A younger me wanted nothing more than to be white with a “normal” sounding name during the separatist movement in Québec in the 1980s. I was asking for too much though, I thought—for life to be a little easier, for me to look less different, be less different. The rotis rolled up as burritos stuffed with curry for lunch didn’t help. The Ar-prét, instead of Hahr-pre-eet, would roll off their tongues. I learned that my name wasn’t Punjabi or English, it was French and not in the cool kind of way.

In 1978, my father immigrated to Montreal from India. He was thirty-one. At the age of eighteen, my mother moved from Labrador to study languages at Champlain College in Ste-Foy, a four-semester program. She studied French, English, German, and Spanish until she dropped out in her third semester shortly after she met my father. She was with her mother, my Nani (grandmother in Punjabi), when she met my father in a disco. On March 9, 1981, one week after they met, they married. They drove from Montreal to London, Ontario, to meet with a Justice of the Peace whom my father knew in the Indian community.

On March 9, 1981, my parents got married in London, Ontario. This photo was taken after they “tied the knot.”

When Nani found out that my mother was not in college, she called her. My mother told her that she had married the man she met at the disco. After Nani found out, she had a few drinks and, in an attempt to find my mom, tripped on the porch step and cut her knee open. She drove herself to the hospital. Until this day, Nani says that she has a permanent reminder of my mother’s marriage to my father. My grandfather’s reaction, on the other hand, was simple relief to have one less mouth to feed. 

Two rickshaws going in opposite directions

In 1982, my parents had a ceremony in a Sikh temple, a Gurudwara, in Sector 19 in Chandigarh, India. Without telling my mother, Nani flew from Labrador and made her way to New Delhi. From there, she was supposed to take a train to Chandigarh, but the train was on strike, so she had to take the bus. Without having any clue about India and the extreme wealth disparities, Nani was dressed in her best clothing and jewelry. She only managed to catch the bus safely and make it to Chandigarh with the help of a man from Nepal. After a long bus ride, her final part of the journey was on a rickshaw. My mother found out that Nani was in India when they passed each other on rickshaws going in opposite directions. 

In 1982, my parents had a Sikh wedding ceremony in Sector 19 in Chandigarh, India.

Nani made it there for the ceremony. Many people who were not family also stopped by. It was a novelty to see a gora (meaning a fair-skinned person in Hindi) marry a man from India. It was a marriage of convenience, although I do think there was some love there. My father was in need of immigration status, and my mother was escaping an alcoholic father and an emotionally distant mother. Out of this wedlock, I was born. 

Not Hollywood, not Bollywood, just real life

My father had the immigrant dream, the one you see in Hollywood movies with money and status: the house with the white picket fence, well dressed children, and a beautiful wife. He tried—really tried—to make it here. He imported rice, clothing, and leather from India. Each business attempt was short-lived. Being a brown Sikh turban-wearing man in the middle of French Québec, the hustle was hard, yet he kept on. He picked up a few French words and nailed each encounter with his charm, eventually making the difficult decision to remove his turban and cut his hair. This was a painful regret he often expressed. 

My father in the 1970s before he immigrated to Canada. 

Cakes, newspapers, and overdue rent

While my father was out knocking doors trying to make a sale, my mother was in the kitchen baking. She was the worst cook, but kept us going with her apple pie. It wasn’t your ordinary apple pie—a tastier kind with grated apples. It was a recipe my Nani stumbled upon by mistake when she used the wrong side of the grater, and the technique stuck. But what I remember most were the tiered cakes for weddings she would create, sometimes three levels with water fountains. I would watch as she squeezed tubes of icing, meticulously decorating each one. When she wasn't making cake, she would put us in the car and we would drive to small communities in the South Shore delivering newspapers. We went to places like Sainte Julie and Sainte-Mathieu-de-Beloeil. 

My Nani’s handwritten 1965 Apple Tart recipe which calls for coarsely grated apples. 

12 years, 20 homes, and a million promises

As far back as I can remember, life was chaotic, unstable, and unpredictable. Poverty made things like rent and the other basic necessities of life uncertain. A constant in my life was picking up to go after a knock on the door. Overdue rent would lead to evictions, and unpaid utility bills would make for very cold winters. I never got comfortable, knowing that another move was nearby. I don’t know the number exactly, but I think by the time I was twelve I had lived in about twenty different places. With every move, our “homes” became emptier. The possibility of eviction made us find ways to live that allowed us to flee more easily. Moving around made me easily adaptable. I became chameleon-like, bending myself into new shapes. Each time, I would figure out how to blend in, navigate, and map out how to take care of myself. My survival skills got really sharp, guiding me out of bad situations—when I would listen to myself. I remember life being hard, because I felt mostly bad. I felt inadequate, ashamed, and afraid, and I had a constant feeling in the pit of my stomach telling me I had to “get out.” 

I was more of an inward child. I remember keeping my toys in a closet. One year for Christmas when I was three, my parents bought me this taffeta dress with green velvet on top and a green, gold, and red plaid pattern on the bottom. My mother found me in the closet with a pair of scissors. I had chopped up the bottom of my new dress and my bangs. I cut some of my bangs short, almost to the top of my head, and the rest I cut in a zigzag pattern. 

For my third birthday, my mother made me a cake: Big Bird from Sesame Street.

The birth of a chameleon

My inwardness became more pronounced a few years later when I turned six. I was in an all white French Catholic school in Saint Hubert. My teacher would only pair me in class with an Italian boy because she said we were the same. She also used to tell me that my legs were dirty. During recess, I ran home and dug through my drawers. My mother walked in and asked why I put on tights in the middle of a hot June day. Then, when I went on to Grade One, my teacher failed me. How can a child fail Grade One? I did. At the age of seven, I was told by my teacher that school wasn’t for me. That message was then reaffirmed by almost every teacher in the following years. I didn’t understand back then why I was being punished by my white teachers. 

At home, just as constant as the moving were the empty promises. My father would promise us the world, from Disneyland to home ownership. He never had the substance behind him to fulfill his promises and always found an excuse for his failures. Much like in the story The Glass Castle, the father promises his children that he will find gold and build them a Glass Castle, a large self-sustaining home made out of glass. Instead, they move a dozen times to stay ahead of debt collectors and law enforcement until the children are dumpster diving for food. 

A family photo taken in 1992. I am on the bottom right corner, with my older sister to my left, my dad carrying my younger brother on his shoulders, and my mom wearing a purple dress. 

I remember the drive and the spark in my father’s eyes. By the time I was about ten, I could tell he got dimmer, sadder, and colder. His words were daggers. He expressed his own disappointment through blame. He felt he was a failure for not making it as an immigrant and carried a heavy burden as the provider. He was hard on my mother and sometimes even cruel.

The tough path to independence

I was eleven when my mother left. I woke up one morning and she was gone. There was no note, and the car wasn’t there. I later learned that she had driven to Toronto to stay with her brother. But not for a visit. She left me, my brother, and sister, or at least that is what I thought as an eleven year old. What she actually was leaving was my father. She left him after eighteen years of marriage. I moved to Toronto a year later and lived with her. I demonized her. My father didn’t help with his constant criticisms of her: “how could a mother leave her children,” “what kind of mother is she,” “she is selfish.” He didn’t want to see how bad living with him was. The ups and downs, his victim mindset, and the constant perpetuation of guilt—that was his biggest tool of manipulation. He acted as though he was the one who was used by all of us and whom we all owed something to.

As it usually goes—we repeat what we learn as children—my mother became her mother: emotionally distant and out to fend for herself. A moment of presence with her was a rarity. I could see her mind racing each moment thinking about how to shelter and feed us. We relied on the food bank for many years. Her life of independence away from my father began with a job carrying lumber, then working as a deckhand on the Bathurst Street ferry to Toronto Island, considered to be one of the shortest ferry rides in the world. By the time I left Toronto, my mother had plowed ahead, working in search and rescue for the Canadian Coast Guard. As a young girl, I witnessed her toughness carry her, which became one of the biggest gifts of my childhood. 

Reclaiming my superpower

I sometimes wonder what it was that got me out. I used to say it was luck. But I now see that my inwardness allowed me to disassociate from my reality. In my own world, I could dream and imagine. I decided that school was for me because I saw it as an escape. I became the first person in my family to attend university. I moved to a city an hour and a half away from Toronto and studied and lived on campus. It was the first time in my life that I felt I had control over my environment and I thrived in the structure. I never lived with my family again. I continued with my education and went to law school. I now see that it was my interracial background and brown skin that allowed me to see the nuances and complexities of situations and a superpower that I will never take for granted again. The way I see it, we have two choices: we can either replicate the narrative that we are passed down by previous generations or create a different reality. 

Meet Harpreet: Harpreet Ahuja is a lawyer, human rights consultant, and social justice advocate driven by the conviction that systems need reimagining. Her work explores the intersection of law, policy, and lived experience—and tells the human stories behind injustice. Harpreet is based in Vancouver on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam Indian Band), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish Nation), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation), and publishes on her website.