Sometimes I think about a solitary man who lived in our town when I was a kid—a Sikh man who everyone called Singh. This was back in the late sixties, when my hometown, Amherstburg, was no more than a bedroom community tucked in the bottom corner of Ontario and linked to the rest of the country by a long, boring stretch of the 401 highway.
Singh was an exotic being back then—an enigma separated from the rest of the community by his appearance. He lived in an apartment that had been converted from a business; his living room was the windowed storefront. We kids knew this because we’d steal glimpses of him through a gap in his curtain as we walked by. I remember him sitting in a straight-backed chair next to a table on which sat nothing but a black telephone. I don’t remember a television or anything else. In my memory he’s just sitting there, alone, in the sparse room. And we, in our nine-year-old wisdom, would avidly discuss him and his turban, and the rumours about the length of his hair underneath it. I don’t know where he worked, and I don’t recall seeing him with any friends. I don’t know if he had a car.
As was typical of most small towns in Canada, the arena was the main hub of community activity. The winter I was nine, Singh took up ice skating. It was with curiosity and cruel bemusement that we kids observed him during Sunday-afternoon and Wednesday-evening public skating—either in the roped-off beginners’ area or hugging the boards on his way around the ice. Singh was always smiling, as if being so out of place—winter coat and mittens over his exotic cotton clothing—amused him, too. His progress was excruciatingly slow, and I’d wonder, as I glided past, what kind of pleasure he could possibly get from his sluggish, jerky trips around the rink; he was such an easy target for the mean boys. But Singh continued to show up at the public skating sessions, and eventually he got better—eventually good enough that he didn’t have to hold on to the boards. He became a fixture that winter, and our interest eventually waned.
Today I remember Singh through the eyes of an adult—not as an exotic émigré, but as a man. I can’t remember when Singh stopped showing up at the arena, or when he left town. And I wish I could tell him that I remember him. That I know now that with every wobbly slip of his blades on the ice he was reaching out to his community. I wonder about the night he might have sat in that straight-backed chair and decided to buy a pair of skates and go skating. I wish I could tell him that his unabashed vulnerability is now, to me, a symbol of generosity and kinship. And that I wonder if he still skates.
Burlington, Ontario