The Meagre Tarmac (11 page)

And so, in a modern, sea-facing house with all the amenities, on land that Ferdy had assembled atop the very soil of their childhood home, she began her Third World memoir, her chance to show that a single drop of blood from the world's most distant corner contains more narrative, more character, more life, than the major streets of the major cities. Yes, I have loved men and women and I am responsible for a death, I have seen the collapse of empire and the rise of the new, and I know all the famous people in my profession, and the stories surrounding them.

But I have done it all as an observer.

Two months into her writing, in a chapter called We Are Six, remembering the first English-language book she'd read, and how she'd connected it to the six members of her family, as she dealt with the Indian takeover of Goa, her father's loss of purpose, and learning English in classes led by Govind Sharma, she realized she was just another colonial
olla podrida
of jumbled languages, passports and lovers. The columns she'd filled in — editor, cosmopolitan — to mix her metaphors, are the common baggage, the dna, of the Third World Immigrant. Being an editor saved her from having to create an identity of her own. Oh, for the surgical certainty of
Ramonah!
She'd spent a life straightening other people's creations, pinching the language here and there. What could be her ending? The lives of people like her seemed the endless middle of an unticketed journey. The pack of cigarettes stayed unopened next to her computer.

She had her own Mbala, who'd been with her all these years, alive in her memories and in her heart.
We are not identical, but we are part of each other.
She had never forgotten.

WAITING FOR ROMESH

THESE ARE THE RANDOM THOUGHTS,
over a late afternoon and early evening, of a balding man waiting for his friend. What is the evolutionary advantage of thinning hair? Could it be that balding apes sensed heat and rain before their hirsute brethren, knowing to seek shelter, thus having more playtime to pass on their genes?

According to theory, one monkey out of an infinite number working on an infinite bank of typewriters will create a flawless draft of
King Lear
. It puts a human face on the notion of “infinity.” Two or three might come close, misspelling a word or deleting a comma, which seems somehow even more miraculous, more human, and tragic. It signals a failed intent. Perfection seems just a more refined form of accident.

Higher altitudes are cooler because fewer molecules are available for collision, thus releasing energy. Given infinite time, every molecule in a confined space — even if the molecules represent the world's population and the confined space is earth itself — makes contact with every other.

All roads lead to Rome. It is said that if one sits long enough at a café on the Via Veneto, everyone he has ever known will eventually pass by. This has not proven to be the case, however, for Cyrus Chutneywala of Baroda, Gujarat, seated this afternoon at The Factory Tavern in Andy Warhol Square, Pittsburgh. Cyrus, called Chutt by his Indian friends and Chuck by his colleagues at the Mellon Bank, has been waiting through a long afternoon, dinnertime and now early evening for his Wharton batch-mate, Romesh Kumar. “

I hope you weren't offended,” the waitress said half an hour earlier, when she set his third narrow flute of beer — this one on the house — in front of him. She is tall and thin, wearing black jeans and a slack, black cutaway T-shirt. He searches for the proper word: singlet? Camisole? Her dark, krinkly hair is gathered in a ponytail. It was she, standing at the end of the bar, who had received Romesh Kumar's “please-tell-Mr.-Chutneywala-I'm-late” phone call. She accidentally hit the speakerphone and public address system at the same time, alerting indoor and outdoor customers to a Chutneywala in their presence, and that she thought “Chutneywala” sufficiently amusing to ask for a repeat. Everyone had heard her giggle. They overheard her half of the conversation. “
His name is what? Chutneywala? Come on, man. Who shall I say is calling?
Everyone also heard “Romesh Kumar.” He had no secrets.

He'd pretended indifference when she approached his table. Her head — lips, tongue, ears, nose and eyebrows — was a mass of cosmetic shrapnel. Rings on every finger, thumbs included.

“Mr. Chutneywala? You're Parsi, right?” she'd said. “See, I'm not ignorant. Your friend Mr. Kumar said he'd be a little late.”

“So I heard.”

“I think he said ‘a trifle late,' to be more exact.”

To deflect the conversation away from himself, which he knew to be the preferred opening gambit of casual conversation between the sexes in America, he could have asked the meaning of the rows of silver, like key rings of varying sizes, that she wore through her ears, nose and eyebrows — or the large blue star tattoo near the strap of her camisole — but he chose the least obvious: the rectangular, flesh-colored bandage on her shoulder. It reminded him of inoculation shots, international travel and of his own life when it was just opening up and full of promise.

“I see you are going away,” he'd said.

“What? The tat? That's from my commune days.”

“No, below it, the plaster. You must have had some shots.”

“This? It's my nicotine patch. But you're sweet for asking.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It is none of my business.”

“No, no, it got so bad I used to smoke in the shower. I had to say to myself, enough is enough already. Hey, I've been to Bombay. I've seen the Towers of Silence. I think it's the coolest thing, putting dead bodies out for the buzzards. You guys don't smoke, right? You're fire-worshippers, aren't you? Maybe I was a Parsi in my former life.”

“Fire is a manifestation. Christians do not worship two pieces of wood. We worship god, not fire.” It is an explanation he has gone through many times, patiently.

“That's more or less what I meant,” she says. “Anyway, I'm not Christian.”

With time on his hands, the normally gloomy Chutt can spiral into a full depression. He is thirty-four and unmarried. Giant pandas, Chilean sea bass and Parsi gentlemen suffer a common fate: a deficiency of available females. Insufficient molecular interaction. So few Parsis — just fifty thousand in the world, if that, and dropping — and so much territory to cover. In his own family, among cousins of his generation, not a single boy had found a suitable Parsi girl, or vice versa. His older sister Shireen had gone to Düsseldorf for engineering and married a German boy ten years her junior. After two sons, he'd deserted her for a Turkish girl. Her sons hated India. They hated being taken for Turks on German streets. They'd become skinheads with dark complexions. His younger sister, Freny, was an unmarried schoolteacher in Parsi Gardens, nearing thirty, too old to marry unless she found a foreigner or Parsi widower.

On her next trip past his table, the waitress drops off a plate of Buffalo chicken wings, also on the house. “My name's Bekka,” she says.

“I'm called Chutt.”

“I know, “ she said. “‘
Please tell Chutt'
... that's how that Kumar guy who's a trifle late started his message. Frankly, I didn't like him. Here you are, sitting here so patiently. You look so calm. You look like you're thinking profound thoughts. Bekka's short for Rebecca.”

“That's a very pretty name.”

“Very Old Testament, you mean.”

“Good names come from good books.”

“It's Jewish.”

He lets out a long, low “ahhh.” He remembered his best years, standards eight through twelve, at the Sassoon Trust School. When he was eleven, his father sent him down to Bombay from Baroda to live for six years with his Aunt Dolly and Uncle Jamshed Contractor. Jimmy Contractor was called Uncle Two-in-Bush for his failure to keep One-in-Hand. Sassoon Trust had been a Jewish School during British times, but after Independence most of the established Bombay Jewish families started leaving for Israel and England. The Trust is still Jewish, at least in name, but the numbers of Jewish names on the scrolls of class toppers had been yielding to other aspiring minorities: Armenians, Anglo-Indians, Parsis and Muslims. He felt close to the Jews. His old teacher, David Solomon, said the Parsis are the real Jews of India: a dwindling minority, huge in commerce and the professions. With so many Parsi trusts and hospitals, there are no poor Parsis.

It's a curious fate, to be a threatened minority with no visible enemies. Truth be told, Parsis are a beloved minority. Admired, trusted, generous, intelligent and patriotic. Every Indian honours Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, the Ariel Sharon of India in the '71 War. He remembers Prudence Solomon, called Esther by her father, his first crush. She married Danny Saul from his class, his competitor for topper, and went off to England. Chutt was left alone with the uncontested class medal and his name inscribed for all to see.

“The school I went to in Bombay had those little things on the doorframes ... ”

“Mezuzot?” she cries. “Holy shit! Mezuzot in India!”

“We called them Methuselahs. Someone said they were old men wrapped up tight in a sheet. They're scrolls, isn't it? What did we know?” His current house in Squirrel Hill has mezzuzahs outside every door, and he's been afraid, and too nostalgic, to remove them.

Chutt is a Wharton graduate. Mellon Bank recruited him, brought him to Pittsburgh and made him an acquisitions manager. He knows the business very well; his division has posted double digit gains every year of his management. Hundreds of millions of dollars pass through his fingers, figuratively speaking, every day, including that very afterooon. Our Wunderkind, the client-brochures call him; he's been a Pittsburgh Top Forty Young executive three years' running. Who couldn't be? he asks himself. For picking winners, he didn't need Wharton, the caseloads, or the anxieties of preparation and presentation. “You've got a Parsi nose,” Romesh had joked, meaning (for once) a nose for profit, not the beak-like protuberance that stereotypically clings to the Parsi profile.

For his first two years, he suffered from the disparity between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, which he explained to his parents as being at two ends of the same state, like, say, Rajkot and Surat. Imagine me out here in western Pennsylvania, so far from clean and civilized Surat, stuck in the marshes of the Rann of Kutch. He used to fly to Philly every weekend, just to walk familiar streets and drop in on old friends like Romesh, all of whom had managed to find positions along the New York-Washington corridor.

Pittsburgh might as well have been Kansas City. Some of his friends, the foreign or more insulated east-coasters, assumed it was in a different time zone. They'd get together for dinners down at Susanna Foo's, just like old times. Now Romesh is making his first trip to Pittsburgh, sent out by the commodities house he works for in Philadelphia. Now it's Chutt's turn to show Romesh the sights of Pittsburgh, such as they are, if he ever shows. Pittsburgh has an advanced transportation network and a funicular from the riverbank up the sheer cliff of Mt. Washington. The top is said to offer a spectacular panorama. There are fine museums and a good symphony, but Romesh is more a hedonist and man of action than Chutt.

Rebecca is at the far end of the bar, talking on the phone. He can't face another chicken wing, but he feels he should wait it out. In case Romesh has an accident, this is the only place in Pittsburgh he can call.

There is something else panda-like about Chutt, comically sad, not roly-poly, with dark rings under his button-black eyes, and ears prone to black tufting. While generally thin, he has the beginning of a small potbelly. His teeth are firm and white, never drilled, only polished. Even when happy, as he normally is, he appears to be pondering grave matters, or to be in mourning. People feel attracted to him and feel safe around him. They trust him with their money and listen to his advice. To Indian eyes he is obviously Parsi — fairer than most Indians, narrow-faced, long-nosed and bright-eyed. He is quiet and contained, a natural gentleman, as Rebecca has observed. Those seem to be rare qualities in American men, and attractive to a wide variety of women. Over the past nine years in America he has not lacked for companionship, whenever he sought it. He's known betrayal, disappointment and occasional danger, but never heartbreak.

When he first came to the United States, Cyrus Chutneywala learned to hone an explanation before anyone could laugh at his name. It went something like this: back in ancient times, a distant ancestor had made pickles, hot and sweet. In fact, his many-timesgreat grandfather had been purveyor of condiments to the British garrison. Indian condiments are called chutney. A person who makes them is thus a Chutneywala. His name signifies that he is part of an ancient community in India called Parsi. In Indian languages, Parsi means Persian. Over a thousand years ago, his Zoroastrian co-religionists, fleeing the invasion by, and forced conversion to Islam, landed on the coast of Gujarat, attracted by auspicious flares of natural gas. They were hospitably welcomed, and allowed to flourish. A hundred and fifty years ago, Britishers determined that every Indian — “Hindoo,” “Mohametan” or “Parsee” — should have a name, preferably two, and so Parsis, who had never used names, were saddled with place-names, or professions they had long abandoned. No Chutneywala has dipped chilies and mango or sweet-lime slices in over a century. Chutt's father is a surgeon in Baroda. His mother is a Readymoney from a poorer branch of the celebrated Bombay moneylenders. By the time he finished his disquisition on Parsiness, all but a determined minority were too bored to laugh in his face.

His father is so ashamed of being unable to find suitable matches for his son and daughters that he has threatened to atone by going off to Africa to perform free surgery. His mother wants a fancy flat in Bombay. Over the past five years, Chutt has rejected eight marriage proposals from prominent Bombay Parsi families. They were good girls, educated, professional, virginal, but — how to say —
too
good, too boring for his new sensibility. He is not without guilt over every rejection. He might be prolonging his loneliness, but he is also condemning eight more Parsi families to barrenness. In such a way, because of men like himself, a people die. To find a waitress in Pittsburgh who knows about Parsis seems as miraculous as a Bombay girl who might know about the Pittsburgh Steelers. Or Methuselahs on an Indian's door.

She says, “Look, I get off at nine. I'm just filling in for a friend's shift, normally I don't get off till two. I hate to see you filling up on chicken wings and beer. Your friend isn't coming. He called again and I told him you'd just left. I love Indian food. I know a quiet place on West Liberty.”

On the drive over, she removes the row of silver key rings from her brow. He supposes they must untwist like wire coils from a spiral notebook. Every day on his way to work, Chutt drives this same block of West Liberty Avenue, yet he has never noticed the large
Gul Mohar
signboard. How could an Indian restaurant exist in Pittsburgh, blocks from his office, without his knowing? Inside the
Gul Mohar
, she pulls him by hand past empty tables and heads directly to the kitchen. The owners are Gujarati, Joshi by name, vegetarian, he presumes. She calls them by their first names, they by hers, she lifts the pot-lids and swirls the steam in his direction. He is lost for a moment in the intensity of childhood memories, he suddenly recalls names of food and spices he'd nearly forgotten, and can see the family cook as a young man, bald old Rupla with his head full of hair, bending down to offer him two or three rolls of khandvi, over which he drizzles warm phorni and mustard seed and says, “Just for you, Baba.”