However Far Away—The Race Toward a Shifting Finish Line

For over a decade I told myself that the reason I was unable to make progress on the novel I had begun in June 2005 was that my corporate career in the healthcare business was far too demanding to muster the required creativity, commitment, and focus. I made small strides: wrote a few disjointed chapters, took weekend classes in creative writing at the University of Toronto, and unpacked and sorted my book collection. I even wrote a few new poems, posted poetry videos on social media, and returned to performing on stage when I was surprisingly accepted by the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word 2017.

(How I Stopped Sabotaging My Writing Goals.)

So, when I was retired out of my career in late 2018, I accepted that I had run out of excuses and this writing project should now receive the required attention.

I pulled together all that I had written to this point—it amounted to about 60 pages or almost 20,000 words. I had a solid opening: a scene written in the present tense in which my lead male protagonist, Devinder Gill, runs beside Kitsilano Beach, Vancouver, reflecting on his life, the death of his birth parents, and, in consequence, his adoption by the family that owned the house in which they rented the basement apartment. Weighing heavy on his mind is the wedding of his nephew Ranjit and his adopted parents’ wish for a spectacular and flawless event that will be long remembered and talked about in the Punjabi Sikh community. I had my two co-lead protagonists in mind—Devinder’s wife Kuldip and his first love, an Irish Canadian artist named Emily Rice—and though their backstories had not been written yet, I had a good sense of the childhood traumas that had shaped them. Not bad, I thought. But there was no structure or narrative arc. I scheduled a daily writing routine and got busy.

After a few weeks of creating additional scenes and mapping the overall story, I could finally see a clear path to the finish line—a vision of that perfect book all writers have in mind and only ever approximate.

But my body had other intentions. Less than two months after my retirement, I was diagnosed with a heart condition, an aortic aneurysm, that would require major, invasive surgery. Suddenly the path was not so clear. Navigating the healthcare system can be overwhelming, but I was lucky enough to know what questions to ask and to whom. I now have a five-centimeter synthetic tube attaching my heart to my aorta, the main vessel through which blood leaves the heart about 100,000 times per day. My surgeon was able to save my aortic valve which has spared me from a future of anticoagulants and blood monitoring. Within 24 hours of surgery the nurses had me walking—more accurately, shuffling—around the corridors of the cardiac ward.

Six days after returning home, however, I developed an ulcer that landed me in hospital for another nine days. I was saved by an expert intensive care team who were able to send a scope through my mouth to my stomach and staple shut the tear in the lining of the duodenum. I had required over 30 units of cross-matched blood to keep pace with what I was losing.

My family had been prepared for the worst by the medical staff.

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This time, I returned home 25 pounds lighter. My muscles had atrophied, and I had to learn to walk without assistance. Suddenly, the novel no longer seemed that important.

Over the five years since then more hurdles have popped up. I now have a cardiac pacemaker implanted in a pocket of flesh just beneath my left collarbone. Oh, and of course there was a global pandemic. There have been several occasions when I feared that my declining health would win the race over my desire to complete the manuscript.

Through all of this, after every setback, I somehow managed to find my way back into Devinder and Kuldip and Emily’s story. I took more classes, researched the two main locations, Vancouver and Belfast, and developed a rigid daily discipline that had previously eluded me. I revisited artistic works that have always inspired creativity, no matter how many times I read/watch/listen to them: Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, Julian Schnable’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy, Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, the Cure’s Disintegration. To this list I added more recent discoveries: Anna Burns’ Milkman, Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s adaptation of Murakami’s short story Drive My Car, and Julia Jacklin’s album Crushing.

There was also a poem I kept returning to: Philip Larkin’s Aubade. It was not the verses about the inevitability of our mortality that replayed in my head but the penultimate line, “Work has to be done.” Whether the statement is meant as defiance or resignation, or both, is difficult to say. Either way, it reflects the work ethic my immigrant parents did their best to pass on to the generations that have followed them. It became my daily mantra. Almost a command.

In late 2022, I was accepted as a client by a reputable and in-demand literary agent and a few months later I had a deal signed with my dream publisher, House of Anansi. The book, However Far Away, which I had originally imagined as a novella, is now over 350 pages long. Much gratitude is owed to my family and friends for their encouragement and support through this sometimes-harrowing pursuit, especially those who assisted directly in my many health recoveries and got me back on track.

I’m thrilled with the book and Anansi has been an excellent partner. However Far Away has been printed and will be on bookstore shelves in early August. Nineteen years will have passed from writing the opening scene to publication. Despite everything, I have won this race, though it has left me a little unsteady and weary.

Minor health issues still linger, but the next novel is gaining pace, if not on the page, at least inside my mind, and there is a manuscript of poetry nearing completion. “Work has to be done.” Publication of these writing projects-in-progress has become my new finish line. 

Check out Rajinderpal S. Pal’s However Far Away here:

Bookshop | Amazon

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