Unarmed Opponents

Last night, I wrapped on my beloved Tassah silk sari and poddled over to the library to assist the New Canadian Centre—a local NGO that helps immigrants navigate the labyrinth of forms and procedures necessitated by choosing to live in a socialist bureaucracy—raise funds by selling international cake recipe calendars. My function was to entertain the audience by giving a reading from my first book while they scarfed down samples of the cake.

 Of all the new duties I’ve acquired since becoming an author, the one I enjoy least is giving readings. (It used to be book-signings, but they were so painfully awkward, both for me and for the poor customers in the store trying to avoid me, that I no longer torture us that way.)  Which is a pity, because readings are about the only thing an author has to offer as live entertainment. (Unless, of course, you’d like to hear me ring the C, B, Bflat, A and G bells in Hall of the Mountain King. But I must warn you, without the rest of the bell choir, you won’t recognize the tune.)

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with readings. I quite enjoy them when I’m in the audience, especially when the venue is stocked with large amounts of good quality Merlot. However, when I’m the one standing at the podium, it becomes an extremely stressful experience, made worse by my inability to drink, because I can’t read when my vision is blurred.  

Readings come in four sections:

Section 1: An introduction to tell the audience who I am and why I’m qualified to entertain them. So far, this function has always been performed by someone else, and it’s the only part of a reading I truly enjoy, since they always make me sound much more exciting and important than I actually am.

Section 2: A few minutes of warm-up patter. In the beginning, I took the advice of internet experts and asked the audience a question related to the topic I intended to read about. This, like so much internet wisdom, turned out to be baloney. Most audiences were too shy to respond, and twice I ran across people who felt the only way to properly answer the question was by sharing their life story. So now, I just say something about where I got the idea for the book, usually cribbed from the Author’s Note, which serves the double purpose of forestalling the inevitable question later.

Section 3: The reading. This is the easiest section for me. I’ve been reading since I was five-years-old.

Section 4: The dreaded question period. This is where it all goes pear-shaped. People are unpredictable. They could ask me anything. Which would be okay, if I had some sort of content filtering system between my brain and my mouth. But I don’t. I have no idea what my answer is until hear myself say it. As a result, I spend most of question period fighting back the urge to fake a coronary event.

Last night’s question period started innocently enough with questions like: “Why did you go to India?” and “What do you miss most about India.” I have really good answers for these questions, since I’ve asked myself the same thing thousands of times before. Then came questions like: “How do you get a book published?” I have strong opinions on this topic as well, but have trained myself not to say them aloud, because I never squelch another’s dreams if I can avoid it.

Eventually, I looked around the room and saw no hands raised. Relieved to have once again successfully navigated the perilous waters of question period, I was about to launch into my closing spiel when a woman wearing a hijab stood up and in very soft, strongly accented, extremely stilted English, said something I didn’t quite catch about Prime Ministers.

I was fairly sure she’d phrased her remarks as a statement, not a question, but since English was obviously her second language, I made allowances for vocabulary and pronunciation. I asked her to repeat her question.

She responded with more statements to the effect that India and Pakistan were not hard on women because the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan were women and it was their duty to take care of other women. Still no question and I couldn’t figure out what I’d said that she was responding to.

Now this was where I had to make an embarrassing admission: I’m politicophobic (No, I did not just make that up. It’s a real word used to describe someone with a morbid fear of politics.) The only head of state I can name is Obama, and that’s simply because my American Facebook friends like to post news items about him, which I make a point of clicking past as quickly as possible to maintain my chronically low blood pressure. I have no idea who the Prime Minister of Canada is, let alone India or Pakistan.

The woman remained standing, waiting for an answer to her non-question.

What I should have done was thank her for the information and launch into my closing spiel. Instead, I listened to myself, with burgeoning horror, making a snippy remark along the lines of - If improving conditions for women featured in the electoral mandate for those Prime Ministers, as far as I could tell from my time in India, they hadn’t gotten around to implementing that part of the plan yet - a stupid thing to say on so many levels, not the least of which was the futility of sarcasm couched in language the woman in the hijab could not possibly have understood. I knew nothing about what those Prime Ministers had promised or done. I knew nothing about the status of women in Pakistan or even any part of India other than Chennai.  

I was mortified by my performance. The woman sat down abruptly, which made me feel ten times worse. Fortunately, another member of the audience (may she be forever blessed) piped up with one last innocuous question about my next book, which I managed to answer before rushing through an abbreviated closing spiel and collapsing into the nearest chair.

This morning, I made a belated attempt to educate myself, in the event I ever have to face the same statement/question again. I figured it would take me a long time to sift through thousands of news reports and magazine articles. In fact, it took very little time at all, because last night’s disaster was—to misquote Pogo—a battle of wits between two unarmed opponents. The Prime Ministers of both countries are male.