July 2024. Brampton, Ontario.
Gurmail Singh Gill was sixty-four years old, twenty-two years in Canada, owner of two South Asian grocery stores and a trucking company that was either thriving or struggling depending on the month.
He had not cried at his brother's funeral.
This was noticed. The brothers had been close — not demonstratively, not in the way of men who said these things, but in the structural way of two people who had shared a childhood and a language and a specific understanding of what their family had been and meant. Harpreet had been the elder, more careful. Gurmail the younger, more volatile. Their relationship had been, for sixty years, the relationship of two people who knew too much about each other to be comfortable and too much about each other to ever be distant.
He had not cried because the grief had arrived somewhere he did not have access to. In the chest, not the eyes. The eyes had been dry and the chest had been a weight he was carrying with the specific technique of a man who had learned, in twenty-two years of immigration and business and the distance from everything that mattered, to carry weight by pretending it was not there.
He had signed up for Digital Pind in May because Navneet had suggested it in the family group and he had made the bakwaas comment and then spent three hours looking at the app's website and then signed up with the quiet of someone doing something privately that they had publicly dismissed.
