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Firdaus Ali

Immigrant blues

"I have never felt so brown in my life," lamented an Asian immigrant on a Toronto-bound international flight. Ever since he's been singing Michael Jackson's `Black or White' number, hoping racial elements will hear him someday.

Like this immigrant, I too had run away from the penury, poverty, pollution and several other `p's' my conventional upbringing won't allow me to mention. All the p's in short that plague the Third World -- the world I came from -- and jumped head-long into the populace of ambitious and ambiguous settlers of Canada.

Like the 200,000 that get thrown into this enormous sea each year, I too became an ingredient of this fashionable term called the "melting pot".

"Welcome to Canada," said a terribly white officer at the airport, stamping my passport with an arrival. It looked like some of the country's snow had got into the colour of his skin. "Ah, that's how they turn whiter. No fear of racial discrimination here," I said to myself, looking around Pearson International Airport for an Asian face.

No Asian sweeping the swanky airport. Vacuum cleaners had taken over. My brand-new country was intriguing. Unemployment had fallen to 6.8 per cent, yet 1.5 million Canadians were still looking for work. The crime rate had fallen drastically, but just one small catch. The murder rate had jumped more than double in the last few years. The suicide rate among young people aged 15-19 had doubled since 1979.

I had arrived! My drive to a friend's house was an enlightening one. Young faces with purple lipstick and yellow-green hair greeted me with elastic smiles. The result of chewing excessive gum, I learnt.

Rings popped out from chins, cheeks, eyebrows and navels. I felt terribly ancient with the two solitary rings in my ears and one in my nose. That, or Canadians had gone terribly myopic and mistaken the chin for an ear and maybe the navel for a nose. Ophthalmologists would do well here, no doubt.

Driving by, we passed several high schools and universities. Each had a `daycare available' sign accompanying the prestigious institution. "Oh, Canadian teens still need to be looked after at high school and university levels. Interesting," I said aloud. To which my Canadian friend smiled. "No, the daycare is because many girls decide to have babies before they can procure a degree."

Oh, that does not only save them the trouble of starting a family when they pass out from school but also gives them enough time in later years for the several relationships, marriages, live-ins and divorces they get into. Aha, must add this to the time-management techniques I learnt back home.

My first few days in Toronto taught me that the West is full of bimbos and combos. The former, of course, come in many forms. On television soaps, talk shows and mainly latched on to the arms of high-school boys.

When my friend's hospitality started tiring his Canadian-at-heart wife, I decided to taste life on my own. Only to find that almost anybody and everybody is badly affected by the canny combos. Be it MacDonald's or Harvey's, and the combos flashed at you. Burger, fries, drink... Fries, drink, burger... Drink, burger, fries.... Juggle the first three with the last three and your combo can last through breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Another interesting aspect is how Canadians relate to the work force. If you are a lab technician, you'd be selling cell phones. Or if you are a writer you could be doing accounts in a grocery store. The reasoning here: you'd be best at something you've never been trained to do. "And, if you do something unrelated to the skills you've learnt academically, it would come straight from your heart and better the chances for a promotion and a raise," explained a Canadian office manager.

A random survey of the job scenario made for some startling revelations. An engineer from India, fearful of being crushed in the Churchgate-Virar shuttle trains in Bombay, flew to Toronto, here to burn metal in some Canadian furnace. "Better get burnt than be a burnout," was his logic.

Another doctor from India preferred selling candies in a local convenience store instead of practising medicine. Every doctor in this part of North America has to be insured for a minimum of several hundred thousand dollars. Because every patient he sees the first day decides to sue him the next. Reasons could be many: negligence, bad breath or simply the doc's face. Freedom could never have been better.

Also, the many secretaries imported from Asian countries are almost jobless. A secretary working for Zee TV in Bombay complained about Toronto's white-collared population. "At least back home we had those MCPs that kept our jobs going. Why, here in Canada the bosses make their own coffees, run their own faxes and open their own mails. I think that's terribly rude. Thank God, the virus hasn't caught on in Bombay," she said boarding the flight back home.

In a country where healthcare, schooling and local telephone calls come free, 60.5 per cent of families still rely on two pay cheques to bring home the bacon. More than a million are still unemployed. And while the unemployment level has fallen considerably over the years, this only means that many have stopped looking for work.

Many Canadians cannot read newspapers even at the high-school level. And many unemployed persons cannot read the job listings to look for work, a newspaper report revealed. The country I have chosen supports 'gay days' and public nudity for women. And Canadians prefer pets to people.

This is the West -- powerful, superior, enviable.

My stay also helped improve my vocabulary a great deal. Some new words I learnt in my brand-new country.

Dude: Replaces the Indian colloquial 'yaar'. So a casual greeting could begin with Hey dude or What's up, dude? Silence from the dude means he is truly well and about.

Give me a shout: Means give me a call or tinkle. The silent undertone is 'when I'm not in'.

Are you lonely in cyberspace: The most frequently used line by spaced-out teens in a bar or discotheque.

Cool: Meaning hot. So, if she's a 'cool babe', she's actually very hot.

Take it easy: Relax, it could have been worse.

And finally a joke from a Canadian newspaper, that helped keep me alive my first few months here: Danish scientists have found that men have 11 per cent more gray cells than women. Only they haven't found what men do with them. A research on the topic is underway!

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