“Loving you changed my life. It should come as no surprise that losing you has done the same.” —Chloë Frayne
In any event, we went to a coffee shop in the mall and ordered our coffee before we started chatting. The very first thing she told me was that she was a cockney. It was obvious to me that she had an accent but I was clueless about what she was talking about. I had never heard of that word or expression in my life and I assumed it must be a British thing. She must have read my face as she started explaining to me that the term cockney is used to describe a person from the East End of London. Subsequently, I learned that it is an accent and dialect that is mainly spoken in London, particularly by working-class and lower middle-class Londoners.
Lynda told me that she and her family migrated to Canada in 1968, leaving her aging parents Julia and Charles King behind in London. She told me that she loved Canada the minute they landed in Toronto. Shortly after their arrival in Canada, she brought her sister and her family and assisted them to get settled in Toronto.
She told me that her sister’s name is Estelle. Even though Lynda was 3 years older, they were very close and Lynda always considered Estelle her best friend. She said Estelle is very smart partly because whatever Lynda used to learn in the school, she would come home and teach her sister right away. They used to spend a great deal of time together. They would sit in their dad’s car, an Austin, and look at the American magazines and catalogues for hours. They were fascinated with the stories about wagon trains and Indians. They used to correspond with their American pen pals and used to daydream about going to America.
She explained to me that the reason for spending all that time together was simply because their parents used to work long hours in their store in order to make a living. Being the oldest sibling, it was a given that she look after her sister.
She also told me that her parents were missing their daughters and grandkids immensely. Hence, they decided to migrate to Canada in September, 1971. Unfortunately, her dad passed away after only three months in Canada which was utterly devastating for her and her sister.
She wanted me to know that she has two beautiful daughters – Ruth 8 years old and Maxine 6 years old – and the bad news was that she was in the process of separating from her husband.
I also learned that when Lynda’s parents migrated to Canada they wanted to live with her and her family. Those days Lynda and her family used to live in an apartment in Toronto. She was an excellent planner, she knew that her parents liquidated all their assets including a business which they owned and operated in London for decades and brough along their money to Canada. She came up with a plan to buy a big enough house where both families can live together. In order to undertake that plan, all she needed was a healthy down-payment for the house while her husband assumed the responsibility for paying the monthly mortgage. Consequently, they ended up living in a nice house in Malton, dedicating a fully finished and furnished apartment in the basement for her parents.
It was nice for Lynda to have her mom continue to live with them after her father’s demise as her mom needed to be with the family. At the same time, it provided Lynda with a flexibility she needed to go out and find a part-time job to keep her inspired. Lynda never had to worry about her kids when they came home for lunch everyday as their nana used to be there to look after them.
She was very apologetic for taking up my time and she said she had no idea why she was going on and on as she had never planned to talk about her personal affairs to anybody. Now she wanted to know about me.
I realized that it was a bit overwhelming for me to grasp everything she told me and I didn’t know how to react. Nonetheless, I was determined to tell her my story.
I told Lynda that I was the product of a broken home. I was born in a small military town called Barkus (Barracks) just a few miles from the city of Hyderabad in India and had a very unpretentious upbringing.
I continued: I did my undergraduate degree in 1965 from a very distinguished college in Hyderabad called Nizam College (Affiliated with Osmania University) which was built by the local king in 1887 for the royal families only but subsequently they allowed people like me only if they had better grades. Even though I had a scholarship/bursary I needed to work to support myself while completing my degree. The time I left India in1967, I was 26 years old and was working for the provincial government.
I neither had any extra-ordinary educational background nor financial resources at my disposal but I was highly motivated to go to America. I had admission in a couple of American universities but didn’t have two pennies to rub together. It was nothing but a miracle that in 1967 I ended up in a small country in the Middle East called Qatar. I lived in the capital city, Doha, and worked there for a year to make enough money to go to Chicago with the focus to study computer science. I also told Lynda that I made the biggest mistake in my life by rushing to get married on the phone to my high school sweetheart and she joined me in Chicago in 1970. Needless to say things didn’t work out exactly the way I had planned. Accordingly, I was also separated from my wife who currently lived in Chicago.
Lynda had several questions to ask me but suddenly we realized that we were terribly late. When we got back I found out that I missed several calls to check the identities of customers for writing cheques to pay for their purchases. However, when I got back from that long coffee break, nobody official complained about it.
Lynda was undoubtedly a teaser and she knew how to provoke me by saying Mr. Ali you just cannot take off whenever you feel like. You got the responsibilities here in the store, you know.
It didn’t take too long for me to ask her to have lunch with me. Then it became a regular thing for us. We started seeing each other more frequently and our friends in the store found so many ways of gossiping about us. We decided to put an end to all those gossips. We started living together in a three bedroom apartment in a brand new building with a swimming pool which was the main attraction for the girls, Ruth and Maxine. The building was located very close to the mall as well as their school.
However, Lynda’s mom wasn’t happy with Lynda’s decision to move in with a Muslim “Foreigner” and I didn’t blame her at all. The fact of the matter was that I was new to the community. Nobody knew about my background except that I had a good job and good education. That is not necessarily an overriding factor for everything else and she was just being a caring mother. The funny thing was that Lynda didn’t care who I was. She believed in me unequivocally and I fell in love with her for her broadmindedness, non-judgemental attitude and level of tolerance. She was indeed the most extraordinary woman I ever met in my life. It took a while for Lynda to reconcile with her mom. In the end, her mother became very supportive and kind to me and I started calling her mom.
At the time of Lynda’s separation, they had no option but to sell their house and the obvious choice for mom was to go live with Estelle and her family which she did.
When the Store Manager found out that we started living together, he wanted to have a word with Lynda. I don’t exactly know how the conversation went but all I knew was that she told him exactly where to go, what he can do with his job, and she walked out from his office. There were no flies on her. She knew that she didn’t need a job as I was making enough money for both of us and I was totally committed to look after her and the girls. Besides, she had no time to work for anybody else when girls and I were keeping her extremely occupied.
What she was totally upset about was the fact that the Store Manager never brought it up with me. Nevertheless, it was in our best interest that I continue to work there.
We had a kind of routine in our lives as Lynda had everything under control. The girls used to visit their father on most weekends and agreed holidays. We used to take the girls out for hamburgers on the weekends when they were not with their father. We would sit out at the restaurant which was close to the Toronto Airport and watch the airplanes taking off and landing. Occasionally, we used to go to the Howard Johnson hotel on the Airport Road where they had a nice family restaurant as well as an English pub. The girls used to like to go there to eat anything other than hamburgers. When the girls were with their father on the weekends, I remember taking Lynda to the pub where we had a nice time. Those were indeed the innocent days of our lives.
Lynda was extremely busy with her daily activities:
- After sending girls to school in the morning, she used to make breakfast for us and I would go to work at the store around 10:00 AM;
- After finishing lunches for the girls and sending them back to school, she would make lunch for us as I used to come home from the store for lunch around 12:30 PM;
- She used to make sandwiches and tea for us when I would come back from the store around 4:15 PM and go to my regular job at Playtex around 4:45 PM; and
- In addition to making breakfasts, lunches, and suppers for everybody, she used to wait up with a hot meal for me to get home around midnight when I used to come home from Playtex.
On top of everything else, mom used to come and stay with us for an extended period of time and Lynda would look after her, too. What a miracle worker she was.
The City of Brampton had built a multi-story apartment building for seniors very close to the hospital in Brampton. Lynda somehow managed to get a one-bedroom apartment for mom for a very reasonable monthly rent which was based on mom’s monthly income. It was getting to be difficult for her to go upstairs for her meals when she was living in Estelle’s basement. Mom liked living independently in a new building where she used to go down for coffee with other residents and she started making friends to go with on the bus to a mall with her scooter.
Our daily activities were so normalized that we started feeling like a family. The only thing we were missing was that we were not married. It was very important for me to talk to Lynda about my background and upbringing before we got serious about getting married. She did her best to discourage me by saying that there’s nothing you are going to tell me which will change my mind about marrying you.
Nonetheless, I went ahead and told her one night all about how I was brought up, how I struggled to get educated, and who helped me to go to Qatar.
