In the spring of 1915, the sidewalks on Nelson Street in Vancouver were baked in scalding concrete. Grey-torrid, cement-hot, wet-heavy. Rows of red-brick chimneys peaked into a nearly clear sky. A few miles outside the city, the air in the Supreme Court of British Columbia was thick with anticipation and rumour.

***

Dear Ira,

I’m writing to you with a vague heaviness in my heart.

An August moon bathed my room precisely at midnight. An illuminating vision woke me, making me stare out my window, down at the vacant street where the surrounding homes were wrapped in a lockdown lull. Before I knew it, I had sunk into my sheets with heavy lids and dreams pulsing inside of me: sights of courtrooms, a rigged election, a rioting mob, wailing family members.

My days are clogged with pending work and impatient minutes. It is a hefty project that I have tasked myself with: to describe a scene, repeatedly. The scene is one that has already been filmed, and as a courtroom drama at that.

In the spring of 1915, a tormented diva was sitting in a courtroom in British Columbia at the trial of Naina Singh and Dalip Singh. This was one of my dreams and I have some films to blame. Make it make sense, I tell myself.

I’m replaying Rex vs. Singh (2008). It seems the only way to overcome sleeplessness.

How are you sleeping these days? Waking?

Sending you some aloof warmth on this cold noon,
Bushra

***

In the spring of 1915, a mere forty-five-minute drive from Detective Ricci’s family home and an hour’s drive from Detective Sinclair’s low-rise apartment, a legal structure’s high ceilings and mahogany-tiled floors contained two suspects: Naina Singh and Dalip Singh.

***

Dear Bushra,

Have you heard of Konstantin Stanislavski’s theory of “public solitude”? The Soviet-Russian theatre practitioner noted the fundamental aspect of the early-twentieth-century modern actor’s performance: an ability to behave as one would in private, despite being watched intently by a rapt audience. For most contemporary actors, the state of being “alone in public” has become the norm: a taken-for-granted gesture.

In Rex vs. Singh, Ali Kazimi, Richard Fung, and John Greyson narrate the story of two Sikh men who were tried, fourfold. Naina Singh and Dalip Singh, among the several cases of Sikh men accused of “sodomy and buggery” in early-twentieth-century Vancouver, could very well be actors on stage. Foreign beings—mostly mill workers, poorly waged labourers, often listed on their identification documents under “Nativity: Hindustani”—summoned to perform before a courtroom. Their look, a semblance of integrated respectability—a stiff blazer, crisp cuffs, and trousers hemmed loosely at the ankles.

Naina, long-limbed, lean, with a handsome, stoic countenance, and Dalip, with a starched white turban, his nose a large presence of symmetry and paternal grace. The two are actors on trial surrounded by an audience like the one you make note of in your dream: “well-meaning” white citizenry; a stern, balding legal jury; a judge whose greys and lines match the several decades he leaves behind in legalese.

Add to this, by way of Kazimi, Fung, and Greyson’s expressive, eclectic quartet-act scenes, a singularly menacing, almost campily enacted Detective Ricci, Detective Sinclair, and the chauffeur—the Vancouver-based undercover agents who accused Naina Singh and Dalip Singh of their alleged transgressions.

The artists present us the trial in four distinct iterations, each in its own right bruising and comical:

1. A period saga, lamenting the tragic fate of the Singhs, regardless of whether or not the two might have propositioned the undercover agents.
2. An informative documentary filtered through queer urban historian Gordon Brent Ingram’s ethnographic lens.
3. A pop musical, comically essaying a series of music videos that satirize the racist courtroom and the tried “Hindoos.”
4. An archival reenactment of the transcript from the court proceedings, inky text of legal documents illuminating and dissolving on screen, fading into one another.

The courtroom happenings, both riotously comical and the stuff of nightmares, are spiced and meshed with speculation and possibility, with maddening hallucinations of criminality, camp, and confession. Immigrants, or rather
actors, on trial.

Are all performers telling someone else’s story? When we speak to an audience, do we become suspects in court?

Bushra, I send you my befuddled obsessions and my contradictory griefs—the only things that make sense to me these days.

I hope the scene becomes easier to describe.

How I miss waking with you.

With love,
Ira

***

In the spring of 1915, two turbaned Sikh men, smartly dressed, hold each other tight, their embrace wet with farewell tears and courtroom sweat. Naina towers over Dalip, patting the blazered back of his elder companion warmly. The verdict is fast approaching.

***

Dear Ira,

I slept well last night, for nine whole hours. Upon waking, a triangle of sunlight carved geometry on my palm resting on the bed. A third of the hand lay luminous, with patchy lines captured in solid daylight. The remainder was a smoother shadow, engulfing gentler, muddier contours. I felt relieved when I looked at this. Seeing myself while knowing there are no other eyes in the room.

Your reflections on Stanislavski’s guide to performance as an illusory, unseen living by actors reminded me of the concept of the fourth wall—the imaginary boundary between audience and performer where both parties agree to pretend. Critic Vincent Canby described it in 1987 as “that invisible scrim that forever separates the audience from the stage.” The performer is an actor, seemingly unaware of the audience a few metres away.

I see the performer’s fourth wall, a peculiar sanctuary, crumble in gay disclosure. The captured subject stares right back at you. She speaks to you—a confrontation, a portrait, in fast motion.

Yesterday, I read about Canada’s decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, introduced in December 1968, effective in 1969. About fifty-four years after Naina Singh and Dalip Singh were tried. More than five decades since they enacted
their fugitive roles. Over half a century after they were injected, or filled, even infused, with a distinct, deviant characterization. Were they actors in a legal drama with an open-ended narrative? What happened to them? Even Ingram, who studied this case archive, doesn’t seem to know. The verdict is incomplete. One can only speculate. The characters live on, but the actors die.

When the fourth wall breaks, public solitude collapses. The confessor becomes an orator addressing an audience. Or even a subject being tried by the masses.
Is an actor stripped of character? Or do the actor and character become one, converging as an otherworldly creature of curiosity and suspicion, of fascination and scrutiny?

In the spring of 2019, I came out to my grandaunt, and she cackled in joy like I had just mimicked her favourite stand-up comic’s set. Big deal! she exclaimed. Big deal! I tried to assure myself.

Have you ever confessed your soul to anyone? Were you scared? Did it work?

Thinking of your embrace,
Bushra

***

In the spring of 1915, the Supreme Court of British Columbia was stuffy. Naina Singh and Dalip Singh took the stand, one after the other, confessing their accounts as suspects or eyewitnesses, righting the wrongs they were accused of. The audience watched, trails of sweat on each pallid, wrinkled forehead captivated by the scene. Between court proceedings and the judge’s remarks, only the shuffling of paper and an occasional gasp were heard.

***

Dear Bushra,

The confession is a brutal thing. I’m so unequipped for it, and you know that.

Perhaps only when you and I are close to each other do I feel the assured calm . . . to be able to conduct a telling. Our limbs intertwined, palm on chest, mouth on shoulder, breath inching closer to skin. When we envelop, there is no fourth wall. A testimony slyly ensues.

Maybe one day I will confess.

But confessions aren’t neat; they leave markings everywhere, and they are not for the faint-hearted. I may be faint of heart for the time being . . .

Klaas Tindemans explores the history of stage actors being regarded as fugitives by the French Parliament in the eighteenth century. An actor’s performance was,
at the time, akin to pleading guilty or confessing illicit activity. After all, “the French Revolution is an illegal political theatre of performance,” observed Edmund Burke, a notorious English conservative. In a political auditorium, the performer is a suspect.

Does the performer singularly bear the burden of confession?

Do you ever think about the confessions your grandaunt with the witch laugh might have once made?

I guess I’m wondering, what did you lose in your admission of self?

Did she lose something that she could never get back?

I come to a conclusion: We often don’t get to determine our confessions, the shape they mould or their reception. In the case of Naina Singh and Dalip Singh, where a prosecutor’s cross-examination is a precursor to confession, the two men were already guilty.

In 1915, during the aftermath of the Canadian government’s Continuous Journey Regulation—the “Whites Only” immigration legislation that infamously oversaw the 1914 Komagata Maru incident—an accused migrant was already a fugitive awaiting sentence. In a nascent Vancouver of no more than thirty years in age—where the 1907 Asiatic Exclusion League ran rampant; where apartheid lines shifted and dictated the racial geographies along Carrall Street—the Sikh man was already queer, always an outlaw. No choice or say in the matter. All confession is denied. In a trial that centres a criminal, a confession, and a predetermined verdict, the performance of due legal process is pure camp. A legal drag night. Pomp and gay.

Remembering the scene of crime is a laborious act; remembering, in general, is a brave task, a risk to your functioning mind. Each disclosure made by a crime suspect is fueled by memory—addressing it, contorting it, believing it.

“Nostalgia is just a way of forgetting,” Nisha Susan writes on a different kind of mourning, more widespread than the subject of this film. “Remembering is harder without the people who made you.”

Do you remember what it was like to cherish memories with another?

Is remembering a confessional act?

With my affection,
Ira

***

In the spring of 1915, no one could hear the racing heartbeats of the suspected fugitives. No one could know of the knee sweat inside their pressed trousers.

***

Dear Ira,

Your words are stewing my insides. The criminalized; the grieving; the protestor; the confessor—who is their audience?

Who is watching us right now? Just you and I, perhaps.

I’m pressed with a chemical longing, I ache for your fingers, their thick cinnamon scent, a gush that trails skin. Your spare, dark strands, a harvest on my sheets. The smell of your scalp here. Film of sun, a balm bare on your back. We rise together. Arms unlike any performance.

My nightmares are flushed out by rememberings of your speech, words tumbling out of your mouth, spilling with gentle carelessness. We turn toward each other, confessing a page at a time, reading, confession on confession . . .

In my dreams I see you, I see a beach, I see a path to the water. I see the spring of 1915, a courtroom, Naina and Dalip, a stage that smells foul of rot, of wood
medicinal like varnish. I see the December of 1981, Operation Soap in Toronto, a police raid of four gay bathhouses that led to the arrests of over three hundred men; I see a present moment, ongoing: wet ghosts, dripping in the nude, handcuffed.

Go off-script, deny past utterances. Change historic language altogether, I tell myself.

All speech acts inherit myth, all speech acts turn to camp. A speech act can turn fugitives into players, with teeth in search of justice. Our confessions are unspeakable, our utterances loud and trembling. The repeated disclosure is now new and raw. Uncontainable one day, illicit another.

All your confessions are yours, always.

I’m awaiting you; I’m always remembering. Your moonshine, my dayfall.

Yours again,
Bushra