Sing Singh

By Harjinder Singh

Teja Singh and his son Amrik live in a bachelor society in the Dominion of Canada. Together they sell sweets and snacks at the mills and canneries in order to save enough money to send for the rest of their family in Punjab, India. When Amrik decides to take shortcuts things go awry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329610699

Harjinder Singh

Harjinder Singh is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Massey Institute of Food Science and Technology. He is also the Co-Director of the Riddet Institute, a National Centre of Research Excellence in food science and nutrition. Professor Singh's research focuses on milk protein structures and functionality, food emulsions, protection and encapsulation of bioactive compounds, and digestive behavior of food structures. He has published over 300 research papers in international journals, and is co-inventor of 15 patents some which have formed the basis of commercial innovations. He has presented over 110 keynote addresses at national and international conferences.

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Sing Singh

Copyright

Sing Singh© 2010 Harjinder Singh. All rights reserved.  Sing Singh© 2014 Digital Edition by Nalanda University Press.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, their distinctive likeness and related elements featured in this book are registered or unregistered trademarks of the author(s). If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by an information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.  This is a work of speculative fiction. All of the characters, names, products, incidents, organizations, religions and dialogue in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used satirically, as parody and/or fictitiously. Nalanda University Press™ is an unregistered trademark of Little Big Lion ™ . All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-329-61069-9

The sun had risen slowly and was now spreading a livid, golden light over a cluster of cabins and shanties made out of corrugated iron and logs that were collectively known throughout the mills and canneries and mines in the Semiahmoo Bay area of Vancouver as Sugar Row. The newspapers had once called Sugar Row a cesspool of depraved, Hindoo demon worshipers that partook in voodoo rituals that required chickens and tar and music to open the gates of hell in the Dominion of Canada.  They claimed that its inhabitants were good-for-nothing cheats and vagrants who were a blight on society selling their black magic sweets and snacks to poor, unsuspecting lumbermen and miners.  But seen through other eyes, written by another hand, the newspapers could have said something else altogether. They could have said Sugar Row was the embodiment of the relentless pioneer spirit that built Canada.  That its inhabitants were farmers, poets, warriors and dreamers who had been lured to Canada by fancy handbills and gross exaggerations of free land and high wages spread by the politicians and cartels to flood the labor pool.

Yes, indeed thousands of handbills went out overseas advertising a dream and thousands of foreign slaves came back, deceived and disillusioned by the elite who had played them for fools.  There was no free land. Not for the Chinese. Not for the Japanese. Not even for the East Indian British subjects who had fought, killed, defended and protected the British Empire in the ‘Little Wars’ as they had once been called.  And like fish to the hook these newly arrived pioneers were stuck in a country foreign to their hearts, squirming and thrashing helplessly, left with nothing but their will to survive and each other.

But what did it matter. The cartels and politicians had driven down wages and elevated profit. They had their cheap labor and they had it in abundance. Instead of paying fifteen cents an hour they had increased their labour pool to such a degree that they could get away with paying one or two cents an hour.  The cartels made money. The politicians received ‘gifts’. Everyone else got screwed.  And when the elite achieved their businesses goals and saw their handbill rouse had worked much better than they had expected, that the foreigners were pouring into Vancouver by the thousands, they very quickly maneuvered to shut down the gates of Canada, afraid to be taken over.

Once again they pulled out their wallets and yanked on their money strings to make the media and politicians dance to their newly adopted tune of ‘White Canada Forever’. And dance they did. The media inspired fear with articles about a ‘Brown and Yellow Invasion’. The politicians drew up laws, taxes and red tape that prevented the wives and children of these newly arrived pioneers from joining them. These Asian pioneers hadn’t been lured so that they could start families and settle the land. They had been lured so that the cartels could drive down the costs of labor and turn a fair wage into a slave wage.

These Asians could come here and work off the debt they had acquired for the journey to the Dominion, and then they could return to their families with nothing but their tails between their legs. That was the plan and this plan would form the foundation for the new model for slavery in the modern world.  And that is something you’ll never read about in a Canadian history book or be required to learn in school because those wallets that controlled the political and media strings all those years ago still yank at and manipulate those strings and continue to control the nation’s narrative. 

Yes, indeed, seen through other eyes, written by another hand, the newspapers could have said that Vancouver wasn’t only settled by a few privileged men in fancy black suits but thousands of Asians who ended up on the fringes of society living in bachelor communities because of a lie that had been advertised as a dream. No, Sugar Row wasn’t a cesspool of depraved Hindoo worshippers who partook in voodoo rituals. Its inhabitants were British subjects who had never even heard of voodoo and who were all quite baffled when the first few newspaper articles came out accusing them of chicken slaughter, black magic and plans for a Voodoo Invasion. The articles intrigued them as much as they scared the good people of Vancouver who were desperately preparing for a magical invasion that never came.

No, the inhabitants of Sugar Row were not voodoo Hindoos. They were Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus, subjects of the British Empire who had been uprooted and disenfranchised