Course Text Update

It has come to my attention that some students are having difficulty getting a copy of Reader's Choice. In the meantime, there is an online version of "My Canada" by Anita Rau Badami.  

You can read it here: http://www.imperialoil.ca/Canada-english/thisis/publications/2000q2/437mycanada.htm

I have included the story here too. Just click the link below to continue reading.


 

EARLY ONE MORNING in June last year, my family and I travelled from Vancouver to Tofino, a small town on the western coast of Vancouver Island. We had come in search of whales, particularly the magnificent orca. If we were lucky, we might even get to see a whole pod of them. When I was growing up in India, nothing had seemed more remote and exotic to me than these great mammals. I had seen pictures of them in geography texts and wildlife magazines, but the depictions were extremely unsatisfactory. The creatures were generally obscured by water or captured as a dim submarine shape by an underwater camera – sometimes there was merely a spout of water shooting upwards from a brief arc of grey that might well have been the shoulder of a wave. By the time I left India for Canada, the orca had assumed mythical proportions, and a huge desire had ballooned in me to see this whale in its natural habitat. The trip to Tofino had been inspired by an advertisement for whale-watching tours in a Vancouver paper. "Let’s go this weekend," I had said to my husband and son. After several telephone calls to book a room in a hotel, we were on our way. It was a grey morning when we left to catch the ferry to Victoria. But nothing could keep my hopes down; we were going to see those whales no matter what. The intensity of my longing, I was convinced, would keep the rain away from Tofino. The crossing to Victoria was rough and cold, and by the time we had driven across the island and reached the small coastal town, we could barely see the way through the rain to our hotel. I had encountered rain like this only in India during the monsoons and had come to expect nothing more in this country than the gentle drizzle that was so characteristic of Vancouver. This wild downpour, accompanied by the roar of thunder and the crackle of lightning, was a glimpse of a Canada that I had never seen before – the country had been doing a slow dance for me over the nine years that I had lived here, showing me tantalizing little bits of itself every now and then. That first day, we were trapped inside our hotel room with nothing to do but gaze at the Pacific Ocean, which was hurling itself furiously at the beach. But the next morning, to our delight, was bright and sunny, and we rushed down to the jetty where the whale-watching tours began. "Too rough to go out in the open sea," said the tour operator regretfully. "I can take you on calmer waters between islands." A lone orca had been spotted grazing in those channels, and if we were lucky, we might catch a glimpse of it. We drifted in and out of dark green fingers of water whose otherwise still surface was now pocked by the rain that had started again. We saw a black bear at the edge of a stand of pines on a tiny island, an eagle gliding on currents of air against the grey sky, otters and stellar seals, but not a single whale. We started our journey home disappointed but determined to come back the next year. And then it happened. On the ferry from Victoria, a cry went up from the crowd of people strolling the decks. There, cleaving the steely, restless ocean, was a large pod of orca whales – bulls, cows, calves – rolling and diving, sending up plumes of water. I had hoped to see one of these creatures, and here I was being treated to a whole family when I least expected it. Looking for the Canada that has gently seeped into my bloodstream is like looking for those whales. I find her at unexpected moments: in the sudden kindness of a stranger’s smile; in the graceful flight of a hundred snow geese; or in the cascading, iridescent shimmer of the aurora borealis lighting up the midnight sky. Several years ago, a friend asked me what I thought of this land of vast, empty spaces, of mountains and trees and snow and water, where almost every person claims ancestry in another culture, another land, and where a hundred different histories mingle to create a new set of memories. I had said that Canada reminded me of a beautiful, enigmatic woman who looks down demurely most of the time, but then surprises the watcher with a sudden glance from a pair of mischievous eyes. A shy coquette, I said, pleased at having found the words to describe a country with which I was just beginning a relationship. In those early stages, I tried to define Canada in terms of other places, as a series of negatives: not as colourful and noisy as India, not as old as China, not as brash and individualistic as the United States. I would read all the Canadian newspapers and magazines and watch all the Canadian television shows I could (including curling tournaments, even though I am not a sports enthusiast and couldn’t see the point of a game that involved a teapotlike object and a broom). I travelled as much as possible into the mountains; breathed the moist air of ancient forests that held secrets of an unknowable past; wandered over the weird, moonlike surface of the Badlands at Drumheller, Alta., marvelling at the skeletal remains of dinosaurs that had roamed there aeons ago; tried skiing and ice-skating and rock climbing, ending up with little more than sore muscles. The more I looked, the less I seemed to see Canada. Until that afternoon on the deck of the ferry, when, as I watched the whales floating in the ocean, it came to me: there was no point in trying to find one fixed image of this land. It would always be an accumulation of events and experiences, smells, sights and sounds. I was, after all, seeing it through so many different lenses: a writer’s, a woman’s, an immigrant’s, a lover’s, a mother’s. It was at that moment that I began to think of Canada without reference to any other country, to love it on its own terms for what it was, rather than what it wasn’t. We came to Canada from India a little more than nine years ago. My husband had woken up one morning and decided that he wanted to reinvent himself. He was tired of his engineering degree and his job in a vast, faceless corporation. Our relatives were alarmed by this sudden decision. They couldn’t understand why we wanted to leave good jobs (I was a newspaper journalist) and comfortable lives for an uncertain future. And why Canada of all places, they wanted to know. Wasn’t that somewhere near the North Pole? Horribly cold? With bears and wild animals that mauled people to death? By September 1990, my husband had arrived in Canada and was taking a master’s degree in environmental studies at the University of Calgary. By March of the next year, I had cleaned out our flat in the bustling metropolitan city of Bangalore, sold all our furniture and packed most of our other belongings in boxes and trunks to store in my parents-in-law’s home. No point taking everything with us – we would be back in a few years, I told myself and everybody else, resenting this move and quite certain that I would never want to live in a country that I knew basically as a vague band of land between the United States of America and the North Pole. At school we had learned a huge amount about Britain and Europe, and at university, American literature was one of the areas I had opted to study in addition to the standard menu of Shakespeare, the Renaissance poets, Victorian fiction and Indo-Anglian writing (works written in English by Indians). But I had studied almost nothing about Canada and had certainly never heard of Canlit. I had once seen a picture in a geography book of a vast, flat prairie with a grain elevator rising from its heart. Another time, in an ancient issue of Reader’s Digest, I had read about a forest fire in the Rockies. The article was accompanied by a lurid picture of dark stands of pines licked by flames against a red, yellow and orange sky. These, and the photographs of the aurora borealis and of a grizzly bear, were the sum of my experience of Canada, a country that had hitherto existed only in the outer edges of my imagination – until I found myself in the Calgary airport in March 1991, dressed in nothing warmer than a mohair sweater and a pair of canvas sneakers. My husband, who had already lived in the city for six months and had survived an extremely frigid winter, had buoyantly assured me that spring had come to Calgary. It was deliciously warm, there was joy in the air, all the trees were in bud, and I would love it. My four-year-old son and I emerged from the nearly empty airport to be hit by a blast of freezing air. I could see nothing for a fewmoments as my eyes and nose had started to water with the cold. My lungs had panicked and seized up. I was wheezing like an old pair of bellows. It was -15 Celsius, and we had just arrived from a city where the temperature had been hovering at 47 Celsius in the shade. In the week that followed, the desire to go back from whence I’d come became ever stronger. I missed the noise, the bustle of people, the smells and the circuslike atmosphere of Indian streets. What was I doing in this barren city where the sky covered everything like blue glass, where I could hear my own footsteps echoing on an empty street, and where I was frequently the only passenger on a bus? I wanted to go home. Two months later, the lilacs were in bloom, filling the air with their scent. There were daffodils thrusting up from the earth, followed by tulips and irises and hundreds of other flowers. The trees had burst into bloom, and I was looking at a different world. I had spent all my life in a country where the seasons merge into one another. This drama of death and regeneration was something I had never witnessed. I was instantly captivated. I would stay another year, I told myself, if for nothing other than to see the seasons change. Four years slipped by, and I was still in Canada. By now I had worked in a variety of places, including a china store, a book shop and a library. A few months after I’d arrived, I had signed up for a creative writing course at the University of Calgary and then began a master’s degree in English literature. I’d had several stories published, and I’d begun to love the crisp winter mornings, the sudden excitement of a chinook, which seems to melt the snow in minutes and peel veils of cloud away from the distant snowcapped mountains. Now, every time I stepped out of my house, I bumped into a friend or someone I knew. It was a wonderful feeling to know so many people in the city. All my fears about leaving my writing career in India, about forgetting how to write, seemed ridiculous. I had also found my métier in fiction writing and had finished the first draft of a novel. In 1995, my first novel was accepted for publication, and we moved to Vancouver. Once again I was filled with that wretched feeling of being torn from all that was familiar and beloved, of leaving home, except this time, home was Calgary, and what I yearned for was long silent streets and canola fields shimmering yellow under an endless blue sky. In the years since I arrived here I have travelled the length and breadth of this land and collected many different images of it. Now if somebody asks me what I think or feel about Canada, I tell of all the people and places, sights and events that have woven a pattern in my heart. I tell stories about Shinya and Mayo, who had come here from Japan and shared with us a passion for spicy eggplant curry and Charlie Chaplin. And Carole, who arrived like a Santa in the middle of our first spring with a bag full of toys for our son, just, she explained cheerfully, to make him feel at home. I talk about Serena and Mike, our neighbours, with whom we watched dozens of late-night movies after shared dinners and delicious fruit flans created by Mike. Or about Grant, who took us on a trip to Waterton Lakes National Park in southwestern Alberta, rowed us out to the middle of one of the many lakes and handed the paddles to my husband and me. "If you want to be Canadian," he declared, grinning, "you will have to learn to row a boat." And who, after watching us quarrel for 20 minutes, during which time we managed to describe tighter and tighter circles in the centre of the lake, decided that there were safer ways of becoming Canadian. There were all those evenings with Suni and Ravi and Mayura and Ratna, celebrating Indian festivals just as winter was beginning to take hold, nudging away those last warm fall days, and the many times that they took care of me while I tried to juggle work and school and home. My Canada, I tell anyone who asks, is the driver who made sure that I was on the last bus out of Calgary’s North Hill Centre when I was working the late shift there, even if it meant delaying the bus an extra 10 minutes. And the members of my creative writing group, who gave me their undiluted comments and prepared me for a career as a novelist. "When your first book is out there being trashed by the reviewers," they told me, "you’ll thank us for your thick skin." My Canada includes all those people who made me feel like I belonged. To my album of memories I will add an enchanted night spent lying on a sloping field in Calgary with a group of friends to watch a meteor shower streaking silver lines across the midnight sky. I will tell all who ask about the time I stood on Alberta’s Athabasca Glacier surrounded by mountains eternally capped by snow, and drank crystalline water from a deep spring so ancient that time itself had no measure for it; of the moon full and golden, floating up over the mountains surrounding Lake Louise, and a lynx’s eyes flaring green at us before the creature snarled and vanished into the darkness; of the flood of people on Main Street, Vancouver, celebrating the Sikh festival Baisakhi; of Chinatown, where a beautiful woman in a small, dark shop sold me exquisite paper and a stamp with a character that, she told me, meant "good luck"; of writers’ festivals all over the country, where a medley of voices from many cultures was heard; and of a café in a remote Yukon town where I met a man who believed that he was the reincarnation of Elvis Presley. I visited India recently, the second time that I had gone back since 1991. When it was time to leave, I realized with a small jolt that I felt none of the regret that I had experienced on the previous trip. The needle of my emotional compass had swung around and set itself in a different direction. While I still cherished the brilliant colours of India, I was also beginning to recognize and appreciate the subtle tints and textures of the Canadian fabric. And I knew that even though a part of me would always look with love towards the land of my birth, and deep inside I would for ever straddle two continents, two realities (the East and the West), my home was now here, in Canada. Photography by Kate Wiiliams; illustration by Ninon/Link