Imaginary Breakfast with Real People

There’s nothing for us in this country, my Iraqi roommate says the second morning after my arrival in Kelowna, as he breaks bread into small chunks and dunks them in cold milk. Except for daily drudgery at $15.65. He hands me a bowl of grapes and says: Aren’t there good schools in India? I nod; he nods. We agree on things we don’t fully comprehend. Running his hand over his thick beard, he proclaims like a prophet— We are here to clean white people’s shit! Do you know how to clean? I shrug, my mind oscillating in a thick fog of longing and separation, propelled by a desire to escape or surrender. I know a place where they will hire you, but you will have to make piss and shit your best friend. They even pay $2 extra. He forces a smile. In the kitchen, a clogged sink is slowly suffocating in a sludge of leftovers, and I dream of Tamor heaving and gushing from the foothills of Kanchenjunga, carrying no guilt of shifting places. The heaviness percolates in drip, drip, drip of decay. If I were you, he says, staring dreamily into space, I’d finish school and go back to India. There’s nothing for us . . . His beard points eastward, to an imaginary homeland he gave up on years ago in hopes of escaping the despairing and diabolic ring that echoes from the shallow waters of Karbala and ends in the dregs of Tim Hortons coffee cups.

From Between Two Valleys, a Lake (Anstruther Press, 2025).