Mr. R. Agarwal was a man my father knew. The father of Mr. R. Agarwal, like most fathers, likely knew much less about the universe than he claimed. But there were some things he believed and wanted, more than anything, for his son to also believe and want. Mr. R. Agarwal’s father lived long before genetically modified seeds arrived to India from the West. He therefore still relied heavily on the notion of cultivation in his life. He knew there were at least one hundred and eight ways to sow one’s seed to get a desired outcome. But he also believed that only one outcome was going to be right for his son. So, in 1934, when Mr. R. Agarwal was born, and even though it was a fortunate year, a bumper crop year, Mr. R. Agarwal’s father thought to modify the mantra he was taught to utter (Om Namah Shivaya) by his own father. Every morning and evening, he advanced his fingers along the one hundred and eight prayer beads of his mala whispering a new four-word mantra: Engineering Skills Are Universal.
Thirteen years later, when the British quit India, Mr. R. Agarwal was already well along the trajectory that had been set in motion by his father’s prayers. The adolescent Mr. R. Agarwal erased every small white error appearing on his handheld slate. He drew only the most congruent triangles. It was at that time the idea behind Independence hit him, like lightning striking a lone tree in a vast field. He looked at the denuded hills around him, at the pretty patchwork of subsistence agriculture, and shouted: Mai bhee ek ped hoon! I too am a tree! Which would feature in a significant way in his adult life, but not until his father’s prayers first came true.
Several years later, he held a university degree in his hands that read “Chemical/Mechanical Engineer.” Chemical referred to matter undergoing a change of state and composition. Mechanical dealt with anything that moved. He was covered. Mr. R. Agarwal’s father then whispered into the ear of his full-grown, diploma-holding son that he could do anything, which was far better than being able to be anything. By then it was the Green Revolution, and even though they had achieved Independence, farmers became worried about their livelihoods. Mr. R. Agarwal was worried that the slash on his engineering degree looked like a tree in mid-fall.
But what could he do at that point to stop a thing in motion? He got a job in a pulp and paper mill dedicated to processing plantations of imported Australian eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus was great at sucking up water and growing fast, and it was swiftly taking the place of natural species across the Indian countryside. His job was to the find the best way of transforming it into paper. But how was this work universal? he wondered. It was certainly true that trees grew almost everywhere. And of paper, Mr. R. Agarwal began to think: Money does grow on trees! This particular thought would, like reverse engineering, change his destiny, but only much, much later.
He took a wife and one year later was transplanted from India to the shallow soils of the Canadian Shield, to Red Rock, Ontario. There were only two places on earth named Red Rock at the time, and Mr. R. Agarwal had heard of neither of them. He had only heard of Canada being a huge wide-open space with few people living in it. What he found when he got there, where the mouth of the Nipigon River spills into Lake Superior, were few people and more trees than he could ever care to count or account for. One day he walked away from the mill and stood in the middle of a path and rotated himself three hundred and sixty degrees to feel what it meant to never lose sight of a tree. He forgot about the agriculture fields of his youth for a while. He grew accustomed to the hematite-bearing strata of rock, the asymmetric ridge with a long and gentle backslope that geologists called a cuesta, which reminded him somehow of the red soils back home.
Mr. R. Agarwal spent a decade in Red Rock working at Domtar, refining the kraft process for the conversion of wood into wood pulp. This process was, to his great satisfaction, both mechanical and chemical. It was during this time he began having children with his wife, R _ _ _. He decided early, based on the fortuitous coincidence of so many R’s in his environment, that he would give all his children R names. Why tempt destiny? Mr. R. Agarwal moved up the ranks effortlessly in the company, and when the vice-presidency came up, he fully expected it to be offered to him first, like the inevitability of paper from pulp itself. But he was overlooked, because a brown person would unfortunately still have difficulty conveying authority over white men. Like a tree in a field of turnips, or a fence around the gene pool of rice.
That day Mr. R. Agarwal discovered the mixture of water, sodium hydroxide, and sodium sulfide, known on the job as white liquor, to be the same temperature as the blood in his body: boiling. He felt the bonds that link lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose break, and turn into invisible fractures in his bones. It was chemical and it was mechanical. He was a tree and now they had made pulp out of him. And so he quit. He packed up his family and moved as far east as possible (while still staying in Canada; why tempt destiny too much?) to another pulp and paper operation, in Newfoundland. Encountering similar obstacles there, he quit, again, and when he returned home to northern Ontario, he decided to quit engineering altogether.
He bought River Mart, a convenience store, in 1975, in Thunder Bay. He saw himself as a kind of indirect farmer, providing milk and candy and cigarettes to the peoples. And, he liked the name of the store, which made him happy to go to work every day. He went on acquiring convenience and real estate, like prayer beads on a necklace, and became a multi-millionaire. And then, everyone in Thunder Bay knew him by the name Ravi.
In 1940, when Mr. R. Agarwal was only seven years old, still eating chapattis and turnips in his Indian village, and still wondering what the words engineering and universal truly meant, 1,145 German prisoners of war lived in an internment camp in Red Rock, northern Ontario. They were members of the German military, merchant seamen, Nazis, non-Nazis, and German Jews. The camp was on the site of an abandoned pulp and paper operation of the Lake Sulphite Pulp and Paper Company. The prisoners lived in bunkhouses that had previously housed construction workers for the company. They arrived at the port of Quebec City on the Duchess of York, a twenty-thousand-ton liner owned by the Canadian Pacific Steamship Line, and took a train ride of two days and two nights to reach the camp.
According to accounts in a book entitled The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior, one of the prisoners, a Mr. E. Spier, says he was handed a cardboard box containing “two loaves of white bread, cut in slices and wrapped hygienically in grease-proof paper. Besides that there were onions, sardines, one enormous Bologna sausage, pork, beans, jam, fruit, a loaf of cheese, sugar, salt, pepper, etc. a mug and the necessary cutlery.” He was not impressed with the boreal landscape: “the train raced through a countryside of little interest and with no scenic attraction, with a seemingly never-ending flat landscape with enormous lakes repeating themselves again and again leaving behind a rather monotonous impression.” Another prisoner, a Mr. G. V. Lachmann, was already one of the world’s leading aeronautical engineers and had patented “slotted wings” for aircraft long before he was detained. Slots allow for higher angles of attack and thus considerably increase the lift. By varying the coefficient of lift, and hence the speed, the slot makes taking off and landing much easier and greater flight speeds possible. Some prisoners took flight into the surrounding spruce forest, but to no avail, prayers crashing down on infertile ground. Many were eventually transferred to other internment locations. In the month of February 1941, just eight months before the camp was closed for good, the records of Captain Kirkness revealed the following:
Prisoners who wrote one letter: 146
Prisoners who wrote two letters: 144
Prisoners who wrote three letters: 104
Prisoners who wrote three letters and one postcard: 111
Prisoners who wrote three letters and two postcards: 92
Prisoners who wrote three letters and three postcards: 77
Prisoners who wrote three letters and four postcards: 148
Prisoners who did not write: 315
But this does not add up. There were only 950 prisoners in the camp by then, still referred to today as Camp R. The R has nothing to do with Red Rock. It’s just a letter taking the place of a number. No one, it seems, got to understand its nature well enough to give it a proper name.
Dad says she fell from the sofa. Mom says she fell from the bed. Dad insists, no, sofa. Either way, one of Mr. R. Agarwal’s daughters, R _ _ _ _ _ , fell when she was a baby, and when she woke up, her body was paralyzed on the left side. No, not her entire body, just her arm and her brain. Just like that.
Several years later, Mr. R. Agarwal’s son R _ _ _ _ graduated from Lakehead University with a business degree. He hired seven or eight women to sit at computers all day in a room without windows (a crying shame because they would have had a spectacular view of the boreal softwoods) to oversee online gambling.
Dad says it was a hit man, Mom says it was an overdose. Dad says, probably both—or maybe just a brain hemorrhage. Whichever, one day, when he was thirty-nine, Mr. R. Agarwal’s son R _ _ _ _ drove from Thunder Bay to Las Vegas, and definitely not to visit the other Red Rock, a famous canyon located near there. R _ _ _ _ died. His body was transplanted to Thunder Bay for the cremation.
And here is the longest condolence note left on the occasion of the death of Mr. R. Agarwal (who, it turns out, was Mr. V. R. Agarwal), on the webpage of Everest Funeral Chapel in 2002.
Ravi was a man with a tremendously kind heart. He worked hard for many causes but I will remember him most for the pride he took in being Canadian, and being from India. Whether it was as an active member of the India-Canada Association, at a TBMA Board meeting, on the Folklore Festival Committee, or just in the community at large, Ravi proudly shared the richness of his cultural heritage. You rarely meet a “gentle man” (and that Ravi was) who so willingly gave of his time to share with others the treasures of both countries. I remember Ravi, Rita, and their youngest daughter proudly carrying the flag of India in the July 1, 2001 Canada Day Parade, with Ravi walking when a younger person would have chosen to ride.
These days the World Wildlife Fund reports that about 17 per cent of log imports to India are estimated to be of illegal origin. Deloitte reports that per-capita paper consumption in India is “woefully” low. One thing is sure: Mr. R. Agarwal is not responsible for any of this, and we can’t know what he thinks of internment or of engineering. His body is already ashes, long since distributed through some river network, entering the soil beneath distant trees. In 2006, the year Mr. R. Agarwal’s son R_ _ _ _ died, he was not around to grieve it. It was the year the very last pulp and paper mill at Red Rock shut down its operations as well. Not for lack of raw materials. Just for good.