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| Sunday, 15 February 2004 |
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Greetings from Little Jaffna Toronto diary by AJITH SAMARANAYAKE Parliament Hill in Ottawa is where Canada's legislature is sited but in downtown Toronto there is Parliament Street although nobody today seems to know why this street is named after Parliament. However by some strange quirk of circumstances it was this Parliament Street and its environs, which became the chosen locale for the first great influx of Tamils fleeing the torments of the shameless anti-Tamil riots of July 1983, which tainted Sri Lanka's name in the eyes of the world. Today a little more than two decades after most of that first generation, having done not too badly from their immersion in Canadian life, have moved to the suburbs (some of them even buying their own town houses) but yet enough remnants of that first invasion remain to justify its name of 'Little Jaffna,' joining the lexicon of other nomenclatures such as Chinatown, Little Italy and Little Portugal. This is where Tamil shop signs crop up in the midst of the jungle of commerce. There are grocery shops and hairdressing saloons, bakeries and news agencies, all owned by those enterprising former citizens of Jaffna practising what they know best even in the quite different setting of Canada. The Yarl is where you go for groceries, the Kalaimagal where you go for your newspapers (any Sri Lankan newspaper can be bought here on order) while Nagesh and her husband bake the most delicious 'malu paan,' vegetable and fish rotties and rolls while their 'roast paan' (that perennial favourite) I am sure can not be matched even by the best in Colombo. Historians of Little Jaffna say that the first wave of Tamil immigrants had washed over the large high-rises in Parliament Street. This had been the hub of activity where Tamil political factions of all persuasions had lived uneasily side by side, quarrelling and making up, raising funds and doing their propaganda and even engaging in gun battles reminiscent of the early days of the Wild West. This then was the original Tamil country, the frontier of the Tamil diaspora, which has made Canada the most populous region for the community outside Sri Lanka. Towns like Scarborough remain their citadels and here anything Sri Lankan can be bought including as we found out even the 'kasaya pas panguwa' so beloved of Ayurveda. And neither are all the immigrants Tamils. There are Sinhalese who have come as political refugees fleeing the terror of the South in the late 1980's while there are others who have come for a variety of reasons among them the education of their children. Several of them are professionals, doctors and scientists and other such figures of the upper middle-class professional pantheon of Colombo but rarely do they find employment here in keeping with their qualifications or their status back home. Most of them have to work as security guards or drive taxis or work at gas stations but this is a different milieu where there are no false notions of status and anyway there isn't much of an option. It is ironic how the British colonial experience should have bred these false notions of status among our middle classes quite antithetical to the dignity of labour prevalent in the onetime imperial centre. In the heart of Parliament Street is the ashram of Gamini Dissanayake, the resident astrologer of the 'Sunday Observer.' Here Gamini runs a bookstore named 'Holistic' which stocks books on Sri Lankan history and Buddhism. There are also curios, wall hangings, greeting cards and other such souvenirs for sale. A veritable shrine to Sri Lanka it is strewn with brass lamps, statues, silver trays and other such ornamental exotica. There are also soaps, incense sticks and a brand of what is called computer sambrani. The computer on which Gamini draws up the birth charts and plots the movements of the planets in keeping with the ancient tenets of Vedic astrology adds a modern touch to what is a throwback to tradition in the heart of an industrial city. Gamini who buys all the latest books takes an impish delight in riling the stiffer and more staid denizens of this city by revealing his taste for, say, heretics such as Noam Chomsky, that intellectual thorn on the side of imperial-military-corporate North America. But whether driven into exile by communal riots, pursuing the neon lights of the west to improve the lot of their children or escaping the stagnant intellectual pool of Sri Lanka on a quest for new ideas, the migrants are in some measure seized by feelings of displacement. They read Sri Lankan newspapers, take an interest in its politics and are enmeshed in even the trivial minutiae of its day-to-day affairs. They invite singers and dramatists from back home, send round the hat and offer them the best hospitality available. Whether Tamil or Sinhala they have become part of the multi-communal tapestry that is Canada, that great melting pot, where all types of faces form an unending part of the passing parade on the pavements. Weather report: The winter continues to deepen and the wind strikes one's face like a whiplash. Snow falls like confetti and overnight snowfalls carpet the pavements and driveways and maroon the houses in their own snow-bound islands. The snowstorm on January 26 was considered the most acute so far. On a visit to the Niagara Falls one could not distinguish between the waterfall and the mist and it looked as if the great green columns of water were pouring from the misty heavens themselves in some torrential celestial cascade. |
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