The Meagre Tarmac (4 page)

“I know,” she says. “Your husband talked about you, and — what was it — a son?”

Six months ago, she says, she decided she had never been happier than when she was in the Bay Area, and decided to come back. She called Al, and immediately he hired her as
cfo
of the many Wong Enterprises. I say I'm sure my husband would love to see her again, but he is in India.

“Al tells me Vivek's thinking of going back,” she says.

So it's Vivek now, is it? I never use his good name myself.

“He's exploring all options,” I say. Those are his words. This is a woman who knew my husband when I was still in India, waiting for the wave of his magic wand.

“I just wanted to say hello,” she says. “Please let him know I'm back in the Bay Area.”

Then she looks up at me and I see it all in front of me; she is twenty years younger, and could be quite attractive, even provocative. Less like a potato, and more like a carrot. I guess her to be maybe Jewish, and then I think of west-Asian types with their big dark eyes and heavy noses and puffy lips and of Mr. Wally and his brood of cousins and probably a wife who could look a lot like her.

“Is there anything else I should say?”

“He knew me back then as Polly Baden, a post-doc from Berkeley. Then — he'll get a kick out this — I was, fairly briefly, Polly Mehta, from Toronto. He was a wild Parsi guy, in case you're wondering. Now I go by the name of Paula McNally, from New Jersey.” She looks down at her feet — she is wearing sandals, I notice, and her nails have been professionally trimmed and clear-polished — “who knows, maybe I'll pick up a third. The number of graduate degrees in one's life should at least balance the number of husbands.”

She's making a joke of it, but I can see through it. An enterprising girl like her, I'm sure she'll succeed. She has been sent here today, as I ponder my sins and my fate, by an even larger fate. Something is watching overhead. Something knows everything we've done. Normally I am not a religious person, but sometimes the workings are inescapable.

“I don't think I've ever heard the words ‘wild Parsi guy',” I say. “They seem the model of decorum.”

“Oh, they're out there, believe me. And if they're out there, I'd find them.” She fiddles around with the orange juice. Maybe she's a wine-drinker, and it's past noon but we don't keep it around. Even my husband's nightly beer is stored in the garage. “You asked me what to say. Well, there's too much to say, and not enough. Just say hello from Polly, and if he asks anything more, say I'm in a very stable relationship and he'd be quite proud of — or maybe just surprised by — the way I've turned out. He got me fired from PacBell, by the way, did he ever tell you? He set my feet in an easterly direction. My only regret is there was never time for children. So just say I'm content. Life finds ways of working out, doesn't it? That's probably too much to remember, let alone say.”

Is it a question to me? I don't know. Why does she come to me, or am I an unwanted surprise? I think of making lemonade from lemons, something they say that seems a little shallow in its thinking.

“Does it?” I ask. “It seems to me that many lives do not work out as well as yours has. For many reasons, I'm sure.”

“Trust me,” she says. Then almost immediately, “I must be going. Tell Vivek hello, and I'm sure he'll make the right decision.”

She gets into a big car parked in front of our house. Pramila comes sweeping in from the kitchen to pick up the juice glass. Obviously she's been listening. “What do you suppose that was?” she asks.

“It is what it is,” I answer. Another of those clever, hollow sayings.

She tsks-tsks under her breath, and I can imagine her little smirk. “We're running low on fresh fruit,” she says. “Next time you go.” And when I catch up with her in the kitchen she turns and says, “You should know one thing. If Baba tries to keep me out of Stanford, I'll kill myself. Just sayin'.”

This next fruit-run goes uneventfully. Mr. Wally was not out front, arranging the fruit. I ask Sammy, “Where's Wally?” and he smiles but chooses not to answer. So maybe it is eventful. I don't want to ask a second time, or ask a different cousin. I don't want anyone's suspicions confirmed.

DEAR ABHI

I WATCHED HIM
this morning juicing a grapefruit, guava, blood orange, mango, plums and grapes and pouring the elixir into a giant glass pitcher. Beads of condensation rolled down the sides, like an ad for California freshness.
Chhoto kaku
, my late father's youngest brother, is vegetarian; the warring juices are the equivialent of eggs and bacon, buttered toast and coffee. He will take tea and toast, but never coffee, which is known to inflame the passions. Life, or the vagaries of the Calcutta marriage market, did not bless him with a wife. Arousal, he believed, would be wasted on him and he has taken traditional measures against it.

Ten years ago this was all farmland, but for the big house and the shingled cottage behind it. No lights spill from the cottage, yet
Chhoto kaku
makes his way across the rocks and cacti to her door.
Don't go,
I breathe, but the door opens. Devorah was alone last night. Usually she comes out around eight o'clock with a mug of coffee and a cigarette, sometimes joined by one of her stay-overs. On our first visit she produced a tray of wild boar sausage that a friend had slaughtered, spiced, cooked and cased, after shooting.

Her hair changes colour. I've seen it green and purple. Today, there are no Mercedes or motorcycles in the yard, she was alone last night. She wears blue jeans and blue work shirts and she smells richly resinous, reminding me of mangoes. Her normal hair is loose and graying.

She told me the day after we'd moved in, “your uncle is a hoot.” She calls me Abby, my uncle, Bushy. His name is Kishore Bhushan Ganguly. We call her Devvie, which in our language approximates the word for goddess. “He looked at my paintings and he said, ‘you have the eyes of god.' Isn't that the sweetest thing?” I count myself a man of science, so I must rely on microscopes and telescopes and X-rays to glimpse the world beyond. “He said I see the full range of existence. He said, ‘I tremble before you.' Isn't that beautiful?”

When I reported her assessment, Uncle said, “I think she is an advanced soul.” I asked how he knew. “She offered me a plate of cold meats. I told her meats inflame the passions.” Youngest Uncle is a Brahmin of the old school. “So, she's giving up meats, is that it?” I asked. He said, “I believe so. She said, ‘maybe that is my problem.'”

Six months he's been with me, my cherished Youngest Uncle, the bachelor who put me and two cousins through college, married off my sisters and cousins with handsome dowries and set up their husbands, the scoundrels, in business. He delayed, and finally abandoned all hopes of marriage for himself.

When he was an engineer rising through the civil service, then in industry, there'd been the hope of marriage to a neighbour's daughter — beautiful, smart, good family from the right caste and even subcaste. Her father had proposed it and even Oldest Uncle, who approved or vetoed all marriages in the family, declared himself, for once, unopposed. Preparations were started, horoscopes exchanged, a wedding house rented. Her name was Nirmala.

I came home from school one day in my short pants, looking for a servant to make me a glass of fresh lime soda and finding, unimaginably, no one in the kitchen. The servants were all clustered in Oldest Auntie's room joining in the loud lamenting of other pishis and older girl-cousins. I squeezed my own limes then stood on a chair and from the kitchen across a hallway open to the skies, I had a good view into Youngest Uncle's room. He was in tears. He had been betrayed. In those years he was a handsome man in his middle 30's, about my age now, with long, lustrous hair and a thin, clipped moustache. Older Uncle had voided the engagement.

Something unsavory in Nirmala's background had been detected. I heard the word “mishap.” Perhaps our family had given her the once-over and found her a little dull, flat chested or older than advertised, or with a lesser dowry. It could have meant a misalignment in the stars, a rumor of non-virginity or suspicion of feeble mindedness somewhere in her family. Or Nirmala might have caught a glimpse of her intended husband and found him too old, too lacking in sex appeal. Every family can relate a similar tale. A promising proposal not taken to its completion is an early sign of the world's duplicity. My parents who married for love and never heard the end of it, did not call it duplicity. They called it not striking while the iron is hot, an image in English I always had difficulty picturing.

In time “Nirmala” stood as a kind of symbol of treacherous beauty. In this case, the rumors bore out. She had a boy on the side, from an unsuitable community. They made a love match, disgracing the name of her good family and rendering her younger sisters unmarriageable to suitable boys. They had two boys before she was eighteen. The sisters scattered to Canada and Australia and had to marry white men. A few years later, Nirmala divorced, and once, I'm told (I had already left for California), she showed up at Youngest Uncle's door, offering her body, begging for money. Proof, as my mother would say, that whatever god decides is for the best. God wished that Youngest Uncle would become middle-aged in the service of lesser-employed brothers and their extended families and that he not spend his sizeable income on a strange woman when it could be squandered on his family instead.

You will see from this I am talking of the not-so-long ago Calcutta, and surmise that I am living, or more properly, was living until a few months ago — with my wife, Sonali, our sons, Vikram and Pramod — in the Silicon Valley and that my uncle is with us. You would be halfright. My wife kicked me out six months ago. Not so long in calendar days, but in psychological time, eons.

My Christmas bonus eighteen months ago was $250,000. In Indian terms, two and half lakhs of dollars; multiply by forty, a low bank rate, and you come up with ten million rupees: one crore. My father, a middle-class clerk, never made more than two thousand rupees a month and that was only towards the end of his life when the rupee had started to melt. What does it do to a Ballygunge boy, a St. Xavier's boy, to be confronted in half a lifetime with such inflation of expectation, such expansion of the stage upon which we strut and fret? Sonali planned to use the bonus to start a preschool. She was born in California and rarely visits Calcutta, which depresses her. Her parents, retired doctors who were born on the same street as I, live in San Diego.

There are three dozen Indian families in our immediate circle of friends, all of them with children, all of whom share a suspicion that their children's American educational experiences will not replicate the hunger for knowledge and rejection of mediocrity that we knew in less hospitable Indian schools. They would therefore pay anything to replicate some of that nostalgic anxiety, but not the deprivation. She could start a school. Sonali is a fine Montessori teacher. Many of the wives of our friends are teachers. Many of my friends would volunteer to tutor or teach a class. We would have a computer- literate school to do Sunnyvale proud. She spoke to me nightly of dangerous and deprived East Palo Alto where needs are great and the rents are cheap.

If I stay in this country we would have to do it, or something like it. It is a way of recycling good fortune and being part of this model community I've been elected to because of the responsible way I conduct my life. You name it — family values, religious observation, savings, education, voting, tax-paying, pta, soccer-coaching, naturehiking, school boards, mowing my lawn, keeping a garden, contributing to charities — I've done it. And in the office: designing, programming, helping the export market and developing patents — I've done that, too. America is a demonstrably better place for my presence. My undistinguished house, bought on a downside market for a mere $675,000 cash, quadrupled in value in the past five years — or more precisely, four of the past five years. It is inconceivable that anything I would do not be a credit to my national origin, my present country and my religious creed.

When something is missing it's not exactly easy to place it. I have given this some thought — I think it is called “evidence of things unseen.” Despite external signs of satisfaction, good health, a challenging job, the love and support of family and friends, no depressions or mood swings, no bad habits, I would not call myself happy. I am well-adjusted. We are all extremely well-adjusted. I believe my situation is not uncommon among successful immigrants of my age and background.

I went alone to Calcutta for two weeks, just after the bonus. Sonali didn't go. She took the boys and two of their school friends skiing in Tahoe. She has won medals for her skiing. I am grateful for all those comforts and luxuries but had been feeling unworthy of late. It was Youngest Uncle who had paid for the rigorous Calcutta schools and then for St. Xavier's and that preparation got me the scholarships to iit and later to Berkeley, but I lacked a graceful way of thanking him. The bonus check was in my wallet. I would be in Calcutta with a crore of rupees in my figurative pocket. I, Abhishek Ganguly of Ballygunge.

Chhoto kaku
is now sixty-seven, ten years retired from his post of chemical engineer. The provident funds he'd contributed to for forty years are secure. One need not feel financial concern for Youngest Uncle, at least in a rupee zone. He has no legal dependents. Everyone into the remotest hinterland of consanguinity has been married. He was living with his two widowed sisters-in-law and their two daughters plus husbands and children in our old Calcutta house. The rent has not been substantially raised since Partition when we arrived from what was then East Bengal and soon to become East Pakistan, then Bangladesh. Chhoto kaku was then a boy of eleven. I believe the rent is about fifteen dollars a month, which is reflected in the broken amenities. A man on a bicycle collects the rent on the first of every month. They say he is the landlord's nephew, but the nephew is a frail gentleman of seventy years.

It is strange how one adjusts to the street noise and insects, the power cuts, the Indian-style bathroom, the dust and noise and the single tube of neon light in the living room which casts all nighttime conversations into a harsh pallor and reduces the interior world to an ashen palette of grays and blues. Only for a minute or two do I register Sunnyvale, the mountains, the flowers and garden, the cool breeze, the paintings and rugs and comfortable furniture. And my god, the appliances: our own tandoori oven and a convection oven, the instant hot-tea spout, ice water in the refrigerator door, the tiles imported from Portugal for the floor and countertops. Sonali is an inspired renovator. You would think it was us, the Gangulys of Sunny vale, who were the long-established and landowning aristocracy and not my uncle who has lived in his single room in that dingy house for longer than I've been on earth.

Youngest Uncle is a small man, moustached, the lustrous long hair nearly gone, fair as we Bengalis go, blessed with good health and a deep voice much admired for singing and for prayer services. He could have acted, or sung professionally. There was talk of sending him to Cambridge in those heady post-Independence years when England was offering scholarships to identify the likely leaders of its newly liberated possessions. Many of his classmates went, stayed on, and married English girls. He remained in India, citing the needs of his nieces and nephews and aged parents.

The tragedy of his life, if the word is applicable, was having been the last born in the family. He could not marry before his older siblings and they needed his unfettered income to secure their matches. And if he married for his own pleasure the motive would have appeared lascivious. This, he would never do. My father, that striker of, or with, hot irons, had been the only family member to counsel personal happiness over ancestral duty. He called his sisters and other brothers bloodsuckers. When my parents married just after Independence under the spell of Gandhian idealism, they almost regretted the accident that had made their brave and impulsive marriage also appear suitable as to caste and sub-caste. My father would have married a sudra, he said; my mother, a Christian, Parsi, Sikh, or maybe even a Muslim, under proper conditions.

I am always extravagant with gifts for Youngest Uncle. He has all the high-tech goodies my company makes: an e-mail connection and a lightning-fast modem though he never uses it, a cellphone, a scanner, a laser printer, copier, colour television, various tape recorders and stereos. The room cannot accommodate him, electronically speaking, with its single burdened outlet. But the gifts are still in their boxes, carefully dusted, waiting to be given to various grandnephews still in elementary school. He keeps only the Walkman, on which he plays classic devotional ragas. He's making his spiritual retreat to Varanasi electronically.

I touched his feet in the traditional
pronam.
He touched my shoulder, partially to deflect my gesture, partially to acknowledge it. It is a touch I miss in the States, never giving it and never expecting to receive it. It is a sign that I am home and understood.

“So,
Chhoto kaku
, what's new?” I asked, the invitation for Youngest Uncle to speak about the relatives, the dozens-swollen-tohundreds of Gangulys who now live in every part of India, and increasingly, the world.

“In Calcutta, nothing is ever new,” he said. “In interest of saving money, Rina and her husband, Gautam, are here ...” Rina is the youngest daughter of his next older sister. Thanks to Youngest Uncle's dowry, Rina had got married during the year and brought Gautam to live in her house, an unusual occurrence, although nothing is as it was in India, even in polite, conservative, what used to be called
bhadralok
, Bengali society.

“Where do they stay, uncle?”

“In this room.”

There are no other spare rooms. It is a small house.

“They are waiting for me to die. They expect me to move in with Sukhla-pishi.”

That would be his oldest sister-in-law, the one we call Front Room Auntie for her position at the window that overlooks the street. She is over eighty. Nothing happens on Rash Behari Avenue that she doesn't know. The rumor, deriving from those first post-Partition years, is she had driven
Anil-kaku
, her young husband, my oldest uncle, mad. He'd died of something suspicious which was officially a burst appendix. Something burst, that is true. Disappointment, rage, failure of his schemes, who can say? It is Calcutta. He was a civil engineer and had been offered a position outside of Ballygunge in a different part of the city, but rather than leave the house and neighborhood, Sukhla-pishi had taken to her bed in order to die. (I should add that modern science sheds much light on intractable behavior. Sukhla-pishi is obviously agoraphobic; a pill would save us all much heartache.)
Anil-kaku
turned down the job and she climbed out of bed and took her seat on the windowsill. All of that happened before I was born. There had been no children — they were then in their middle-twenties — so she became the first of Youngest Uncles' lifelong obligations.