North of the Equator

encouragement.

NORTH of the Equator

Rolls of fat climb down her body, perspiration drips like rain. In the sauna their eyes meet, almost inevitably, thanks to the cramped space in the swimming-pool area. Casually, desultorily, they both turn to look out the small window overlooking the pool, to the regular swimmers doing their determined lengths: the male and female bodies going back and forth in the water as the steam in the sauna rises like silent, invisible waves.

She is almost mute. Ravi vaguely thinks of his own thin but strong-limbed body moving alongside hers in the pool not so long ago. He manages a smile and she, too, smiles—more a twitch of the mouth than anything else. Is that a signal for them to begin speaking to each other? Or is it simply an indication that they are strangers, perhaps of his own shyness or awkwardness? Maybe hers, too?

He did his usual number of lengths in the pool twenty minutes ago and still feels exhilarated, more or less, despite the intense heat in the sauna, though she doesn’t seem deterred by it. There is a storm kicking up outside. Again, he glances at her, slyly. In the men’s change room, he imagines, the discussion will be about ways of keeping fit: the regulars, civil servants, army and navy types, dwelling on muscle formation and cardiovascular strength, now obsessions in the nation’s capital. Heat swirls oppressively. Do the women over in their change room also talk about the unfailing sense of the body? Specific strategies for health, diet, and a woman’s unique physical development?

Ravi looks at the other swimmers in the pool, some moving faster than others. Maybe the woman next to him wishes she were like them. Does she? He remembers her doing her lengths a short while ago, lifting her arms in the slow crawl because of her distinct shape, then the determined breaststroke and, maybe, everyone was aware of each other and not without some attraction. In his fantasies Ravi is attracted to any one of a number of the female swimmers in the pool. He smiles to himself.

The woman next to him, in her forties maybe, swats at a trickle of perspiration on her left shoulder as the heat in the sauna becomes unbearable. Ravi can hear the storm outside. He thinks of the place he came from and of the life he now lives in Canada where climate is always a factor. Here, in Canada, though, is the country he wants to experience fully: all its lakes and rivers. Perhaps, one day, to ski down the mountains at Whistler with breathtaking speed. Such fantasies!

With his eyes closed amid myriad shapes, he thinks of himself becoming a seasoned traveller and going to the tourist-information offices, including those of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia, each sending him glossy magazines with pictures of the very landscapes he is indeed becoming more familiar with. Does he want to go to a far-away place like the Nahanni Valley in the Northwest Territories? Or somewhere perhaps unheard of before...to settle? However, he also recalls someone who recently said to him that no matter what, he could never be. Be what... a Canadian?

Yet Canadian ways are growing on him. He again glances at the woman next to him who, no doubt, has dreams of her own of travel to far-off places, to Asia or Africa, all the while contemplating her own origins. Her presence now in the sauna makes him feel a sudden, wavering sense of himself as he sprinkles water into the embers and the heat again rises. He heaves in and she, too, instinctively heaves in, like a reflex action. Suddenly it seems they have all the time in the world. Maybe it’s the whirling snow outside that keeps them in the sauna.

She duly squirts water into the embers. No doubt she wants the heat to rise again. Ravi compares her with one particularly lithe, leggy woman he sometimes swims alongside in the pool who seems bent on showing him she can be faster than any male! He smiles. The other male swimmers are all aware of this one with the strong leg and thigh movements, her torso and upper body knifing through the water with grace. In Ravi’s mind’s eye the pool becomes an ocean and waves rise rhythmically. Something to behold.

You come here often? Ravi finally asks.

The woman nods an answer. Ravi considers the pool’s structure, built in the 1930s mainly for the poor, as the bronze plaque outside indicates—literally for the unwashed at a time when Depression woes were everywhere. Now, decades later, the pool is used mostly by well-heeled bureaucrats. The times, indeed, have changed.

Not really, the woman adds with an affable expression. Her pink skin ripples. My first time. She wipes a glob of water like a necklace from her throat. I want to get back in shape. She quickly looks away from him.

Does she just will herself to be here? Ravi thinks as the sauna steams.

He imagines being in another place, in another time, too. Somewhere neither tropical nor temperate. The wind blows harder outside. This must be the coldest time of the year.

Is she a government bureaucrat like many of the others who use the pool? It is one year since he worked for the government. He recalls how at a staff meeting he was asked to make a presentation, and afterward his colleagues congratulated him on a job well done. But the director of his division—a Belgian-born woman in her fifties—remarked, It’s amazing how well you speak considering English isn’t your first language.

Was that meant to be a put-down? "But English is my first language!" he retorted, feeling mortified because he prided himself on his command of English.

He immediately wanted to tell the director he’d come from an English-speaking country, didn’t she know? Was this a sense of a different Canada where no one was able to tell precisely about a newcomer’s language skill and background any longer? Was he just seen as a newcomer? For days he remained piqued and became confused about himself.

Ravi imagines that the woman next to him is becoming slimmer as the perspiration slides down her neck and arms, her face taking on an almost cherubic look. Yes, tell her what you are thinking: about immigrants who are told that English isn’t your first language, yet you speak so...

He wants to ask the woman about her own origins, French as she seems to be. The sauna heat still rises, even though the embers have died down. In the pool the water splashes, the fast swimmers going at it. Parlez-vous...? Should he tell her he recently tried learning French but ended up with only a rudimentary knowledge of it?

In his speech to the federal-government types he talked about this new world of Canada opening up before him. He spoke of how he wanted to travel to every town and city. Indeed, Canada itself is changing, he said.

But the federal-government bureaucrats, his erstwhile colleagues, snickered, Come on, Ravi. Stop the crap. This business of always feeling grateful for being here. Stop being so self-conscious about it!

The woman smiles. Should he tell her he resigned from the government because of the endless power games, the backbiting and cynicism he couldn’t stand any longer? That it became a place where he no longer wanted to pursue a career? Near the end he was asked to fill out a form in which all the ethnic employees had to indicate where they were born as part of a multiculturalism exercise. Bah!

The woman seems to feel at ease with him and says her name is Pierette. Ravidar—he pronounces his, emphasizing the dar. The heat is now almost stifling, the embers a red glow, like being near the equator, never mind the cold wind that blows outside.

And is she really trying to get in shape? What...shape?

She prefers this pool, she says, but she isn’t a regular. I’m heading off... she hums, then stops and looks at him almost quizzically.

To where? he prompts.

Ah, she is trying to get in shape before going to Jamaica. She is going there despite the rumours of violence: last she heard was that a tourist had been brutally assaulted. Really? he says. She nods and more knobs of perspiration fall down her neck against the dark hair that layers her pink skin. She may imagine herself already in a holiday resort like Montego Bay, akin to Club Med, as the tourist brochure says. Pierette takes him into her confidence, he feels, as she adds that she and her daughter, Monique, will scuba-dive there. She smiles and looks suddenly attractive.

Palm trees wave, trade winds hurl across a sandy beach, splendid sunshine everywhere, far unlike Ottawa with winter’s blast outside. Monique is going on sixteen. This particular vacation will be a genuine mother-daughter bonding experience because, at the moment, Monique is asserting her adolescent identity, Pierette tells him.

Ravi thinks about when he first came to Canada nine years ago... for a vacation? The steam in the sauna continues to rise as Pierette again squirts water, though a sign forbids doing this, and a swirl of smoke forms from the embers. Then she says she’s been to Guadeloupe and Haiti in the Caribbean. French-speaking, didn’t he know? She loves Guadeloupe’s fishing town of St-François and the neighbouring places with East Indian people living alongside Africans. Does she say this now because of her awareness of his race and colour?

An image of the director in the federal government comes back to Ravi, asking about his ethnic background as he unconsciously squirmed. He wants to tell Pierette about the Caribbean he knows, where he came from. All this surfaces with a myriad of other places in his mind—an immigrant’s occupational hazard, more or less. But she keeps talking about St-Francois and the hurricane that devastated the area not so long ago. She talks about the French in Canada who want to go to Louisiana or Florida to have their own place, not unlike a special Acadia. It is her daughter Monique’s dream, too. Not Quebec any longer? But didn’t she quote to him what astronaut Marc Garneau once said? Going to the stars and looking at Earth, I can’t get worked up about nationalism.

A barrage of other sensations arise—the many new immigrants seeking out their individual niche, maybe wanting to form distinct identities in this vast land that is now theirs. Tell her what you are thinking. Pierette smiles. He wants to tell her he imagined Canada to be just Montreal during the FLQ October crisis and the War Measures Act when Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister. Yes, such deep anxieties existed about the country falling apart. Now he fervently hopes this never happens!

Pierette talks about the Caribbean, calls it paradise, sunshine and ochreous sand everywhere. Why did you ever leave there? she asks.

Leave?

You must long to go back, don’t you?

She tells him it was like heaven when she last went to the islands, though now things are changing, everything becoming so awfully expensive. Ravi hasn’t been back to the region in a long time, he wants to say. Maybe it’s because he started feeling such a strong sense of his Canadian identity.