‘Every moment is a new beginning.’
Elie Wiesel
For the first time in years, I wanted to talk to my parents again. In part because the dark clouds of shame had slightly lifted, and I had some decent news to share. And also because staying with a family that was kind beyond words, but which was not my own, had made me miss my own parents more.
The first thing I heard was my mother crying – a startling sound. This was a woman who I had always considered to be made of pure confidence and strength. Hearing her at her most vulnerable undid a hardness in my own soul, a stone placed to keep the dam from breaking, and her tears were answered by my own. Suddenly I realised how dearly I had been missing her over the long period of our separation.
When her words came out, they were equally unexpected. ‘How are your teeth?’ she asked, between sobs.
Of course. She had no idea I’d had the braces taken off in Port Moresby, a good six months earlier. We had a lot of catching up to do.
We shared our stories. While I was making my own odyssey across the seas, my parents had been on their own path toward self-preservation, travelling deep into the jungle of Burma. With their sharp planning and acute survival skills, they had managed to endure what was now being referred to in the news as the Rohingyan genocide.
Our lives were still linked, even as we had fallen out of touch. When I was first taken into detention on Christmas Island, before I had learned to fully distrust the system and those who ran it, I had listed my mother as my emergency contact, along with her phone number in Burma.
Later, when I was moved to Manus Island, the Australian authorities reached out to their peers in Burmese immigration to tip them off that they had one of their countrymen in their grasp, someone who had managed to get away. They were instructed to tell my mother that her son was in detention in PNG and should call him back.
This was at the height of the reign of terror in Burma, after my parents had moved to a different side of the country, where no Rohingya was permitted to settle, to ride out the violence. The phone call from immigration put her and my father in great danger, and it was on account of the conniving Australians.
Fortunately, my mother had some manoeuvres of her own, and managed to finish the call without arousing questions about her current whereabouts. She also admitted, quite honestly, to having not spoken to her son for years, defusing the risk that she would be summoned to immigration to help convince me to come back home. Through a mix of truth and evasions, she saved her own life, as well as mine.
There were other links between the two ruling regimes. For one thing, Australia was the only Western country that continued to train the military of Burma throughout the years of the genocide. The Australian defence department spent $400,000 on this effort in 2017–18 alone.
The family with whom I now stayed were survivors in their own right, like nearly everyone who was part of the Rohingya diaspora. Saiful was a student, with a wife and daughter – and another daughter to come. They were grateful to be in Canada, where they were doing well. They lived simply, but their hospitality made their apartment more welcoming than any mansion.
Soon after my arrival at their home, Saiful arranged an appointment with his family doctor. The GP let me know my feet were frostbitten – a memento of my first outdoor walk in this country. Thankfully, my flesh survived the ordeal, but I had painful and swollen toes for a while. I also had a bad cold. While I didn’t require hospitalisation, the doctor put me on a busy schedule of follow-up appointments.
With my health improving, I readied myself for the upcoming hearing with Canadian immigration. I passed a mandatory medical examination and secured a lawyer, paid for by the state, to help me present my case.
After four weeks with Saiful’s family, I began feeling guilty for overstaying, not that they ever gave me cause to. They treated me as one of their own. I was so thankful for their hospitality but couldn’t stay any longer.
By that point I qualified for rent support, and I found a cheap basement room to rent in Waterloo. It wasn’t much, a bed and a desk crammed next to a water heater and furnace: my first private space since my university days in Rangoon. A room of my own.
‘Oh no, no, no, Jaivet!’ said Saiful when I showed him around. ‘This is no place for you to live. It’s practically a boiler room, and there’s no light coming in.’
He was right about the lack of light. The room had just one small glass pane window high on the wall. ‘Please just come back and stay with us. We feel like you are part of the family.’
Saiful was a good man and a wonderful host, but I had been in Canada for more than a month and feared inertia. I was eager to stand on my own two frostbitten feet and walk my own road.
My new room sat beneath the modest home of a gruff older man named Joe. A retired truck driver, he was somewhere between seventy and eighty years of age. Joe lived alone and he adored Donald Trump. Despite our differences, he was a decent guy, if prone to grumpiness, and we struck a deal that allowed me access to his living space upstairs. We were the ultimate odd couple.
I spent hours up in Joe’s house, sitting at the dining table, preparing for my hearing and speaking to my legal aid representative, an affable lawyer named Ebrahim. He was based in Scarborough, two-and-a-half hours away by bus on the opposite side of Toronto.
A few weeks after our first phone meeting, on a snowy day, I took the bus to Ebrahim’s office to sign some papers. On the return trip I had a four-hour stopover in Toronto. It was bitterly cold and still snowing, but the brief visit to the city put a glow in my heart.
Leaving the warmth of the bus station, I pushed my hands deep into my pockets and headed north toward the gullies of concrete, glass and steel. After half an hour I found myself in a neighbourhood of old stone, looking up at a sprawling gothic building crowned with spires and parapets. It was as if a piece of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had been dropped in the middle of the modern city.
There was a group of people who did not look like they belonged together, standing on the steps outside the unlikely castle. I fell in behind them.
What I first guessed to be a tour group was in fact a gathering of new students – including international scholars and their parents – on an orientation visit to campus. It turned out the splendid building belonged to the University of Toronto. ‘Okay then,’ I thought to myself, ‘I guess this is how I’m spending my afternoon.’
Over the next hour or so I strolled the grounds and took in the ornate high ceilings, lavish woodwork and sturdy masonry of the Victorian-era construction. I only half-listened to what the university guides had to say about the history of the place, and the courses offered. I was too awestruck by the architecture. When the tour finished, the guide handed out a selection of brochures and application forms.
I took a handful, just in case.
In our meetings earlier that day, Ebrahim had assured me I could expect a favourable outcome when my case went before the refugee board. ‘After what you have been through, I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine. It won’t even take long.’
His optimism struck a chord. I was impatient to regain control of my stolen life and begin shaping my future. With my twenty-sixth birthday looming large, it was depressing to think I’d been forced to spend a quarter of a century in a state of busy stasis, constantly moving but never getting my start.
On the bus back to Waterloo I thumbed through the university applications and wondered if I had a chance in the gothic wonderland of academia. It might be wiser to take the practical path of looking for a job.
Back at Joe’s, the choice took on a painful edge. There was not just my welfare to think about, but that of Shahed, who had sacrificed his own comfort to rescue me, repeatedly. He had taken on serious debt, and I owed it to him to repay it. I needed to find a job as soon as possible.
Over the next few weeks I applied for countless positions, from restaurant and bar gigs to professional roles in pharmacies. I scoured Craigslist and other websites for any job, from the trades to data entry, that paid a wage. Each time I was either turned down or ignored. Meanwhile the cut-off date for applications to the University of Toronto was approaching.
Researching the school further, I discovered that in addition to being architecturally elegant, it was a prestigious seat of learning, the best-known university in Canada and among the top twenty globally. Something my mother said to me, a piece of advice from the past, sounded in my ears: ‘Jaivet, you need to be the best you can possibly be in order to survive.’
If I found a regular job to pay the bills, and offset my debt to my family, who knows, maybe I would end up stuck in the same state of wage slavery years from now, with no hope of advancement. It took more time and effort to build a career by first gaining a Canadian education. But a bigger investment promised a bigger reward.
For my parents, I needed to try harder. They had taken risks and made sacrifices to give their children a fighting chance, and the least I could do was honour their efforts. I also needed to do it for my own sake. Otherwise, all that I had been through, setback after setback, challenge after challenge, added up to little.
Also in my mind were the guys still in detention, or stuck in refugee limbo in the countries I had passed through to get here. Whether they thought of me, or even knew I was still alive, I owed it to them to do my best. There were opportunities available to me that they could only dream of, and for their sake, as much as mine, I should make the most of them.
As usual, my peculiar legal status made the challenge more difficult. Even in a country like Canada, which prided itself on being welcoming to newcomers, it was unusual to apply for a top university before having any confirmed legal status. To navigate the system, I would need help. I booked an appointment with an academic advisor at U of T – only to learn that the deadline for online applications had passed.
By now I knew there was likely to be a loophole, a hole in the fence. After some prodding, the advisor admitted there was still time to submit a paper application to the university.
She told me this in late February or early March. By May, to have a chance at being accepted, I needed to complete the application – no easy task – as well as obtain my original academic transcripts from Burma. I also had to pass the academic English test – more demanding than the one required by immigration – with a score of no lower than 6.5 on all four dimensions: reading, writing, listening and speaking. All while completing my preparation for the hearing with the refugee board, which would make or break my chance to stay in the country.
The memory of my recent past, the sinking boats and the missed flights, played in a continuous loop as I undertook one of the most gruelling efforts of my life, this one of the intellectual kind.
There was not enough light or space in the basement, so I used the kitchen table, spending so much time with my books and paperwork that it angered my housemate. ‘You go to bed so late and then in the morning the first thing I see is you sitting at the table studying your ass off,’ Joe snarled one day. ‘When I rented you the room, I didn’t know you’d be occupying the rest of the place too. I know I said it’s yours to share, but do you have to be in here all day every day?’
It was a fair point, so I started studying at the local library instead. First up was for the IELTS, the standardised English test. Most people studied for it for months, if not years, under a teacher. I had less than four weeks and no instruction.
The test was held at 8 am at the university. I woke up at 3 am to make sure I did not miss the two buses to get there. I ended up receiving a score of 7.5 across the board. My mother would be proud. She was proud, when I told her.
Just as I was ready to relax again, I received some distressing news, in the form of a letter from the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board. The same month it was due to take place, my hearing was postponed indefinitely, with no reason given.
That term – indefinitely – was anathema to me. The salt in the wound during my years in Manus was the open-ended nature of indefinite imprisonment. The loss of hope, of not knowing when the hurt would stop, had often been harder to bear than the hurt itself.
The rote procedural letter from the Canadian government plunged me into a depression. I could hardly sleep and, when I did, I had recurring nightmares about being back in detention. Guards shouted and chased me through the ghastly dreamscapes until, cornered, I woke in a sweat in my bed in the basement.
Once again, I was stuck. Despite all the risks I had taken, and the sacrifices I had made – and the ones that had been made for me – it felt like I was back at the start, still trapped, in my mind at least, in one of the most cursed places on earth.