You remember arriving at Toronto’s airport, and changing money. The surprise of finding Queen Elizabeth’s profile on the coins and bills. And then the recall of older histories twining this Britishness to the Pax Britannia legacy of India: expulsion of Komatu Maru’s Sikhs based on immigration policies dictated by the imperative to maintain the racial purity of the Canadian nation. Also the Jack London stories of fur trappers, lumber men and gold prospectors and scenes from Ondtaaje’s novels.

Yet Canada, when you stepped out of the airport glass doors, and rode a bus on the highways towards a train station felt like U.S.A, except of course for those highway markers subtitled in French. And the same flatness of the Great Plains, and the vegetation or the lack of it here; in the temperate zones as recalled from middle school geography; it was in Grade 4, you think, that you covered North America. However you could feel, perhaps in a psychological sense, feel the northern latitude. That was as far north as you had gotten so far, you with your tropical blood.

The few low and sparse trees you remember standing in the plain on either side of highway were still bare; this in the middle of May. And then the echoes of a Lisel Muller’s poem on riding with the spring, in the reverse direction, north to south, from Maine to Georgia, to find herself standing in the dense swampy shade of ash oaks in summer. The ways in which poetry is tied to memory, the ways in which it becomes a shorthand, a mnemonic device to enfold time in.

And soon the train with its linoleum floors, plastic seats, and cargo of faces of every kind (black, white, brown, yellow, human) carried you to the city center. You were spending the night at the Youth Hostel, off King Street, which sat of course next to the Queen Street. Downtown Toronto had a kind of tentative newness when compared to New York City of the previous few days. You later read that most of these water front streets adjoining Lake Ontario were once occupied by dowdy warehouses and factories. Then all those buildings of steel and glass must have been of recent manifestation, recent giant tombstones.

Yet, what struck you most about Toronto streets were not these structures of steel and glass but the silence, and the absolute absence of people vis-¨¤-vis the frenetic madness of New York City streets. And this on a Thursday evening. It was as if you had accidentally arrived in a theatre all too soon, and were seated with few others before the curtain opened and something happened on stage ¨C till then the all too loudness of your breath. Perhaps this is the loneliness and loathing that you have read veteran travelers like Paul Theroux and Pico Iyer write about.

After dumping the bags over your bunk bed, you picked up a map and headed out to the water, past the railroad station, past the giant indoor stadium where ice hockey is probably played, past the pack of bums who kept darting in and out of the traffic at red lights with upturned hats for drinking money, ducking under the expressway, down to the lakefront, which is nearly silent and deserted. You wondered if your arrival was taken as the herald of the plague, and if the citizenry had evacuated in advance, leaving behind a few stragglers, wrapped in woolens against the breeze coming of the bay?

A mile or so from where you sat, your face shifting in the lake water as setting sun glinted off it, there was an island; you could see houses standing amidst clumps of tree branches; a different kind of sparsity there, of landscape, of people. Eye tracking the sunlight falling obliquely over the glass gravestones, which too were set wide apart, all along the water front, as if to cover all the expanse of naked space, as if land there was still to be had for taking. And the needle of the CN Tower imperceptibly revolving about its axis. A lyric from Gulzar came to you then; about a revolving restaurant high up, 60th or 70th floor, and one pair of hands enveloping others' as if they were two purses secreting away two stalks of maize for the winter.

And then soon enough darkness began to fall. Evening hours can be the loneliest hours, especially if you are a stranger in a strange and seemingly deserted city. You got up, zipping up your rain jacket against the coolness of the night; an eighteen degree centigrade May evening, unimaginable in the tropics. A long walk along the waterfront, through blocks of newly built condominiums, through new construction sites, through the touristy attractions of faux gondola and sail ship rides; shore birds there, you couldn't identify any of them, until you leaned over the railing to greet some mallard ducks, and shivered imperceptibly.

For there in the garbage that collects at the edge of any urban water body, a pure white swan, its neck bend in pure repose. Proving something? That occasions of beauty shine through even the bleak hours, and startle open the eyes? You remember the silence then, on the quay; and this image of you, the lone human for half a mile or so on the lakefront, joining with the that of Leda, already full in being, in those polluted waters of Lake Ontario.

to be continued...