There is news I want to share with you all

But I'd like to tell you the story behind it first.

My parents left Sri Lanka when I was six, and we moved to the Middle East where my father had been offered a job. For the next twelve years, I considered Dubai my home, even though we all knew we wouldn't be allowed to stay there. Expatriates couldn't get citizenship - that only happened if you had Arab blood or were rich enough, and none of us qualified on either count.

In other words, when my father reached his sixties, he would have to retire, which meant his employer wouldn't sponsor him and he wouldn't have a residence visa. Which meant the rest of us would be sent packing as well. Many of my parents' fellow-expat friends, aware that this applied to them as well, treated Dubai as a stepping-stone to the States or Canada. They eventually emigrated.

My parents didn't (though I've wished many times that they did). Instead, their plan was that either I or my younger brother would study in the States, get a job there, get citizenship and then sponsor them in their old age. My brother and I knew about the plan from day one.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans.

At first it all went like clockwork, and I was accepted by the University of Georgia for my bachelor's degree. I was alternately terrified (because that was the first time I'd been completely on my own) and exhilarated (because that was the first time I'd been completely on my own). Different though life in the States was to my sheltered upbringing in Dubai, I loved every moment of it and wanted to live there forever.

I went to the University of Texas for my graduate degree, because it was understood by everyone that I had to get a PhD. But soon I had the first sign that perhaps plans, even those we've cherished for a lifetime, don't always work out. I didn't pass my qualifying exams for a PhD and had to settle for the consolation prize of a Master's.

My mentor was disappointed. My parents were disappointed. I was quietly mortified, because if I hadn't spent so much time writing a novel in my spare time maybe I'd have passed. Still, I would have a Master's degree. I looked forward to graduating, getting a job, getting citizenship and all that.

It was August 2001.

To be continued...

By 2002, it was becoming obvious that I couldn't accept a job.

I didn't have too much difficulty getting jobs. The problem came when the employers realized how much red tape they'd have to get through to hire me (the INS had clamped down after September 11). At that point they generally gave up and moved on to the next applicant. It was exhausting and frustrating, and I was rapidly running out of money. Probably the only thing I could still do was write, but that wasn't exactly paying the bills.

The people I knew, both those online and in real life, were sympathetic. One of them even offered to marry me, but given that he was old enough to be my grandfather, I didn't think the INS would buy it. I sold my car and took a cheaper apartment, hoping something would happen to change the situation.

Something certainly did. My mother was diagnosed with Stage IV liver cancer.

That changed things, all right. My parents and I discussed the situation and decided that I would move back to Dubai both to be with her and to regroup while I worked out what to do next. My brother was leaving to go to college in the States (he was clearly Plan B), so they had a vacant room.

I said goodbye to the States, packed my books and left for Dubai. My parents picked me up at the airport and we drove past a McDonalds, a Starbucks, a Kenny Rogers Roasters and a Cinnabon. I felt homesick at once, something I'd never experienced when I'd traveled in the opposite direction.

Things had to get better from there. Didn't they?

To be continued...

Degrees from the States count for a lot in the Middle East - many of the jobs advertised specify that they want people who are "UK/US educated".

What I hadn't taken into account was that there simply isn't much scope for science there. Architecture, engineering, computers, yes... but not science. The few jobs available in that sector are fought over, and have requirements that I never expected. Sample conversation :

"Hello, I saw your advertisement for a lab technician."
"Yes. Are you South Indian?"
"Uh... no. But I have a master's degree in--"
"We only want South Indians."
"Why?"
"Because the people who work here are South Indians."
"I'm sorry, I don't understand. Why do I need to be South Indian? What difference does it make?"
"So employees get along with the people working here and can speak their language."

I tried offering articles to local magazines, but that was even more of a dead end. Though perhaps I shouldn't have started with a letter to the editor about why a recent article on HIV transmission was inaccurate (the article, predictably, made it sound like a disease related to blood transfusion, because the alternative would be mentioning sex).

Still, it wasn't as though I had nothing to do. I spent time with my mother and accompanied her on hospital visits. We also looked into where I could go in the future, since obviously Dubai wasn't going to be a long-term solution.

Australia was out, because I didn't meet the immigration requirements. I did manage to make it past New Zealand's paperwork, but I was so homesick for North America at that point that I just couldn't bear to give up on that continent just yet. I tried Canada, and ended up five points short of their federal immigration qualifications.

But then someone told me that there was another option - provincial migration. Apparently there was a province - Quebec - which had different requirements for immigrants. I did the math to see if I would qualify. And I did.

We were cautiously hopeful, but we knew so little of the application process that we knew we needed help. A friend recommended an immigration agent who wasn't cheap but who was supposed to be good. The agent made it clear that this wouldn't be a quick or an easy process, but she thought I stood a chance of getting in.

Well, she was right about the process not being quick or easy.

To be continued...

My mom and I had always been close. Even though there were things we disagreed on (like the fact that I'd deconverted in the States, while she had become more religious during the same time), we generally got along well together. And she helped me as much as she could during the application process, including giving me the ten thousand dollars that the Canadian High Commission needed as evidence that I wouldn't be playing a violin in the subway.

(One reason my first novel is dedicated to her, but that comes later.)

Anyway, the money and certificates and so on were the easy part. The difficult parts were the interview, which would have to be done in French - je veux etre une Quebecoise, vous comprenez - and the medical test. But I'd studied French in high school, and I was confident I would pass the medical test, because I'd always been in good health.

The same couldn't be said for my mother. One day the doctors at Dubai Hospital told me they wanted to speak to me privately. I thought for a moment that I had gone too far in asking them questions. I'd always been fascinated by disease, and with a background in science, I could understand more about my mom's health, but I knew that some of the doctors didn't like being questioned by a little Asian girl. So I thought they were going to tell me off.

I wish they had. Instead, they informed me that my mother was going to die. "She has six months to live," one of them said. "The chemotherapy is not working."

I don't recall much of that conversation. I think I shook my head. I know I must have said something they didn't like hearing, because another doctor told me, "Everyone dies." I remember thinking that that sounded like an REM song. It all felt very unreal.

I went home in a sort of daze, and told my mother what the doctors had said. She was very indignant and told me not to worry - she was far from dead. She wasn't in poor health, exactly, but she was getting tired easily and starting to lose her appetite, though she still kept her job and tried to do everything that she had done before. The problem, though, was that the doctors weren't willing to give her any more chemotherapy.

Then a friend suggested that we go to Vellore Hospital in India, because her son had had leukemia but went into remission almost at once when he was in Vellore. My parents were ready to grasp at any straw, so they made travel plans and we all left for India within days.

That was the beginning of the end.

To be continued...

We were in Vellore for forty days and nights.

Given that it was a Christian hospital, that was most apropos, but I don't think we passed that particular test. On the one hand, the doctors and nurses were very kind, which was a relief after dealing with the "she's going to die, get used to it" bedside manner of the oncologists in Dubai. On the other, they adopted the approach of giving the patients whatever they paid for.

And since my parents were willing to pay for more chemotherapy, that was precisely what my mother got. She walked into that hospital, but she didn't walk out. The drugs ruined what was left of her health and at the end of the forty days all she wanted was to go back home.

We all did, at that point. It was a horrifying experience - not just the culture shock of being in such a different place, but the rapid deterioration of my mother's health. And the environment didn't help. We were all staying in two rooms on the hospital grounds, which were terribly overcrowded. Poor family members would sleep on the bare cement floors outside wards, which always made me feel guilty for disliking the place (at least I had a bed with a pillow). And there were ants and flies everywhere, unlike the sterility of Dubai.

There were some memorable moments, such as when my mother described how she had a portion of her colon removed, and I said that now she had a semi-colon. I also managed to get taken on a tour of the microbiology lab there. But for the rest of the time, we were just counting the days until my mother's platelet count recovered from the chemo overdose and we could go home.

They took blood from her every day to monitor this, and as her veins grew more and more scarred, the daily ritual became a nightmare. She would cry each time the technologists came into the room. I think that's one reason I have such a fear of venipuncture even today.

Once the doctors told her that there wasn't much more they could do for her in India, though, her platelet count jumped exponentially. So we got her into a wheelchair and took her back to Dubai.

To be continued...

The doctors in Dubai gave us their six-month deadline (no pun intended) on August 1st, 2004. In September, we left India and came back to Dubai. One of the first things my mother did was to call her boss (from her wheelchair) and ask if he could keep her job open for her until she got better.

I remember that so well. I was volunteering at a high-end thrift store at the time, and I'd bring home any pretty name-brand clothes I could find that would fit her. And she would say, "I'm going to wear that next summer" or "I'm going to wear that when I get better."

If sheer determination was all it took, she would have beaten that cancer like a rug.

But that wasn't working and chemotherapy hadn't worked, so the faith healers closed in. Things grew increasingly bizarre at home. Once I arrived to find a shrine set up in our living-room, and another time some of my mother's friends tried to make her drink holy water (when she could barely swallow). We kept having to take her back to the hospital for blood transfusions, tapping fluid and so on, while the doctors never lost an opportunity to make things a little more difficult.

One of them even refused to give her pain medication, on the grounds that if she suffered on earth, she would be rewarded in heaven. I had to leave the room at that point, because I was so furious I thought I would hit him. The funny part was, my parents were upset with me for my disrespect towards the doctor. After all, he was a religious person with strong faith, whereas I only had secular grounds for my objections. But we did agree that it would be nice if she wasn't in constant pain, so the doctor eventually stopped being an imam long enough to give her some pain meds.

One of the other doctors then asked me to sign a paper. I took a look at the first line - "Patient's family refuses to accept prognosis" - and walked out. Whether I wanted to accept it or not was irrelevant. My mother wanted to live, and that was what mattered.

But she was exhausted and I didn't know what to do or say to make it better. Other than bringing home more and more pretty clothes, all of which were too big for her by then. Even emaciated as she was, though, she was heavier than I was (I weighed about 75 pounds at the time). So one day, when I tried to help her up to go to the bathroom, she slipped out of my arms and ended up sitting on the floor.

Fortunately she wasn't hurt, but we decided not to repeat the experience. So I sat on the floor beside her and we waited for my father to come back home from work. Another time I had to ask a neighbor to help me lift her. No such thing as home care in Dubai, I suppose.

In November of 2004, she was so weak that my father (who was even more intensely religious) arranged for an exorcism. In the adjoining room, I covered my ears but could still hear the yells and screams at the demons of cancer to leave her. The demons seemed to be around even after that, though, so we had to take her to hospital for the last time.

My father stayed with her after work and I would be there during the morning and afternoon, but I don't think she knew we were there. She was on oxygen by then, and comatose, so both my father than I came home at night. That's where we got the call from the hospital to say my mother had died.

I was too burned-out by then to cry.

And it didn't really come as a shock. What happened after that... did.

To be continued...

The Sri Lankan embassy gave us written permission to take my mother's remains back to Sri Lanka "to be cremated or berried (sic)". My father asked me to come with him to the crematorium, which remains one of the most horrific experiences of my life. I'd always imagined that a crematorium reduced bodies to ash, so it never occurred to me that an industrial-strength grinder was also required. I had to leave the place before I fainted.

But it was done and we took the remains to Sri Lanka, where my mother's family was in shock (she had told them all that she was going to get better, and they hadn't seen everything we'd witnessed first-hand). Then we went back to Dubai.

There was a void in the apartment. As though a continent had vanished off the map overnight. I did what I could to cook and clean, as well as emptying my mom's closets and giving away most of her clothes, but it was about a month before I felt strong enough to attend to something she wanted done. Before she died she had written a letter to the hospital administrator, and she had wanted it typed up and mailed. I went to the computer, which was on, and glanced at the screen.

There was an email on the screen. It was a love letter from my father to another woman.

I read through it, and soon realized that my father had started dating again. He seemed to have skipped over all the Kubler-Ross stages of grieving and gone straight to acceptance. Still in shock, I confided this to an aunt of mine in Sri Lanka.

And promptly received a worse shock, because apparently everyone in Sri Lanka knew about this and had been urging him on. I had never expected such a thing, because in Sri Lanka, a person is expected to wait a year after a spouse's death to remarry. Doing so before that is considered highly disrespectful to the spouse's memory. But my father was already making plans to marry another woman, and no one seemed to think there was anything strange about this.

I soon found out why, though. Since my mother had never expected to die, she hadn't put her financial affairs in order. Since she hadn't done that, my father controlled her estate. And since he did so, he decided who would and who wouldn't inherit what she had owned.

That was why the family was eager to support him in whatever decisions he made. But I didn't - couldn't - support his sudden remarriage.

That meant I inherited nothing.

At a time when, more than anything else, I needed to pay my immigration agent and go to Canada.

To be continued...

Thanks, guys! Glad you're enjoying the story.

The immigration agent's fee was a thousand dollars. There would be further fees for the medical exam. And then, if all went well, at least fifteen hundred for the plane ticket.

I had a few dollars, at the most.

Oh, there was the ten thousand in the bank (which thankfully my mother had put in my name long before her death). But I didn't dare touch a penny of it. What if the Canadian High Commission wanted evidence that it was all still there, an intact reassurance that I wouldn't be on their version of Welfare?

Now that my mom was gone, I was free to take a full-time job, but those were just as difficult to come by as they had previously been. So I tried anything I could to raise money. I gave tuition and sold anything I didn't need at the thrift store. I also used to take the half-used candles from the grotto outside the Catholic church, melt them down, make new candles and sell them outside the Anglican church, and I don't think either church would have been too pleased about that.

Those brought in a few trickles of money that I hoarded fiercely. I used to walk everywhere (in the Middle East, in summer) to save even the bus fare, and since I was still living in my parents' apartment at least I didn't have to pay rent. My friends in the States helped too. I was a member of a large online community called the Internet Infidels at the time, and another infidel once sent me seven hundred and fifty dollars via Western Union.

My father gave me nothing at all. I tried confiding in my mother's family, but soon stopped that when one of them took my letters to him. So I spoke to her closest friends in Dubai, women who I felt more certain would try to help me. One of them actually spoke to him, asking about the land that my mother had left to my brother and me in her will.

"The land is in Sri Lanka," my father said, "and none of us plan on living there or using it. So I've sold my son's share and sent him the money."

The friend nodded. "And what are you doing for your daughter?"

"We're praying for her."

Because I could presumably buy my plane ticket to Canada with prayer.

To be continued...

May, 2005.

My father went to Sri Lanka to get married. I was invited to the wedding, but declined. By now I had run out of legitimate ways to raise the funds I needed and resorted to less legitimate ones, such as writing college application essays for a boy who was all but illiterate. After I had done those, his father tried to stiff me on the money. I reminded him that I knew which universities his son had applied to, and could always contact them to mention the essays. He paid up.

My father returned alone, but before I could be too relieved about that he informed me that the woman (now his second wife) would be with us in a few months. I asked if we could move to a new apartment, because it would be very difficult seeing someone else in my mother's kitchen. He said no. I asked for the money I needed. He walked away.

Events in his life seemed to be proceeding at breakneck speed, while mine was stalled. In desperation I went to the immigration agent that June, explained the situation and asked about when I could expect the interview with the Canadian Consulate. Until that happened, I was going nowhere.

The immigration agent sympathized, but said that there was such a long waiting line in Dubai that I would be looking at a year at least.

"What about outside Dubai?" I said. "Another country nearby?"

She looked thoughtful, made a phone call and then told me that if I wanted to have the interview in Syria, it could be done in July. Next month! I said yes, I'd have it done there. The plane flight from Dubai to Damascus wouldn't break the bank either.

I really should have wondered why there was almost no waiting line in Syria.

To be continued...