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About
Hardev Dange is suffering through a tumultuous year. He's just been informed that the bank is going to foreclose on his house. His fickle daughter Birendra is on the verge of marriage, his son Emile is studying curses (while falling in love with a fellow male grad student), and his younger daughter, Dorothy, who's deaf, is working at a tattoo and body piercing parlour and collecting stories from the older men languishing at her local hangout. And because he's confined to a wheelchair, Hardev is dependent on his homecare worker, the kleptomaniac Rodriguez, to help him devise a plan to keep house and home together.
In this modern, multicultural re-telling of King Lear, Uppal explores the vulnerability and complexity of family and inheritance. She exposes the tragic and comedic dimensions of our failures to communicate and the consequences of our betrayals, which result in disappointment and disillusionment, but also, unexpectedly, in moments of compassion and love. "To be this young and assured a storyteller, this insightful an observer of human nature is, if not the product of divine intervention, at least very rare." - Ottawa Citizen Priscila Uppal was one of three Canadian writers on the 2007 shortlist for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the author of five collections of poetry and the internationally acclaimed novel The Divine Economy of Salvation. Uppal completed her Ph.D in English Literature at York University in Toronto, where she is a professor of English Literature. She was named a "Canadian Writer to Watch" by the American Library Association. Thanksgiving
My kids have the manners of savages, he thinks, as his son lifts a slice of pepperoni pizza from the box to his open mouth, grasping the cheese with loose fingers, forcing separation from its neighbour. It's Monday October 13, 2003, Thanksgiving, and Hardev Dange hasn't enjoyed a traditional turkey dinner since his wife, Isobel, left. That first year, 1988, he tried preparing the meal himself — or, to be more exact, monitoring the meal once the homecare worker left. Manoeuvring around the stove was difficult, the door troublesome to control with only one good hand, and the pots of potatoes and carrots were nearly impossible to stir from his wheelchair. The bird burned. Meat dry, skin tough — the children didn't hide their distaste; the girl, twelve at the time, called it "disgusting" as she removed it from the oven, ribcage split, stuffing black. Hardev had forgotten the gravy. The mashed potatoes dripped. The only thing not spoiled was the canned cranberry sauce from Dominion's. Since then he'd given up on traditional trimmings for family gatherings — since then the Dominion's had become a Loblaws, then a No Frills — and opted to let the children choose takeout instead. Pizza won every time. A good choice, he admits. There's a pizza place on every block in the city, and it can be delivered every single day of the year, right to your home.
But Hardev still yearns for his family to be like other families on Ashbrook Crescent; now more than ever, with Mr. Karkiev signing notices in the back of his mind. He wishes they were settling into an afternoon of Thanksgiving Monday football (though he doesn't follow football, only hockey, as any good Canadian should), or card games around the dining-room table after the dishes are washed (though they have a dishwasher, and no one's played cards in the house since childhood Go Fish days). He doesn't want his girls, or even the boy, to mind the time, worrying whether they should scoot off to their mother's place to wish her a happy holiday too. Hardev Dange wants a white linen tablecloth (preferably handed down through the generations), pewter or brass candleholders, a horn filled with corn and gourds, and pumpkin pie. Yes, pumpkin pie, that glorious solid yet mushy mixture he tasted with delight shortly after immigrating from India. To add insult to injury, th
In this modern, multicultural re-telling of King Lear, Uppal explores the vulnerability and complexity of family and inheritance. She exposes the tragic and comedic dimensions of our failures to communicate and the consequences of our betrayals, which result in disappointment and disillusionment, but also, unexpectedly, in moments of compassion and love. "To be this young and assured a storyteller, this insightful an observer of human nature is, if not the product of divine intervention, at least very rare." - Ottawa Citizen Priscila Uppal was one of three Canadian writers on the 2007 shortlist for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the author of five collections of poetry and the internationally acclaimed novel The Divine Economy of Salvation. Uppal completed her Ph.D in English Literature at York University in Toronto, where she is a professor of English Literature. She was named a "Canadian Writer to Watch" by the American Library Association. Thanksgiving
My kids have the manners of savages, he thinks, as his son lifts a slice of pepperoni pizza from the box to his open mouth, grasping the cheese with loose fingers, forcing separation from its neighbour. It's Monday October 13, 2003, Thanksgiving, and Hardev Dange hasn't enjoyed a traditional turkey dinner since his wife, Isobel, left. That first year, 1988, he tried preparing the meal himself — or, to be more exact, monitoring the meal once the homecare worker left. Manoeuvring around the stove was difficult, the door troublesome to control with only one good hand, and the pots of potatoes and carrots were nearly impossible to stir from his wheelchair. The bird burned. Meat dry, skin tough — the children didn't hide their distaste; the girl, twelve at the time, called it "disgusting" as she removed it from the oven, ribcage split, stuffing black. Hardev had forgotten the gravy. The mashed potatoes dripped. The only thing not spoiled was the canned cranberry sauce from Dominion's. Since then he'd given up on traditional trimmings for family gatherings — since then the Dominion's had become a Loblaws, then a No Frills — and opted to let the children choose takeout instead. Pizza won every time. A good choice, he admits. There's a pizza place on every block in the city, and it can be delivered every single day of the year, right to your home.
But Hardev still yearns for his family to be like other families on Ashbrook Crescent; now more than ever, with Mr. Karkiev signing notices in the back of his mind. He wishes they were settling into an afternoon of Thanksgiving Monday football (though he doesn't follow football, only hockey, as any good Canadian should), or card games around the dining-room table after the dishes are washed (though they have a dishwasher, and no one's played cards in the house since childhood Go Fish days). He doesn't want his girls, or even the boy, to mind the time, worrying whether they should scoot off to their mother's place to wish her a happy holiday too. Hardev Dange wants a white linen tablecloth (preferably handed down through the generations), pewter or brass candleholders, a horn filled with corn and gourds, and pumpkin pie. Yes, pumpkin pie, that glorious solid yet mushy mixture he tasted with delight shortly after immigrating from India. To add insult to injury, th