This time I’m rolling the clock back to 1999. The period when we were still in Dubai.
A couple of years ahead of ’99, one fine day while doing whatever it is that one does in that city, this having been nagging me for some time, I arrived at a conclusion that, long term, Dubai could never be our permanent abode. A view which was not unique to me since at that time, sooner or later almost all expats working there ended up having to make a similar decision. With this pesky thought constantly reverberating in my mind, possibly in a moment of weakness or more likely becoming just another one of the hordes of rats following the Pied Piper of Hamlen Town, I had gone ahead and initiated the paperwork required for the family to immigrate to Canada.
That having been done, during the intervening years, having all but forgotten that our application was in the pipeline, it came as a bit of a surprise when sometime in the latter half of ’98 I received a letter from the Canadian immigration department advising me that all 4 of the family were required to attend a personal interview in their office in Detroit. To cut a long story short, with the formality of that interview having been dispensed with, a year later in October we went through the process of becoming Canadian landed immigrants. For those who may not be aware of this, the term ‘Landing’ is used in Canadian bureaucratic parlance to describe the initial visit to Canada where, at the point of entry (in our case this being Toronto airport), a final validation of one’s immigration documents is done by Canadian immigration officials, reconfirming that everything is in order for one’s permanent residence in Canada.
Madhav having completed his schooling in Dubai, in applying to various universities, had also applied to a couple of Canadian universities, including one to Acadia University located in Halifax. That application having been accepted; wanting to kill not just two, but many more birds with that one stone, I had timed our landing in Toronto with his University admission.
The underlying deviousness of the timing being my understanding that as a landed immigrant, Madhav’s university fees would be discounted by as much as 40%. It being another matter altogether that this information which I had swallowed hook, line & sinker ended up being a canard, a misunderstanding which hit me (hard) only when I actually dipped into my pockets to settle his first fees across the counter.
A day after our arrival in Toronto, having gathered our wits around us, we went across to a rental agency to pick up a car to set off on a two-day cross-country drive to Wolfville which ‘town’ is where Acadia University is located. Arriving there we realised that Wolfville was nothing more than a tiny village which had likely popped up after the establishment of the University. Barring the exceptionally large campus, the rest of that one-horse-town was a single street which a person could hop-skip-and-jump across with the least amount of extra effort. Having run through the formalities and paperwork, with Madhav being left to fend for himself, we headed back to Toronto to try and properly plant our roots as wannabe Canadian citizens.
Which exercise ended within a couple of weeks from when it had started. A decade earlier, having relocated from a spacious bungalow surrounded by a massive bungalow compound in Assam to Dubai where, while nowhere as expansive as the one in Assam, we were living in a villa which had a decent sized garden around it, here we were in Toronto, cooped up in a characterless apartment without the company of our dogs. Just the thought that this would be our fate for at least the next 3 to 4 years being enough to give me the heebie-jeebies. The bottom line being that following a short 45-day sojourn in what we had convinced ourselves would be our El Dorado, Kitty, Muskan and yours truly found ourselves seat-belted on our airline seats heading back to Dubai. Which is where we stayed for the next year before we finally relocated to Sri Lanka in 2000.
During the 3+ years that Madhav was at Acadia, business exigencies had me
visiting Toronto at least once every six months. On four of those occasions, keeping an extra week in hand and since I love driving, I ended up making a 2-day each way round trip to Wolfville where, on each visit, I would spend just 24 hours with Madhav, each time staying in the same (the only one I believe) B&B establishment in the boondocks of Wolfville. On each visit there, Madhav would make a conscientious effort to make sure I stayed put in the village and away from the Univ. On two of those visits to Wolfville, there was some convoluted cock & bull story about some ongoing activity in the campus which added up to it having been declared as a ‘no-visitor-in-the campus’ period. Which meant that my son would amble across from the campus to meet me at the B&B, with the two of us then spending the evening in either one or the other of the two watering holes in Wolfville, downing pints of beer.
On the other two occasions, without informing him of my visit and having managed to beat Madhav at his game, I landed up in the campus unannounced. On the first of those two, Madhav very cleverly managed to steer me away from his accommodation (‘my roommate has some action ongoing in the place’) and made sure that none of his professors were available for a chat with me. The second time around, while the 
professors were again mysteriously unavailable, I was VERY reluctantly given the honour of being allowed to peep into his accommodation. One glance was enough to make me recoil and stumble backwards – neatly stacked one on top of the other, one whole wall of that room was as though having been built with beer cartons of various brands. The obvious conclusion which flashed across my mind being that Madhav’s sojourn in the university was being treated as party time and followed by my somewhat alarmed question to my son, was casually shrugged off with ‘we collect the empties from the bars to make our space look trendier.’ Not that I believed a word but there was bugger all I could do about it.
That I fretted and worried about where Madhav was heading, it was only well after he graduated from Acadia and took up a job in Toronto that he shared some photographs of his (a couple of which this yarn is peppered with) time in the university which, had I set eyes on them while he was supposed to be studying there, would have knocked me out cold.
Should the proof be needed of the veracity of the adage ‘all’s well that ends well’ (one 
which I firmly believe in and live with) one need only look towards Madhav who, despite all his obvious shenanigans during his university tenure, once out in the wide world with his graduation degree in hand, landed beautifully on his two feet. Having taken up a job and working in Toronto for five years, the very next day after he got his Canadian passport, he was on a flight back to India. It being an accepted fact that every youngster hankers to head from East to West, my dear son is the only one who headed in the opposite direction. His warped logic being “There is no cricket in Canada.” Which sport, since he moved back to India, is what he has been involved with.
Having got carried away and having vaulted a few years ahead, I’m rewinding the clock back to the year after Madhav graduated and came to visit us in Sri Lanka. On reaching home and unpacking his suitcase he very proudly handed me a set of four glass beer mugs emblazoned with “ACADIA” across the front of each.
The return present and my money’s worth for the $200K I had shelled out!!