The Meagre Tarmac (8 page)

As a four-year-old, the full burden of assimilation fell on me. I had to learn the etiquette of survival in a bilingual, bicultural city, when one is not, strictly speaking, part of the paradigm. Like the Nilingappas of old, we lived comfortably but without intimacy among the English. My school was English, and we were drilled in French by Anglo teachers in the time-honoured manner of colonial administrators. The purpose of French instruction in the Protestant schools appeared to be inoculation against local usage. I never had my brothers' sturdy grounding in our Kannada language. To make the obvious pun, I had only Canada, and only half of that.

Before 1965 even got established, my father would pass his mandatory Canadian medical boards and set himself up in a practice. In India, he'd been a researcher with severely limited “clinic” hours; in Montréal he became a trusted family doctor. In those early years, when Indians were barely a presence in North America, he was seen as wise as well as competent, avuncular but authoritative. He could say to patients who'd traded in certainties all of their lives, “We of course can never be certain,” and they would nod “of course not.”

... Canada regains top prize ... UN releases annual Quality of Life results ... criteria based on personal income, environment, crime, housing availability and affordability, health care, life expectancy, infant mortality, political stability, educational standards and gender equality ... Rounding out top ten ... former #1 Norway falls to second, followed by 3. Australia, 4. Sweden, 5. Netherlands, 6. Belgium and 7. Denmark ... United States ranks 8; Japan 9 and Iceland rounds out top ten ...

In the Canada of my childhood, we might have smiled, or felt slightly embarrassed at such a ranking. What about the North, Newfoundland and the Maritimes? we might have asked. Stability? When our largest province wants to break away? When the courts are busting up public health? What cities did these
UN
guys visit, Vancouver and Toronto?

Now, three days back, I think the hordes of young people I see in the bistros and cafés would say, “
Regain?
When did we ever lose it?”

5. When I was seven years old, Expo '67 came to town. Suddenly we had a Métro system. The underground splendor of Place Ville- Marie was replicated in our neighborhood by Alexis Nihon Plaza and Westmount Place. Every stop on the Métro groomed its own gaudy, year-round-summertime, subterranean city. My oldest brother, Rajah, was twenty, then at Sir George. He talked himself into a job in the Indian pavilion at Expo. Early networking, this time with his fellow “workers”, the privileged sons and daughters of high-ranking Indian politicians who'd somehow managed to place their children in such cushy circumstances. Middle brother, Suresh, was seventeen, the summer before he was to start out east, at Dalhousie. My mother decided I was deficient in Hindu knowledge, and so she began a project of epic proportions, bundling me up in bed with her and reading the
Mahabharata
in Kannada. My father went back to Bangalore for the summer, “to avoid the noise and crowds of Expo,” he said.

The great Indian epic concerns an endless war between the armies of two brothers, the Pandavas and Kauravas. The battles are thrilling in their detail, even through the screen of my mother's telling in a language that will never be more than a second screen for me. “No hatred is greater than inside a family,” she said. “Brothers will fight until no one is left, no home, no fields, no wife, no children.” It was not much of a leap to read the epic as an intimate family melodrama, my father against his older brother. Older Uncle wanted to sell the estate; my father and younger uncle were against it, and willing to take their case to court.

Bangalore in 1967 was still the sleepy cantonment it had always been. But rumors of new money were filtering in, largely based on people like us,
NRIS,
non-resident Indians who wanted to return to India for retirement, but had grown accustomed to Western-style luxury after saving mountains of foreign exchange in the
UK
, Canada and
US
. Trusts were consolidating packages of farmland around Bangalore and floating huge building loans against inflated, overseas, hard-currency subscriptions. Not a brick had been laid, nor roads, nor services, and the land deeds were all in dispute and the “contractors” were crooks, but doctors and engineers who were too busy to visit muddy rice paddies were plunking down thousands of dollars for a precious lease, ten or fifteen years down the line. My oldest uncle had been approached. The grounds of Nilingappa Bhavan could easily accommodate a high-rise apartment block. The estate, of course, and the gardens, garages and tennis courts would all disappear. He stood to clear more rupees in one day than any Nilingappa had ever stashed under his mattress.

“The hell,” my father said.

Uncle might have made (by my rough calculation) the equivalent of two hundred thousand 1967 dollars. In today's hi-tech Bangalore, even without tearing it down, the property might be worth five million. No one could have foreseen a time when Marpi Town would be a close-in suburb to a city of eight million hustlers, and home to five hundred overseas corporations. And thus was launched the suit and counter-suit, a war that would flare and subside for the next eighteen years as trial dates were set and delayed, bribes and counter-bribes paid; as judges retired and died, and lawyers moved onwards and upwards, and sometimes changed sides.

Father's message to my mother was: without total victory, without the expulsion of my brother and his fat whore of a wife, we're never going back. This cold, empty house, the snowploughs and snow-clearing — louder than a herd of panicked elephants, my mother would cry, hands over her ears — without Indian friends and with supermarkets full of unpalatable food under finger-numbing, impermeable plastic wrap, no banana flowers: this is your life. All your expertise negated; all your flaws exaggerated. We will fight him to the death, my father declared. This was a side of India, and even of my father, that seemed at odds with all I remembered and respected. At home, his rage was uncontainable; it terrified me. His plotting against Older Uncle was as elaborate and as fanciful as anything in the
Mahabharata
. Poisons, murder. Convenient accidents. And yet he was able to meet his patients day after day, the kindly, courtly, soft-spoken medical counselor.

6. In time, I too went to Sir George, although now they called it Concordia. It occupied an immense, worst-of-the-60s, cream-colored, fourteen-story office block between Mackay and Bishop, fronting on boul. de Maisonneuve. We were told, for what it's worth, that it was the largest educational building in the British Commonwealth. During the 70's and 80's, Concordia kept expanding, especially as old family businesses closed in the English-speaking west end. Apartment blocks were converted to offices of specialized programs. Across de Maisonneuve, another monster office block appeared, maybe the second largest in the Commonwealth.

Montréal of my college years was a different world from my brothers'. By the 80s, Indians were everywhere, though the demographic shift offered little social comfort to my mother. There were five Indian restaurants within two blocks of campus. Montréal was a French-speaking city now, signs were in French, and the Parti Québecois was in power. The English were selling out and moving west. The party outlawed the teaching of English to immigrant children. Had I arrived a dozen years later than I did, I would have become francophone, like the little Chinese, Indian, and Caribbean children I passed on the street and saw on the Métro; like the Italians and Greeks of the old English-Catholic schools. So far as any of us knew, Québec would be an independent country in a year or two. Despite the assurances of my middle brother, Suresh, my parents and I had no faith there'd be a place for us — non-French, non-English, now called “allophones” in the New Québec my brother and his comrades were building.

What to major in? My brothers had already split the world between Law and Commerce. Both were politicians, maybe even statesmen. If I'd wanted medicine I should have gone to McGill.

The one profession never mentioned and never permitted for an Indian son is anything remotely approaching the arts. “Every son of India who writes or acts or paints is a family tragedy,” my father used to say, and my mother probably agreed. But I was drawn to the arts, and the most dangerous art, as I plodded through a prearchitectural degree.

My father also promised to do his duty to me and find a bride. I took a good picture, and he was rich and “situated” so he was confident of a successful match. He wanted to find a good Bangalorean girl. My brothers were too independent. They dated Canadian girls, but I was a good boy, I didn't date.

Meanwhile, property values were plunging and my father decided our future would have to have a Toronto address. The Englishspeakers who left Québec for the rest of Canada and those allo phones who sided with them were called Rhodesians. Call me what you will; it was my one honourable chance to get away, and I knew if I didn't grab it, my life was over. I called myself British Columbian. I applied to the graduate school of architecture at
UBC.

Theatre Arts accepted me.

You've guessed, haven't you? Who I am, and what I became? Especially if I say the blessing and the curse of my post-adolescent life is that I grew into extraordinary handsomeness. Too handsome to be trusted, too handsome to be anything but a replica of handsomeness, like a credit card version of wealth. I became an actor. Does the caterpillar know he will some day fly? (I always did.)

7. This morning I called my (late? former? ex-?
feu?
)
belle-soeur
, sister-in-law, Janelle Nilingappa-Desrosiers, attempting to express my sympathies. I was a week late for my brother's
shradh
, the cremation and ceremonial death-service. Excusably inexcusable, I felt, since I live in Los Angeles and news from Canada barely penetrates. I learned of my brother's death only when an old Montréal friend called, surprised I was still at home and not in Canada. Janelle and my brother had been married nearly ten years, though I've never met her.

Janelle, c'est Alok, ton beau-frère, d'la Californie.
(I waited. Nothing.)
Personne ne m'a informé.
(No one told me.)
Je viens d'arriver à Montréal.
(I just got in.)
Je suis desolé. Je regrette profondement ce qu'il c'est passé, et j'éprouve de la sympathie pour toute la famille.

Quel beau-frère?
(What brother-in-law?)
Je n'y ai pas.
(I don't have one.)
Vous avez le mauvais numéro. Décrochez. Ne m'inquietez plus.

(Wrong number. Hang up. Don't bother me anymore.)

Janelle, s'il te plaîs, je peux m'expliquer ... puis-je te visiter?

Quel type de sicko es-tu? Vas t'en foûtre.

Janelle, ton mari, Rajah, avait deux frères. Nous étions trois. Rajah, Suresh et Alok. Rajah était l'aîné. Moi, je suis le cadet.

Vas t'enculer, tu, tu ... sac de merde.
(Go fuck yourself, shit-sack).
Je n'ai plus mon mari. Je suis veuve.
(I don't have my husband anymore. I'm a widow.)

I can tell you're a little stressed, Janelle. Grieving. Maybe this isn't a good time.

As I fumbled through my profound sympathies, I realized she wasn't just stressed — she didn't have
la moindre idée
of who I was. Rajah and I were the last Nilingappas, but my brother had excluded me from the family, cast me into some kind of Indian family
salon de refusés.
For what, exactly, I don't know, but it isn't hard to guess. I wasn't invited to their marriage ceremony, either.

8. After the call I went walking from my hotel, looking for something solid, something recognizable in the city that formed me. The only thing I could think of was my alma mater, squat, ugly old Concordia. If I couldn't send my sympathies directly to Janelle, at least I could leave them off at the Nilingappa Centre for South Indian Studies. The walk between Concordia and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, along Dorchester or de Maisonneuve, past Phillips Square, is something I've done a hundred times. Of course, the street names have changed and the low, undistinguished buildings have been razed and replaced with new towers, each of them with food courts and underground mini-malls and access to Métro stops I didn't know existed, and new hotels with lines of Euro-trash tourist buses outside and liveried doormen to unload their dozens of bags.

It occurred to me that if none of us had ever moved, if my father had patched things up with his brother and we'd stayed in Bangalore, or if I'd stayed in Montréal, we'd all be richer and more at peace with the world. Blips in the market come and go; one mustn't uproot oneself in panicked reaction. Montréal is a beautiful, sophisticated city and Canada has the highest Quality of Life in the world. My brother Suresh was right, it's better that everyone speaks French (“the Frencher the better,” he used to say, “it's just like India. Every state gets its own language,” and he was too big for our outraged father to slap him.) If I had stayed, I'd be one of the Montréalais I hear in the hotel bar, or on the streets, whose mastery of English is indistinguishable from his French.

And now that cascade of transmission — regret, confusion — settles in. I remember my theatre classes, and then my roles, all my reviews, the regret that I was never able to share them with my parents who patiently waited for their architect-butterfly to stagger from his cocoon. Vancouver theatre to West Coast theatre, to television, to movies, to a final home in California; it looks so easy, so inevitable. I changed my name and I used to hide news of my appearances, hoping that minor celebrity profiles would not be reprinted east of Edmonton.