Under the Bridge (8 page)

B
EFORE THE DEATH,
Reena's grandfather would tell her of a village called Jandiala where there was no railway station, but wheat and cotton and sugar cane. There was a single school for boys, and there, Reena's grandfather, as a young boy named Mukand Pallan, earned high grades and dreamed of his father.

His father had gone to Canada in 1906. To go to Canada or Africa or England, that was the trend for young men in Jandiala. “They left to get settled, to make a living,” Mukand recalls. His father left the village and traveled by boat to Singapore and Shanghai, through Honolulu, and then to San Francisco, where he took a train to Seattle, and finally another smaller boat to Victoria.

His father worked in a famous garden in Victoria, the Butchart Gardens, where acres of rare and magnificent flowers flourished in the mild and damp climate. He worked not with the flowers, but in a quarry, loading limestone from the sunken cavern. With the white ash on his hands, he walked home past the Himalayan poppies and Dutch tulips and French forget-me-nots.

Mukand was born in 1926, the year his father returned to India. His father built a large three-story stone building in the village, and, on the ground floor, a store sold flour, grains, lentils, and sugar. He built a well for the village, and this brought the family even more respect because, as Mukand recalls, “it is a big contribution if you supply water.”

Mukand was never sure why his father did not come back to the village. He left in 1929 and he did not return. Mukand thought it had something to do with the war, which ruptured all the ways of transportation.
Transportation.
The word was one of the first English words he learned and he would try to envision ships and planes, the modes of transportation that took his father away, transported him to Canada. The war made voyages home perilous, impossible. War kept his father in Victoria. Mukand missed his father and he tried to imagine Canada.

Canada. This is how he imagined it: a cold country, snow, and lots of white people.

From this country, his father sent silk, lots of silk from China. Mukand's mother would sleep with her cheek on the smooth, red gift; she would drape the gift around her body and walk through Jandiala, serious, and with heartache. His father sent Viewmasters. You could look through them and see the sights of his father's new town. The Empress Hotel, named after Queen Elizabeth and covered in ivy. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, dressed in red, their faces stern and white and mustachioed, the horses like singular cavalry. His mother told him, “You'll go to Canada soon. When the war is over. Your father will come and get you.”

But the war went on, and his father did not return. Mukand became one of the best students in Jandiala. It did not occur to him to misbehave. Rebellion was unnecessary; it was good behavior that would unburden his mother and bring his father home. In the 1930s in India, the schools were British, yet his notebooks were made of native paper and emblazoned with the seal of Haria Singh and Brothers. In his notebook, Mukand wrote the common English proverbs he was learning to memorize. He wrote:

Only nine years old, he was not quite able to grasp the moral complexity, or so he thought, modestly. “I just like them,” he told himself, and he would sit at the dinner table, and recite them to his mother, with the hint of Mrs. Gaitskill's accent.

“A burnt child fears fire,” he would say, and he knew of fire and would think of a small child in a newsboy cap and tweed pants running from forests of flame.

“A single sinner sinks the boat,” he announced gravely, though he did not know what a sinner was yet, only that a boat would soon bring him to his father, and so he must never be a sinner, he must never sink the boat. He earned high grades in math, his head covered with a turban, bent over the notebook, learning long division scrupulously. He earned the highest marks and dreamed of going to university in the city where his father was, the city named after the British queen where good men on horses wearing red uniforms rode past stone buildings covered in ivy.

He learned new sentences:

And though he was very thin and solemn, with high cheekbones and narrow, wary eyes, he enjoyed singing, sometimes secretly, when he walked by the fields of cotton and sugar cane. He liked the patriotic fighting songs.

His father wrote him that “the rivers are just like two bands; it's very rare when they can meet again, but we will as the rarest river does.”

He would smile when he went to the films with his mother. Outdoors, in the theater with no roof, they would watch the singing and the dancing, and he would go home, and write the songs down in his notebook. It was not that he knew he was leaving India, only he knew if he ever did, he wanted to have these notebooks in case he forgot the songs and phrases he loved as a child.

Mukand saw photographs: his father wore three-piece suits now, the vest buttoned under the blazer, the pants creased, the tie of silk. He and his father seemed alike, thin and tall, with their shoulders slightly sloping in, and their brown eyes kind and wary.

The Pallan store was popular, but his father did not want him to work there because he preferred his son to study so he would earn good grades and be accepted by a university in Canada. Of his father, Mukand would describe him succinctly: “He was a very gentle man.”

He finally went to Canada in 1947. He was twenty now, and he wore three-piece suits just like his father, suits of scratchy brown wool, with narrow pants and fitted vests and a blazer with buttons of tortoiseshell.

For the rest of his life, he would remember the journey as one remembers falling in love. It was a kind of soaring he'd never felt before. He first left Bombay in an old army boat and sailed for San Francisco. The boat was very nice, he believed, a Marine Adder, owned by President Lines. The journey was costly and revealed previously unknown hierarchies. His third-class ticket cost three hundred dollars. His sister was in second class—a five hundred dollar fare. They slept in bunk beds, his brother above him, with the small slit of a window showing the endless blue.

In first class, there were diplomats and businesspeople.

What captivated him were the students. There were hundreds of them, leaving Bombay, going to America for what they called “higher education.” He would sometimes sit near them while they studied on the long tier of deck. He had brought his own book, and he would sit by the students and feel slightly kindred. He wrote on the cover, “My Trip to Canada,” and inside he kept notes.

He would want to write more, in English, and so he returned to the proverbs, which he had memorized nine years ago. They came back to him now, on the passage to a new country.

He wrote them as neatly as possible. There was not a letter that dangled or an ink spot or a forgotten word:

He knew now, at eighteen, the meaning of the proverbs, and believed in
their wisdom and warnings. Fire and sin and quarrels were never welcome. They brought only sinking and fear.

On March 2, 1947, he arrived in Canada, and in his notebook, he wrote: “We were very thankful to God that we came to Victoria and that's what we had in our mind when we saw relatives and friends who we were longing to see.”

All through his boyhood, he'd imagined Canada as white—the white skin of people, the white snow on the ground—and yet on the March day, there was so much green, the dark, heady green of the evergreens, the clean green of the careful lawns. The phrases left his head. “I was not aware of this danger.” “It is a result of your carelessness.” He forgot them, though they remained in his notebook, which he kept next to his bed.

And he would keep this notebook forever, even when he was a grandfather to eight, when he had retired and spent his days playing cards, at the temple. Sometimes he needed a respite from the Jehovah's Witnesses who came for coffee and his granddaughter with her blue nail polish and troubled heart. This notebook—he never chose to discard it, never dismissed it as juvenilia or nostalgia. It recalled both his childhood and his journey across the sea. “My Trip to Canada” would remain on the outside, and on the lined pages of the Haria Singh and Brothers notebook, were the English proverbs Mukand had memorized because as he recalls, “I just liked them.”

A
LL AROUND
Principal Olsen was Nike. Not the goddess of victory, but the emblem of the sports corporation. Who knows why certain symbols become status symbols? Ten years ago, the Lacoste alligator on shirts with collars turned up, then the little Ralph Lauren polo player, and now this Nike swoosh. Mrs. Olsen could look into a classroom and see four swooshes. The swoosh abounded on the chests of her young charges. The swoosh on sweatshirts, on caps, on shoes. Alicia Clarkson today even wore a white Nike band around her forehead, like tennis players used to wear, and so the swoosh was on her forehead, as if a sacred object, like the bindi above the eyes.

A basketball player named Jen, unaware of the forthcoming murder, waved to Mrs. Olsen, and walked down the hall toward the foyer. In the foyer, Marissa was teasing Warren.
Speedy Gonzales.
Warren bounded from the bench in imitation of the fastest little Mexican mouse who could always dash from his pursuers and save the starving and the tiny. Warren with his white baggy pants and recently permed and dyed hair, now like a mushroom cloud of blonde curls, ran around the foyer. “Arriba! Arriba!” he cried. “Yeehah!”

Erik Cash, school heartthrob, sat on the floor in front of his locker, just being cool. He too was unaware of the murder soon to be. Instead, he wondered about Friday night. Should he go to Brandon's birthday party? Or should he spend the night with his girlfriend? Erik wore his baseball cap like this: flap to the right, tilted ever so slightly. Other boys had tried to copy this insouciant and original style. Other boys failed. The yearbook photographer came by, and Erik Cash posed for the photo. He threw up the Westside gang sign. He looked not yet twelve.

Dimitri and Marissa walked together, hand in hand. The tallest boy in the school and the “little munchkin”—the tiniest girl at Shoreline School. The yearbook photographer asked if they would pose for a photo. Dimitri made a W with his fingers just like Erik and the rap stars
did when they were photographed. Marissa giggled as she was wont to do. Later, in the spring, certain photographs would not appear in the pages of laughing youth. After the murder, Mrs. Olsen, Shoreline principal, decreed that no photos of the accused killers should be included in the 1997/98 Shoreline yearbook.

•   •   •

At Shoreline, there were no cheerleaders. With the recent cutbacks, the school could no longer afford the extravagance of uniforms. Shoreline could not even afford to provide uniforms for band members or athletes. This year, there had been some embarrassment, even shame, when the Shoreline students arrived for games or concerts at Oak Bay or Lambrick Park High School. Mrs. Olsen would explain to the other principals that her students were wearing regular clothes not out of disrespect or disobedience, but because the school simply did not have the finances for uniforms.

Despite the lack of uniforms, the basketball team would triumph. In the yearbook, the coach states, “Our team was small, but mighty. Their good enthusiasm and good sportsman-like skills carried them through a tough season. All boys demonstrated good skill and smart aggressive play throughout the year. Well done guys!”

Perhaps the lack of uniforms contributed to the attitude of a girl named Madeline, class valedictorian at a school in a wealthier district. “I just knew, pretty well for my whole life, that I would never be friends with anyone from Shoreline. I don't know why that was. I remember once Shoreline was playing against our school, and my friends scratched the S off the side of their bus so it said Horeline. I said, ‘Hey, you idiots,
Whore
is spelled with a W,' but the guys just got mad at me, and said, ‘Who cares. It's funny.' We always called the school Horeline after that, but not really to their faces or anything.”

•   •   •

In art class, Desiree drew two elephants under palm trees. Brittoni drew the moon above the sea, with the shadows of evergreens in the corner. She used chalk for the shadows of trees and gold crayon for the shimmer on the sea. Ashley folded her knees to her chest and wrote a poem, privately. “In my dreams,” she wrote, “I see a clear running stream, a sign of tranquillity.” Ashley looked up, as though she might be discovered,
but all her friends were busy with their own work. She wrote, “Wherever I may be, peace will be by my side. The tears I so often cried / Will all have dried / Bringing me rays of sunshine and happiness / To fill my life with warmth / And serenity / No longer scorned by the evil of others / A road of my own that I will travel / No hills, no curves, and no gravel. Giving a clear, open way to where I belong / Showing me love and how to be strong.”

Shawna was the only one that day to draw not a landscape, but an abstract of her own design. Against the backdrop of a globe, an eagle rose out of a long, narrow eye, drawn up like the eye of Tutankhamen, and beside the observant eye, the sheaf of a knife jutted up, slicing through the globe, emblazoned with adornment of a perfectly drawn butterfly.