Where is home?
When you’ve lived in another country for more than 20 years, coming home to Canada is like immigrating all over again. You arrive in a place that feels alien. It didn’t feel like that on previous visits. Those were holidays. Those visits felt like homecomings.
In 2022, I returned for good. It should have felt like a homecoming, but it didn’t. It had shadows.
The sky and the air felt different. The trees loomed. Even the buttercups seemed sinister. The clouds were filled with tears. I rationalized that the circumstances of my return, a major loss, a change in my status, coloured my perceptions.
That was partly true. What was the rest of the truth?
Coquitlam and then Port Coquitlam, where I eventually settled, were beautiful, fairy-tale places. There were woods and walking trails, around a bend a host of buttercups, foxgloves, dandelions and rhododendrons could be seen in unusual places.
The most amazing part of it all — there was a river! It was unreal. I should have been enchanted and delighted.
Instead, I was uneasy. I was gliding in a dream with a nightmare hovering at the edge. I had to ask where things were. Whom to approach for various other things. I knew the vocabulary, but it was as if I’d forgotten the language.
For two decades I had lived on a desert island. That had been home. It was my comfort zone.
Despite the searing heat — easily handled with air-conditioning. Winter? That was the best time of the year.
More, I knew where, when and how to get around. My supermarket, the hospital, doctors, bank, my church, the cafes and the souk. I could drive to most places without GPS or directions.
“It takes time, mom,” my daughter encouraged me. I knew that but it was taking a long time for me. Does age slow down the clock? I thought that as one grows older, time races by.
But here I was struggling with everything, swimming against a tide, with my lower back reminding me of my age far more than my grey hair. I had to deal with this stupor into which I had fallen.
So, for the first time in my life, I set myself a few targets. One of these was to get actively involved in my church and the other was to join a writers’ group.
Thanks to my children, I found a church, St. John the Apostle in Port Moody. In no time, I was embraced into their fold.
The other goal, I thought would be harder to achieve. Then, quite by chance, I saw a small notice in the Tri-City News about a writers’ group — the Tri-City Wordsmiths meeting in the Terry Fox Library at Port Coquitlam Community Centre.
That was in April 2023. I was warmly welcomed into the group. The fog in my brain had started to burn off.
Something else, I realized I needed to do was to get my driving license. Initially, I thought I should have it in case of an emergency. I took an Uber to the nearby ICBC. Booked an appointment and brought all the necessary documents, including my old Canadian license.
Everything was in order. The lady behind the counter ticked the boxes. I stood in front of the camera. Click! My temporary license was ready. A few weeks later the actual license arrived in the mail. The hard shell that had been constricting my heart cracked. Independence of movement — although I had used Transit until then; there was a huge reluctance in my bones and muscles to go anywhere in the wind and wet and cold weather.
Having my license opened another door. I felt I was getting closer to freedom, closer to home.
Then there was winter. The first winter I had gone back home — the old home. So, I didn’t have to contend with the cold and the snow.
There were things I’d had to deal with back there, but I had a lot of friends, and their warmth and affection helped. There were things and people and places I knew. A winter that was warm and filled with flowers and a turquoise sea.
When I came back to Canada I felt as though a large iron gate had clanged shut behind me. I had been evicted, albeit by circumstance and my own decisions. There was to be no turning back.
My second winter I lived through the cold. I had forgotten the incessant damp and how the chill seeps into the bones and almost never leaves. And when summer finally came it felt almost too late.
This April I bought an old used car. I felt at ease in it. The seat slid forward with a lever. I instinctively knew where the lever was. The automatic gear shifted easily. I reached out and adjusted the side mirrors. This felt familiar. But I needed GPS to find my way home.
There were other car-related struggles, figuring out how to fill gas. Back in my island home in the Arabian Gulf, the gas station attendant did that. Parking in my spot required several tries. It didn’t just flow as it did back then, back when….but I could still feel the hard shell that had held a strangle-hold on me cracking open a little wider.
Is this how a butterfly feels when it struggles to break out of its chrysalis? This panting effort. This painful grappling with a new life and an old exoskeleton.
In May, on Trinity Sunday, at my church, I had the unique honour of the choir singing a hymn I had written way back in my old middle east home. It was sung to celebrate this church’s 125th anniversary.
I participated in the Tri-City Writers’ festival and read a story at the Port Moody Library. I drove there and back without GPS. Most recently, I reversed into my parking spot in one smooth movement.
When I came up the elevator and walked through the door, I was able to say to my daughter, “I’m home.”
Finally the words rang true and somewhere in the Amazonian jungle of my heart, a butterfly flapped its wings.
- Rohini Sunderam, Port Coquitlam
You can find Rohini Sunderam on Instagram, Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter).
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