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CHAPTER 1 |
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Much
to the shock of his family,
Mr. Singh rather enjoyed delivering
newspapers. Who would have
thought
that Gurdial Singh, former
chief engineer for India Railways,
the largest transportation
company
in the world, would be dropping
newspapers at people’s
doors commencing at 5:05 each
morning. He didn’t need
to work. But since coming to
Toronto four years ago, he
had absolutely insisted on
it. No
matter that he was turning
seventy-four-years old on Thursday
next. Yes, it
was a silly little job, Mr.
Singh was forced to concede
to his
wife, Bimal, and their three
daughters, but he liked it.
That’s why Mr. Singh was humming an old Hindi tune
to himself as he walked briskly through the early-winter darkness on a cold
Monday morning, the seventeenth of December.
He entered the marble-appointed
lobby of The Market Place Tower,
a luxury condominium on Front
Street, and gave a friendly
wave to Mr. Rasheed, the night concierge. The Globe and Mail newspapers
were neatly stacked just inside
the door beside a diminutive
plastic Christmas tree. How strange,
in a country covered in forests,
that they would use plastic trees,
Mr. Singh thought as he hitched
up his grey flannel pants and
bent down to cut the binding
cord with his pocketknife. He
sorted the papers into twelve
stacks, one for each floor on
his route. It had been easy to
memorize which residents took
a paper, and it was a simple
matter to walk down the deserted
hallways and drop them squarely
at each door.
The solitude was very nice. So unlike the clutter of
Delhi. When he arrived at the top floor, Mr. Singh knew he would see the one
person who was always awake. Mr. Kevin something. Mr. Singh could never remember
Mr. Kevin’s last name, even though the gentleman was one of the most
famous people in Canada. There he would be, in his shabby bathrobe, a cigarette
cupped
in his right hand, cup of tea in his left, scratching his gray beard with his
shoulder, anxiously awaiting his morning paper.
Mr. Kevin was the host of a morning radio show that was
broadcast across the country. Mr. Singh had tried to listen to it a few times,
but it was just a lot of chatter about fishing in Newfoundland, fiddle music
in the Ottawa Valley and farming on the prairies. These Canadians were funny
people, most of them lived in cities but all they seemed to discuss was the
countryside.
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