The Meagre Tarmac

by Clark Blaise

  Bicycle-nephew was more than happy to trade a monthly eight hundred rupees for ten million, cash. And with India being a land of miracles and immediate transformation as well as timeless inertia, I returned to California feeling like a god in the company of my liberated Chhoto kaku, owner, zamindar if you will, like my ancestors in pre-Partition East Bengal, of property, preserver of virtue and expeller of evil.

  It is America, contrary to received opinion, which resists cataclysmic self-reinvention. In my two-week absence, my dear wife had engaged an architect to transform a boarded-over, five-shop strip mall in East Palo Alto into plans for the New Athens Academy, the Agora of Learning. Where weeds now push through the broken slabs of concrete, there will be fountains and elaborate gardens. Each class will plant flowers and vegetables in February and harvest in May. Classes will circulate through the plots. I can picture togaclad teachers. New Athens will incorporate the best of East and West, Tagore’s Shantiniketan and Montessori’s Rome, Confucius and Dewey, sports and science, classics and computers, all fueled by Silicon Valley resources. She’d started enrolling children for two years hence.

  And then I had to inform her — that outpost of Vesuvius — that my one-crore bonus cheques now rested in the account of one Atulya Ghosh, the very cool, twenty-year-old grandson of Bicycle Ghosh, nephew of old Landlord Ghosh, the presumably late owner.

  One of the Ghoshes, it might have been Atulya’s grandfather, had been the rumored lover of a pishi of mine who’d been forced to leave the house in disgrace. She killed herself, in fact. Young Ray- Bans Ghosh was a Toronto-based greaser, decked out in filmi-filmi Bollywood sunglasses and a stylish scarf, forked over a throbbing motorcycle — all I could ask for as an on-site enforcer. He took my money and promised there’d be no problems: he had friends. Rina, Gautam, and Rina’s mother deserved to share the pokey company flat bordering a paddy field on the outskirts of Cossipore.

  Sonali wailed, she broke down in tears, sobbing, “New Athens, New Athens!” she cried. “My Agora, my Agora! All my dreams, all my training!” What had I been thinking? And the answer was, amazingly, she was right. I hadn’t thought about her or the school, at all.

  “You don’t care about me. You’re always complaining about our boys’ education, you think I’m lazy, you only care about your goddamn family in goddamn Calcutta ...”

  “I should return home,” said Chhoto kaku.

  “Oh, no,” she cried. “I should return home! And I’m going to!”

  She stood at the base of the stairway — I could rhapsodize over the marble, the recessed lighting under the handrail, the paintings and photographs lining the stairwell, but that is from a lifetime ago. And her beauty, I am easily inflamed. I admit it, and I will never see a more beautiful woman than Sonali, even as she threw plates at my head. “Boys! Pramod, Vikram! Pack your bags immediately. We’re leaving for San Diego!”

  Chhoto kaku began to cry. I held him. Sonali went upstairs to organize the late-night getaway. The boys struggled to pack their video games and computers. The ever-enticing, ever-dangerous phenomenon of the HAP, the Hindu-American Princess, had been described to me by friends who’d urged me not to marry here, but to go back to India. Do not take on risky adventures with the second- generation daughters of American entitlement. Did I listen? Did she love me for my money, had she ever loved me? Was this all a dream? I sat on the bottom step, hiding my tears, cradling my eyes and forehead against my bent arm, while Chhoto kaku ran his fingers through my hair and sang to me, very low and soft, a prayer I recognized from a lifetime ago.

  Well, enough of that. Justice is swift and mercy unavailing. The property split left Sonali and the boys in the big house and my uncle and me in this tiny rental. Last Christmas there was no bonus. My boss, Nitin Mehta, called me aside and said, “bad times are coming, Abhi. We have to stay ahead of the wave. I want you to cut twenty percent of your tech group.” So I slashed, I burned. Into the fire went everyone with an H-1B visa; back to Bombay with Lata Deshpande who was getting married in a month. Off to a taxi in Oakland went Yuri, who’d come overnight from Kazakhstan to Silicon Valley, thinking it a miracle. This Christmas there will be no job, even for me. Impulse breeds disaster, I’ve been taught.

  In a month or two we’ll be free to move back to Calcutta. Ray- Bans Ghosh informs me the “infestation” has been routed. But Youngest Uncle has found a girlfriend in America. Kaku and the Goddess; my walls glow with her paintings. The turpentine smell of mango haunts the night.

  In the summer of my fourteenth year, Youngest Uncle was given a vacation cottage in Chota Nagpur, a forest area on the border of Bihar and West Bengal. Ten members of the family went in May when the heat and humidity in Calcutta both reached triple digits. The cottage was shaded by a grove of mango trees too tall to climb. Snakes and birds and rats and clouds of insects gorged on the broken fruit. The same odour of rotting mango envelops the Goddess and the sharp tang of her welcome.

  She is a well-known painter in the Bay Area and represented in New York. The first time we visited, Youngest Uncle said, “You smell of mango,” and she’d reached out and touched him. “Oh, sweeties,” she said, “it’s just the linseed oil.” She never seems to cook. On garbage collection days there is nothing outside her door yet she can produce cold platters of the strangest foods. She has an inordinate number of overnight guests who doubtless return to their city existence, trailing mango fumes. My uncle brings her sweet lassi, crushed ice in sweetened yoghurt, lightly laced with mango juice. I hope that in place of a heart she does not harbor a giant stone.

  That summer in Choto Nagpur, I had a girlfriend. There was another cabin not so distant where another Calcutta family had brought their daughter for the high-summer school holidays. We had seen each other independent of parental authority, meaning we had passed one another on the main street of the nearest village, and our eyes had met — in my twenty-four years’ memory I want to say “locked” — but neither of us paused or acknowledged the other’s presence. The fact that she didn’t exactly ignore me meant I now had a girlfriend, a face to focus on and something to boast about when school resumed and the monsoons marooned us. I had the next thing to a wife, a Nirmala of my own. Knowing her name and her parents’ address in Calcutta and trusting that she was out there waiting for me when the time would come, I was able to put the anxieties of marriage aside for the next five years.

  When I was eighteen I asked Youngest Uncle to launch a marriage inquiry. I provided her father’s name and address — I’d even walked by their house on the way to school in hopes of seeing her again and perhaps locking eyes in confirmation. Youngest Uncle was happy to do so. He reported her parents to be charming and cultured people with a pious outlook, whose ancestral origins in Bangladesh lay in an adjoining village to our own. Truly an adornment to our family. It seemed that the girl in question, however, whose name by now I’ve quite forgotten, was settled in a place called Maryland-America and had two lovely children. And so, outwardly crushed but partially relieved, I took the scholarship to iit and then to Berkeley, met Sonali at a campus mixer thrown by outgoing Indo-Americans for nervous Indians, had my two lovely children, made millions and lost it and the rest is history, or maybe not.

  All of my life, good times and bad, rich and poor, married and alone, I have read the Gita and tried to be guided by its immortal wisdom. It teaches our life — this life — is but a speck on a vast spectrum, but our ears are less reliable than a dog’s, a dolphin’s or a bat’s, our eyes less than a bird’s in comprehending it. I have understood it in terms of science, the heavy elements necessary to life, the calcium, phosphorous, iron and zinc, settle on us from exploded stars. We are entwined in the vast cycle of creation and destruction; the spark of life is inextinguishable. Today human, but who knows about tomorrow? We are the fruit and the rot that infects it, the mango and the worm.

  Ray-Bans Ghosh now wants to put his crore of rupees to work in Toronto. Dear Abhi-babu, he
writes, tear down this useless old house, put up luxury condos and you’ll be minting money. Front Room pishi, who misses nothing outside the window, reports that she has seen evil Gautam in various disguises sneaking about the property. Dear Abhi, she pleads, come back, that man will kill me if he can and your cousin Rina and her mother will bury me in the yard like a Christian or worse, and please send my love to Chhoto kaku and your lovely wife and children, whom I’ve still not met.

  Perhaps my Nirmala waits for me in Calcutta, perhaps in Tokyo or Maryland or the ancestral village in Bangladesh. Youngest Uncle will stay here just a while longer, if he may, keeping my house clean and ready for whatever God plans. He has bought himself some brushes and watercolors, and takes his instruction from the Goddess who guides his hand and trains him to see, he says, at last. His old middle room has been vacant these past several months. It will suit me.

  This life, which I understood once in terms of science — the heavy elements, the calcium, phosphorous, iron, and zinc, settled on us from exploded stars — is but one of an infinity of lives. The city, the world, has come and gone an infinite number of times. One day I expect my Nirmala, whatever her name, to come to my door wherever that door will be, our eyes will lock, and I will invite her in.

  BREWING TEA IN THE DARK

  MY YOUNGEST UNCLE and I and a busload of other Englishspeakers were on a tour of Tuscany, leaving Florence at dawn, then on to Siena, followed by a mountain village, a farm lunch, another mountain village, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and back to Florence after dark. I had planned to spread his ashes unobtrusively over a peaceful patch of sloping land, but each stop seemed more appealing than the one before, and so by lunchtime I was still holding on to the urn.

  The mountain towns on our morning stops had been seductive. I could imagine myself living in any of them, walking the steep streets and taking my dinners in sidewalk cafés. I could learn Italian, which didn’t seem too demanding. The fresh air and Mediterranean Diet could add years to my life.

  The countryside of Tuscany in no way resembles the red-soil greenery of Bengal. Florence does not bring Kolkata to mind, except in its jammed sidewalks. My uncle wanted to live his next life as an Italian or perhaps as some sort of creature in Italy, maybe just as a tall, straight cypress (this is a theological dispute; life might be eternal, but is a human life guaranteed every rebirth?). Each time that he and his lady friend, Devvie, a painter, returned from Italy to California he pronounced himself more Italian than ever, a shrewd assessor of fine art and engineering, with a new hat, shoulder bag, jacket or scarf to prove it. He said Devvie was the prism through which the white light of his adoration was splintered into all the colors of the universe. (It sounds more natural in Bangla, our language). If that is true, many men are daubed in her colors. She taught him the Tuscan palette, the umbers and sienas.

  At the farm lunch a woman of my approximate age — whose gray curls were bound in a kind of ringletted ponytail — sat opposite me at one of the refectory tables. She was wearing a dark blue “University of Firenze” sweatshirt over faded blue jeans. In the lissome way she moved, and in the way she dressed, she seemed almost childlike. I am forty-five, but slow and heavy in spirit.

  She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I can’t help noticing that urn you’re carrying. Is it what I ...”

  I had placed it unobtrusively, I’d thought, on the table between the wine glasses. It was stoppered and guaranteed airtight, a kind of Thermos bottle of ashes. I was afraid that if I put him on the floor an errant foot might touch him.

  “Very perceptive,” I said. “It’s my uncle.”

  “Lovely to meet you, sir,” she said to the urn. Then to me, “You can call me Rose.” Call me Rose? I must have squinted, but she said, “You were talking to him back in Siena. You were sitting on a bench and holding it in your lap and I heard you. Of course, I couldn’t understand what you were saying, but I’d never seen anything like it.”

  “Why the mystery about your name?” I asked.

  “You’ll find out,” she said. Perhaps she changed her name every day, or on every trip, or for every man she met. I told her my name, Abhi, short for Abhishek.

  The farm landscape reminded me of paintings on the walls of Italian restaurants: mounded vineyards framed by cypress trees, against a wall of purple hills sprinkled with distant, whitewashed villas. She moved like a dancer to the fence, then turned, and called to me.

  “Why not right here?”

  I walked over to the fence, but a goat wandered up to us, looking for food, and tried to butt me through the slats. Then he launched a flurry of shiny black pellets.

  “Maybe not,” she said.

  When we remounted the tour bus, the aisle seat next to me turned up vacant. “May I?” she asked. She told me that my morning seatmate had also made a connection with the urn and a possible bomb, or shortwave radio. He too had seen me talking in a strange language in Siena, probably Arabic.

  During the next leg of the trip, she opened up to me: “You came here on a mission. So did I, in a way. I read that an old friend of mine was going to be in Florence for a Renaissance music festival. He plays the mandolin. And suddenly I wanted to see him again. Not to be with him — goodness, he has a wife and family — but I thought how funny it would be if we just happened to run into each other.”

  I could not have imagined so much disclosure in a single outburst. I couldn’t even understand her motivation. Funny? The impulsiveness of my fellow Americans is often mysterious to me, but I listened with admiration. We’d never met and we were on a bus in Tuscany, but she was spilling her secrets. Or did she consider me a harmless sounding post? Or did she have no secrets? And then I wondered had she — like me — been pried open by some recent experience? Perhaps our normal defenses had been weakened.

  “Maybe you had a wake-up call,” I said. The things we do that elude all reason, because suddenly, we have to do them.

  She seemed to ponder the possibility, then consigned it to a secret space for future negotiation. After a few moments she asked, “Where are you from?”

  Always an ambiguous question: where are you really from? India? Am I from Kolkata? California? Bay Area? She said, “I work in a library in a small town in Massachusetts, two blocks from Emily Dickinson’s house.”

  She’d been married, but not to her mandolinist. She’d gone to New York to dance, she married, but she’d injured herself and turned to painting, and then she’d divorced and started writing. By her estimation she was a minor, but not a failed, writer. Like most Bangla-speakers of my generation, I’ve known a number of poets and writers, although most were employed in more mundane endeavors, by day. I had never considered them minor, or failed.

  And then her narrative, or her confessions, stopped and I felt strangely bereft. I sensed she was waiting for me to reciprocate. What did I have to match her?

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  I began to understand that something thicker was in the air. “Why do you ask?”

  “You have an appealing air,” she said.

  It is my experience in the West that Indian men, afraid to press their opinions or exert their presence, are often perceived as soulful. Many’s the time I’ve wanted to say, to very well-meaning ladies, just because I have long, delicate fingers and large, deep-brown eyes and a mop of black, unruly hair, do not ascribe to me greater sensitivity, sensuality, or innocence, or some kind of unthreatening, prefeminist manliness. Our attempts to accommodate a new culture are often interpreted as clumsy, if forgivable. I think my uncle and his painter friend enjoyed such a relationship, based on mutual misreading, but in his case all of the clichés might have been true. He was, truly, an innocent. Unlike him, I have no trouble saying “fuck” in mixed company.

  “Do you have children?” she persisted.

  I have a girl and a boy, who stay with their mother and her parents in San Diego. In my world, the lov
e of one’s family is the only measure of success, and in that aspect, I have failed. I said only, “yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s none of my business.”

  My uncle was an afflicted man. He never married. His income paid for the education of all the boys in the family, and the dowries of all the girls. In a place where family means everything, and if part of the family is pure evil, even one’s house can be a prison. Literally, a prison: he lived in a back bedroom, afraid even to be seen from the street. He was forced to pay his grandniece’s husband ten thousand rupees a month, on the threat of his turning over certain documents to the cbi that would prove something. You ask why he didn’t protect himself, why he didn’t sue, why his passivity was allowed to confirm the most heinous charges? And I say, Indian “justice” is too slow and corrupt. Cases linger before judges awaiting their bribes. Cases go on as lawyers change sides, as they win stay after stay.

  That grim prison was the house of my fondest memories, the big family compound on Rash Behari Avenue that our family began renting the moment of their arrival from the eastern provinces, now known as Bangladesh. Our neighborhood was an east Bengal enclave. We grew up still speaking the eastern dialect. We thought of ourselves as refugees, even the generation, like my grandparents’, which had arrived before Partition. In soccer, we still supported East Bengal against the more-established Calcutta team, Mohun Bagan. It’s the most spirited competition in all of sports, perhaps in the world.

  Six years ago, I’d arrived for my annual visit, this time with a quarter-million dollars in year-end bonus money. It was the dot. com era nearing its end — although we thought it would go on forever — and I had been a partner in a start-up. When my uncle spilled out his story, and I could see the evidence all around me, I also had the solution in my pocket. I acted without thinking. No courts, no police, no unseemly newspaper coverage that would tarnish the family name. I simply bought the house and kicked the vermin out. But I had forgotten that my wife had a use for that money; a school she’d planned to start. I came back from Kolkata with my uncle in tow. She and the children left for San Diego a week later.