Pico’quant Tales

My ex and I appear in Pico Iyer’s latest book, Global Soul. His chapter on Toronto, called ‘Multiculturalism’, ends with his talking about meeting Kalpana and me!

Pico is the author of Video Nights in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk (a novel), and is in the stable of writers for Times or Newsweek (does it matter which one?). But this I have paid attention to: whenever they have to review a cultural product from the south in general or south asia in particular, in their trademark soft focus, toothless, air-brushed analyis, (say a new film by Shekhar Kapur, a novel by Vikram Seth, or a retrospective on Ousmane Sembene), it’s Pico writing it.

Anyway this chuut had met my friend David in Havana and so when Pico came to Toronto to write about Toronto he got in touch with David. David invited Kalpana and me over for the evening. David, Alicia (David’s partner), Pico, Kalpana and I went for dinner to Bar Italia on College Street.

This is two and a half years ago. In those years I had a job which took me to Toronto from Lahore every fall.

So. Somewhere towards the end of the chapter in Pico’s book begins a passage that goes like this: we went for dinner to Bar Italia, ‘‘a tall Muslim man from Lahore,’’ and his girlfriend, a husky voiced, dark beauty from south India, and David, a Jewish man in his 40s and a successful banker, and his partner Alicia, ‘‘the shiny Goan’’.

Pico quotes us, misquotes us several times but always refers to me as the man from Lahore and Kalpana as ‘‘husky voiced Indian’’. He doesn’t mention our names. But he uses the occasion to clinch his argument on the nature of multiculturalism in Toronto (For his point of view please read the book).

Kalpana and I have our own version of the evening. When we tell our story, which is not often considering we are exes and she is in Toronto and I in Lahore, people have fallen out of chairs from exasperation when we (well mostly me) perform it.

MAKING FUN OF PICO. OR, THE STUPID SUBJECTS STRIKE BACK!

(Or: a case of bad writing versus good writing.)

The invitation to meet Pico Iyer sent my girlfriend into a spin (not the whirling of a dervish but the careening of one set off balance). It was not because he was an international writer of travelogues and a celebrated brownie. She feared not having anything to say, anything to add to a conversation. A conversation, she was convinced, would reek of pretension.

We arrived with broad grins, teeth shining, but the house was dark and empty, or so it seemed. We let ourselves in and walked to the back out to the yard where we heard voices. David greeted us. He stepped back into the yard and we caught a glimpse of people. A big white face loomed out as David introduced Pico. Confusion took over until a gentle voice from the corner said hello. This was Pico, a slight, seated figure, brown-skinned, not seeming an international bigwig. The looming whiteface was a man named Tattle.

Tattle was a boyhood friend of David’s. He had just dropped by. He had curls like coils. I kept staring at them. He had a big laugh. Pico was not saying much. David talked about how Tattle and him used to hang out in the early 70s in the part of Toronto called little Italy, gambling and womanising.

But this was an awkward reunion. Tattle had stumbled onto David and Alicia’s literary circle and mistook Pico for an ineffectual immigrant. After a brouhaha of merry reminiscences with David, over winning racetrack bets and drunken brawls, Tattle’s tale slipped between his legs. He came to realise, in the ways that David would defer to Pico, the weight of the diminutive figure in the corner. Pico graciously smiled and nodded to the fact of Tattle but Tattle was visibly rattled.

Tattle’s high of the evening occurred when Alicia left for the kitchen and the conversation turned to David and Alicia’s house hunting. As David talked about various neighbourhoods of Toronto Pico perked up. When David talked about looking at houses in upper class Forest Hill, Tattle guffawed and said your new neighbours would mistake Alicia for your maid. This comment on Alicia’s brownieness made David blush in the dark.

Pico was in town to write about Toronto and its diverse charm in terms of being the home of immigrants, refugees, and mixed bags of heritages. Not long ago he had returned from Japan, where he seduced a Japanese matron, which relationship he made the subject of yet another Pico travelogue.

That book was lying on the table. As the conversation turned towards the book I remembered a previous conversation between Alicia, Kalpana and me about the book:

Alicia: you can’t tell if they ever had sex, and it never came up that he was not Japanese.

Kalpana: in an issue of Wired (the internet and culture magazine) Pico has asserted that people are becoming nomads. He is predicting that we will all become global nomads. Just like him.

But now Pico was talking.

Yes I travel all over the world.

Kalpana: When do you see your girlfriend?

Pico: Half the time I spend with her, living in her apartment. She asks nothing of me.

David: That’s the Japanese for you. Egoless. What a different culture!

Kalpana hissed in my ear: Oh come on, there is no such thing as an egoless girlfriend…!

Plans were made to move the party to the trendy Bar Italia for dessert and witty repartee. Pico was brutally made a party to our whims. His polite graciousness Alicia put down to his inescapable gentle nature. Tattle, alas, escaped! Making a generous offer to join us at the cafe (he was going to drive there and we were walking), he was never seen again that evening.

I had a moment with Pico as we walked out of the house: we began to talk about the Satyajit Ray biography by Andrew Robinson. I told him I was very grateful to have found the book. Pico had spoken to Andrew and Andrew had confided in him that he wasn’t sure if the book would find an audience. I felt good about Pico and me having a literary interlude.

We traversed a park blanketed in mist. David and Pico walked ahead and Alicia and Kalpana behind me. The neighbourhood lights had gone out. All we could see were ghostly facades fo turn of the century houses. David turned to Pico and said, ‘‘Isn’t it just like Havana?” David and Pico had first met in Havana and as Pico obliged and talked about Havana I fell behind to hear what Kalpana and Alicia were talking about. They were talking animatedly and made no attempt to include me in the conversation.

Here is a part of the story that Kalpana tells:

Alicia and I hung back from the boys. It gave me the opportunity to pull my knife from its sheath and skewer Pico. I told Alicia it’s ridiculous that this stranger to Toronto has the audacity to come here with the purpose of writing about the multicultural marvel it has become. Especially when his research comes from two days in the city walking up and down the streets recording his impressions. This is the kind of gobbldegook that Edward Said warned us of: the outsider, colonialist, scholar, westerner making comments on the other, colonised, marginalised easterner. Who is he to write about video nights in Kathmandu and multi culti in Toronto? Hmph! I looked up from my diatribe to see Rehan waffling between us and the front of the procession.

O.K that’s the only part of the story I am letting Kalpana tell.

I walked back up to David and Pico, as if I had something to say. David turned to Pico and said: Rehan is doing something interesting: (my face brightened in the dark) he lives in Lahore.

I was disappointed: I was sure that David was going to introduce me as a writer. He talked about visiting me in Lahore and what a good host I had been.

Pico nodded politely, as was now usual for him this evening.

Bar Italia was hopping but we found seats promptly.

I don’t know when it all began. But I remember it was after Pico was talking about how he didn’t believe home, location, identity, ethnicity were that important anymore. He said he had Indian parents, grew up in a boarding school in England and never suffered from racism in England.

I could not take it any longer. I jumped in and said I am interviewing partition survivors in Lahore. Somehow it sounded meaningless. Out of context. But I started gushing about my grandfather who was an SP Police in Alwar State. He was fired from his job just before partition. Who knows why? He was also the president of the local Muslim League. Alwar state was the only princely state in India to have suffered from violence. Details without any scheme. Alicia spoke up and called me a Muslim hamlet.

But I persisted: His house was burnt down. In Alwar there was a genocide against a certain ethnic group. For the first time in my frenzied outpouring of personal details I seemed to have more than polite attention. But I couldn’t remember the name of this ethnic group, for the life of me. In post-Partition Lahore my grandfather was a lawyer, and not a very good one, I continued, but he had a loyal clientele and almost all of this clientele belonged to this ethnicity. And now I needed a name.

Momos.

I should have said Mayos, but I said Momos. These Momos used to give all their legal business to my grandfather in Lahore. But what did he do to win this loyalty?

David broke in: Pico, does Iyer mean writer? Pico’s eyes widened.

David asked me: What does Ansari mean?

The conversation went off somewhere between David and Alicia, with Pico wilting in the corner.

Alicia addressed Pico: It’s wonderful how you had a relationship with a woman with whom you did not have a common language.

Pico: Yes, I spoke not a word of Japanese. And she knew no English.

Pico was agitated. As soon as he could he asked for the bill. He grabbed the bill when it came and put his credit card in the waiter’s hand without looking at the amount. He turned to us exclaiming, ‘‘It’s my (re)treat!”

Once again Alicia saw this as his graciousness and David offered to walk Pico to his hotel. Pico blanched. As soon as he got the card back he fled the restaurant and hailed a cab. Amid a flurry of goodbyes he was gone without a backward glance.

Back at Alicia and David’s living room David announced that Pico had left an inscription in the Book of the Japanese Matron. He read it aloud: To Alicia and David, a profound example of the multicultural project. With love, Pico.