Boarding houses have long fascinated me with their louche, transient quality. In his memoir, The Enigma of Arrival, V.S. Naipaul reflects on the boarding house he first inhabited upon immigrating from Trinidad to London in the 1950s:
"I felt that at one time, perhaps before the war, it had been a private house; and (though knowing nothing about London houses) I felt it had come down in the world. Such was my tenderness towards London, or my idea of London. And I felt, as I saw more and more of my fellow lodgers - Europeans from the Continent and North Africa, Asiatics, some English people from the provinces, simple people in cheap lodgings - that we were all in a way campers in the big house."
People of diverse backgrounds live in close proximity - fragments of their pasts butt up against each other, all the while remaining largely unreadable. Ironically, it is only years later, after Naipaul has become a celebrated writer, that he realizes the boarding house would make prime literary material. At the time, as a fledgling writer, he was obsessed with validating another "idea of London," one that he confesses was drawn from Dickens. A London based on class and hierarchy, the very principles being eroded upon his arrival in the 50s.
Until recently, my father's childhood was veiled in mystery, too. He grew up in 1950s Toronto, at Bloor and Lansdowne - not an easy place to inhabit amidst the post-war discrimination against Japanese-Canadians. While researching my own memoir, probing my dad with questions, I discovered that the house at Lansdowne had been a boarding house. My pulse quickened. One day, we went there together and as I stood in front of the sagging porch, the place caught hold in my imagination. Ancestors and family members came alive as characters, from my fragile, ex-beauty queen grandmother to the grandfather I'd never met. He'd died under mysterious circumstances the year before I was born, and no one in the family liked to talk about him, save the rare allusion to "Kaz's dark side." Later that evening, I started a short literary piece to explore a family in decay.
But now I want to find out what really happened. To connect with the past. Later this week, I plan to revisit the house.
Photo from: here
