During the spring of 1967, an informal Indian group organized an evening of entertainment, with a fashion parade of costumes from India and a short dance drama produced by Rubena Sinha. I recall Ganga performed a Bharata Natyam dance. Since she was in the early stages of pregnancy, we kept our fingers crossed about her bouts of morning sickness.
That summer I too got pregnant but Providence had other plans for me and I miscarried. A few weeks later, I got a part-time job offer from the University of Manitoba, to teach a freshman course. I had given my resume to the English departments of both U of M and United College (which a year later became the University of Winnipeg) and was marking for a Professor at the U. of Manitoba, and so both departments knew about me. Just before classes started, I got a call from Prof Walter Swayze, head of the department at United College, asking if I was interested in a job interview for a full time opening. Of course I was.
My resume was impressive enough. Except for a couple of B+ and a B, I had As and A+s all the way from both Indiana University and Michigan State University. The B was in 19th century American literature, a course in which there were innumerable names and titles that I had never heard of before. The other tough course was the Milton course – with William Riley Parker, who was at the time engaged in writing Milton’s biography. So all our minor assignments were on such biographical details as finding out Milton’s date of birth, year when he went totally blind and such. I don’t know who was more appalled at my first assignment, he that there could be a graduate student who didn’t know the ABC of documentation or I at the number of red pencilling across all the pages! Prof. Parker was not only an eminent Milton scholar but also the author of the indispensable Manual of the Modern Languages Association, that dictated every aspect of documentation – that footnotes should have the author’s first name first and the bibliography should have the last name first; where one uses single quotes and where double; whether the comma is placed at the end of a quote or after the quotation marks and such innumerable picky details that I had never heard of in India. That experience with the basics of essay-documentation developed a mental block in me and though I have published a great many critical papers, I still carry that mental block and have to check my documentation a dozen times before I send out any essay for publication! Now that I am retired, I can sit back and just write!
My resume being impressive enough, the Head and the Dean (Ed Eagle) were cordial and the interview was a breeze. At the interview, the Head and the Dean had an exchange in a low voice that I was not supposed to hear, but the Head said that since they had just appointed someone with a Master’s degree at a salary of $8000, I should be offered $8500 because I was so near getting my Ph.D.
I mentioned at the interview that I had accepted a part-time job at the U of Manitoba but Dr. Swayze said he would take care of it. He did, and in those days all it needed was a phone call to the Head at the U of M. to release me from the contract. Just the other day, when I was shredding unwanted papers of the last forty years, I came across that letter.
Recently a colleague asked me to write about racism-related experiences in my life and all I could say was that Canada was a different country in the 1960s, and my sari and British-India accent elicited appreciation and curiosity and never animosity. Nor did I ever suffer gender discrimination at my workplace. Yes, in the 1960s, we thought we had made a good decision in choosing to emigrate to Canada rather than to the U.S.
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