The Meagre Tarmac (15 page)

The last contact I had with Smriti Roy was at Dum Dum Airport when she was heading off to London for a law scholarship. It was arranged suddenly, just a day or two after my wedding announcement. “I put my life on hold for you,” she said. “It's time I put myself first.” Then she took my hand in her very firm grip and managed a little smile. “It wasn't all a waste, was it? I hope you'll be very happy with your little Meena.” I probably said something sappy like, “At least we'll always have Dhakuria Lakes,” in homage to those hours of Film Society screenings.

Over the years, I've wondered about the suddenness of that trip. I've wondered about those “tales” my father alluded to. Everything in the old Calcutta had such brutal ramifications. Any act of love, however innocent, could rise up like a cobra. In those years, women of good standing didn't run off alone to the West without rumors following. Sudden foreign travel=pregnancy. We'd certainly been heedless in much of our lovemaking.

From that airport moment on, we've lacked any contact except for the Calcutta gossip-mill. I heard that she'd married an African Muslim. India Tobacco Roy cut all ties. She took the name Firoza Imran. She had two sons, and raised them alone. She was a lawyer and a strongly left-wing member of parliament. “Firoza the Ferocious,” she's called. My parents were too refined to comment on the religious and racial intermarriage, but took comfort in her socialism as a confirmation of all their doubts about her in the first place.

Had she conceived? What about her “second son”? It's idle speculation now, but if I were ever to contact her I would have to ask. In the curious ways of the world as I'm trying to understand it, Smriti and I are still playing a kind of choreographed mixed doubles, well into our middle age. By the time I learned of all these things, “my little Meena” had left me for a string of men, all of them inappropriate but none of them Muslim or African, so far as I know. Hers was a rebellion against me, not our culture — a young wife in an alien country, and my single-minded ambition. Our lives have settled down to a defined shape and substance. Or at least mine did, until last month.

In those lost years before Meena came back, I was often in London. Many's the time I looked up “F. Imran” in the Parliamentary Registry. I could have called, but of course, I was afraid. I was ashamed of myself, and guilty. Such a radical self- transformation can only spring from anger, rage even — against me, against her parents, against the upper middle classes, against Hindu Bengali bourgeois culture. Once, I saw her on the telly. Still an attractive face, but much of it was hidden by the headscarf.

There are so many secrets in marriage. Meena knows nothing of the most intimate moments of my life. And I can't begin to imagine what she was doing in the years we were apart. And my son is from a different planet.

When I came back from visiting some of our facilities in south Asia, I was still of a mind to stay in California and enjoy my second firstmarriage and the baby, and our new house, and perhaps fund a few interesting projects in India from long-range. The customs agent flipped through my American passport, observed that I sure do a lot of traveling, to which I merely smiled, to which he reiterated, “A lot of South Asian travel,” to which I said, “Family, you know,” and he responded, “Family in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Malaysia and China?” and put a number on my declaration form. I'm scrupulous about keeping receipts and not exceeding the customs exemption.

This was at
JFK
. All I had to do was claim my bag and roll it to the domestic conveyor belt, none of it easy without a wheelchair, then move on to the domestic departures lounge. Nothing comes easily unless I'm met in
SFO
by my driver. But I didn't make it to the conveyor belt. I was still waiting for my bag at the carousel when a uniformed officer came up to me, specifically to me, no one else, and said, “Let me see some
I.D.
”

He was holding a sheet of paper, which appeared to be a faxed photo. He kept looking down at it, then up to me. I still had my passport and customs form out, but he didn't bother to open it. “Not some fake passport. Some other i.d.,” he demanded. I travel in loose-fitting Indian clothing, without pockets. My wallet was in my briefcase. When I started to bend over to pick it up, holding carefully to my cane as well, the officer said, “Not so fast there. I don't want you to open that briefcase.”

Now I was starting to get irritated. “You asked for more i.d., and that's where I keep it.”

He looked down at his fax one more time, then at me, and something clicked. His mind was made up. “I said, back off the briefcase. And give me that stick.”

“I can't stand without my cane.”

Very evenly he said again, “Give me the stick. Handle end first.”

“I refuse.”

He waved his hand over his head, and shouted, “Back-up!” and two younger guards materialized. They conferred, I heard “apprehended” and “uncooperative” and “resisting.”

“You're coming with us, Abu.”

I took a deep breath, as I went through a list of options, all of which began or ended with variants of
do you know who I am? Forbes 500! Hell, Forbes 35!
I can call senators, mayors, cabinet members, lawyers and bankers. My captors would not take it well. “As you can see, I'm standing here peacefully waiting for my bag. I'm not going to leave it here. And I have a domestic connection in an hour.”

To which the lead-officer put his hand on the top of his holster. “Oh, you got a domestic connection, all right. I think you can forget going anywhere tonight. I said ‘come with me.' You don't want to resist an order from Homeland Security.”

I turned away from him and back to the carousel for just an instant, and in that moment, two more officers arrived, big fellows, and when they had me surrounded — by now, I'd gathered a crowd of waiting passengers and I could hear them murmuring,
they got him ... to think he was on my flight, my god!
— the first officer said, “Check out his feet. He's got something under his socks. You, get down on the floor. Slowly remove your sandals. Then we're going to peel back those socks.”

“The bloody hell you are,” I said, and with one swift chop to the back of my knees, they had me on the floor. The first officer was shouting at the second and third, “Lock his feet, lock his feet!”

Flashbulbs went off. I was flat on my back and the second and third officers had each grabbed one of my legs, and now they held my bandaged feet in their hands. My feet are medicated, wrapped, and kept under pressure bandages. I've had a dozen surgeries. If I'd had the strength I would have kicked hard and sent the officers flying backward. An instinct told me not to answer questions about my feet. Any explanation would turn on a self-incriminating fact: they indeed had been injured in a terrorist bombing. The fact that I was the victim and not the perpetrator was immaterial. The first officer knelt down and held the faxed photo in my face.

“Is this you? Do you deny it?” So certain was I of mistaken identity, of their bloody-mindedness, that I turned away from it. My briefcase was held in front of a dog that sniffed it, apparently confirming the presence of some alien nitrates, or spices, then lowered into a bomb-disposal Dumpster. He pushed the fax back in my face.

The picture was of me. Taken from a cellphone, I suspect.

“Flight attendants report you were disruptive. Do you dispute that?”

“Of course I do — for God's sake,” I was crying now, screaming, “don't touch my socks. Put my feet down.” Of course, they pressed harder.

“Secure the feet! Be careful, he's got a weapon in there!”

I screamed, I roared. The pain was searing. They started squeezing my feet, laughing as I screamed.

“We've got a report that you were constantly messing with your feet during the flight. What's going on there?”

“I have to keep loosening and tightening the bandages. I'm in pain, let me go!”

And the damned hound from hell was allowed to sniff my feet through the pressure-socks, and he must have sent an alert because I was jerked on my side and handcuffed, there on the floor of the
JFK
baggage room.

I've never been so happy to see a wheelchair. Over the past two years I'd graduated from chair to canes, and then a single cane, but when they whisked me and my entourage of officers, dog and Dumpster through the crowds and the doors and into an elevator, I simply closed my eyes and tried to dream of far-off places. Calcutta. Isfahan, the comforts of reversion. My arms were cuffed to the wheelchair. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, I'd been having dinner with the Minister of Technology in New Delhi, formulating a master plan to put India in the forefront of world technology. I wanted to call Meena from my cellphone, but it was in the Dumpster. If I had come in through sfo, I would have called the mayor, or my lawyer, but in New York, all I have is a sister-in-law in Queens.

I made up my mind not to say another word. When they peeled off the socks, I hoped the sight would disturb their sleep for years to come. When they rummaged through the briefcase, let them be impressed by the business cards, the various journals, scientific articles with my name on them, magazines with my picture on the cover, the official invitations, the newspaper articles, and the faxes from the State Department. When they booted up the computer, let them read the letters to and from colleagues around the world. When they opened my suitcase, let them take out my Indian suit and shirts, neatly folded, the medications, and the silk jacket I'd had made for Meena, by her old family tailor in Calcutta.

Of course, they had no interest in any of that. They flipped through the books and riffled the various pages of papers and magazines and tossed them aside. They were of a mind to hold my property, especially the computer hard drive, for detailed inspection and then proper disposal, probably by detonation. They were impressed by my feet — the purple scars, the intricate stitching — as anyone should be, but they ascribed the scars, as I feared, to bomb-making activity. “Play with fire, you're going to get burnt, right, Abu? What were you doing in Pakistan — seeing your friend in the mountains?”

“You don't have the slightest idea of who I am.”

“You're using the name of Dasgupta.” They had their little laugh. “Dasgupta, what the fuck kind of name is that?”

Well, all right, I got through my night in hell. I missed the connecting flight to
SFO
and I got my bags back along with a wan apology, and a warning, about feet and flying. I should have been the one to thank them; they resolved my dithering with perfect logic and clarity. I was able to call Meena and tell her my flight from India was late, and I was staying near the airport and would be home in the morning. And that's another secret she knows nothing about.

This girl is a very nervy character. One minute she's attacking everything about India, it's all corrupt, all rotten, and everything about America is great and good and even glorious, and the next, she's weepy with nostalgia for just about everything in India that even I find appalling. My son and Meena seem to get pleasure and much amusement from her company, so it's hardly up to me to make a fuss.

I'm sitting with my feet up in the dark living room in the middle of the night when the girl comes up the staircase, holding her empty water glass. “Oh, Dr. Dasgupta, you gave me such a fright! Can I get you something? Water?” She doesn't know I can't sleep, or the pains.

“I'm fine. I'm enjoying the view.” It's a clear night; the amber lights of the Golden Gate are twinkling. The city sparkles. She drops to one knee and stares with me. She's in her sleeping clothes, a T-shirt and sweatpants, no robe, no bra. It's an innocent but suggestive scene. I'd hate to explain it if Meena were to come upon us.

“May I ask a question?”

She has an appealing directness, I'll give her that.

“Are you thinking of going back to India?”

“I think most Indians have very strong ties.”

As soon as I say it, I think: but my wife doesn't. She has strong memories of India, but when she visits, she's unengaged and mainly irritated. She's able to compartmentalize, or maybe just pinch off what she doesn't need. Deadheading the past, like a good gardener.

“All of my life I dreamed of getting to America. Now that I'm here, I don't know if I want to stay.”

I could say, a little cruelly, what makes you think you have the option? Tourist visas run out. Instead, I say, “'All of your life?' All eighteen, nineteen years?”

“I'll be twenty in a few weeks.”

I'm beginning to feel a slight discomfort. I reach down for the
India Abroad
to cover myself. She cocks her head as though to read the headlines, then glances up at me, knowingly. She's enjoying my discomfort. She should be downstairs, trying to seduce my son. Meena was twenty when I married her. Smriti was twenty when she left for England.

“Your son is a very good person. He saved my life, you know.”

“He tries to be, by his lights. But I don't know anything about his life-saving skills.”

“I'll tell you some other time. Some other night, perhaps.” And with that she walks over to the fridge for cold water and gives me a little wave, a fluttering of her fingertips, as she goes back downstairs. I have exceeded the achievement of Berj Melikian a thousand-fold, a million-fold, but I remain the lesser man. I will never fill a room like Berj Melikian, even with a thousand shareholders cheering. Man and boy will not turn out to cheer. It's Houseman, not Hopkins, and I can't stop the tears.

I haven't moved in hours and have barely spoken, but my heart is racing, as though I'd climbed the very steep hill below me.

MAN AND BOY

AMERICA HAS GIVEN ME
more than I ever wanted, more than I even thought I could want, and I will be forever grateful.

Thirty years ago I came to Stanford to gain engineering knowledge that I could put to practical use. Of course I was planning a comfortable life for my wife (whomever my father might choose) and children (should I be so blessed). Those things, the monetary things, have worked out beyond all accounting. None of that, on the scale I have enjoyed, would have been possible anywhere but America.

Coming from Kolkata, the old Calcutta — in my case, even from well-off circumstances — I'd been formed by life-and-death dangers that define survival in that city. In California, I appreciated personal security I could take for granted, the friendliness of landlords, neighbours, fellow students and professors, and the respect that was paid to me — even as a foreigner — by the business and investment community. I could go to a bank with good credit and a business plan and compete for a loan. In America, I could trust in contracts and know that they actually worked for mutual protection. I cannot imagine a more hospitable country than the United States of the early 1980s.

America gave me everything I ever wanted. But somehow, I, or America, could not deliver on what I really needed. In the spirit of honesty, I must say: it has become time for me to leave.

On the streets of my childhood, I also knew love and security. Back in those days, Sunny Park was green and serene, the bungalows widely spaced behind high walls. I knew the names of chowkidars who night and day sat on wooden stools in our neighbours' driveways, and the danda-walas who walked the street by night, hour by hour, chiming their thick wooden dandas on the concrete, waking us to the reassurance that no miscreants had breached the security of our streets and walls.

We were trusting souls.

I was the little boy in a St. Xavier's white shirt, gray shorts and a loosened tie who would sit at the feet of gnarly old chowkidars, absorbing the people's history of Bengal. The old men's memories and passions stretched back before Partition, to their youthful love for the leader of the Indian National Army, “Netaji” Subhas Chandra Bose. Netaji saw the mortal threats to Britain from Germany and Japan as the God-given opening for India's immediate independence. Allying himself to Britain's enemies — what could be more obvious? According to Bimal Nag, my toothless, chowkidar-informant, Netaji broke with those Congress Party traitors, Nehru and Gandhi. Nehru was even (“pardon me, young sir”) on intimate terms with Lady Mountbatten. What kind of Independence could such a twisted man negotiate?

“We know, don't we?
Bishwasghatak.
” Treachery. “Mountbatten's vengeance on Nehru was slicing us up in Partition. They robbed us of our homeland. Your people are from East, no?” Yes, they were. I was born in Kolkata, but both of my parents were born in Dhaka. At home we spoke the eastern dialect and in soccer we lived and died with East Bengal.

Those had been thrilling days in old Bengal, when the Japanese Army was raking through the jungles of Burma to the edge of “British” India. Soon, the Japanese Army would link up with Netaji's
INA
, Calcutta would welcome them, and Delhi would automatically fall to our home grown liberators. The British and all the vermin who'd sided with them would be swept away to England or Australia. My grandmother remembered — with mixed pride and terror — the Japanese bombing of Kidderpore Docks. “They meant no harm to Indians,” her father had assured her. “Their fight is only with the Britishers.”

We hadn't yet learned what the Japanese had done to their fellow Asians in China, the Philippines, Korea, Singapore and Indonesia. Indian nationalists like my grandfather would have called those pictures of bombings and beheadings “Churchill propaganda”. He trusted only his two heroes: Netaji and Adolf Hitler. My father remembered his first meeting with American airmen, running up to them in welcome, and being offered a few paise to shine their dead-cow shoes, an untouchable's job. He was a proud man: he never forgot.

Today, Kolkata's airport, (which used to be called Dum-Dum, after the village where the British made their bullets), is named Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport.

One morning, as I walked past him on the way to school, Nirmal Nag didn't snap to attention and offer a fake-military salute, as he often did. He was slumped against the wall, head nearly in his lap. I walked over to him, asking, “Mr. Nag, are you keeping good health?”

A necklace of dried blood stretched across his throat from ear to ear. You would think that was enough to alienate me forever from my hometown.

At dinner, my father declared, “It seems our Maoist friends are sending a message.” But what “message” were the Naxals sending, murdering a patriotic old man and wiping out the only history book I could trust?

“Naxals!” my mother cried. “They'll kill us in our beds. They'll feel our soft hands and kill us on the spot!” The Naxalites were our local Maoists. They wanted to exterminate all educated, soft-handed capitalists like us.

“It must have been a garrote,” my father explained. He spelled the word. Nag's death helped me learn a useful new word, never to forget it. “Fear not,” he said. “The police will protect us.” My father was very friendly with Mr. Ranjit Gupta, the Chief of Police.

“Army and police are all with the Naxals,” my mother persisted.

My father was an avid golfer, a member of two clubs with 18-hole courses; one of them designated “Royal.” His threesome was usually made up of “Slicer” Sinha, his personal banker, and Dr. “Peppy” Peppermintwala, his arthritis man. When I was twelve, I was allowed to carry my father's bag, and then to scour the greens and roughs for old golf balls. I was present the day “Slicer” laughingly said, “Now I will demonstrate the rationale behind my nickname,” and proceeded to skewer a drive into a dense strip of scrub and trees. Just beyond the trees, on the other side of a high wall topped with barbed wire, we could make out the tin roofs and smoke from the cooking fires of a teeming bustee. That's how it always is in Kolkata: splendor and squalor cheek-by-jowl.

Slicer Sinha went to assess his lie, and never emerged. A few months later, when my father thought I could absorb the news, he casually mentioned that two days after the unfortunate incident, Slicer's head, wrapped in an old sari, had been deposited on the lap of his dozing chowkidar. The poor old man went mad.

And I was friendly with the dhobis carrying a family's laundry on their heads, and the istiri-walas — the ironers — standing under broad trees, dropping hot coals into the belly of their heavy appliances to keep them steaming-hot. I knew the names of their children who would sit at their father's feet with a notebook, keeping accounts. The children, somehow, had learned to read and write (as their fathers never had), and to add, and I don't think those children ever missed charging for the ironing of a sheet, a school uniform, a sari, or was any item ever lost or over-charged. My mother doublechecked every expense. That's the old Calcutta: double-check, then verify.

If I'd been able to put two-and-two together, I would have placed those dhobis and istiri-walas and their big-eyed children under the tin roofs of the bustee next to the golf course. I would imagine them drawing tea-water from a rivulet where thousands of people had dumped their night's slop-buckets, where wives and mothers squatted for hours turning chapattis and stirring a pot of daal on an open fire fueled by cow-dung patties plucked by the delicate hands of diligent daughters from the dust of roadways. I can still smell the acrid smoke, augmented by millions more street-dwellers cooking the same items by the same cow-dung on the streets of Kolkata, which would turn our winter skies black with smog.

But I was a St. Xavier's boy, skipping along the wide footpaths under a canopy of trees, without a care. It came to me much later, when I'd made my fortune, that I began thinking of the millions of such children in India: bright, curious, adaptive, and how we'd wasted their lives. Back in the days when I could walk without canes or assistance, I toured those bustees. I might not be able to alter the country's fate, but a few million dollars entrusted to an honest contractor could provide clean water, trees and gardens and school rooms with computers and dedicated teachers.

My wife called it a pipedream.

Even today, especially today and the past few months, I can conjure the smell of coal-fired ironed sheets, my mother's saris, and my school uniform. I knew our driver, Naseer Ahmad, and the names of his twelve children and three wives, and our Christian primary cook, Samuel, whose wife and children lived somewhere in Orissa, and Mohammed, our replacement cook, or sous-chef, as I learned to call him, who took over during Samuel's month-long Christmas and Easter breaks.

The major Christian holidays made serious demands on Samuel's time. At Christmas, and at Easter, many of Samuel's children magically found their way hundreds of miles to Kolkata, to Sunny Park, and materialized on our verandah with their hands out. So did Naseer Ahmad's and Mohammed's at Id. With a domestic staff of Hindus, Christians and Muslims, we were always short a driver, a cook, a bearer or chowkidar. We were not a particularly religious family, but we were communally tolerant. We were Hindu and we knew our
gotra
and tried not to violate it by ill-considered marriage. My family had expended all their energies getting out of East Bengal, settling in Kolkata and educating their children.

My father earned his electrical engineering degree in Britain, in the uncertain years just after Independence. India dithered. Should we align ourselves to the East, West, or stay neutral? Socialist, Communist, Capitalist? We were a little of each. And so, four dreary, hopeless decades passed, with Five-Year plans, promises and no delivery. The energy of two generations was wasted, their aspirations thwarted. We fashioned a culture of bribery. We created the land of eternal legal stalemate. We became a stagnant pool of incredible talent, turning cynical and corrupt.

Before leaving for London, my father had married. When he returned he went to work at Calcutta Electric Supply Company. He created a family: my oldest sister, born nine months after marriage, then two more girls after his return, then two boys, and me, the baby. By then — we're up to the early 60s — he was able to leave
CESC
and start his own company, Dasgupta Electric, which he merged with his father's Dasgupta Construction. We built housing then furnished them with television sets and the transistor radios and recorders and later, microwave ovens. Eventually we eliminated the need for istri-walas, dhobis and door-to-door appliance repairers. Dasgupta
C&E
was the company that I was sent to
IIT
-Kharagpur, then to Stanford, to bring into the late-20th century. In my father's incessant planning, my job would be to transform
DE&C
from retailers into manufacturers and salesmen into researchers.

How orderly and planned my life was to become! If I picked up all the bread crumbs scattered by my father — if I'd come back with the proper engineering degree, topped perhaps with an
MBA
, if I'd taken charge of Dasgupta Construction & Electric and hired my brothers and brothers-in-law to impressive-sounding positions, if I hadn't fallen in love on my own — I would have led a comfortable and doubtless, rewarding life. I would have been one of Kolkata's young shakers and movers.

I'd already discovered Smriti Roy, the girl I wanted to marry, but it never happened. I went to Stanford instead and she went to London and became a Muslim parliamentarian. Eventually, I married my father's choice, Meena Mitter, and we have our son, and she divorced me and we got back together, for a while, and we now have a baby girl. And we have a second divorce.

Without a drop of rebelliousness in me, I systematically rejected every nugget of fatherly advice. I left Stanford before my degree. I didn't go to business school. I went deep into debt to start my own company. Our son is a very different kind of genius. One night when he was sixteen, in the midst of the usual Indian immigrant “Harvard- Cal Tech or Stanford” debate, he announced: “I'm gay. The whole world will be my university.” He dropped out of high school and went on a bus-and-walking photographic safari of India. He took pictures — high quality, I must admit, and much honoured — of all the places boys from good families had been taught to avoid. All the kinds of men and boys we'd whispered about. I hated myself for thinking: thank God my parents are dead. They will never see those photos of men dressing as women and men-on-boys and police raids on rail-station toilet stalls.

My father used to say, “When Manik is turning a picture, all of Calcutta is working.” This was never truer than the years of my adolescence when Manik-da — or, as he was known outside Bengal, Satyajit Ray — was making movies based on the novels of other friends of my father, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Moni Shankar Mukherjee. “Shankar” was Bengal's most popular novelist, but with him novels were only a hobby. By day, he was an executive with Dunlop's. Manik-da's films of the 70's were contemporary, not historic, appealing to a middle-class audience and based on the daily compromises made by middle-class, commerce-based Calcuttans. In other words, movies were being made about people like us, like our clubs, our colleges and our class.

When Manik-da was making a movie, all the taxi drivers, caterers, carpenters and electricians, all the part-time and full-time actors, the musicians who'd put away their instruments or packed away their dreams, found work one more time. So did the streetcleaners, repairmen and technicians. Dasgupta Electric provided the appliances and the generators. Middle-class Bengali-speaking children found walk-on parts. Has any artist ever been so attached to his city? Maybe Samuel Johnson, as I learned at St. Xavier's, but I doubt even Doctor Johnson knew such connection, or received such adulation. “When you are tired of Calcutta, you are tired of life,” he might have said, had he known our city. Even I found a small walk-on, in
Simabhaddo
. For a few months, I thought of myself as an actor-in-training, dazzled by Sharmila Tagore, not an apprentice electrical engineer. I have known many of the world's “great men” but in my mind, Satyajit Ray was the greatest.