A reporter takes a summer internship in a small town to learn about his new career, only to discover he has more to learn about himself.

BY DRUV SAREEN

IMAGE BY PUBLIC DOMAIN PICTURES/PEXELS.COM

All I knew about Jalal before I met him was that he had a cyst on his ass that had caused him to miss work for a week. When I had first heard this, my mind had begun to paint a picture of an older, portly Pakistani man, wearing khakis and a discount dress shirt like my dad. Images of a Salman Rushdie-esque figure, minus the fatwa, filled my head. He was a Muslim journalist in Alberta; what was he going to be like? Was he going to be my mentor? Would he teach me all of his secrets about writing? Would I have to see the cyst on his ass?

When I met Jalal, after his cyst had subsided, I was ill-prepared for the twenty-eight-year-old in front of me. Instead of the chubby, grey-haired, and dress shirt-wearing figure I had imagined, was a skinny balding Pakistani man in sweatpants and a soccer jersey.

Jalal had been the only reporter at the Lac La Biche Post for the last three months. The main publisher, Rob, was still writing articles and the advertising salesman, Mark, would write a piece when they were desperate, but Jalal was the only one with a reporter title. Jalal had no formal training as a reporter; he had gone to the University of Regina to study business management. When he had gotten homesick in Saskatchewan, he had decided to move in with his older brother who had taken a job in Lac La Biche, Alberta.

I existed in contrast to this; I had come to Alberta to get away from my family. I had just completed the second year of my journalism program and wanted to find a summer job in the industry. My professor knew I was eager and had passed along a few listings for journalism internships, all of them in far off cities. I saw the opportunity to move out after twenty-eight years at home and get experience in the field. I ended up choosing the one farthest from my mother’s basement. Why not get two birds stoned at once?

Lac La Biche is a small county of fewer than fifteen hundred people, located two and a half hours north of Edmonton. It is in the heart of oil country and was the last place I was expecting to run into another Brown journalist. It was not the place I was expecting to help me develop my appreciation for my otherness.

I had come to this small community to work as an intern at the local paper. That sentence does not do the journey credit. I drove more than 3,000 kilometers and spent hundreds of dollars to live in Alberta for ten weeks so I could work as a reporter. My sister and I suffered driving through the endless hellscape of the flat plains of Saskatchewan, just so I could be there. During the times when all I could see was flat horizon, I inexplicably empathized with flat earthers. Murder had been contemplated multiple times by the both of us. We both knew no one would find the other’s body.

Jalal, by comparison, had just applied and was hired because Rob knew his brother. It was a very small town and this was pretty common, I was about to learn. Rob knew everyone in town and everyone knew Rob.

That didn’t lessen my initial resentment for Jalal. He had been nothing but nice to me, but every time he complained about the job I filled with rage. There were lots of things about Jalal that would enrage me. In terms of personality, I found him condescending and close-minded, where he found me sanctimonious and idealistic. By comparison, we were effective opposites. I was Indian, he was Pakistani. I liked basketball, he only watched football. I was born in Canada, while he was an immigrant. I was chubby where he was skinny. I coveted the hair on my face, whereas he was clean-shaven and coveted the hair on his balding head.

He was surrounded by family. I was 3,000 kilometres from home while my childhood dog died from cancer.

Despite all of the things that made us different, despite all of the perfectly legitimate grievances I had built up in my head, Jalal and I became friends. A lot of it was out of necessity. He was the only other person my age that I knew. Lac La Biche was an older town, where people would come to retire by the lake. That age was great for the newspaper industry, but my Tinder range had to be increased to 200 kilometers.

We would get sent on story assignments together for big events. Jalal would be my pass around town, getting us into all the events simply by pointing to the DSLR around his neck. Jalal drove me to my first rodeo and warned me about the same specific joke the old white folks were going to make. He was right and by the end of the event, I had it burned into my brain.

“Guess you can say, ‘It’s not my first rodeo,’ ayy bud?”

I think our contempt for the people of Lac La Biche was what really brought us closer together. Of course, we both hated our boss who had left us for three weeks to go on vacation, but there was something special about the way we hated the locals.

It wasn’t simply the fact that we were Brown and they were White. Lac La Biche had been settled by Lebanese mink farmers. It had one of the highest rates of Muslim people in Alberta, but that was mostly due to how small it was. We weren’t treated differently for just being Brown, we were treated differently for being reporters.

I remember one time we had gone out to get a picture of a school crossing sign. We had walked down to the school and were taking pictures when a truck with a large “Fuck Trudeau” decal drove by. They stopped to see what we were doing. When they realized we were the Brown dudes from the paper, they told us we should get a real job instead of just taking money from the government.

Not all of our interactions were that obnoxious. Sometimes it was a local lady I had met in passing asking to touch my beard. Sometimes it was my landlord congratulating me on the Raptors winning the NBA championship by saying, “Them Black boys finally won y’all something, huh!”

Eventually the job would end and I would head back home. While my first week in Alberta had culminated in my dog dying and many sleepless nights doubting why I had done this, it was tough to leave Alberta. By the end of my time there I had been in a long-term (for me) relationship, had a job that paid, and was free from the depths of my mother’s basement. Alberta forced me out of my comfort zone and made me grow up after twenty-eight years of not doing that.

I can say it was all based off self-introspection and mental fortitude and solemnly looking out at a lake contemplating my existence, but that would be a crock of shit. I learned from getting out of my comfort zone and embracing the differences in people. I had never been on a First Nation reserve before Alberta. When I got to take part in their ceremonies for a school graduation and eat moose for the first time, I learned that older women regardless of colour will never listen when you tell them you’re not hungry.

I think the person I learned the most from was Jalal. He didn’t espouse any wisdom or grand rhetoric; some of his views on more progressive issues were clearly brought over from Pakistan. But I still learned from being around him, seeing that with our different perspectives and backgrounds, we still had commonalities. I could see the things I liked and hated about myself in Jalal.

It’s been well over a year since Alberta, and sometimes I still message Jalal. It’s not because we’re friends, it’s because I will always appreciate what Jalal made me realize about myself. All the things that make us different don’t matter. At the end of the day, you both still feel the same pain. When your boss makes a joke about the Indigenous community and says, “That’s why I hire the actual Indians,” you both get the same turning in your stomach. Your pain may come from different sources, but it’s the same feeling.

I never would have learned about myself and grown up if I hadn’t embraced the different. I embraced the difference between different provinces, different counties, different routines and time zones. All of those differences helped polish and show me who I was inside.

I never would have found that if I had stayed the same, in my same routine with the same habits and time zones. I never would have learned this lesson if I hadn’t embraced someone who was my opposite, ass-cyst and all.

Druv Sareen studied journalism at Humber College. He hopes to one day write for publications across Canada, from the small towns in Alberta to the CBC where he currently works. When he's not walking his dog, he can be found on Twitter @DruvSareen.

An earlier version of this story was originally created as part of Humber’s WRIT 400: Literature and Composition 2 course.

Image: Public Domain Pictures/Pexels.com, Newspaper Origami, 2016.

Edited for publication by Chelsey Clark, as part of the Creative Book Publishing Program.

The HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by the Applied Research & Innovation.