Stars

October 20th. My flight from Victoria landed at Toronto Pearson sometime after dark. In the tunnel connecting gate to terminal, bleary-eyed passengers dragged carry-on luggage alongside a motorized walkway so deconstructed it couldn't live up to either half of its name. The machine had been out of commission since my previous flight in the summer, at least, and probably earlier. One has to wonder what the hold-up is in a situation like that - it's not exactly some mystical new technology repairable only by technopriests interpreting gemstone runes. Maybe, I wondered as I made my way to arrivals to meet the Park N Ride shuttle, it's a Snowpiercer situation, where the runaway train of modernity is slowly losing the ability to reproduce parts required to run its most basic processes. 

Flying has two unspoken rules: no one fuckable flies first class, and post-landing conversation with passengers from your own flight is punishable by death. Everyone clustered with me waiting for the minibus knew the rules and so we stood in companionable silence as I overheated under a wool sweater that had been perfect for the west coast, but was overkill somewhere the temperatures were still double-digit. Our driver turned out to be a middle-aged South Asian man with a drooping mustache and as little an inclination towards talking as the rest of us.

The Park N Ride where I usually leave my car is a dusty gravel lot beneath the shadow of a water park. At night, the only light comes from the porch of the lot’s two-room office building and cars waiting to be picked up. It always strikes me as remarkably trusting, their starting the cars for you and leaving them running with the keys inside, though I suppose it would take night vision and giant brass balls for a thief to even find their way down that industrial backroad in the dark, let alone get away with someone else’s Ford Focus. On that night, four sets of waiting headlights glowed from the lot, illuminating looming fragments of the waterslides steel skeletons. Quiet still reigned as we disembarked, passengers murmuring thanks to the driver as he helped them down from the van and unloaded their bags. A leafy windbreak behind the office muffled the sound of cars passing on the nearby 407. Even the four engines seemed barely to be idling above a whisper.

It was hard not to contrast this calm with the day I’d left: at the height of rush hour, a black SUV trying to change lanes at the water park turnoff had accelerated hard, unaware the transport truck ahead of it had stopped for a red light. The SUV plowed into the truck’s rear at near-highway speeds, crumpling the driver’s side in a nightmarish explosion of plastic and glass. I swerved to avoid oncoming debris and pulled over to call 911 as two men, including the truck driver, attended to the wreck. A heavy set middle-aged woman stumbled out of the now open passenger side door, her face stricken. A purple backpack dangled limply from one hand.

In the end, the jaws of life were needed to extricate the driver, a 70-year-old woman who was then airlifted to hospital with what the newspaper would call “life-altering injuries.” 

Waiting for the light at the same intersection two weeks later, I could see the marks on the road where the collision had occurred, and fresh white paint where lines had to be redrawn. It’s not an original thought, that the worst day of someone’s life amounts to two paragraphs in the Brampton news and an afternoon of clean-up for a municipal work crew, but alone at night on the freeway, under an empty black sky, it’s a thought you’re going to have. Or at least it’s one I had, a morose tug at the back of my mind which grew stronger as time passed. Before long, mortality was my only thought, a companion so real it may as well have occupied the passenger seat.

An indeterminate amount of time later, the horizon exploded into showers of green and gold on all sides. Low hanging ember constellations burned brightly, one after another, leaving delicate smoke tendrils in their wake. Either, I thought as yet more clusters of fireworks burst into light, the Irish are getting into gender reveals in a big way, or it’s Diwali. 

Diwali, the festival of lights observed by more than a billion Hindus, Jains, and Sikhs begins on the 13th day of lunar month Ashvina’s dark half and lasts until the second day of the next month, Karttika. I was traveling on Lakshmi Puja, Diwali’s third and main day, first of the new moon. A time when Lanterns are lit and fireworks launched in the hope it will encourage Lakshmi, Hindu goddess of prosperity, to bring blessings. 

My introduction to Diwali had come some fifteen years earlier during a 14-month stint at doomed Victoria newspaper “The Diversity Reporter.” Its editor was Mohsin, a Pakistani journalist who had arrived in Canada fleeing political persecution less than a year before I met him at CFUV, the university of Victoria’s campus radio station. We’d both been volunteers, working our way towards shows of our own. Diversity Reporter was born not long after our first conversation, the radio shows quickly forgotten. 

Mo became my guide to the Canadian west coast’s south Asian side. We cooled molten biryani with raita at crowded lunch counters where the only signage was in Urdu. We met his contacts in bridal shops festooned with rainbows of gowns and bangles, and in empty restaurants at 2am, where nervous men in shalwar kameez avoided making eye contact. Once, on our way back to the car, I asked Mo why the men refused to look at me.  “Because,” he said. “They just got off a plane from Lahore and they’ve never seen a tattooed white man before. They’re scared of you.” 

Working on a no-budget newspaper with no journalistic experience and an editor who was unfocused at best was stressful in a myriad of ways and there are moments I consider the whole experience wasted time. Then, there are nights like Lakshmi Puja, when colors fill the sky and I remember those nervous men, the meals we eventually share. Even the grim passenger I’d welcomed onboard at the accident site couldn’t distract me from the wonder unfolding above. It wasn’t my cultural celebration but it was a celebration nonetheless, and while the world's many tragedies couldn’t be dismissed, neither could my many blessings. 

I pressed the accelerator down, the colourful array of temporary stars blurring until they became indistinguishable from an endless canvas of real ones.