100 Million Love Songs,

All Right Here in the

First Chapter

T
he fantastic voyage began on a sandy paradise for
fishers and their children in 1973. This is where and when Bumi
was born, his face all small and crinkly, brown and wide-eyed
wonder at the implausibility of being plucked from his mother’s womb
while she lay bleeding on a dirt floor silently and stubbornly refusing to
cry out at the pain of birth. He was the Bugis boy with a Javanese name
chosen by his Javanese mother. She had, for the most part, let her own
traditions slip away as the years and the island colluded to make her
their own. Rilaka became her new motherland, its Buginese language her
lingua franca. Her firstborn’s name was a tribute to that natal part of her,
and because it meant ‘earth’ in her faraway mother-tongue, it honoured
the place of his birth in a multicultural chorus.
From the beginning Bumi’s eyes pierced harder than any other’s, glow-
ering while his father forced him to try football, glowing brightly at the
chance to help the man count market money from mainland fish sales. By
age four he’d humbled his father by becoming a faster and more accurate
bookkeeper. He also spoke better Indonesian, a skill his father exploited

1
for price negotiations with mainlanders. By age five he was bored with
accounting and took to engineering.
Bumi’s father, a wiry man with surprising strength and audaciously
self-granted authority, went looking for the boy late one evening after he
failed to come home for supper. On their tiny island of a hundred people,
any lost child not found in five minutes was assumed drowned. Yusupu
was not worried. Bumi was no likely drowning victim, the first five-year-
old potentially smarter than the sea.
Yusupu found Bumi on the far, sloping side of the island where no
one had ever bothered to build or settle. It was simply too far away
from the others. In recent years it had become a place where the women
gathered to make clothing when they wanted to get away from the
tourists.
Bumi was there cursing a foul black streak the likes of which Yusupu
hadn’t heard in all his years on boats, not from his father or grandfather,
nor any other man he’d known.
“Bumi! What’s wrong?” he shouted, half in anger and half in concern.
“I can’t get it tied!” Bumi retorted, pointing in frustration at a small
tangle of netting and thirty empty plastic pop bottles. “My fingers are
too small!”
“Why do you want to tie them?” Yusupu asked. The sharpness in his
voice was all but gone.
“You tie them at one end to make it float. Then you can leave it and go
play,” Bumi explained. “Then you come back and you have fish. So you
have more time to play with me, Daddy.”
Yusupu was not an exceptionally hard-working man, but he did spend
six hours a day at sea — six hours Bumi felt would be better spent playing
with him. While flotation nets have existed in fishing cultures for cen-
turies, Rilaka’s more labour-intensive methods worked to keep the men
out of the women’s hair for six hours a day, and vice versa, and to make
physically strong, hardy men for an island left naked in the exposure of
rain and merciless sun.
Like most human innovations Bumi’s idea had unforeseen impacts.
The lighter workload and greater cash flow that came their way (once

2
Yusupu caught on and got to tying what Bumi’s little fingers couldn’t)
resulted not in more play time with his father, but less. And the time he
did spend with the man became much less pleasant.
Though Yusupu and the other Rilakan fishers had never before felt
any need for alcohol, which was taboo, it was free time, and the rum that
helped pass it, that changed Bumi’s father. On finding themselves with
unprecedented time on their hands, and not having any particular desire
to return to their families, Rilaka’s fishers began visiting a little bar with a
live musician near the seaport after the catch was sold. The toxins in the
liquor put the inexperienced drinkers in a collectively ill mood, and most
of them disliked the numbing effect of too many drinks. Only Yusupu’s
stubbornness pushed him forward until he had drunk more than his fill
several nights in a row. His cohorts would keep him company and switch
to coffee after just one glass of strong rum. Yusupu drank every night,
long after the others had tired of alcohol.
It seemed to Bumi that when Yusupu drank, all the man’s frustrations
bubbled to the surface. The first time Yusupu hit him forever changed
his understanding of pain. There was no desire in it at all, just deep
disappointment.
He had stayed up late, determined to see his father before dream time.
He had refused to come home, afraid that sleep would overtake him if
he got too comfortable. Instead he stayed by the shore playing long after
the tourists had returned to the mainland and the other children had
gone to sleep. He drew pictures in the sand with a stick to pass the hours
after sunset, past midnight even, bleary-eyed and obsessed with the single
thought of his father. When the boats finally returned Bumi ran to them
and watched open-mouthed as the other men helped his father over the
gunwale. Yusupu retched and spit into the sea he’d always told Bumi was
sacred.
“Daddy!” Bumi cried, thinking Yusupu was hurt. He ran to him,
pushing through the other men to offer a hand.
Yusupu looked down at Bumi and sneered. “What are you doing up?”
Bumi swallowed and looked up at Yusupu, who pulled back his mat-
ted salt-and-pepper hair. Even hunched over, Yusupu towered over the

3
boy like a giant sea creature lurching onto the land. “Waiting for you,”
Bumi said.
The men laughed and one tussled Bumi’s hair. “He misses you,” one
of them told Yusupu, who smiled a bemused smile, took the boy up into
his arms, and carried him home.
Yusupu kept smiling until he had crouched in through the door of
their little house. Then he put Bumi down and took him by the arm,
looked the boy in the eyes, and said, “Don’t you ever embarrass me like
that again.”
He gave a half-smile and slapped Bumi’s face. Bumi’s lips quivered and
a tear came to his eye. “Are you going to cry now, Son?” Yusupu asked.
“Are you going to embarrass me further?”
Bumi swallowed hard, sucking a head full of tension down his throat.
His body was shaking, but he didn’t cry. He shook his head solemnly ‘no.’
“Good,” Yusupu said, jerking his head to the side. “Go to sleep.”

4
 When the Reception Fades to Zero in
Chapter 2,
Turning Up the Volume Won’t Help

T
oronto is everything good and everything bad
about a city. It is everything intense, frenetic, and exciting,
everything dull, drab and dreary. Everything fun and everything
frightening can be experienced here. It is a place you can do anything you
could do anywhere else: eat the food, dance the dance, hear the language
of any culture in the world. It is segregated, sanctioned and compartmen-
talized. It is all things to everyone and it is fully satisfactory to no one. It
is not exactly my home but it is where I was born and it is where I live.
I was awed and fascinated by the human scars on the streets of my city
when I was wide-eyed and small, pre-cynical and innocent. I wondered
at the filth of homeless people, asked my mother why it was I had to
bathe and they didn’t. She told me, “Because I said so,” or, “Because their
mothers didn’t care enough about them to make them have a bath and
look how they turned out.”
I was never given free reign anywhere in the city, but was reined in
and kept close at all times, hand-held walking, lap-sat on public transit. I
was taught scepticism of strangers, not to talk to them. My very survival

5
depended on this rule, yet I couldn’t follow it and often engaged in idle
chit-chat with random conventioneers on the sidewalk. My memory of
what was said is murky, broken by a large, clearly feminine hand gripping
my shoulder and pulling me back to the safety of my mother’s Great Worry.
And so, under the vice-grip of fierce protection, I learned to fear strangers
and admire their fearful forms from afar. I fit in perfectly in Toronto.
Having never lost my fascination for humans, I studied social work. The
ones who looked at me with a weird mix of longing and anger were the
ones I admired most. I graduated summa cum laude and landed a job at
a community health centre. I was quickly put to task compiling quantita-
tive reports on clients served, and writing fundraising proposals promising
grandiosity beyond human connection. No one would fall through the
cracks thanks to a five-year strategic plan drafted by professional consul-
tants. I had a knack for it and the more I wrote about clients the less I
saw of them. When I did see them it was fleeting. They gave me the Coles
Notes version of all their problems and I made suggestions, like a drive-by
saviour.
I climbed the salary scale right to the ceiling in only four years, at
which point I’d need a new career or a promotion to Executive Director
to improve my financial status. I enacted creativity with language and
numbers, and thanks to me we hired health promoters, nutritionists
and social workers to help keep track of the stream of needy people who
flowed rapidly and powerfully in and out of our doors each day. I was
content when I was twenty-five years old.
It helped that I met Sarah that year. She was a dark-eyed intelligent
fashion model—if you can believe my luck—who looked like she’d
stepped straight off the cover of a Rolling Stones album. Actually she did
mostly department store catalogues, but she was attractive enough that
all my friends seriously wondered if I were blackmailing her.
I met her in an antique store where our perception, attention and gaze
slowly shifted from the same set of plates to each other. “What do you
know about these?” she asked me.
“They’re Acton,” I told her. “Mid-nineteenth century, hand painted
with oil. Great colour, medium condition; I wouldn’t pay this price for

6
them.” There is a meticulous and rigorous part of me that acquires and
hordes these facts like precious stones, and keeps them at the ready to be
shared in order to impress a devastatingly attractive woman.
“Really?” she said nonchalantly, holding the question in the space
between us with her soft, studious brown eyes, wide as the plates in ques-
tion. They compelled me to say more.
“Yes, really,” I said.
“Interesting,” she answered. She was unconvinced.
“They’d be from Cornwall originally,” I offered, unable to stop the
mundane things exiting my mouth.
“Brought back on a trip,” she told me with more authority than my
facts. It was the kind of authority that can be granted only by the imagi-
nation. “For a woman’s collection of things that were kept in medium
condition, just for spite.”
“Spite?”
“Spite. Every day she cleaned the house for him and made all his
favourites for dinner from carefully selected and purchased ingredients.
Little did he care. She laundered and pressed his clothing, took his mes-
sages, and typed his letters. Little did he notice her hard work. All he
noticed was her decline.
“So what was her revenge? She didn’t vacuum all the way to the edge
of the carpet. She didn’t wash the dishes right away. She didn’t maintain
the prize possessions.”
“Like plates.”
“Exactly. She neglected all the little things she knew he wouldn’t notice
anyway, but never the things he would. Never would she under-salt the
sauce or overcook the pasta.”
“Not much of a revenge.”
“Vengeance wasn’t her specialty. She left that to God and outlived her no-
good husband by thirty years. They were the best of her life. Well, mostly.
Those last few years when she was alone and too sick to clean at all, and
her family plate collection sat gathering dust, they were difficult years. Poor
woman died just last month during the ice storm. Here it wasn’t as bad as in
Montreal but it was bad enough for a ninety-four-year-old shut-in.

7
 “So, the grandchildren swarmed the tiny apartment. They were
amazed at the acres of junk stored in one tiny space where a small elderly
woman had spent the last eight years of her living existence.
“They picked and nabbed and claimed bits and pieces here and there,
some for sentimental value, some for kitsch and some for hopelessly opti-
mistic financial value. As if.
“But most of an entire lifetime of acquired little materials ended up
jammed into a Goodwill slot.”
“So, how did this plate get here?” I asked, captivated by her mind’s
wanderings.
“A keen-eyed collector saw it at the Goodwill,” she continued. “Bought
it for a buck, and brought it here so it could enter another collection of
random acquisitions in someone else’s struggle with a mundane mortal-
ity, where material things are a temporary comfort.”
She smiled and gazed at me.
“That’s the saddest plate I’ve ever seen,” I told her.
“No,” she said. “It’s no sadder than any other plate.”
She was the saddest girl I’d ever met.
By the time of the power outage the ice storm’s stories of heroism, trag-
edy, triumph and conception had been replaced with the myriad stories of
September 11, the retaliatory oil wars, severe acute respiratory syndrome
(sars) and West Nile virus. These were the plagues of a vengeful God. Fur-
thermore, Sarah and I had fallen in love, moved in together in an East End
flat, and settled into a routine struggle with a mundane mortality without
even the financial resources to maintain the mediocre comfort of material
things.
I wasn’t miserable mind you. Had I been truly miserable I wouldn’t
have needed the power outage to free me. I was monotonous to other
people, and a little bored myself, that’s all.

the crush began at 7:30am on a southbound bus; standing

room only, glazed eyes on forlorn faces, shipped to our pens on the other
side of the city. The crush got tighter at 7:45, all colours and classes of
crowded multicultural sounds and odours, all absorbed in a short series

8
of words strewn across a long piece of paper: the Metro Daily News-bites
for people on the go. Torontonians. West we went with more filing into
the cargo box at each stop and people shuffling and sliding in the hopes
of avoiding touch and conversation, while our engineer tried to keep us
awake with alliterations on the names of the stops: “Swingin’ Sherbourne
is the next stop! Swingin’ Sherbourne is next!”
An accidental touch here drew a glass-eyed glare, returned with a
mumbled apology.
I stepped onto the northbound train where I could breathe and sit and
read part of the paper, drink from my thermos, power nap or daydream
of something other than report-writing and the needy people I can’t help
even though it’s my vocation and occupies half my waking time.
I stepped off the train and onto a long ride on a long bus, from which
I’ve watched the city develop over the past four years, through a long cor-
ridor of tall buildings, from the bottom of which I never see the sun. It
is only visible there from 11:00 am until 1:00 pm, when I’m in my office.
Eventually I reached my little health centre, situated by a pretty
creek where dragonflies, birds and even deer can be seen in the sum-
mer. I went inside and sat at my computer with my coffee and began an
eight-hour typing shift: social work.
My only client that day was Abdul, a Sri Lankan refugee claimant
and a geneticist who was not allowed to work or attend school until his
refugee hearing, to be held sometime in the next twenty months. Every
time I met with Abdul he sighed deeply, shook his head, and told me the
same thing: “I’m a hard worker, a very hard worker, and I can’t even find
volunteer work.”
That week, like every other week, I had tried and failed to find volun-
teer work for a geneticist. Every lab I asked told me about union troubles.
Volunteer workers take away paid work. Besides, they wondered, how
could they tell if a guy with three Sri Lankan degrees knows how to work
in a Canadian lab?
I dreaded breaking the same bad news to him every week. Every week
he sighed and shook his head and asked me what he should do. Every
week I had no answer.

9
 I wished I could spend the whole day with Abdul, show him the
framed art in our galleries and the graffiti art in our streets, take him to
hockey games, show him the urban expanse below the cn Tower, give
him the therapy of doing something, anything, which he couldn’t do
alone on his ‘material-needs-only’ welfare allowance.
But with reports due to the government funders that hold our exis-
tence in their godly palms, it was my lot and my time allotment to
appease them with sacrificial reports and proposals, occasionally taking
the communion of workshops on budget development, and doing the
ceremonial dance of regulatory lingo. I had but thirty minutes available
for Abdul, during which I referred him to several volunteer agencies,
none of which were likely to have anything for a geneticist.
If I were a Christian, a true Christian, I’d have taken Abdul out and
about in my free time, or given him some money at least. But my per-
sonal budget was carefully and strictly allocated to loan payments, rent,
RRSPs, and scrupulously pre-selected registered charities benefiting from
my benevolence. There was little left for handouts.
My time was equally regimented: forty hours for work, softball on
Mondays, volunteer board meetings on Tuesdays, art class on Wednesdays,
Thursdays were for writing a weekly piece I do for the social workers’ news-
letter, and Fridays were for Sarah. It was her insistence on quality time—
during which we played cards or watched movies, though when we started
we used to sing each other love songs until it got so hot we were naked on
the floor, exhausted, with all the heat rising above us as sleep ensued.
My weekends were dedicated to the never-ending task of fixing up our
fixer-upper house, the only one we could afford in Toronto despite rent-
ing the upstairs to students. It was an ongoing process of drywall, primer,
paint, rewiring, re-shingling, spackle, tar, glue, hammer, sixteen different
kinds of wrenches, 112 kinds of screws and drivers, a drill for tough jobs,
re-spackle the mistakes, sanding through dust and fumes.
What time did I have for clients? Besides, you take one to a ballgame
you gotta take ‘em all, which is well beyond my allotted charity budget.
Abdul left my cubicle with his head hanging as always, and as always
I wondered if there was more I could have done. I put it out of my mind

10
and returned to my budget analysis. Someone was spending too much on
long distance phone calls.
At 4:30, as I was drafting a memo outlining a new policy on long
distance calls, the power went out. There was a collective groan from the
cellblock at the interruption. Technical difficulties again? As if the com-
puters weren’t slow enough.
A strange silence set in, as if time had frozen. The steady hum of the
computers and florescent lights had ceased. Now what?
One by one we staggered into the hallways, overwhelmed by the
frightening possibilities of our newfound freedom. It was the freedom of
nothing to do, or the relative freedom of plenty to do but no tools with
which to do it.
“Power’s out?”
“Look’s like it.”
“Well, let’s see.”
My manager, Sherry, and I strolled around the maze asking intermit-
tently, “Your power out too?”
“Yep, should someone check with maintenance?”
Bill, our maintenance guy, fumbled around with the fuse box for a
while as we stood around wondering aloud what could have caused a
complete power outage.
“Anyone got a battery-operated radio?”
Mabel, our receptionist, had a battery-operated radio in her drawer,
which was filled with gadgets and elastic bands, paper clips and candles,
just-in-cases. The radio explained that a central generator Somewhere-in-
America had gone down. The reasons were as yet unclear.
“Okay Bill, you can stop pretending to problem-solve,” Mabel shouted
to the broom closet.
“What now?” I asked Mabel, Sherry, and two other social workers,
Connie and Maria.
Sherry told me, “If you didn’t think you could go home at 4:30, now
you can.”

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