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Illustration by April Dela Noche Milne

It was an ordinary day when my father came home and told us that he had been passed over for a promotion at his firm. What was missing from that speech, and what I would learn from him many years later, was that he suspected it was because of the colour of his skin.

My father didn’t mention his suspicions because he was following a well-worn script that almost all immigrants share: Racism didn’t exist. We pretended it didn’t exist even though its existence was announced all around us, even in the daily newspapers. In 1981, The Toronto Star printed poll results revealing that one in 10 Torontonians would feel uncomfortable doing business with someone of East Indian or Pakistani descent. One in six felt uncomfortable sitting next to one of “them” on a bus or an airplane. Where the North American Dream promised endless opportunity, this was the stuff of nightmares.

My dad came to North America, landing in Montreal from Punjab, India, in 1965, the day before his 26th birthday, determined to find a job as a civil engineer. Back then, according to Statistics Canada’s 150 years of immigration report released in 2016, less than one per cent of the Canadian population were visible racial minorities. Less than one per cent meant being the only person of colour in an office building or an entire neighbourhood. That meant that when something bad happened, we didn’t commiserate with people like us; instead, we stuck to the script: it wasn’t an example of racism but an isolated event by aberrant hooligans.

So when one of our favourite neighbourhoods in Toronto’s east end, the Gerrard India Bazaar, where we watched Bollywood films and ate sweet and tart paan afterward, was attacked in 1980, again my father said nothing. The Globe and Mail, my father’s favourite newspaper, ran the headline “East Indians: Racial slurs, growing fears.” Increasing acts of vandalism and violence aimed at the Indian-owned businesses and their patrons had left the community fearful and angry. The police refused to consider this an act of racism or a hate crime.

My father did his best to pretend that he was a different kind of Indian, the kind who was immune to target or attack. He wasn’t the only one skirting the racism issue. Professors Chandrima Chakraborty and Robin E. Field noted the same theme among Indian immigrant authors in the 1960s and early 1970s. “Ethnic stories that consolidate Canada’s definition of itself as cosmopolitan or as humanitarian – as a place of refuge for those fleeing hunger, violence or discrimination – seem to be able to quickly secure a reading public,” they wrote in a 2016 column for South Asian Review.

In the same way, adhering to this narrative did wonders to ingratiate my dad to his bosses, neighbours and bank loan officers, the gatekeepers to his safety and financial security.

But toward the end of the 1970s, North American immigrant writers and filmmakers were writing about racism. In Bharati Mukherjee’s 1981 essay An Invisible Woman for Saturday Night Magazine, she writes of the indescribable “agony and betrayal one feels when one is spoken of by one’s own country as being somehow exotic to its nature.”

According to Mukherjee, the cosmopolises of Montreal and Toronto of my dad’s early days were dangerous for anyone with brown skin and an accent. Newer Indo-Canadian immigrant writers like Neil Bissoondath, M.G. Vassanji and Anita Rau Badami challenged the flattened immigration fairy tales through their rounded protagonists’ stories of racial violence, painful isolations and a longing for the home they left for what was believed to be greener pastures.

My dad, however, stuck to his guns.

Growing up, while I engaged with the racism that I witnessed all around me, he continued to push movies that either championed the North American dream as a zippy straight line toward ever more success (The Party, Short Circuit) or portrayed India’s benevolent heroes and savage villains through a white-gaze lens (Gandhi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). We both dug in. We loved each other but were strangers in each other’s worlds.

Things might have continued like that for another 20 years, but our life veered off-script. At 70, my dad developed gall bladder cancer and began to die. Months of chemotherapy, radiation and hospitalizations followed. On one of the many days he and I spent walking laps around the hospital ward, he took my hand in his, squeezed it tightly, held it to his chest and began to tell me the truth.

Over the next few months, he spoke of the jobs he was fired from in Canada. The promotions he was overqualified for but lost to lesser, whiter colleagues. The loneliness of being the only one. Then it was my turn. I told him about how I had been called a “Paki” at age 6 and of other slurs. He bowed his head, then looked at me and wielded his succinct judgment.

“Rubbish.”

He exhaled the syllables as though he was blowing down a house of cards. The fallacy of the North American Dream forced my dad into a suffocating space of denying racism; I followed him into that darkness. As he was dying, he stepped out into the open and pulled me out along with him. It was the easiest we had ever been together.

Five years after he died, I began to step out from under that grief beginning with a keynote speech at a retreat sponsored by my medical school alma mater, The University of Toronto. After a standing ovation, I mingled with the crowd and found myself chatting with a circle of people about my dad. Upon hearing that my dad was from India, a senior colleague began speaking to me in an Indian accent.

I froze. My circle of colleagues was silent. There were no words of consolation to me or outrage.

But the ringing of one sharp word in my memory woke me up from this bad dream.

Rubbish.

“Don’t do that.” I stared at him.

“Come on, Shelly, I’m just kidding,”

“It’s not funny. Don’t do that.”

I turned away and walked to the bar. I ordered a brandy, neat. My dad loved brandy.

Shelly Dev lives in Toronto

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