AN IMMIGRANT IN HIS OWN COUNTRY

(Dedicated to Anne Aguirre, Saeed Anjum and Mary Ellen McQuay, my family members who inspired me to create this story)

When I finished the painting I realized that it was the picture of an old man having Christmas dinner all by himself. Although the Christmas lights, the tree and the candles in the background, the turkey, the homemade bread and the bottle of wine had a euphoric touch, the empty chair on the other side of the table was a sad note. I was not aware that I was painting a self-portrait. I could not imagine having a Christmas dinner without my wife, who died ten years ago, after forty years of companionship, and my children, who had deserted me. How could you celebrate Christmas without a family? I was brought up in the tradition that Christmas was the time of the year when the children and the parents and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents all got together and exchanged gifts and celebrated.

         But that was all a dream for me. After my wife died, my son married a Jewish woman and my daughter started living with an Indian atheist. I felt cut off from all my family. They never called or invited me. The last time we all got together was last Christmas Eve. I had prepared a big meal, decorated the tree, and bought the presents and the special wines they liked. I had invited my children and their spouses for six o'clock. I set the table, lit the candles, and after waiting for half an hour I put the turkey and the bread on the table. While waiting for them I started to drink. By the time they arrived at eight p.m. I was quite drunk and angry. They made an excuse about the traffic but I was not in any mood to listen to those excuses. I lost control and started to shout and scream. I told them loud and clear that I felt rejected and abandoned by them since they had stopped visiting or inviting me over after their mother died. I accused them of coming to see me only at Christmas to relieve their guilt and receive presents. I asked them to leave without eating dinner or exchanging presents. They wanted to apologize but I kicked them out.

         The next day when I regained by senses, I realized what I had done. At first I thought I was drunk and angry and had not meant what I said, but gradually it dawned on me that I truly had meant every word. It was just that alcohol had given me the courage and strength to say all those things that I could not say when I was sober.

         So I never called to apologize.

         I felt lonely in my own home and in my own town, the town in which I have lived my entire life, but all my childhood friends were either dead or gone away to far off places. I did not even have their address or telephone numbers. I did not have a single close friend in the whole wide world except my painting brush, the brush that could pour out my sadness and existential isolation onto the canvas. But then I used to cry looking at my own paintings.

         And one day my son called, and told me that since I had not accepted his wife, he was going to break up his relationship with me. I felt so sad and lonely that I went for a long walk. That was the first day in my whole life that the thought crossed my mind, "Isn't it better to die in peace than lead a lonely and miserable

life" and I started to walk towards the lake. After walking for fifteen or twenty minutes I felt chilly and I stopped in the local library to have some rest. While I was standing in the hall I saw a poster on the notice board stating that an Asian writer and psychotherapist, Dr. Sohail, was delivering a lecture that evening. The title was "We All Have Two Families". I was so drawn by the title that I stayed.

         I would have never thought that that evening would become a turning point in my life.

         The essence of his presentation was that all of us have two families, a family we are born into and a family that we make for ourselves. The first is the family of relatives and the second the family of friends and lovers. I was quite intrigued by his ideas, so I went to talk to him after his presentation. He was an interesting man. When I told him that I paint, he showed a keen interest in looking at my paintings and wanted to share his poems and short stories with me. I was pleasantly surprised. Over the next few months we became friends. It was the first time I had sat down with a man who was not from an Anglo-saxon background and had not been brought up in a Christian environment. Every time I met him he had fascinating stories to tell. He told me how his parents had moved from India to Pakistan because they believed in a separate homeland for Muslims and they had wars between India and Pakistan. Sohail vividly remembered when he had to dig trenches for women and children during the war and how one night a whole village was bombarded because one villager had taken out his gun and tried to shoot the plane. Although Sohail grew up in that environment, he believed that religion had come to unite and not separate people. He felt that political and religious parties had sacrificed the masses to gain power. He did not care how many countries we had in the world - it was the common man and woman that mattered, not the governments. I was always fascinated listening to him. He made me think about issues that I had never thought seriously about before.

         One evening he invited me to his place to meet one of his friends. His name was Danish. He was also from a Muslim family but he had been brought up in India.

         "So both of you are from rival countries." I chuckled.

         "But now we are friends." Danish said and hugged Sohail. I was pleasantly surprised to see an affectionate relationship between two Asian men which I have rarely seen between two North American men.

         Danish was quite inquisitive about my paintings. I told him that I painted what I felt and what I experienced. They were the paintings of a lonely man. Danish told me that he grew up in Calcutta where he used to participate in street plays. Most of those plays had left-wing leanings and were critical of the government, so many of his friends were picked up by the police and had to spend a few nights in jail. I was amazed to discover that he could speak Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and English. I wondered what it would have been like if I had learned French, Spanish, German and one of the Native Indian languages alongside English. Meeting Sohail and Danish made me curious about other languages, cultures, values, traditions, and lifestyles. I had never travelled but I felt that knowing one person from any culture intimately is a good introduction to that way of life.

         A few months after that, I met Nora, an Argentinean lady, in the university cafeteria. She told me that she was a refugee as her life was in danger in Argentina. I could not imagine how that was possible. She told me that she and her brother were involved in a party that was trying to overthrow the dictatorship. Finally they were caught and put in jail. Her brother was killed and she managed to escape. In Canada she was teaching Spanish literature and was doing her Ph.D. on the relationship between creativity and madness.

         One of the interesting things I discovered about Nora after we became friends was her indifference to religion. She never discussed God or the Holy scriptures or life after death. All those issues that had haunted me for years because of my strict Irish Catholic upbringing were non-issues for Nora. She told me that her parents were atheists and intellectuals and they had never discussed God or religion at home.

         And then one day when I went to a story-telling evening at the local library, I met Angela who was a nurse from Trinidad. She was an excellent singer. Her smile and charm were contagious. I could see many men trying to get close to her but she managed to keep a pleasant distance from them. She was quite religious but was a liberal person and never imposed her views on other people. It took me a while to get used to the emotional intensity she had. She told me that the people from the Caribbean Islands were quite emotional. She said one could feel these emotions in Black music. In the beginning I found it overwhelming but then I started to enjoy her company and introduced her to some of my other friends. It took me some time to become aware of the fact that the Caribbean Islands were multicultural, that various languages and religions have been co-existing together for decades.

         Once I started making new friends and enjoying their company, I realized that my loneliness was dwindling and my existential horizons were broadening.

         In the next couple of years I met Harry who was from Yugoslavia and had worked on farms for years before he could escape from the Communist regime. I also became friends with Marrium who was from Ethiopia. She had fascinating life experiences to share. She told me that her grandfather was a Muslim who used to travel to different African countries and had relationships with women wherever he went. He had eleven children in eleven different countries in Africa. Her grandmother was a Catholic because when she was four, she and her older brother found her family dead as a result of famine. They left their home and walked for miles, until they found a church. They met a kind-hearted priest who adopted them and looked after them. So they became Catholics.

         One other friend that became a part of my circle was Shabir who was from South Africa. He was a psychiatrist and was quite mischievous. He shared with me that he grew up in an environment where he was considered an Indian child and could not mix or socialize or go to school with whites or coloured or black children. He and his family and his community were completely segregated. He was usually harassed by the police because of his white girlfriend.

         I could not imagine a country where the police controlled people's romantic lives.

         So finally I decided to invite all these friends for Christmas dinner and I presented them with a painting in which they were all sitting around the table eating turkey and homemade bread, sipping wine in the candlelight.

         The painting was in bright colours depicting the mood of a family reunion but there were dark shadows in the background and one could make out a few sad faces, the faces of those people who had lost their own families, and could not make new ones. They felt like strangers in their own homes. The faces of those people from my past still haunted me. It took me a long time to realize that in the last few decades my environment had gradually changed so much, that like many others, I had become an immigrant in my own country as I was surrounded by people from all over the world.

         After that dinner I thought I should invite my children again and accept their partners of life wholeheartedly. I wondered why, like many people of my background, I couldn't accept them before.