I lay awake in my sleeping bag on the carpeted floor. Turning sideways, I could make out the muffled shapes of my wife Margaret and son Sanal, similarly cocooned in their sleeping bags. No, we were not out camping : we were in a rented apartment with no furniture. We had had the foresight to bring our three sleeping bags fit for Himalayan altitudes. We did not really need the warmth from the bags as the heating (which was included in the rent) in the room was quite toasty. We had arrived in Richmond, BC a couple of days ago and had moved in with our 6 suitcases directly from the airport into this spacious three bedroom apartment which Margaret's sister Hazel had rented on our behalf. Hazel and her family had arrived in Canada six months before us. They lived in the apartment directly above the one in which we were now sleeping.
My inability to cope with jet lag and the time difference of thirteen and a half hours between Vancouver and Mumbai was an old weakness. In spite of twenty three years of girdling the globe as a flight attendant, this was something my body had never got used to.
Finally, at around 4 am I padded stealthily to the kitchen and made myself some tea. The electric stove had four burners and the water boiled quickly. This was a vast improvement from when I was growing up (in the 1960s) in Liluah, a suburb of Calcutta (now spelt Kolkata of course) and we had to cook on little earthen ovens - referred to universally as "chulhas" - cleverly fashioned out of aluminium buckets. The fuel was coal which we bought at a subsidised rate from the railways. It was sold in large blocks which we broke into smaller pieces with a hammer. The coal was placed over a little grill under which wood kindling was lit and the fire thus produced would slowly heat up the coal. Of course this produced copious amounts smoke, so it had to be done outdoors. Once the coal had reached the right temperature, it would glow a bright orange, with little blue flames leaping around like mischievous elves!
Later we transitioned to cooking on kerosene stoves. These had flat cotton wicks dipped in the fuel tank and arranged in a circle. The intensity of the flames could be controlled by moving the wicks up or down with the help of a small rotary device. The wicks would burn in the space formed by two concentric metal cylinders with little circular holes in them to assist the air flow. If properly maintained, you could coax a beautiful blue flame from this kind of stove as well. The only catch was that kerosene was available only through the so called Fair Price Shops under the rationing system which was introduced around the time of the Indo-China conflict of 1962. That brief war had heralded an era of scarcity in India, so the government decided to sell staples like rice, wheat and sugar through their public distribution system.
By the time LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) became available in Calcutta I had moved to Mumbai where I had to start all over again! Since I was registered in the family ration card in Liluah, I had no access to kerosene in Mumbai! This commodity was like gold and each family was entitled to 5 litres or so every week. When Margaret (who, like me, was not "domiciled" in Mumbai) and I got married in 1981 we rented an apartment and bought a kerosene stove. The next problem : where would we get our fuel from? An angel in the form of Carmen, who worked with Margaret, came to our rescue. Her parents lived in Wadala and had graduated to LPG, so she persuaded them to part with their quota of kerosene to keep our home fire burning! Every month Margaret and I would ride my 250 cc Yezdi motorcycle (based on the Czech Jawa) the 13 km to Wadala to collect our stock of kerosene.
But I digress. That was then and now was twenty years later. I went across to the bare living room and looked north. Through a gap between the edge of the apartment block and the roofs of the houses in the vicinity, I could see the rounded hump of Cypress mountain, perhaps 30 km away. I could make out the white patches where the ski runs divided the dark green conifers.
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| Cypress Mountain in April as seen from our apartment |
I sipped my tea at leisure and contemplated the almost thousand square feet carpet area of the apartment - this was bigger than the 841 sq feet (built-up area) of the 2 bedroom apartment we had vacated in Mumbai. And when you factored in the almost 25% reduction in the "built-up" square footage to give you the actual floor area, it left only 631 sq ft of usable space! I viewed the upgrade as "progress". I had lived for many years as a paying guest in Mumbai, sharing a room with someone, and I knew even that was a privilege -thousands in that city had to share their space with as many as ten people!
I had plenty of room to go through my pre-jog stretching routine in the living room. The chilly dawn was just beginning to illuminate the blue winter sky as I headed out the door and began walking west on Francis Road. Hazel had told me that there was a dyke a block away and it would give me ample opportunity to run. When I reached the dyke, I realised that there was much much more than ample room : the gravel trail on the dyke stretched north and south for many kilometres. And in front of me, a swathe of tall grass and reeds growing on mud flats separated me from the waters of the Strait of Georgia which flows between Vancouver island and the Lower Mainland (as the collective of different cities and municipalities of the Greater Vancouver District is referred to).
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| The mountains of the Sunshine Coast form a picturesque backdrop for the mallards near the West Dyke of Richmond |
Almost by instinct, I began to run north, towards the mountains in the distance. Although I have never been athletic by any yardstick, I had taken up sporadic jogging in Perth, Australia whilst I was there on a 3 month assignment at the end of 1984. On my return to Mumbai, I tried to continue but it wasn't easy. Where do you find an unobstructed stretch of road or empty gardens to stretch your legs? When we moved to Marol, I was lucky to have the extensive green belt of the Aarey Milk Colony nearby to continue running. When the copper pod trees were in full bloom and the stretch of road near the New Zealand Hostel was carpeted with the turmeric yellow blossoms it was a great time to go running.
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| The snow bowl of Cypress mountain is visible behind and to the right of Margaret sitting on a bench on the West Dyke in Richmond |
Now here I was in Richmond, faced with the prospect of running all the way to the Terra Nova wildlife refuge on the one side or to Garry Point in Steveston on the other. If I headed north, I would pass the bald eagles nesting on trees at the edge of Quilchena Golf course and would make the mallards take flight. I would also see the sharp shinned hawk hovering overhead. If I turned east at Terra Nova I would be running along the Fraser river and could watch the aircraft take off at YVR across the water and the seaplanes roar into the air from the river. And if I looked up on a clear winter day the peaks of the Golden Ears park in Maple Ridge would be glistening with snow and ice in a sheet of dazzling white. This was paradise!
Even in paradise, mundane tasks had to be completed, but these were achieved with rapid efficiency. We had a telephone installed and activated in a day. We were even offered a pool of of numbers to choose from! I remembered that it had taken us 5 years and a payment of Rs.5000 to get our telephone in Mumbai!
My son's admission to the Gilmore Elementary School whose grounds we could see from the balcony of our apartment was completed within a few days after he was tested by the Richmond School Board. We watched him one day in February going off to school with his cousin Adele, both bundled up in warm clothing as it had snowed the night before and flakes were still falling as they ran through the fields.
Our SIN (Social Insurance Number) cards were mailed to us within 2 weeks and I could not help but contrast this with my 2 failed attempts to obtain the voter's ID card in Mumbai : the grand plan which had been drafted by the then Chief Election Commissioner T.N.Seshan but which failed to deliver on its promise. I had stood for hours on two distinct occasions in a queue to be photographed by some "official" photographer, had filled in a form with all my personal details and yet I never did receive a card. Some of my friends who did receive their cards were not amused : their names and ages had been altered in the processing and some had even undergone a change in gender!
Our bank accounts were set up speedily : oh yes, banks anywhere in the world are always glad to take your money! What was new to us though were the slew of banking charges that was in the fine print: I had grown up with the free service that nationalised banks in India had offered to their customers for decades.
We took public transit one day all the way to downtown Vancouver and were pleasantly surprised at the lack of crowds. We walked around Canada Place, admiring the sweeping architecture of the distinctive white sails as seagulls squawked loudly around us.We took the Sea Bus (a ferry, really) to Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver and spent the afternoon browsing the shops and eateries there.
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| The Sea Bus making the 10 min crossing from downtown Vancouver to Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver |
We were immigrants, but for the first month in this brave new world we felt like tourists! The reality checks would come later and these would radically change our perceptions. In the meantime, we began to furnish the apartment slowly with furniture either discarded by friends or bought at thrift stores.
I paused at the point where the West Dyke meets the Fraser river as this great waterway loses itself in the Georgia Strait. The mountains of the North Shore were by now a dazzling white and it was easy to be lulled into a state of bliss, as if this was truly paradise. The sceptic in me, never far from the surface, questioned if I was living in a fool's paradise : had I been seduced by the physical environment around me and by the glowing write up I had soaked up from "Passport's Illustrated Travel Guide to Vancouver and British Columbia", a book I had impulsively bought on 18 Nov 1996 (yes, I used to write down the precise date and place where I had bought a book!) in a bookstore in Manhattan? Was Canada really the land of milk and honey, and were the streets here really paved with gold?
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| Copper Pod tree (also known as the Rusty Shield Bearer) in April in the Aarey Milk Colony, Goregaon, in Mumbai. |
For the moment, my running shoes pounded the gravel street once more as I headed back home for breakfast. I spent a month in Richmond and then returned to Mumbai where I planned to tie up all the loose ends which were still pending. Margaret and Sanal would remain in Canada and I hoped to join them permanently soon.
