The Meagre Tarmac (5 page)

“This is your house, uncle,” I said. “Don't be giving up your rights.” As if he hadn't already surrendered everything.

“Rights were given long ago. Her mother holds the lease.”

I should say a few words about my cousin-sister Rina. She is most unfortunate to look at, or to be around. I was astonished that she'd found any boy to marry, thinking anyone so foolish would be like her, a flawed appendage to a decent family. We'd been most pleasantly wrong. He was handsome, which goes a long way in our society, a dashing, athletic flight steward with one of the new private airlines that fly between Calcutta and the interior of eastern India. We understood he was in management training. Part of the premarriage negotiation was the best room in the house, that would allow him to pocket his housing allowance from the airline while subletting the company flat, and his own car, computer, television, stereo, printer and tape recorder. He'd scouted the room before marriage since the demands were not only generic, but included brand names and serial numbers.

“I cannot say more, they are listening,” said my uncle.

It was then that I noticed the new furnishings in the room, a calendar on the wall from Gautam's employer. This wasn't Youngest Uncle's room anymore, though he'd lived in it for over fifty years. He'd sobbed over Nirmala on that bed. The move to the sunny, dusty, noisy front room, rolling a thin mattress on Sukhla-pishi's floor, had already been made. Next would be Gautam's selling on the black market of all the carefully boxed, unopened electronics I'd smuggled in.

“Let us go for tea,” I suggested, putting my hand on his arm, noting its tremble and sponginess. I kept an overseas membership in the Tollygunge Club for moments like this, prying favourite relatives away from family scrutiny, letting them drink Scotch or a beer free of disapproval, but he wouldn't budge.

“They won't permit it,” he said. “I've been told not to leave the house.”

“They? Who's they?”

“The boy, the girl. Her.”

“Rina? You know Rina, uncle, she's — “ I wanted to say “flawed.” On past visits I'd contemplated taking her out to the Tolly for a stiff gin just to see if there was a different Rina, waiting to be released. “ — Harmless.”

“Her mother,” he whispered. “And the boy.”

I heard precipitous noises outside the door. “Babu?” came my aunt's query, “what is going on in my daughter's room?”

“We are talking, pishi,” I said. “We'll be just out.”

“Rina doesn't want you in there. She will be taking her bath.”

The shower arrangement was in uncle's room. His books, the only ones in the house, lined the walls but Rina's saris and Gautam's suits filled the cupboard. It was the darkest, coolest, quietest, largest and only fully serviced room in the house. Not for the first time did it occur to me that poverty corrupts everyone in India, just as wealth does the same in America. Nor did family life — so often evoked as the glue of Indian society, evidence of superiority over Western selfishness and rampant individualism — escape its collateral accounting as the source of all horrors. I suggested we drop in at the Tolly for a whiskey or two.

“I cannot leave the house,” he said. “I am being watched. I will be reported.”

“Watched for what?”

“Gautam says that I have cheated on my taxes. The
CBI
is watching me twenty-four hours a day from their cars and from across the street. I must turn over everything to him to clear my name.”

“Kaku! You are the most honest man I have ever met.”

“No man leads a blameless life.”

“Gautam's a scoundrel. When he's finished draining your accounts, he'll throw you in the gutter.”

“They are watching you too, Abhi, for all the gifts you have given. Gautam says you have defrauded the country. We are worse than agents of the Foreign Hand. He has put you on record, too.”

All those serial numbers, of course — and I thought he was merely a thief. Every time I have given serious thought to returning to India for retirement or even earlier, perhaps to give my children more direction and save them from the insipidness of an American life, I am brought face to face with villainies, hypocrisies, that leave me speechless. Elevator operators collecting fares. Clerks demanding bribes, not to forgive charges, but to accept payments and stamp “paid” on a receipt. Rina and Gautam follow a pattern. I don't want to die in America, but India makes it so hard, even for its successful runaways.

And so the idea came to me that this house in which I'd spent the best years of my childhood, the house that the extended Ganguly clan of East Bengal had been renting for over fifty years, had to be available for the right price if I could track down the owner in the three days remaining on my visit. It was one of the last remaining single-family, one-story bungalows on a wide, maidan-split boulevard lined with expensive apartment blocks. I, Abhishek Ganguly, would become owner of a house on Rash Behari Avenue, Ballygunge, paid for from the check in my pocket and my first order of business would be to expel those slimy schemers, Gautam and Rina and her mother, and any other relative who stood in the way. Front Roompishi could stay.

Perhaps I oversold the charms of California. I certainly oversold the enthusiasm my dear wife might feel for housing an uncle she'd never met. Rina and Gautam would not leave voluntarily. Auntie would cause a fight. There'd be cursing, wailing, threats, denunciations. Nothing a few well distributed gifts could not settle. Come back with me for six months of good food and sunshine, I said, no cbi surveillance, and you can return to a clean house and your own room, dear Youngest Uncle.

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.