spelling and language and all of that stuff.
Okay, my skin is dark. I look “different.” I’m the darkest one in my family, outside of my grandfather who’s still in India. I’ve never met him, but I’ve seen pictures. Mom says I look like him. It’s funny how the colour can be so different, even in the same family. My little sister, Baljinder, was really light-skinned when she was born. She’s kept that light skin, too, the way she’s kept the nickname my father gave her the moment he first saw her. We call her “Babli” and now it seems more her real name than Baljinder. It’s shorter to say and suits her. She talks. All the time. Babbles even, so Babli fits her.
I know I’m really dark. Even though they call me Ron at school and not Rana—which is my real name—there’s no mistaking me for a white kid. I hadn’t thought it mattered much. Until now.
When we did that research in Grade Five and I learned about prejudice, I had thought that it wasn’t too bad in Dinway. At least it wasn’t too bad at school. There are three East Indian kids in my class this year and we get on all right with the other kids. No one calls us names or refuses to play on the same team as us in gym. The other guys, the whites, leave us pretty much alone at lunch and recess, but we stick together in our own group and don’t bother about them, either. There doesn’t seem to be much prejudice in our school, but I guess I’d just had my first lesson on how much prejudice the adults carry around with them.
Maybe it’s because of the mill. Dinway is a small town and its major industry is lumber. That’s what it says in the tourist guide book that the town makes up every year. We have one big mill in town and a lot of people drive the logging trucks or work in the bush, cutting down the trees so they can be brought into the mill. Almost everyone in Dinway works in the logging industry, and those big trucks loaded with logs roll into town all day long. Dad is a foreman at the mill. He’s the only East Indian to have such an important job, but there are a lot of others from the Sikh community who work there too.
It’s because of the mill, the mill and the jobs, that there are so many East Indians in Dinway. A lot of young men come over from India, looking for work in British Columbia because there is work for them, work they can easily learn to do. And Dad says that when an East Indian gets a job, he works hard to keep it.
Harder than the gorays, the whites. Dad says he can always count on his Sikh workers to take the shifts no one else wants and to help out if he needs someone to work overtime.
He says our people don’t slack off on the job, or try to take extra-long lunch hours and coffee breaks the way some of the other workers do. Many of the men who work here have families back home in India, wives and children that they want to bring to Canada. And the only way they can afford to do that is to hang onto a job and save every penny. So the East Indian men work hard at their jobs and sometimes even share a house with other East Indian workers, putting up with shabby furniture and rooms that need painting, just so they can save more of their salary.
Dad says that things are getting harder, now. The mill had to lay off some workers and when some white guys lost their jobs and some East Indian men didn’t, it got pretty tense. But things are tough all over British Columbia right now, Dad says. It’s the recession, whatever that means. He’s always talking about it and hoping it will end soon.
A few years ago there were lots of jobs and everyone who wanted to work was able to. Now, though, mills in some towns have even closed down and people are out of work everywhere. I guess that sort of feeds the prejudice, makes it grow. When a white worker loses his job, he blames the East Indian who kept his. And when he sits home unemployed, I guess he can think some pretty ugly thoughts, even though it’s the recession’s fault.
Anyway, Dinway was going to have an East Indian player—me—on its minor hockey league, like it or not. Somehow I’d have to convince my parents to sign that form.
As I opened the front door, the warm smells of cooking rushed past me; hot oil and chili peppers and fresh ginger and garlic. “Hi, Mom,” I called. “Something smells good.”
In the kitchen, my mother, her arms streaked with flour, was working with the roti dough. Rotis are sort of a bread-pancake that we eat with almost every meal. We don’t use much bread, except in sandwiches for lunches, so Mom makes roti almost every day.
“You’re late, Rana.” Mom didn’t look up, but kept patting the balls of dough between her palms until they flattened into perfect circles.
“Yes. Sorry.” At home we mostly speak Punjabi, but Babli and I use English once in a while. Mom’s own English is terrible, but she likes to hear Babli and me speak it. When Babli started school, Mom enrolled in a special class to help people learn to speak English, but she didn’t learn much. She kept right on speaking nothing but Punjabi at home and to her friends and never practised her English. After a while she quit going to the classes. But my dad is really fluent. His English is almost as good as mine, which I guess is one of the reasons that he got to be a foreman at the mill.
I watched my mother as she slid the flattened rounds of dough into the hot frying pan, flipping them over after they browned. Then she put them on a rack over one of the stove elements, glowing red hot, and the rotis puffed up like beach balls. When she takes them off the rack, she butters one side lightly and stacks them and they settle down so they’re pancake shaped instead of beach ball shaped. Reaching out, I took a roti from the stack of fresh ones.
“Rana! Wait! Dinner is nearly ready.”
“Ah, Mom…” I grinned at her and bit into the warm roti anyway. “It smells so good I can’t wait.”
She smiled back, pleased. “Flattery, Rana, flattery. Go and call your father and sister, please.”
Dinner was roti and dal, which I guess looks a bit like chili, but is made with beans or lentils and no meat. It also has more spices in it than chili and although they’re both spiced to be hot, they taste really different. I like chili on a hot dog, but for dinner I prefer dal.
I waited until everyone was nearly finished eating before I took a deep breath and brought up the subject of minor hockey.
“Mom, Dad…” I said, tearing off a chunk of roti to scoop up the last of the dal in my bowl. “I…uh…I want to join the minor hockey league.”
There was silence around the table and everyone stared at me. Then my father said, “No Rana, absolutely not.”
“You didn’t even take time to think about it,” I said. “Just listen for a minute. I’ve got the money, saved it from my paper route and my allowance. I’ve got enough for new skates, too. And I’m a pretty good skater. Remember last winter when our school had an outdoor rink? We all had to skate in gym classes and I had to learn. I got those old skates and used to go down to the lake and practice on Saturdays.”
“He’s a good skater,” said Babli. “Not like me. I still fall down a lot.”
“So skate on the lake. Go to the arena. Why must you join a team?” asked my dad.
I didn’t say anything for a while. Why did I want to join the hockey league?
“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Skating’s all right, but I watched some of the guys play hockey at noon hours, on the school rink. It looks like fun. I’d like to try it. Just skating around by yourself is pretty lonely. I mean boring.”
No one said anything for a minute or two.
“So, is it okay?” I asked. “I need you
