The receptionist looks over the waiting room, clipboard in hand. She is a middle-aged woman, dusky, of unreadable national origin: the face of multicultural Canada. She stammers: 'M-M-Man-Manjorie. Manjorie Tapas.'
'Yes.' I stand up.
She flashes me an anxious smile. 'I'm not sure I got your name right.'
Having grown up with a funny 'foreign' name, I understand her anxiety. I feel it my duty to quell it. 'That was perfect,' I say.
'The doctor will see you now, Manjorie.'
***
It was the early 1970s in Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's Canada, my father was working at a think tank, and my family lived in a sleepy hamlet in Ottawa, where everyone was friends – or so it seemed. I was three years old. For a year, I stayed home as my older brother and sister trotted off to school every morning with the neighbour girl, Dara: she of the oblong face, blue eyes and straight blonde hair, and a desire to make us children feel at home. Dara and the other kids knew me by my family nickname, Sanu – little one. 'S'nu.'