The ailing one truly dying, with tropical jamun, blacksage, water hyacinths, the village`s houses on stilts foundering... WHY S VIA PLATH, I didn`t k .1 had taken to her b "" of the man who strutted out and stood before us and brought us Boston, the entire East Coast, in solid phrases. Tufted grass, water whirling, the Atlantic buffeting like a rutting bull. And billows, clouds. He kept on talking, like a confession, about Lowell, Roethke, Sexton, Plath ... ah, her! The professor - he was trained at Boston University - tall, but not thin; he chain-smoked and now spoke softly, eyes hardly alight; the cigarette dangling at his fingertip, akin to a stick of chalk (would he write with it as he moved towards the blackboard?). He`d recently been to Dublin, he said, and wrote a telling poem about this experience; all about existentialism: his sounds, grunts, growls ... grrrrhhh, Orangemen, Catholics in Belfast! It was concrete poetry, his rhythms oddly uniform. He wiped his glasses, his words coming out more slowly, almost haltingly. A week earlier I`d watched him thank a boisterous sound poet after a reading at the university: a big CanLit event it was here in Northern Ontario. On Fridays once a month he haphazardly organized the local poets to read: he didn`t mind being one of the Americans "taking over" Canadian universities ("Canadian culture," he`d said). Bah! When it was his turn to read, he always did with a slight cadence, an unaccustomed lilt, maybe his ingrained affectation; the giant Lake Superior in the background, I kept thinking, permanent in my imagination. The tropics also in the background, and suddenly sugar-cane leaves floating in Lake Superior. I`d wake up in the middle of the night thinking about this, perspiring. I started reading Sylvia Plath for the first time: The Bell Jar; poems, "Daddy," in particular, in Ariel. He`d urged my becoming acquainted with neurosis, madness - like an initiation. A young girl daring America with a spectacular death! And 1, truly from the tropics, kept being constantly amazed. Plath and her entomologist father Otto: a bee-keeping frenzy or hobby, I imagined, carving words of my own. Ah, the friends she had? A boyfriend recuperating from tuberculosis in a sanitarium: he suddenly stood nude before her, and all she could think of was turkey neck and gizzard. Bollocks! MORE CONFESSIONAL: all the impulses, fantasies, cries of the heart laid bare. Bouts of real-unreal madness, like half-truths: nothing was too sacred. A twosome attending a creative-writing class in Boston with Robert Lowell (their instructor), Sexton and Plath. And this same figure of a man, his double, looming large, more deliberate as he uttered words, conceived images out of a hat almost. Trickster! I started identifying with confessions of my own: a cockroachfilled night, the insects running wild across the kitchen floor in a rundown house on stilts. At once I knew my limits, and compensated by conjuring up bougainvillaea, zinnia, hibiscus. And Grandmother now very ill, my mother and I taking her to meet Dr Bhatnagar Rameschandra from Bombay (he, in this cutback South American place with unbearable heat devoid of exoticism). He was the best -they said - a soft-skinned man, large eyes, who wetted his lips constantly as he talked. The remedies for high blood pressure, diabetes ... he laughed, took the ailing one into a side room, my mother accompanying: to discuss in more detail the vagaries of women`s ailments made more unpredictable in the tropics. Dr Rameschandra suddenly looked grave, my last view of him ... I was now contemplating a student`s life, steeped in poetry, fiction as I was. Sexton, Plath: yet to come! On the waiting-room table, a copy of the New Yorker, and there was a lengthy review of Robert Lowell`s Life Studies: descriptions of Nantucket, images of a buffeting, rocking sea; he, the foremost American poet, said the New Yorker. Dr Rameschandra, do you hear? So much vicarious pain, more palpable in the adjoining room. Grandmother wincing, my mother also wincing, veins meshed in an instant on this forlorn day. It was all coming to this, who I was: the Caribbean sea or ocean also wildly rocking, waves steadily drawing closer to the Orinoco, Amazon. Much closer, to our three great rivers - Berbice, Essequibo, Demerara; and the hinterland forest with its six types of cat: jaguar, jaguarundi, ocelot ... you name them! The many-plumaged birds: a hundred species of macaws, robins, egrets. They would dare fly north. And Americans would come to the Amazon to "champion" the environment? Dr Rameschandra, dwelling on faraway India, Calcutta, or Orrisa State: Bengali tigers rampaging in his mind`s eye as he vaguely contemplated the lineage of indenture: this bringing our ancestors here to work on the sugar plantations ... Who we really were, soon-to-become creolized in an environment of hybrid races. Dr Rameschandra grimacing, urging the ailing one`s hopeful recovery. I SOON left the Lakehead, all of Lake Superior with the man who strutted still with me, I felt. And I`d also had enough of planting spruce, fir, jackpine; I was now also away from storms or winds howling like an elephant in distress: my recurrent image of Northern Ontario, you see. In Kingston, pears fattening like little Buddhas -my mind`s own frenzy, Sylvia Plath`s imprint on my memory or consciousness. I kept carrying America`s neurosis in Canada with me, intertwining now with Sir John A. Macdonald - a trumpeting founding father. Not Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln! Ah, Kingston grows on you, said a local poet: north side, all the anxious poor. South side, the well-to-do professors. I`d soon start writing a dissertation, no? On whom? What subject? Shelley`s Prometheus Unbound: freedom of the spirit, the imagination`s own pulse-beats; my colonialism`s self-contempt and simultaneous longing for a lasting liberation, if not a life of ease. Dr Rameschandra, is she really dying? Sylvia Plath again, amid the throes of pain, a nascent depression. She`s not well known, you know. She`s American! "Pears fatten like..." I CONTEMPLATED swimming nude with Barbara, Costas, Merle, Joanne, Ron, Genevieve, Roy in the take close to a quarry in Kingston. Limestone all around; ivy creeping up in mute silence as water splashed in the dead of night. More moonlight. Sir John A. turning in his grave, the cemetery`s ghost of a haunting as we kept searching him out like a living symbol - or semblance of the life after Confederation. Ghoulish, who was I? What was I becoming? The ailing one truly dying, with tropical jamun, blacksage, water hyacinths, the village houses on stilts foundering, termites eating at the beams. Rain`s heavier downpour, pellets on rooftops; then, always surprising, a splash of sunshine. The myriad shades, colours washing in the sunset. Parakeets, macaws, all screeching delight. I BEGAN pursuing other worlds, places to conquer with the febrile imagination. Ah, England`s Olwyn Hughes`s response to my letter: she, sister-in-law, the executrix of Plath`s estate. Not husband Ted Hughes? Olwyn, whom subconsciously I didn`t want to meet. Not now, or perhaps at any other time. I breathed harder; impulses in me, veins rattling. Real pods. Semblances, correspondences. What attracted you to Sylvia Plath? asked the first solemn examiner. "Pears fatten..." My East Indianness, mulling over a solid sugar plantation memory. All the ones, vagrant youths clapping cards, caterwauling because of the anxiety of the harvesting season about to begin. Machetes raised in the glare of the sun; a whacking, resounding beat. Northern Ontario winds` roar late at night. Ash from the burnt cane leaves, stalks. Soot smeared on hands and feet. Faces. A mask on. The mightiest of lakes` own bottomless throb. Why ask? I wasn`t able to convince them. Ivy creeping up the limestone walls all over Queen`s Grant Hall amid a fulsome sense of aesthetics and intellect. Lake Ontario water lapping. The sweat of a hard life in this journal or diary. Entry of bathing nude in moonlight. ... A moment`s individuation!