, whose restaurant was open for breakfast and who, thankfully, accepted credit cards.

There, on a patio overlooking a pool beyond which was a lake, I was introduced by the waiter, responding to my plea:“Just bring me food. A typical Guatemalan breakfast, especially if it's good, would be perfect”, to the desayuno chapin. Desayuno is Spanish for breakfast. Chapin is slang for Guatemalan.

I don't usually eat breakfast, but every morning for the fourteen days I was in Guatemala, including the three I spent on Nuevo Horizonte, I ate a desayuno chapin - that's how good it was. I ate a high-end version at the Sábana that morning and another high-end version at a café in the Zona Una, the most prestigious section of the capital, Guatemala City, where I happened to have to spend a night there on a trip between the eastern and western parts of teh country. I ate middling to rustic versions of it every other day.

The meal includes the following elements: two fried eggs, refried beans, fried plantain, cheese, and tortillas. Sometimes the cheese was a dusting of the residue from a hard cheese, sometimes it was a soft, fresh creamy wonder, mostly it was something in between. Usually the tortillas came in a pack in a side basket clothed in a tea towel, but the café in Guatemala City, they were tortilla chips artistically positioned on the refried beans. Often the meal was accompanied by a red salsa that ran the range from made-from-scratch to poured-from-a-jar. Sometimes it wasn't. Whenever I ordered a desayuno chapin I knew what I was getting. The variations were the adventure.

I spent the rest of that first day in Guatemala wandering the hilly mostly-cobblestone streets of Flores, and made this note in my journal: “Flores is a small town well described in the Lonely Planet. What's disconcerting is that the cobblestone streets are being ripped up – to lay electrical wiring underneath – and replaced with interlocking, terracotta tile. I just want to know how far back the cobblestone dates, because it churns my stomach a little bit to think it might be part of the original settlement.”

I spent my second day in Guatemala visiting the Mayan ruins at Tikal.

The morning of the third day, I headed to Nuevo Horizonte. I took a tuk-tuk to the bus station. I squeezed into a mini-bus and got off at a point that Sandra had told me to in an email. It was hot and dusty and the road was an unforgiving gravel. I surveyed the scene around me and was reminded of a cheap Western movie. There were, literally, two men wearing wide-brimmed sombreros sitting on the run-down porch of a store with a rickety sign. I asked them if this was Nuevo Horizonte. They pointed me up the road with their heads and without a word.

I stumbled up the gravel road, and was glad I had chosen to travel with a small duffel bag instead of luggage with wheels. Then I turned a corner and was faced by a beautiful church. Near it was an interesting-looking building which tuned out to be the Tourism Office and down the road, a freshly- painted modern building, which I later learned was the high school.

And that pretty much summed up Nuevo Horizonte, to the extent I would discover it in the next three days: dismal and fascinating.

It bears mentioning, parenthetically, that the reason I only stayed for three days was the following: if an outsider on the cooperative was not there to participate in working the land with the people who lived there – they plant crops like pineapple and corn, and teams of university students from Canada, the US, Italy and Spain arrive there to work with the residents during planting, harvesting and maintenace in between, or sometimes individuals assist in other ways, such as instructing at the high school - the residents preferred that the person, such as myself, a wandering- through, casual observer, stay a maximum of three days. About a hundred families lived there, and they deserved the privacy of their home.

I understood the reasoning and I respected it. They didn't want to cater to potential voyeurs from left-wing interests and they didn't need to risk spies from right-wing interests

At the tourism office, after the woman working there called Tono to tell him I had arrived, as was expected by my email communication with Sandra, I noticed there were items for sale including t-shirts with a logo Turismo Solidario (Solidarity Tourism). I bought one for each of my children.

When Tono showed up, he asked me if I needed to rest or if I was ready for my tour. I told him I had rested and bathed and eaten a meal and I was good to go once I had gotten rid of my luggage. He took me to my hotel room. On the way there, he explained to me that the tourism project on the cooperative had been funded for its set up by a grant from the government of Quebec. He also told me that the high school was built on a grant from the government of South Korea.

My room was a clean, basic space that had a double bed, a night stand and an overhead light. It was painted in warm primal colours. It cost me sixty quetzales a night, about seven Canadian dollars. The showers and the toilets were stalls at the end of the row of rooms similar to mine. They were empty because I was the only tourist in the tourism project at the time. There was no hot water on the cooperative, but I had exnough experience travelling to know that if I waited until the late morning, the heat from the sun would have warmed the pipes enough to make the water for my daily shower.

After I'd dropped off my duffel bag, Tono took me on my tour. He began with a description of the civil war, but, realizing that I'd already done my research, talked to me about Guatemalans from privileged families who had brought skills like radio-communication to support the predominantly campesino rebels during the civil war.

“It's remarkable, isn't it?” he said.

“Not really,” I said. “Right is right and wrong is wrong and some people just know that better than others.”

“You know that because you're Indian.”

“Not really,” I smiled. “I think that's the version of India that Gandhi exported. Kind of our best face. But I don't always practice right as right or wrong as wrong. I wish I did.”

Tono then showed me the place where the cooperative raised chickens for sale and the fields where they grew crops, also for sale. After that, he took me into the jungle. He told me that part of the cooperative mandate had been returning as much land as they could afford to the jungle. They had more than tripled it in the twelve years they had been there.

“The jungle protected us during the years of the war,” he explained. “And now we're returning the favour.”

He said little else to me as he and I trekked through part of it together over more than two hours. At the end, we sat down across from each other on benches made of rough wood in a resting place. He pulled a pocket knife from one of his pockets and a mango from another. He sliced apart the mango and shared it with me.

“You know there are tigers in here?” he told me.

I had seen nothing of the sort in the last couple of hours, but he didn't strike me as the lying kind. I cringed. “Are there snakes, too?” I had to ask. I hate snakes.

“There are all kinds of creatures here, but they won't harm you unless you harm them. When we were in the jungle we would watch what the animals and the birds ate and then we would survive by eating the same things.” He paused, then laughed to himself. “Those weren't the animals we were worried about.”

My journal notes from those three days on Nuevo Horizonte fill many pages, telling  my engagement with the experience and the many anecdotes that came with it. They include doing manicure/ pedicures with Sandra and Don Tono's other daughter, Maria Elena, drinking beer with his wife, Sofia, and standing on the back of an enormous flat-bed truck, along with at least fifty residents, to go to another cooperative where a youth team and a women's team from each played  friendly games of soccer against each other.

At the end of the day, however, sharing any stories other than those permitted by those who trusted me would make me the kind of voyeur the cooperative preferred not to entertain.

I connected with Tono's family and I spent most of my time there hanging out with them, including being invited to Tono's fitieth birthday party the second evening I was there.

However, apart from that family, and two women who worked in the kitchen of the tiny restaurant where I bought my meals, people were extremely guarded with me. Thirty-six years of civil war meant not always knowing who the enemy was. That does a number on a person's psyche. The kind of number that gets passed down at least a generation, maybe two or three.

The two women who worked in the kitchen had both fought in the war. They told me stories of moving through the jungle and of the people in small towns that they passed secretly getting food to them. One day, I was watching one of them make tortillas. She set the dough on circular piece of soft plastic and, with the tips of her fingers, quickly pressed the dough into a perfect circle. I had noticed that Sofia made her tortillas the same way.

“Do you want to learn?” she asked me.

“Sure. I've never seen tortillas made this way. I always thought they were made like this.” I smacked my hands back and forth.

“That's the traditional way, and we used to make them that way, too. But in the jungle, if we did that the military would have heard us and come looking for us, so we began making them this way, instead.”

Of course, I thought. Duh!

*JG

Santería?

While I was doing an M.A. In Spanish Literature at Syracuse University, I took a course called “Afro-Cuban Literature” within which we looked at Santería as a backdrop to the Literature of African-descended people in Cuba. I learned about Ochún and Obalá and Ifá and a whole lot of other gods and goddesses. I always, however, needed a visual schemata to understand which god or goddess fit where in the big picture. As fascinated as I was by Santería, the complex web of deities was impossible for me to memorize. It wasn't unlike the way I related to Hinduism.

Being raised Catholic meant the pathways of religious thinking inside my mind were, unfortunately, fairly linear.

What fascinated me about Santería, however, was less the network of gods and goddesses than the fact that the religion itself was created as a creative solution for African slaves who wanted to continue practicing their religions without suffering the wrath of the Catholic Church, which dominated in the part of the world where they were enslaved. What its practitioners did was use the multiplicity of icons available in the Catholic religion as a way to manifest in the outside world the deities from their own.

Take the Virgin Mary, for example, and her many icons. As Our Lady of Mercy, the colour of her clothing was white, which made her the icon Santería adopted for the god Obatalá. As Our Lady (or the Virgin) of Regla, where she wore blue and white, she was adapted as the god Yemayá, in the picture above.

A favourite notion of mine from Hinduism is the idea that while we cannot choose our oppressors or what they do, we can claim personal power in choosing how we respond to them. I loved the subversive creativity of Santería. The very image of slaves outwardly praying to the Catholic icons of their oppressive masters while inwardly praying to their own gods, which they had made manifest in those same icons, made me giggle somewhere deep inside my soul.

So when I went to Cuba for two weeks in the summer of 2008, the first and only time I've been there, I was kind of sort of remotely hoping somewhere in the back of my mind that I would find an opportunity to be invited into the world of Santería. Considering it was an underground religion and I was a tourist at a resort in Varadero, the hope was a very long shot, but I still nurtured the idea of meeting flesh and blood practitioners of something that had been only an ink and paper reality for me until then.

No such luck. In fact, while I was in Cuba, the real challenge was in getting out of the elaborate tourist bubble. Getting to the practitioners of Santería rapidly became beside the point.

I had never before, nor have I since, stayed at an all-inclusive resort. For Cuba that year, however, considering I was going by myself to a place for the first time, a place that was unusual at that time in that it would ask for the address where I was staying upon arrival, I opted for an all-inclusive because it was the simplest solution. I bought a Lonely Planet, nevertheless.

I also happened to have had a particularly difficult few months preceding the trip which had left me so exhausted I was skirting the edge of burn out. When my flight took off from Toronto, I was as much looking forward to the rest and relaxation of a vacation as I was to the adventure of exploring a place I'd never been to before. I didn't even crack the spine on my Lonely Planet before I left.

For the first forty-eight hours, I mostly slept. When I wasn't sleeping, I stumbled about the resort grazing off the gifts of mojitos and papayas and mangoes and shrimp and an astoundingly-tasting simple cheese and coconut water in coconuts taken straight from the trees. I would crash on a chaise longue on the beach to spend some time in the sun before retreating to my room to sleep some more.

Two days later, when I was rested and was ready to get off the resort to visit the actual Cuba, I was stumped by road blocks. How do I get off this resort? I asked people who worked there. Rent a bike, they told me, or a moped or a car. Thinking that selling certain concepts was maybe what employees at all-inclusive resorts had to do, having never been on one before, I decided to check out my Lonely Planet for the 'truth'.

I was lying on a chaise longue on the beach when I opened the book. There was actually a boxed-out section on one of the pages that was titled “Escaping the All-Inclusives” where it recommended renting a bike or a moped or a Jeep. Translation: Ride around or snorkel or romp on a beach. But don't expect to connect with actual Cubans. Not in Varadero, at least.

I had never before in all my travels not had access to the culture I had come to visit. The fact that even Lonely Planet was telling me I had no hope on this front freaked me out. Did this mean I would spend my two weeks in Cuba getting drunk on mojitos, eating meals within the hours the resort had designed for them, going to the resort-endorsed entertainment every evening and boring myself to death duirng days spent by the ocean?

I stormed off the beach, and literally ran smack into one of the security guards.

“What's wrong?” he asked in English. His name was Ariel.

“How do I get out off this resort?” I pleaded in Spanish.

He told me that with my skin colour I could pass for Cuban. Over those two weeks, incidentally, many Cubans told me I could pass for Cuban, particularly Cuban from a particular place: Santiago de Cuba.

Ariel told me he would help me get off the resort, but I couldn't be pegged for a tourist. I would have to figure out a way to hide the wrist band that I had been given so I could on the resort be identified as someone allowed to be there. Once I began stepping out of the tourist bubble, I would slide the wrist band off my arm to leave the resort with Ariel, or one of the people he introduced me to, and pass as Cuban, and slide it back on to be on the resort. I felt like a married woman having an affair taking off and putting on her wedding band. There was a lot of sneaking around.

While I waiting for him to figure out how to get me off the resort – it took him a few days, which in the context made a lot of sense - I decided to join a Belgian woman, her son and her son's friend on a day-trip to Havana. She had hired a car with a driver, and the four of us split the cost among us. We did a superficial tour of Havana, which definitely requires more than a day to see properly

The smartest thing I did on that trip was skip lunch. The guide wasn't allowed to eat with the tourists, which meant that I would've been hanging out with three Belgians speaking Dutch. I decided to wander through the streets of Old Havana, instead. At first it reminded me Connaught Place in Delhi - decrepit colonial buildings, which were still used because they were not quite ruins. But Havana, I quickly realized, was like nowhere I had ever been before because it was so safe. I'm sure it's a different story at night, but that afternoon, I wandered through narrow streets and back alleyways, places I wouldn't go in most cities I know, let alone ones I don't know. I was never creeped out. I never worried about anyone touching me or grabbing at my purse. No one bothered me. No one even gave me a second glance. When I pulled out my camera, people asked a couple of times if I was mexicana. No, I apologized. Canadiense. I was hooked. I had been told that Cuba was safe, but I had no idea. To women, especially women alone, safety is freedom, and I was flying high.

Included in our tour that day was a stop at the Plaza de la Revolución, the Capitolio Nacional (which resembles the Capitol in Washington, D.C. ), the tank on which Fidel Castro rode into Havanas in triumph on January 1, 1959 and the Museo de Bellas Artes. We also stopped in the lobby of a hotel that had a showcase with the longest cigar in the world, and at a rum factory before ending the day with the obligatory mojito at Hemingway's (the bar made famous in the movie Havana with Robert Redford and Lena Olin).

When I returned to Havana a few days later, on public transportation, with Ariel and Antonia, a receptionist at the hotel, they took me to their Havana. Much has been written about the margins of poverty where the average Cuban lives and does not be repeated here. One of my favourite moments in their world was being at Ariel's aunt's place – a room about eight feet by ten feet in which seven people slept. From his duffel bag, Ariel pulled packages of shrimp, bottles of rum and bars of soap, which he had stolen from the resort and which he handed around the room. I sat on a couch that had a unfolded cardboard box for a seat. On the only dresser in the room was a small black and white TV with the fuzzy image of a Mexican telenovela. From the pots on the hotplates she was cooking on, Ariel's aunt served me a stewed fish with moros y cristianos (black beans and rice) which was so delicious I would have accepted the seconds she offered me if I hadn't been concerned that I would foraying into someone else's dinner portion.

The next day, I took Ariel and Antonia to the Havana I had seen a few days before. I was passing for Cuban and I knew Cuban law forbade businesses from disallowing Cubans to enter establishments (there is legally no concept of 'private property' in Cuba). Still, I noticed that the two of them at first seemed timid about going into lobbies of hotels, for example, to see the giant cigar or fish in a pretty indoor pond. I led the way and acted like I assumed they'd be right behind me, and eventually, they became pumped with the adventure and we had a great time.

It broke my heart a little bit, however, when, at some point during the afternoon, Antonia said: “I feel good about living in Cuba, today. I feel like a tourist.”

Below are some excerpts from notes I made when I returned.

“This a country where ninety-nine percent go to university. This is a people who knows what they don't know. This is not an ignorant people. This is also a population of whom very few are allowed to travel, few have the resources and/or the permission to surf the internet, and even those with higher education probably didn't have great resources in terms of books and other materials, I found Cubans to be the least provincial in their thinking of any people I've ever met. I was only there for two weeks, and I spent more time plotting to get off the resort than I actually spent off it, so I can't speculate as to why that would be. It was the first time I'd been in a Latin American country where, when I outed myself as hindou ('sudasiatica' hasn't hit Spanish yet), I wasn't asked the two questions I'm always asked: why do Indian women wear a dot in the middle of their foreheads, and why can't you kill cows in India when the people are so hungry. In fact, when I mentioned this to a couple of Cuban friends, they scoffed and said they couldn't kill cows either. Cows (unless the state kills them for those hamburgers and steaks I saw at the resort restaurants), like in India, are for producing milk. "We could get twenty years for killing a cow", they told me. I don't know if I believe that, but I am tickled by an image of Old Fid and his group of barbudos reading up on Indian policy as they plotted a revolution.

“There is racism in Cuba. Don't kid yourself, even if you're Cuban. Five hundred years of the history of a Spanish colonialism that completely eradicated the Tainos, the nation there when the Spanish arrived, were not cancelled out by fifty years of a revolution that has made racism illegal. Still my observation was that in day to day life, solidarity was more important than difference, and that racism was more about value attached to certain 'looks' and less about 'entitlement'.

“There is elitism. I spent a night in a suburb of Havana called Sant Fe. No beat up buildings. No electricity issues. "This must be where Fidel lives," I commented to my friends. They snapped their heads at me for saying his name. I think they concurred, but I'm not sure. Whatever. I know what I saw, and what I saw was 'same shit, different place'.

“The thing that took my breath away, however, was the homophobia. Among a people for whom solidarity in la lucha means more than difference, where 'breeding' is not a priority, where anger is a caprice few indulge themselves, where kindness is valued more than cruelty, where winning does not mean being the biggest asshole, I was struck dumb by the callousness of the homophobia. I have no analysis here. Only shock.”

More excerpts:

“A decent monthly salary in Cuba is the equivalent of $24 CDN. People who earn tips as well and artisans and others in business for themselves earn more. If the necessities of life are food, shelter, transportation and clothing, I have these observations to make.

“When Jawaharlal Nehru developed the concepts of First and Third Worlds, he also developed the concept of a Second World, which was the Communist Bloc of the time. Cuba was my first time in the Second World.

“Cubans don't go hungry, but they don't eat well. Through a ration card system, every person, every month gets five pounds of rice, five pounds of sugar, some frijoles, some meat, a daily portion of bread, a minimum in toiletries, among other things. Children under twelve are given milk. but there are no fruits or vegetables provided by the state, which automatically means it's a struggle for people to eat in a healthy manner. There are no beggars on the streets.

“I was told there were homeless in Havana. I didn't see any. Housing is assigned by the state. I left with this impression: if you inherited a home, you owned it, but you couldn't sell it. You could exchange it with someone who had one of more or less equal size.

“The transportation infrastructure is a fright. It consists of buses, called guaguas, which run on no particular schedule, collective taxis, called combis, and hitching. Since people may live far from where they work or study, they often spent hours every day getting back and forth, never knowing how long it was going to take them. How they usually got to work on time was difficult to understand, but even more difficult to understand was how the women kept their manicures intact, their hair in place and their make up from smearing in all that grimy travel. I don't wear make up and I was really glad I'd gotten a manicure/pedicure the day before I left for Cuba. The first time, I went past the tourist line for two days, I left my shampoo and conditioner at the resort. I missed them dearly.

“Clothing, make up, medicines, pencils, notebooks: these are all a scramble for people. What Cubans lack is stuff and the consumer power to purchase it, if it is available. At first, I didn't find this disconcerting since I'm fairly minimalist as a materialism goes, but after awhile it struck me that it seemed almost mean-spirited to educate a population to the extent Cubans are educated, and to cultivate among them a culture of dignity and respect, and then make it so hard to have a little aesthetic or a little luxury in their lives. I try not the consume much, but I choose what I consume, and that corresponds to a level of comfort that works for me. The women I talked to about this didn't want huge houses or multiple cars. They wanted what the felt I had - a fairly simple life materially, but one that was comfortable for me.

“The thing I consider coolest about Cuba is the way the do queues. The don't line up unless the physical space means they have to. The collect in a bunch outside banks and when waiting for a bus. The first time I saw a crowd waiting for a bus, I thought, oh no, this is going to be like Mumbai, a push- shove, survival of the fittest to get on the bus. Not so. When you join a queue, you go up to the assembled people and say "¿quién es último?" (who's last?). The person identifies him/herself. You know you're behind that person. You can sit, you can stand, you can chat with a friend, you can wander away for a few minutes, you can make a phone call. All you have to do is remember who's ahead of you. It's brilliant. And it works because everyone respects it.”

A few days after I got back to Toronto, I had drinks with a friend of mine, Sascha, who has been to Cuba many times. I told him how mesmerized I had been by the place and the people.

He warned me to be careful. “They trap with that Santería crap. They all practice it, you know. They put this Voudou magic on your brain with it.”

I laughed in his face. I knew that Santería – and Voudou, for that matter – were just religions and had nothing to do with magic. But I also understood his bitterness. He loved Cuba with a passion, but his ex-wife was a Cuban who had taken him on an emotional ride that had broken his heart and a financial ride to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

My birthday approached a few weeks later. I had been in email communication with Ariel and Antonia. Ariel sent me a message saying he had got me a present and was sending it with a Toronto man he had met who was not staying at the resort where he worked but at one nearby.

My birthday that year was the first day back to school for my children, and I spent the day between meeting friends first for breakfast, then for lunch, and doing the shopping for things my kids had forgotten to tell me they needed or only that morning realized they'd lost from the previous year, like  scientific calculators and combination locks. In between running around that day, I stopped at home a couple of times. One of those times, I ran into a woman, Arlene, who lived in the building.

“I have something for you,” she told me.

“What?”

“My son was in Cuba and he met someone there who sent a small thing for you. Looks like a card with something inside.”

The man Ariel had randomly run into on a beach and with whom he had sent my birthday gift lived with his mom in the same building I did.

“What are the chances?” I gushed to Sascha when he called me later to wish me for my birthday. “One in two million? One in three million?”

“See, I told you,” he snorted. “Santería.”

*JG

San Cristobal de las Casas

When I got to San Cristobal de las Casas in the summer of 2009, after spending two weeks in Guatemala, it was a relief to be back in Mexico, a country by then deeply familiar to me. It was immediately apparent that the place, which I had never visited before, was what my Lonely Planet had promised it would be: a cosmopolitan city that attracts artsy, socially-aware Mexicans and foreigners.

Guateamala had been extremely interesting and often inspiring, and I had found the people resilient and charming. However, except for parts of the capital and some smaller cities, like Panajachel, it was also pretty rustic and quite conservative, and I was ready for something more sophisticated.

The state of Chiapas, in which San Cristobal de las Casas is located, has a significant Mayan population that has managed to preserve many of its languages and customs, but it is a population that is, unfortunately, socially marginal within the country. Chiapas is perhaps best known internationally for being the site of the Zapastista uprising that began on January 1, 1992 – in recognition of the five hundred years since Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas and the atrocities suffered by First Nations since then. The first place taken by the Zapatistas was the government buildings and central plaza in San Cristobal de las Casas.

My first evening in the city, I saw a documentary detailing the uprising from the point of view of the rebels. I saw it at a cinema cafe that served excellent coffee, pastries that looked like they could be included in a healthy diet, and a range of teas and tisanes. Before going into the theatre, I noticed that many of the people around me were Anglos speaking halting, accented Spanish with each other – obviously students at one or more of the many language schools in the city. The rest, whom I assumed were Mexicans but may not necessarily have been, were a bohemian lot who ranged in age from university students to scruffy, middle-aged men and women who spoke with the enunciation of the well-educated.

After the movie, I met a friend of mine, Sandra, who lived in San Cristobal de las Casas for what turned out to be a very decent glass of red wine at an upbeat tapas bar a block from the central plaza. There Sandra and I had a lively conversation with a Colombian teacher and his British-journalist boyfriend. When I talked about the film I had just seen, all three of them scoffed at me for being an armchair idealist. Sandra and I went for a walk afterwards and stopped for chocolate-dipped churros.

The next morning, on my way to the artisan market where I planned to shop for gifts, I came across a French bakery where I got a hot from the oven, rich, flaky croissant.

Right about then is when I fell in love with San Cristobal de las Casas. Who wouldn't want to live here? I wondered. It was a physically beautiful place, if a tad cold since it was in the highlands, that had good film, good food, good coffee, good wine and good conversation.

I went to the artisan market several times. I visited all the churches and cathedrals. I went to the amber museum, the jade museum, the coffee museum, and the museum of regional indigenous clothing. I visited Na Bolom, the house converted to a museum of Swiss anthropologist and photographer, Trudy Blom, who waged a long and intense campaign to save the lives and the way of life of the Lancandon people who lived in the nearby jungle. Her husband, Frans Blom, was an archaeologist who surveyed Mayan ruins in Chiapas.

One afternoon, I saw a young Sikh man on the street. I had read somewhere that there was a tiny Sikh community somewhere in Southern Mexico.  I was obviously curious to know if he was one of its members. I'm not the kind of bold, however, that will come out and ask a person a personal question like that. Instead, I pretended to be lost and asked him for directions. His Spanish was native-speaker fluent.

Another afternoon, I walked by a store that had a cloth ornament hanging in its entrance that had the mirror work on brightly-coloured fabric that is the signature of the craft work that comes from the town of Pipli in Orissa, though the work is sold in souvenir shops and in markets across Northern India. The mother and daughter who owned the store excitedly described to me the two-week tour they'd been on that had taken them to Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Their faces glowed as they told me that they were saving up to go back to India, this time to spend some time on an ashram on the Ganges, hopefully in Benares.

I began every day with a coffee and a croissant. I usually had lunch in the courtyard of a restaurant that also housed a gallery of indigenous art and artisan work and that was just off the central plaza. I ended every day with red wine and tapas and animated conversation.

After about five days of bliss, it occurred to me that I had seen little evidence of 'real life' around me. I had seen no gaggles of school children, no hospitals, no public transportation, no grocery stores. Since I ate out all the time, I hadn't had to shop for anything other than toiletries, which I had picked up at a store the size of a corner store, the only type of store I had seen.

The next afternoon, after lunch, I decided to hit the Mercado Municipal, the local market, for some fresh fruit and perhaps a dose of 'real life'. My Lonely Planet warned me to stay alert there because tourists had had their pockets picked and bags snatched from their hands. I'd had had money or jewellery stolen off me in Barcelona, Delhi and Montreal, but generally, I was a savvy enough traveller to know how to protect myself from petty thievery. Besides, this was Mexico, and never when I was alone in a public place had I been taken for a tourist. I was always assumed to be Mexican.

Not so at the Mercado Municipal.

The place was loud, vibrant, colourful, chaotic and smelly. It have been raining that day and I had to step carefully in other to not risk slipping on the pathways strewn with vegetable and fruit peelings. Rivulets of water tinted with animal blood flowed between the stalls. From the way the vendors looked at me and from the cold formality with which they talked to me, I knew I stuck out like a tourist. I really didn't like the way that felt at all, but I tried to take it in stride.

Then two women walked by, each with a live, squawking chicken under her arm. I whipped out my camera. I don't believe in taking reams of photographs when I travel, and I always ask for people's permission if I'm going to be taking one with them it.

“Can I take a photograph?” I asked politely.

The women glared at me for a second.

“Sure,” said one, her voice dripping sarcasm. “For a hundred pesos.”

There were guffaws in the crowed around me.

“What hundred pesos?” sneered the other one. “For a thousand pesos.”

It occurred to me that I should feel insulted, but I simply couldn't take it that personally. That much intensity had everything to do with what they already experienced and little to do with me. I put away my camera, bought some fruit and left the market.

When I returned to the part of the city with which I had become familiar, I felt as if I were inside a bubble of delusion. I didn't go to the tapas bar that evening; I stayed in my hotel room and watched TV.

San Cristobal de las Casas is lovely, interesting place that is definitely worth visiting, and I had a great time while I was there.

The incident at the market, however, left me feeling like a hypocrite. It was as if those of us who were outsiders had found out how to make the place delightful for ourselves, but the people to whom that place actuallly belonged felt like outsiders and were naturally upset about it.

I checked out of my hotel the next morning. I spent a few hours tracking down Sandra and people I had met there in order to say good-be to them.

That evening, I left.

*JG

 

 

 

 

Montreal, Canada

I fell in love with Montreal when I was an undergraduate at Carleton University in Ottawa

The two cities were two hours but, in many ways, a world apart.

Ottawa was where my parents opted to live when we immigrated to Canada. I was fourteen. I went to high school there and to university.

I loved Carleton for many reasons, and I am proud to call it my alma mater.

But I hated Ottawa. I thought it was boring and soulless. Granted it was a pretty city, and it had museums and art galleries and the National Arts Centre and decent restaurants with a good range of international cuisine. A place, however, where sixty-five percent of the population worked for the federal government was a place, at least as I experienced it, that had very little creative energy and too much small-minded conservatism, both of which tapped my spirit to lengths that were sometimes unbearable. I took every opportunity I could to get out of there.

In the summers, I travelled abroad as much as my bank account permitted.  During the academic year, I made frequent trips to to Montreal.

I decided to spend the summer after I graduated from university in Montreal because I wanted to know if it would work as a place where I could live happily, or at least more happily than I had in Ottawa. I had registered to do a one-year post-undergrad certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language at Carleton, which was my ticket to a job in South America, where I wanted to live for a couple of years: my immediate dream. That meant that I had to spend one more year in Ottawa, but after that, I never wanted to live there again.

And I never have.

In Montreal that summer, I worked at an Indian restaurant downtown and, rents being what they were before either place gentrified, earned enough to keep my small apartment in downtown Ottawa and rent another small one in the 'McGill Ghetto', the housing just off the McGill University campus.

Everything I had sensed about Montreal from my brief trips there turned out to be true when I lived there that summer. The energy was completely different from Ottawa. It was liberal and joyous. I met writers and painters and women who were bold and confident.

Although I was neither an artist nor a woman who was either bold or confident, I was energized by the possibility that I could be all three. I knew that there I could grow and, hopefully at least, find the courage to explore the limits of my personal potential.

In Ottawa I risked disappearing into a muck of mediocrity.

I decided I would move to Montreal after I came back from South America. Three years later, I did.

I ended up living there for ten years between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. I came into my own as an adult and as a woman there. It was there that I learned how to eat well and drink well and to understand that clothing could be a personal expression, not just a reflection of fashion trends or the cultural norms. I earned my living by teaching English as a Second Language in CEGEP's and in businesses, and I made my first forays into writing there as a freelance journalist and as an editor.

My eldest child was born there.

And while I continued to love it - and to this day I could never hate it - I slowly began to fear it.

Alongside the energy and the attitudes that had so engaged me, what I had not seen about Montreal until some time after I actually committed to living there, was that there was also a racism that was so insular it was shocking considering how non-insular Montreal was on every other front. It was a queer-safe place and one where common-law partnerships stood nose to nose numerically with formal marriages. Family law there is so progressive it's downright refreshing, and has been for decades.

It was a place that rallied from the core of its heart and its soul when fourteen female Engineering students were gunned down by Marc Lepine on December 6, 1989.

Seven months later, however, when the mayor of Oka, a town just north of Montreal, decided to extend the town's golf course into a pine forest sacred to the local First Nations group, the Mohawk, the city did not rally at all. The Mohawk from both Kanesatake, near Oka, and Kahnawake, near Montreal, both rose up in an coordinated and clearly articulated objection to the outrage by blocking bridges and highways. The conflict would go down in the history books as the first significant one between First Nations and the Government of Quebec.

While there was significant sympathy from the mainstream community, people from that same population demonstrated a hatred of First Nations that was shocking enough to include publicly burned effigies of Mohawks.

Why that difference exists in the Montreal's social conscience involves long conversations, of which I have had many.  None, however, have cleared up the issue for me.

I began to notice more and more an indifference to race as a social issue inside the mainstream consciousness in Montreal. When, in the spring and summer of 1991 two unarmed black men were – on separate occasions - shot to death by police officers, many of those who called in to radio stations made reference to the issue that neither of those men were particularly upright citizens, as if that, if it were correct, justified their unjustifiable deaths. At some point during that same time period, a teachers' collective in Montreal began arguing that the children of immigrants needed to be educated in places separate from the rest of the school population.

As a single person, and even as someone in a relationship, I could live a meaningful life there that skirted all of that ignorance.  The thing about Montreal is that people who are cool there are really cool, and I lived my personal and professional lives inside that particular space. I wrote feature pieces for newspapers on the topic of race in Montreal, and in my brief spell as the English editor for a French/English magazine, I was able to give forum to voices that elegantly articulated the topic of race in the city.

Then I had a child.  And the thought of his interfacing with the mainstream through public institutions – like schools – freaked me out. He would be exposed to all that racism, I feared, and there would be no way for me to effectively protect him.

Partly because of that, though there were other reasons, my partner and I left Montreal for the United States before our kid was two years old.  When I came back to Canada, I opted for Toronto over ontreal because I didn't fear Toronto in terms of the way it addresses race.

I still go back to Montreal as often as I can. I still love it. Some of my closest friends live there and every time I go there, I have a great time. The history I have with that city and the way I spend time with my friends there engage pieces of my being that are engaged nowhere else.

I was there for five days recently - in early July 2011. I stayed with a friend who lives on the Plateau. The morning after I arrived, when I was out and about, I felt like a myself in a way I feel nowhere else on earth. By that afternoon, I was back to being a Montrealer, so much so that people asked me for directions on the street. Over the next few days, I shopped in the stores I liked to frequent and I had lunch at familiar haunts. Every evening, I had great meals and great conversations with my friends. Nothing about food or drink or conversation was ever mediocre in the Montreal.

I even began fantasizing about living there again.    

Then on the fourth day, I walked by a bus shelter that had an advertisement for a brand of bottled water. It had four people of different skin colours. They had paint on their faces that was crudely stereotypical of First Nations war paint, and equally crude feather headdresses. They were postured in aggressive stances, with their teeth bared, depicting savagery. The poster was so racist, it took my breath away.

Immediately, I began noticing that so many of the brown people around me looked beat down. Later that day, as I walked up St. Laurent Boulevard from St. Catherine Street to de Maisonneuve Boulevard, I noticed that the Indian shops I remembered had fallen into even further disrepair than I last remembered them being. They were decrepit now and downright depressing.

By the fifth day, I was antsy to leave.

I love Montreal because there are people there whom I love dearly, and because I so much love the part of myself that comes out to play there.

But I'm not sure I could ever live there again.

*JG

My 21st birthday in Mangalore, India

Let's make this interesting by first mentioning that Freida Pinto, the female lead in Slumdog Millionaire, is a Mangalorean Catholic, the community into which my mother was born and in which she was raised.

The seeds of the Mangalorean Catholic community were sown in the mid-sixteenth century when an exodus from Goa began; the community grew roots as the exodus continued over the next two hundred years.

Goa was under Portuguese domination from the early sixteenth century until 1961, when then Prime Minister of India, Jahwaralal Nehru, decided that fourteen years after the rest of the country had been liberated from British rule, it was time to end the colonial hangover represented by the Portuguese

The two-hundred year exodus had to do with fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition (through which many Goans had had to choose between life and conversion to Catholicism), escaping the dramas of the wars between the Portuguese and Indian kingdoms, or generally being pissed off at the politics of the Portuguese, that included, for example, the fact that one could own land in Goa as a Hindu, but not sell it unless one had converted to Catholicism. According to my ancestral tale as it's been told to me: it was the third reason that brought my mother's family into the fold of the Mangalorean Catholic community.

Some, upon leaving Goa, returned to Hinduism. I've been told I have an ancestor who built a Hindu temple on the land right upon exiting Goa. On my bucket list is tracing back the path of this story.

Those who remained Catholic formed an enclave community in Mangalore in what is now the state of Karnataka. They allied with the British during wars between the British and kingdoms in the area, most notably during the Second Anglo-Mysore War (1780 -1784) between the British and Tipu Sultan's father, Haider Ali. The community, primarily dedicated to commerce, had thrived during Haider Ali's rule, but – for reasons still unclear to me – supported the British.

 For this, Tipu Sultan punished them during his entire 15-year reign – from the time he ascended the throne upon his father's death in 1784 to his own death in 1799. He exiled the Catholics to a place called Seringapatam where, during their fifteen-year captivity three-quarters of the community was decimated through death or forced conversion to Islam.

While Tipu Sultan is rightfully a hero in the Indian consciousness for being a resistance fighter to British domination, Mangalorean Catholics tend to shy away from offering him any kudos.

What the captivity did, however, was solidify the community and cause it to articulate a unique identity. They maintained many of the Western aspects that came with Catholicism, but integrated into it aspects of the Hindu culture around them. What a bride wears at a traditional Mangalorean Catholic wedding is a good example of this. At the ceremony, she wears white, but a sari, not a dress. At some point afterward, however, in a ritual referred to as the 'sado', the women of her family and perhaps close friends from a circle around her shielding her from other eyes as she changes from the white sari to a red one – the colour worn by Hindu brides – which she wears during the reception.

September 8th is another example of how the community blends Catholic and Hindu traditions. The date is considered by Catholics to mark the birth of the Virgin Mary. It is also the date of the Mothichem Festival, a harvest festival celebrated by Mangaloreans of all faiths. For Mangalorean Catholics, the date is the culmination of eight days of bestowing flowers on grottos and shrines to the Virgin Mary. It is also the day when the first fruits of the harvest are served to extended family.

September 8th also happens to be my birthday. The year I turned twenty-one, I arranged the dates of a four-month trip I was making in India so that I would be at my grandmother's house in Mangalore for my birthday. My grandmother and I had an amazing relationship considering we only saw each other maybe a half-dozen times before she passed away in March of 1989, but especially considering that we did not speak a language in common.

She spoke Konkani, which I was never taught.

My parents grew up in a colonial India where only English-medium schools were legal. They, understandably, internalized a sense of the power and 'legitimacy' of English, and chose to raise their children in an English-speaking household and to send us to English-medium schools. Added to that was the fact that my father was half-Mangalorean through his father and half-Goan through his mother, but was born and raised in Karachi and therefore outside either context, grew up identifying as a generic Indian Catholic, but speaking Goan Konkani, which, though mutually-intelligible, was nevertheless different enough to make English a more comfortable language for my parents' communication.

Considering that my siblings and I have only ever lived in the Desi Diaspora, speaking English with the entitlement and fluency of a first language has no doubt made our lives easier than they would have been otherwise. Not speaking Konkani has disconnected us from nuances of our story, however, and I, who have spent so much of my life loving and learning and teaching and translating languages, will never not wonder what it would have meant to have been able to speak Konkani.

My grandmother picked up on this despair in me. I don't know when and I don't know how she did it, but she lives in my memory as one of very few people who 'got' me in an intuitive way. She was a feisty woman who was independent and proud, and I like to think that she recognized in me a kindred spirit. She figured out a way to communicate with me through eyes and signs and occasionally bullying someone to interpret for us, and despite what seem like gross inadequacies in her techniques, she handed to me a legacy of an identity as a woman stronger than any handed me by any other woman I knew growing up.

It was only when I got to Mangalore the day before my birthday, when my cousin, Sunil, who was living at my grandmother's house while studying at a university in the city, told me about the Mothi Festival and the scale on which the Virgin Mary's birthday was celebrated in Mangalore that I understood that my birthday was not going to involve the simple celebration I had anticipated.

It also became apparent that evening that I would expected to go to Mass the next morning.

I was, by then, solidly on a path of being estranged from the Catholic Church. I had gone to high school and university in Canada in the late 1970's inside a generation where many of us embraced a consciousness of rage at what European colonizers had done to our ancestors and the ways in which that had compromised our cultural inheritances. I was only a Catholic because the Portuguese had forced my ancestors into the religion by threatening them with the loss of their land if they didn't convert, or death once the Inquisition came along under Francis Xavier. I had stopped being a practicing Catholic some five years before while still in high school, which had been a difficult enough battle with my parents. Until that point in my four-month trip to India, I had been able to wheedle my way out of attending Sunday Mass – the minimum commitment of a practicing Catholic – by promising my more conservative relatives I'd 'go later', and by begging the indulgence of skipping a week or two of my more liberal relatives. Sometimes I straight out lied and said I'd gone earlier with another aunty, uncle or cousin.

My birthday fell on a Monday. Because I had been travelling all day on the Sunday, no one expected me to have gone to Mass. Until I found out what a big deal September 8th was in Mangalore, and given that I was only going to be there for three days, I was not at all prepared for this to be an issue with my grandmother.

It turned out to not be an issue at all. My political consciousness shriveled under my grandmother's expectation that I would accompany her to Mass very early on the morning of my birthday. I did. The Mass was in Konkani. I understood nothing. No, that isn't entirely true. I understood none of the words. The intonations of the prayers, however, were completely familiar to me, and the rhythms of standing and sitting and kneeling through a Mass was as they were in the Masses with which I'd grown up. It would take years before the thought gelled into a form I could articulate, but it occurred to me then, despite my hatred of the reasons for the fact that I was one, I would never not be a Catholic. I eventually figured out that I could expunge the indoctrination from my mind, but the religion was in my bones and my flesh and my blood. To this day, I can walk into a Catholic Church anywhere on this planet and feel a familiarity that is visceral.

At lunch that day, family, mostly unknown to me, and friends, all unknown, and I sat with legs folded on the floor of the verandah of my grandmother's house and dug into thirteen vegetarian dishes which we each ate with our hands from a banana leaf that served as our 'plate'. Sunil, sitting next to me, explained to me that in serving thirteen harvest dishes – which is the reason the meal is vegetarian, because my family is not – our grandmother had essentially gone overboard because it was my twenty- first birthday. The number of dishes served had to be an odd number, he explained, but nine or seven or even five would have been acceptable. By serving thirteen dishes, Sunil added, she had raised the glamour factor on my birthday to that of a wedding reception.

It was impossible to not be totally flattered by that..

More importantly, however, what she did that day, was sow the seed of what would become the core of my cultural identity in Diaspora. That day, under her wing and in the euphoria of my birthday celebration, I opened up my politically-furious heart and mind to think and feel beyond the linear of my anti-Catholicism and to entertain the more complex sophistication of blending and hybrid and fusion when it comes to cultural identity.

I have, in the years since then, read every respected – and some less than respected – feminist and womanist theory in my journey to understanding myself as a woman. I am also super familiar with post-modern and post-colonial theories as they apply to race. In the process of acquiring one undergraduate and two graduate degrees, I've written a number of academic essays – in English and in Spanish – on the themes of race and gender as they inform identity. The irony, however, is that at the root of all that exploration is my relationship with a hard-core Catholic, Konkani-speaking, doyenne of a family farm who could not read or write a Western language and with whom I was in contact maybe five times in my entire life.

I dare anyone to tell me that not being able to speak my 'mother tongue' cut me off entirely from the legacy of my ancestors.

Sunil took me for a walk on the beach the evening of my birthday. The Indian Ocean was then my favourite body of water in the world. (It became my second favourite after I discovered the Caribbean Sea.) He an I stopped for a beer before heading back to my grandmother's house. That evening alone was about as lovely as I would have imagined a celebration of my birthday.

My grandmother's imagination was way superior to mine.

*JG

Barcelona, Spain

I spent the winter semester of my second year of university studying in Barcelona. It was the beginning of the year 1979.

I had entered Carleton University the previous year as a Journalism major and taken one elective in Spanish, which was the first time I studied the language. I fell completely in love with it. I have an affinity for Spanish, and a level of comfort in many aspects of the various cultures in which it is spoken, that is inexplicable even for me. I am almost, though not quite, as comfortable in my Latino world as I am in my South Asian, and the writer in me takes great delight in the fiction of passing for Latina. 

I didn't speak Spanish fluently when I arrived in Barcelona, but three months later when I left, I did.

An amusing side story about that trip has to do with my cousin, Laural, who spoke no Spanish at all, but managed to locate me in Barcelona. Laural lives in India, but was then spending a year travelling in Europe. I had sent her my professor's address as initial contact information with the understanding, at least in my mind, that I would send her my own address once I had found housing for myself. She arrived before I did that and without letting me know to expect her. She got off in Barcelona from a train she had taken from Rome. At that time, almost no one spoke any English in Barcelona, or in Spain, for that matter, and yet she managed to get to my professor's place – thinking it was where I was staying – on public buses by showing passengers and bus drivers his address. My professor wasn't home when she got there, so she wandered through his building, knocking on doors, asking for the “Señorita Canada” of any and all who answered their doors. Fortunately, one of the other students in our group, Barbara, who qualified as a “Señorita Canada”, was living with a Spanish family in the same building, so a neighbour sent Laural to that family's apartment.  Fortunately, Barbara was home. She invited Laural in and called the residencia where I was staying to let me know that she was there.

The context in which I was in Barcleona was the following: I was one of fifteen students majoring in Spanish Literature who opted for the opportunity to do our second year as an intensive program. By the end of that year, we were expected to be prepared to read Literature and write academic papers in Spanish.

Our fall semester was spent at Carleton in a particular room – 115 St. Patrick's College - where for thirty hours a week - plus copious homework - we spent our time immersed in Spanish in preparation for our trip to Spain.

The minute we crossed the threshold of 115 St. Patrick's, we were not allowed to speak English. We were taught by four professors: three Spaniards and an Argentinian. Each day of our five-day week was broken up into two three-hour time slots: one before lunch and one after.

It was a grueling schedule.

I don't remember how many of us started out in the program. I do remember the room being packed during he first days or weeks. I do know that only fifteen of us survived.

Anyone who has learned another language as an adult will tell you that the process comes with generous doses of humiliation. My salient memory on that front was the day, during a routine review of the simple past tense, I confused the applicable forms and instead of saying the Spanish for: “I embarked on a boat last Tuesday”, I said: “I got pregnant on a boat last Tuesday.” Only one of the students, Julie, caught it and tittered from where she was sitting at the back of the room. The professor then did the other students the service of telling them what I'd said. It was a few days before I lived that one down.

Once in Barcelona, however, I was grateful the professors had held my nose to the grindstone the way they had.  They had prepared us in mono for what we would live in stereo once we were actually in Spain.

True we fumbled, some more than others, and with us all being in the same mess, we helped each other out, especially at the beginning, but, big picture, we were well prepared. We found places to live – some, like Barbara, chose to stay with families, some, like myself, chose to stay in a female- only residencia with other students from our group and with young Spanish women who, typically, were from other places in the province of Catalan, of which Barcelona is the capital, and were in a city where they had no family and had to make friends, just as we were. In their case, however, they were Spaniards who were there because of their jobs, and in our case we were foreigners who were there to study. Some of us frequently partied with some of them on weekends, and over thirty years later, I maintain occasional contact with two of the women.

It bears mentioning, parenthetically, that in terms of historical context, the Spain we were in was just over two years years out from under the forty-year Fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. Franco died in late November 1975. We arrived in January 1979. As we were getting ready to go out one Friday night, one of the women, Frida, who is one of the two with whom I'm still in contact, explained the during-Franco and after-Franco difference this way: “When the hijo de puta was in power, we couldn't go out in miniskirts like these.” She waved her hand at what the five of us in the room were wearing.  “But at that time, we also didn't worry about getting raped.”

Our classes were held at a language school - La Escuela Internacional de Idiomas - that was on a small street off Las Ramblas, down which I would walk every day towards the Mediterranean Sea. Visible in the near distance, standing by the water, was a statue of Christopher Columbus (who sailed from Barcelona in 1492) pointing in the direction of India. Man, did he get lost! Bobbing nearby on the sea, but securely moored, was a replica of the Nina, one of his three boats, the other two being the Pinta and the Santa Maria. It was astoundingly small considering the journey it had ended up making.

Las Ramblas had a wide pedestrian walkway down the centre. On either side of it was a lane for cars. The street was favourite for both tourists and locals, and it was, therefore, almost always crowded. Along its course were souvenir kiosks, flower stalls and newsstands.

Just before I reached the end of Las Ramblas, I would take a right onto a side street and walk past a churro stand, where I had my first churros ever. The school was a modest building on the edge of the red-light district.

We had classes in History, Literature, Grammar and Conversation.

One of the other students, Lynn, who was also my roommate at the residencia, and I became fast friends around the notion that Conversation classes were ridiculous given that we were in Spain and could do a much better job of improving our conversational Spanish outside the classroom with Spaniards than we could inside the classroom where no one, other than the professor, was a Spaniard. We began skipping Conversation classes and began exploring together.

 Antoni Gaudi's Casa Mila was just down the street from our residencia, and so Lynn and I had almost immediately upon arriving in Barcelona been enchanted by his unique style: he completely ignored the straight line as an architectural necessity. We were also a bit taken by the romance of his death. He was presumed to be a mendicant, because of his appearance, when he was hit by the streetcar that killed him mid-1926 when he was was in his mid 70's. By the time he was recognized, at the hospital where he was taken, he was already dead. We visited his then still unfinished magnum opus, the Sagrada Familia Cathedral, and we spent many afternoons, where we chatted incessantly with random people, at the Parque Guelle, a public leisure spot that was both quirky and intense at the same time.

 Lynn and I also spent time at art museums where we became particularly familiar with the works of Pablo Picasso and Juan Miro.

A few times, we took the train out of Barcelona to the nearby fishing/beach town of Sitges, which, given that we were there in the winter, the off-season for tourists, was quiet and charming and endearingly sleepy. There, in a bar we came to favour, that in appearance was much like an American diner, we were introduced by the salty sometimes-fisherman owner to what lay on the chrome dishes under glass domed covers that lined the top of his bar: tapas, a cuisine concept that remains a favourite of mine to this day. We savoured cured fish and meats as well as magnificent olives, chesses and vegetables like red peppers and artichoke hearts marinated to a delectable perfection. And always it was accompanied by a fabulous crusty bread. The fact that we could do that on our meager student budgets explained to us that this was nothing exotic for the average Spaniard living or vacationing in Sitges.

This was their normal.

One afternoon, towards the end of our stay in Barcleona, Lynn and I bought a bottle of red wine, a whole roasted chicken and the Spanish version of a baguette. We then climbed to the top of Mount Tibidabo, where we consumed all three.

“Tibidabo” is Latin for “I give to you”. The legend behind this name is that when Jesus Christ was giving his Sermon on the Mount, he was not on Mount Canaan in Palestine, but on this mountain top. Him saying “I give to you” and pointing to Palestine might well have been a worthwhile offering to his followers, or so the legend goes, but him standing n this mountain and offering them the magnificence of Catalan was a much superior one.

I have never been to Palestine and, therefore, am not in a position to compare the two offers. However, while Lynn and I basked in the sun with the splendid vista of Barcelona and its surroundings around us, I understood why the legend had come to be. 

Before we trekked back down the mountain, Lynn and I made a solemn promise to each other that we would travel as much as we could for the rest of our lives.

*JG

Medical Insurance - Colombian Style

I have two scars acquired during the two years I spent in Cali, Colombia between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four. I was there on my first 'real job' – teaching English as a Second Language at the Centro Colombo-Americano.

One of the scare is a twonie-sized circle above the ankle of my right leg that resulted from my jumping on the back of a motorcycle and scorching my leg on the exhaust pipe.

The second scar is the result of a bizarre injury on my right hand and, given that I am right-handed, would have handicapped me for life but for a shot of luck, the kindness of strangers and amazing medical support.

Anyone who has been to a Third World country – from India to Brazil to Kenya to, well, Colombia – will know that a typical middle-class property will have around it either a wall with chunks of broken glass bottles along the top or or a metal fence with spikes along the top, the idea of both being to discourage intruders.

Within six months of my two-year tenure at the Centro Colombo-Americano, I had negotiated my schedule from split shifts that started early and ended at different times to one where I was working a straight six-hour day from 3 pm to 9 pm. My visa required me to work full time, and that schedule was an ideal one for me. It allowed me to go out in the evenings and to sleep in before preparing for work. As any teacher or former teacher knows, even when the textbooks and the curriculum are pretty much one and the same, there is still a couple of hours of prep work and/or marking that has to scheduled into every day, so I typically began working around 1:00 pm.

After work, I usually met up with friends at a bar called Martyn's that was catty corner from where the Centro was located. It was a place owned by a couple I came to know well – Martyn, who was Welsh and taught at the British school in town, and Angela, who was Colombian and worked in Marketing at Gillette Colombia – yes, the razor people. They had one hired bartender, a young man named Juan Carlos. It was an convenient place for me to meet people with whom I had plans for the evening or to count on running into people I knew if I did not have plans.

For reasons unknown to me, the railing along the steps leading up to the bar had metal spikes along the top. It seemed an exaggeration in burglar detraction considering there was also a fence around the terrace and a gate at the top of the stairs that was shut every night after the bar closed – each of which also had the spikes.

About three months before my contract ended with the Centro, I was battling a bad cold and stopped into the bar after work to tell my friend, Andrea, that it would make more sense for me to sleep in the next morning instead of meeting her for breakfast, as we had planned. I had one drink – a shot of Southern Comfort – with her and her new boyfriend, Tony, an American scientist who was in Cali working on a project with the Centro Industrial de Agricultura Tropical, before leaving to grab a taxi home.

It was raining. I slipped on a step and flailed my arms for a second to regain my balance. As I prepared to continue walking, I realized my right hand wasn't coming with me. It had been impaled on one of the spikes.

The two truly odd things about that moment was, one, the clean entry – in the fleshy padding under my thumb – and exit – in the skin extension between the thumb and the index finger, and, two, the fact that I felt no pain when the spike entered my hand or while it was in there. An ounce of Southern Comfort is not that powerful as pain killers goes.

My brain froze in horror, and when it offered up no instruction on releasing my hand, I resorted to screaming at the top of my lungs. The music inside the bar was too loud for anyone in there to hear me. A young couple going up the stairs edged away from me as if were someone not in full control of my mental faculties, but something in my blubbering explanation made them recognize that this was a crisis. I babbled the names of the people they should ask for in the bar. The woman stayed with me while the man ran inside. Juan Carlos was the first to appear. He grabbed me by the waist and tried to coax me into lifting my hand from the spike. Andrea and Tony were right behind him, Andrea weeping emotional support. Someone I knew as an acquaintance from the bar, Rodrigo, wandered up the steps. The salient fact about him to me, until that evening, was that he drove a Ferrari which he used to to seduce women. What I learned later about him was that he stopped outside the clump of people and watched me.

With the support around me, my adrenalin dissipated. I fainted. Had Juan Carlos not been holding me, I would have fallen and ripped my hand in half before tumbling down the stone stairs.

What I learned later was that the second I fainted, Rodrigo ripped my hand off the spike, and, with Juan Carlos' help, threw me into his Ferrari. Andrea came with us. He sped off to the nearest clinic.

I woke up on an examination table with Andrea beside me and, a few feet away, Rodrigo and a doctor standing in profile to me. I heard Rodrigo assuring the doctor that he would cover the cost of my examination. I heard the doctor explaining, in that particularly patient tone that a person uses after repeated explanations in a situation where frustration or impatience is not an option, that through my job, I had been paying medical insurance into a network of clinics of which his was not a part. I had no idea that I had been paying this insurance. I'm Canadian. Through the part time jobs I had held through university, I had learned to live with inexplicable deductions from my paycheque.

“She's a teacher,” the doctor explained to Rodrigo. “A right-handed teacher. She can't let chalk into that wound. It's not just the repair that needs to be compensated. It's the recovery. Take her to a clinic she's associated with, and she will be paid for her time off work. If I treat her here, she won't.”

Andrea had by then indicated to Rodrigo that I was awake. He asked me what I wanted. I was not earning enough to not worry about a loss of income, and I was concerned that I would be in violation of my visa conditions if I wasn't following the rules.

“I can make it to another clinic,” I assured him.

The doctor gave me a pain killer and cleaned out the wound with iodine. Then, we were back in the Ferrari with Andrea sitting splayed legged – since the car did not have a back seat – between Rodrigo and me behind the gear shift on the lip of the trunk.

At the clinic we arrived at, my wound was sown up and I was given a tetanus shot by a doctor who took a moment to wonder at my luck. “A millimetre to this side or that and you would have cut a nerve or a muscle and your hand would have been damaged forever.”

He explained that I would experience temporary pain because the spike had grazed some nerves. “Insultó algunos nervios,” were the words he used. Literally translated: it insulted some of your nerves.

“Were their feelings hurt?” I quipped, the painkiller from the previous clinic having by taken full effect.

He shook his head and smiled at me. “You have an extraordinary karma, señorita.”

Colombia at that time, thirty years ago, was already in the throes of what defines it today. The government and the rebels were already doing battle in certain states. Kidnappings for ransom were already beginning to be feared by middle-class and upper-middle-class Colombians who were part of the social circle to which I had come to belong. An Irish teacher I knew, who taught at the British school along with Martyn, had fallen in love with and become engaged to a Colombian man, Mauricio, whose family had money. Mauricio was gunned down at a gas station by police. He had been followed by them and asked repeatedly to stop – the reason was never made entirely clear to me. He had refused to stop because, as Miriam explained to me, kidnappers often wore police guise. I didn't know Mauricio well. I only knew him socially through Miriam. My read on him was a laid-back guy who wouldn't even know how to be a jerk. I had no idea of his family's wealth until he was dead.

A few days after his shooting, the Centro was shut down for the afternoon – along with all the businesses in the area – in the wake of the police opening random gunfire on sidewalk vendors on the main street – Avenida Sexta - two blocks from the school.

I, meanwhile, through what is to this day my worst accident, had six weeks of fully-compensated recovery. I was on antibiotics, which meant I couldn't drink alcohol, and my iodine-odour hand made me less-than-sexy presence in the dance clubs, which meant I couldn't party with my usual suspects, though I was guaranteed an honorary place on the couches of friends' hosting parties and responsibly fed lemonade. On the initiative of one of my roommates, a Polish woman named Sylvia, I went once to a concert at the Cali symphony when a visiting Israeli pianist whose skill was gorgeous, but not anything I could critically evaluate given my lack of familiarity with the world of symphony music.

Mostly what I did with that time was realize, recognize and embrace the fact that I happened to live three blocks from one of the best alternative cinemas in all of Latin America, a theatre called La Tertulia. It had been there all along, but I had been to it only two or three times until my hand was hurt and I couldn't work and I couldn't party. It was a theatre with red-velvet cushion seats and a massive screen. It was the place where I learned to overcome my snobbery that books are by definition better than film. There I saw movies that books would beg to better - movies that introduced me to Japanese film through an Akira Kurosawa festival and ones that introduced me to Italian film through a Luchino Visconti festival. That accidental education informs my love of film to this day.

My right hand recovered completely and functions as if it has never been hurt, but I will always have the scars to remind me of what could have happened to it.

*JG

 

Four Eyes

 

The only explanation ever given me for my extreme myopia – my uncorrected vision is 20/400 - was that as soon as I was born at Government Hospital in Manama, Bahrain, a member of the royal family gave birth in another room and the nurses attending to my mother dropped me to rush to her side. My head hit the floor and my eyesight was damaged.

While I'm far from being an expert on anything medical, I think my head hitting the floor upon exiting the womb would explain a few other things about me, but I doubt it explains the almost exact deformation of the retinas in both of my eyes.

What it also might explain is that my parents, during my toddler years, thought I was intellectually delayed because I bumped into things and stumbled a lot. It wasn't until I was two-years-old (or so the story goes) when I picked up a book, held it an inch from my face and began deciphering the letters that they realized the problem was with my eyes. The eye doctor they took me to diagnosed my short-sightedness, but informed them that, since the lenses for glasses at that time were made only with glass, they were considered too dangerous for anyone under the age of three.

WhenI was three, I got my first pair of glasses.

One of my earliest memories is of walking down the street, holding my dad's hand, and people pointing at me saying “Look at the little girl in glasses”.

It was the beginning of what would be a very self-conscious childhood.

I hid behind books. I don't remember learning to read. I also don't remember not knowing how to read.

The passion for books continued when I, as an eight-year-old, was sent to St. Joseph's Convent School for Girls, a boarding school in Quetta, Pakistan – the country of my father's nationality, my mother's through marriage to him, and that of my siblings and I through birth – where I would spend nine months of each of the following four years. My sister, two years my elder, attended the same school. The Catholic school in Bahrain did not go past grade six, and the expectation, then, was that we would be at the St. Joseph's until we graduated from high school.

At the boarding school, I missed much of what went on around me because I preferred to read books, and I was excluded from much because I was a 'four eyes'. What was impossible to not pick up on, however, was the ways in which the sexuality of some of the girls bloomed in that compound, sometimes spilling across the street to St Francis' School for Boys – which two of my brothers attended. One of the girls would meet her beau, the son of the school's gardener, at the gate that led to the street that separated the compound that housed the boarding part of our world from the compound that housed the school part. Once in a while, a girl would be expelled because a boy who loved her would be caught while he tried to scale the wall around the boarding compound and had gotten cut or snagged on the broken bottle pieces that studded the top of the wall. If he succeeded in scaling the wall, the girl he loved would be expelled because he had then wandered along the edge the compound disturbing the peace as he looked for her by whispering her name through the iron-grated windows of one or all of the seven dormitories, each housing twelve sleeping girls.

Inside the compound, what I was most aware of was younger girls, since I was one of them and they were my friends and/or classmates, developing crushes on older girls. What I learned later was that 'girl on girl action' was a complex thread that ran through that place and included the range from loving relationships to sexual abuse at the hands of some of of the nuns.

At the time, however, behind my coke-bottle bottoms, I was oblivious to anything nuanced on this theme, and only aware of the overt pieces. I sought out the friendship of an older girl, Rosemina, and was accordingly teased for having a crush on her. Both Rosemina and I knew that I liked her because she had books, and she liked me because I loved books. Honestly, if I had had word that one of the boys at St. Francis' had books worth reading, I would have found a way to endear myself to him.

That never happened.

Our academic year ran from March to December. At the end of my second year there, just before final exams, in an accident that involved a tennis ball hitting my face as I was playing a solo version of a ball-bouncing-against-wall game called 'sevens', my glasses fell from my face to the cement ground and one of the lenses shattered.

The nuns decided, since the strength of my prescription meant that the glasses would have to be sent to a major city for repair and would likely not be back before we broke for the long vacation, that it would make more sense to assume, based on my academic record, that I would have passed my final exams anyway and been promoted to grade five, to leave it to my parents to repair the glasses when I returned home and to excuse me from writing the final exams.

I spent that exam period sitting under my bed. Reading.

Flash forward to the following year. Same time. Same place. This time I broke my glasses on purpose. Same result.

This time, however, though no one else seemed to be on to me, my dad certainly was. “Funny how your glasses broke again just before the exams,” he commented when he and I were alone in the car for a moment during the melee of him, my mother and my two youngest brothers picking up my sister, my two brothers who went to St. Francis' and me at the airport on our return home for the long vacation.

He got me one of those cords that connect to each arm of the glasses and loop around the back of the head. If my glasses fell off my face again, they would simply hang around my neck.

Through no fault of my father, that cord became meshed in my mind as a symbol of the end of joy and mischief and a piece of my innocence.

The following year, 1971, what would end up being my last year at the boarding school, something much more momentous preceded our final exams than my breaking my glasses.

On December 3^rd a third war broke out between India and Pakistan - the one would go down in the history books as the War for Bangladesh.

One of my close friends, Naz Parveen Khan, who also lived in Bahrain, had received a letter from her father a few weeks before saying her mother was ill and she needed to return home immediately. Naz and her family were then East Pakistani; after the war, they would be Bangladeshi. Later I would learn that her mother was not at all ill, but that the letter had been a ruse to get her out of Quetta before the war her parents knew was coming but we did not. It would be Naz who would, when we met again in Bahrain, give me graphic accounts of the atrocities committed on East Pakistani civilians by West Pakistani soldiers in the months leading up to the war.

Most of us at the boarding school paid it little attention to the war, however. It was the inconveniences it came with that mattered more to us. Our final exams went forward as scheduled even though studying for them was difficult. The white-light bulbs in our dormitories were replaced with minimal-wattage green ones – enough light for us to move around during the hours of curfew, but impossible to study by. Heavy black curtains were hung over the doors and windows. We would study outside by the light of day until it faded. Then some of us would beg the kitchen staff to let us study by the bright lanterns permitted in the cavernous space where they cleaned up after dinner – lanterns that could not be seen by the Indian Air Force should it fly over us in search of targets, which it never did.

Indelible in my memory is the is a scene lit by two white-light lanterns, each about four feet high, standing on a table and hissing on the gas that fueled them. Four or five girls are sitting cross-legged on the floor hunched over text books in their laps. Hamid, a huge, bearded Pathan, clatters platters between the table and the sink while around him three women, one of them named Sarah, their heads covered by dupattas or the pullaos of saris, float like shadows, quietly clinking cutlery and plates.

Every night for the thirteen days of that war, we would huddle around radios in the verandah that ran in front of the dormitory doors and listen to President Yaya Khan pump us up with patriotism through a speech that always began with the words: “My fellow countrymen.” Once, when we were in our beds, which were lined up in rows of six against each wall, one of the girls in my dormitory suggested that maybe India wasn't really bad. The rest of us pounced on her, verbally, like cats on a rat.

One of our teachers, a newly wed, kept a map on her desk on which she charted a path, partly imagined by her and partly informed by letters from him, that her soldier husband was taking in the war. She neither taught us nor supervised us during the final exams when they came around. Instead she spent the class time grunting over the map, and she snarled at us if we dared ask her anything.

Through all of this, we had no idea that Pakistan was losing the war, let alone how badly.

The final exams ended. The war ended. The girls who lived in Pakistan went home.

A handful of us who lived abroad had to wait for permission from the government before we could leave the country. We waited for days. On Christmas Day, we went to see the Disney version of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, which I learned later was made in 1944.

Eventually the government provided a list of the categories of people who would be allowed to leave Pakistan, among them the one my siblings and I and all our Bahrain-resident friends fell under: students returning to families whose airfares were being paid by parents who lived abroad.

We went next to my uncle's house in Karachi, where we always stayed when transitioning between Manama and Quetta and vice versa. There we waited a few more days while our paperwork was completed. Every night, over and over again, the television station we watched aired Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's outraged at the United Nations Security Council before he stormed out of there out of there.

Here is a YouTube video of that speech.

Finally, on January 6, 1972, we were allowed to fly home.

My father had sworn not to shave his mustache until we were home. It had grown to a handle bar. My mother described to me what it was like pacing the hallway of our apartment, with no news of or from us, listening to BBC radio news detail how devastatingly Pakistan was losing the war.

In the social clubs, where we mingled with Indian and Pakistani families I'd known my whole life, I met up with friends who went to boarding schools in India. I discovered I wasn't patriotic at all, but I sure was envious that they'd been able to fly home right after the war and be home for Christmas.

By then, the school in Bahrain had introduced higher grades which would soon mean a high school levels, as well. My parents gave us the choice of staying there or returning to Pakistan. I chose to stay as did one of my brothers. My sister and my other brother chose to return to Quetta.

I have never been back to Pakistan.

And I have never again broken a pair of glasses accidentally or intentionally.

*JG

 

 

New York State's Highway 87

For reasons that will quickly become obvious, a couple of people and a couple of places will not be identified in this story.

Highway 87, which begins at the Quebec border with New York State is now an expressway that more or less follows the route that liquor, dispatched from Montreal, travelled to New York City during the Prohibition Era in the United States in the 1920's. What I've come to learn is that it is today a route used to transport marijuana that is grown in Southern Quebec to New York City.

A couple I've known for many years lives very near that border. In fact, their house was once a stop on the liquor route during Prohibition. They've gutted and renovated it, and they live there in reasonable happiness with their three children. And there are people in their world who consume marijuana.

On fine April day in 2004 when I, who was then living in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania with my husband and our three children, was at the end of a two-week jaunt with just the children – then aged 11, 7 and 22 months – through Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal to visit family and friends. Although the visits had been lovely in themselves, much of the driving had been through wet, snowy byways and construction-riddled highways.

The last stop on the trip was the home of the aforementioned friends.

The day my kids and I headed home was finally one of those gorgeous April days that one relishes before summer arrives and one can happily take them for granted. When I was packing up the car, I realized that I had forgotten to do laundry, and since I didn't want the dirty clothes packed with the clean ones, I shoved them into grocery bags from my friends' kitchen and threw them into the trunk of the car.

Crossing the border was a breeze, and as we cruised down Highway 87, my elder son settled into the book he was reading, my younger son zoned into his Game Boy and my daughter sucked on her toes.

About a half hour later we hit a police road block.

“What's your nationality, M'am,” asked the officer who ducked his head into my window as I lowered the glass.

“Canadian.”

He pulled out his head. “Where do you want her?” he asked another officer standing behind my car. Beside this second cop, a dog was jumping up and down.

Between the two of them, they directed me to park between two trucks parked on the side of the road.

The second officer appeared at my window. His sunglasses-covered eyes looked directly into my sunglasses-covered eyes. “New York State Police Narcotics Division, M'am. Can you please pop the trunk of your car?”

I did. I also got out of the car because I figured the words “Narcotics Division” likely meant a conversation my children did not need to hear.

The dog, meanwhile, had jumped into the trunk and was frenetically pawing at one of grocery bags that held our laundry. The officer asked for permission to look in the bag. I consented. He pulled out a pair of boy's jeans, several T-shirts, a toddler's dress, random underwear.

At the bottom of the bag was about a half-tablespoon of marijuana.

Neither one of us removed our sunglasses during the conversation that followed.

“Do you know what this is?”

I have no doubt that if I had had the presence of mind to do so, I would have lied, but I was frozen by a fear I had never known. Before my mind's eye traipsed the images of me being handcuffed in front of my children and being driven away in a patrol car. My husband would be assumed to be complicit. My children would be handed over to Department of Family Services and sentenced to foster care, and I would be jailed in whatever hamlet or hick town was nearest to where we were in the godforsaken boonies of New York State.

Although I'm not a user, I'm hardly naïve about the world of recreational drugs.  At that time, however, I was deeply entrenched in suburban motherhood, and information that might have kept me calm, like legal maximums, was not information I kept in my brain.

He took my silence for ignorance. He told me it was marijuana and asked me where I had gotten the bag.

“I was visiting some friends. I took the bag from their kitchen.”

He asked for the name of the town where they lived, but not for their names. “Do they have teenagers?”

“Yes. And their teenagers have friends who hang out at their house. It's a small town.”

He asked if he could check the rest of my truck. We pulled out all the bags and my daughter's stroller, which, one by one, he placed by the dog. The dog reacted to none of them. The officer then lifted the rug. In the crevices around the spare tire was a pencil and a few goldfish crackers. Together we re-packed the trunk.

“How old are your children?”

I told him.

He shook his head. “I'm not going to put the dog in the car. It would scare them.”

I'm not sure if I thanked him. I think I was still stunned.

He offered me back the plastic bag with the half-tablespoon of marijuana. The half-smile he cracked was the first expression I had seen on his face.

I snorted. “You can have it. I still have five hours of driving and I don't want to run into another one of you.”

When I got back in the car, my daughter gave me a patchy-toothy smile.

“What was that about?” My elder son looked up from his book.

“Oh,” I said as I checked my rear view mirror before sliding back onto the highway. “They're just stopping people randomly because they're looking for people who have drugs.”

“Drugs are bad,” my younger son volunteered without looking up from his Game Boy. “In school they taught us about these two parrots who were brothers, then one of them began taking drugs, and then they began fighting with each other and they didn't get along with each other ever again.”

Until I calmed down, I distracted myself with images of a parrot snorting cocaine, a parrot shooting heroin, a parrot dropping pills, a parrot smoking weed.

The following Saturday, at my younger son's soccer game, I sought out a woman named Sherry, whom I knew casually, who had worked for the New Jersey State Police Narcotics Division for sixteen years before becoming a stay-at-home mom.

I told her what had happened to me. “What would you have done?”

“Honestly, when I was a rookie, I would have busted your ass. But over the years, you learn to read people and figure out who's who and who's doing what. Obviously, they didn't have that road block up for your half a tablespoon of pot. They must have got word of a big delivery going down there to the City. I don't know.  But, still and all, you are really, really lucky you didn't get a rookie.”

No kidding.

*JG