Toronto Journal
Of Tulips, Open Spaces and Freedom
The city of Toronto appears to undergo a subtle change about a week before the Victoria Day long weekend (May 19).There is a murmur that begins in the early spring breeze and lingers on the white sails of the boats in Lake Ontario, bobbing up and down on the gentle aqua blue waves. The murmur swells into a whisper and then into a voice that can be heard on every lips, every heart in the city: "It's the first long weekend of the summer - we must get away from the city!" And so we did. We packed cheese sandwiches, juice boxes, fruits, samosas and masala chicken into a huge icebox, acknowledging in our hearts that we would have to stop at Tim Hortons and MacDonalds, anyway. We also loaded bikes, skateboards, dolls, Cranola markers, drawing paper, a weekend worth of clothes and of course, the excited children into the SUV and we were off at last! Our destination? The celebrated Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. The Canadian Tulip festival has grown to become one of the largest Tulip Festivals in the world from a gift of International Friendship. In the fall of 1945, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands presented Ottawa with 100,000 tulip bulbs. This was in appreciation for the safe haven that Holland's exiled royal family received during the Second World War in Ottawa. The tulips have now become a celebration and a symbol of friendship and of the beauty of spring. As we walked through the rows of flowers, nodding their yellow and red heads in the slightly cool scented breeze, I could not help but take a snapshot of the sight with the camera and the eye of the mind, so that I could, like William Wordsworth revel in the after glow. On our way back to Toronto, the drive was spectacular with the purple clouds following us in the distance and the surrounding vast open spaces, the undulating green country side, the solitary brown cow, the cherry picking farms, all rushing by so fast and the cries of the children; "Oh Mummy, look!" and the inevitable "Are we there yet?". This sense of space and the open road is a Canadian prerogative that envelopes each immigrant as they land on this soil. One is immersed in the history of this continent as one senses the excited pulse of the early pioneers who landed here, experienced the sharp taste of freedom and cut through wilderness, rivers and mountains to set up their lives and homes. Freedom is a right and how better to express that right than in thought, words and deed? Luminato the Festival of Arts and Creativity opened to great fanfare in Toronto in June. We heard readings from British poet Daljit Nagra book of poems Look We Have Coming to Dover, which won the 2007 UK Forward Poetry Prize for best poetry debut. Daljit is a 40-year-old English teacher whose parents came to Britain from India in the sixties. His poetry is written in Punjlish (Punjabi English), which The Guardian poetry critic Rachael Cooke couldn't praise enough: "It is accomplished and dextrous, complex but not complicated. It pays proper attention to the traditions of poetic form. But best of all is its voice, the way it pins the experiences of British-born Indians so vividly to the page. Racism, arranged marriages, corner shops, the mosque; all these things are here, but so, too, are Ms Dynamite, Hilda Ogden, KFC and Torvill and Dean. It is a book that tells the story of what it is to be an in-betweener, to be caught between two cultures, both of which you love and, on occasion, fear. I think it is wonderful." Also present were Canadian author Jaspreet Singh, whose new book Chef explores the complexity of Kashmir; and Padma Viswanathan, author of The Toss of a Lemon (Random House). There was also a Shakespearean play at the Luminato which was unique in its rendering and exploding with "colour, light and fabric". It was The Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Tim Supple and is a hit of The Royal Shakespeare Company's Complete Works Festival. This comedy featured a multicultural cast of 23 dancers, musicians and actors and blended the British and the desi traditions of music, dance, dialogue and stage artistry. The dialogue was performed in English, Tamil, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Sanskrit! The diverse Torontonian audience sat there, their senses savouring the sound and the fury, completely captivated at this inconceivable interpretation of Shakespeare's genius. The Toronto Star, the city's leading newspaper commented: "Toronto, this Dream was meant for you!!" Sayeeda Jaigirdar's novel-in-progress is The Song of the Jamdanee Sari.
Look we have coming to Dover!
So various,so beautiful, so new
- Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach" Stowed in the sea to invade
the lash alfresco of a diesel-breeze
ratcheting speed into the tide with the brunt
gobfuls of surf phlegmed by cushy,
come-and-go tourists prow'd on the cruisers, lording the waves. Seagull and shoal life bletching
vexed blarnies at our camouflage past
the vast crumble of scummed cliffs.
Thunder in its bluster unbladdering yobbish
rain and wind on our escape, hutched in a Bedford can Seasons or years we reap
inland, unclocked by the national eye
or a stab in the back, teemed for breathing
sweeps of grass through the whistling asthma
of parks, burdened, hushed, poling sparks across pylon and pylon. Swarms of us, grafting
in the black within shot of the moon's spotlight,
banking on the miracle of sun to span
its rainbow, passport us to life. Only then
can it be human to bare-faced, hoick ourselves for the clear. Imagine my love and I,
and our sundry others, blared in the cash
of our beeswax'd cars, our crash clothes,
free, as we sip from an unparasol'd table
babbling our lingoes, flecked by the chalk of Britannia.
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