Across Water & Time:
Kate Burnham interviews Paul Dhillon

Paul Dhillon

Past contributor Kate Burnham talks with fall issue #232 contributor Paul Dhillon about his creative nonfiction piece, “Five Lessons.” They discuss the intimacy of learning to swim, the first diasporic Punjabi communities, and water as a vessel for memory.

 

Paul Dhillon’s (he/him) work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Geist, and Event Magazine. He holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. He lives on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples. He is a high school English teacher.


“Five Lessons” reads as a meditation on time—how our perception of it evolves from childhood, when “summers felt like a lifetime,” to adulthood, where “life and time are fluid, just like water, filling up whatever it is channelled into.” How do you see the connection between water and time in your work?

When I am in the water, especially the ocean, I connect to first diasporic Punjabi communities who arrived via ships across the Pacific Ocean. That the wave of this migration is linked to the one wave of the ocean, and its global connectedness. By being in water, I feel connected to the past, and the present simultaneously. Water in itself holds time. That something from these past journeys is echoing through me, if not in my body, definitely in my mind and heart as I write.

The act of teaching someone to swim carries an inherent intimacy—a deep trust is necessary between teacher and learner for the learner to feel safe, let go, and be carried into deeper waters. How do you see this exchange reflecting the dynamics of familial trust and care in your work?

Since I was so much younger than my brothers, they had lived so much of life before me and showed me the way, teaching me how to ride a bike, roller blade, make toast, but there is something different about swimming. Being taught to swim by my older brother gave me a way to keep up with him. To join him in a new space, him saying, “I want you here with me too.”

Water in your work feels like a vessel for memory—the lake, the pool, the Sutlej River, the kitchen sink are all sites of shared history. How do these spaces allow memory to surface, to stay alive in the present?

Swimming is such a bodily experience. The wetness, focus on my breath, the rhythm of my arms and legs. I am not thinking of really anything when I swim. I am centred in my body. Though I am rooted in the self, as with the first question, I feel water holds memory and was a space for locomotion of past Punjabi communities. When I am in water, I feel a deep connection across time to ancestors and the Punjabi community, as if I am living my whole life right in that moment, with all my past experiences embodied in the current day.

This piece so movingly explores the tension between presence and absence—returning to the pool after twenty-two years becomes a return to self after years spent feeling adrift, as well as a re-entry into the body and the present moment. Yet swimming also becomes a way to reckon with the absence of your brother. How does water serve as both a site of return and a way of remembering him?

My brother was really alive, and smiled the most when he was in water. Also, since my brother was quite a bit older than me, he taught me so much about the world and how to navigate it. So, each time I swim, it is as if he is alive still. That my body is a conduit or vessel where his teaching continues to live on.

You create a wonderful sense of movement, of being carried forward, on the “current of inevitability, of death.” How do you see this movement—this pull between vitality and mortality—shaping the emotional landscape of your writing?

Losing my brother at such a young age has given me a complicated relationship to endings. I fear endings, but also understand there is beauty in the retrospect, looking back at moments you didn’t quite notice, how important and breathtaking they were. The tension between vitality and mortality, if anything, helps shock me back into being present so I can receive and cherish what life is happening in front of my eyes.

“Five Lessons” begins and ends with children learning to swim—moments that feel tender and full of hope. What inspired you to frame this piece with these scenes, and how do you feel they speak to the coexistence of sorrow and possibility in your work?

I find it so fascinating when anyone says, “you said that like X or you move like Y.” How we embody people in our lives and carry those gestures, ones that were imbued with meaning and love, forward. I wanted the piece to show that though the physical body of my brother is not around, his spirit and kindness echo and reach across time.

Both sorrow and hope coexist as I am steeled by physics’ law of conservation of energy, that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another. Rather than “Where does it go?” I think “Who does it go to?” Something of a person must exist, proliferate, or continue to bloom. I feel ending the piece with a scene showing my niece the depth of the ocean is an example of my brother’s energy channelling through me to her, and hopefully she will take that forward as well.

What are you working on now?

A multi-genre short story collection set in Vancouver. All Punjabi characters, and of course water is one of the motifs that links across the collection. Keep an eye out for it someday.

 

Kate Burnham

Kate Burnham