The Meagre Tarmac

by Clark Blaise

  I had salad in the food court of the San Francisco Center. I looked inside a luggage store and remembered going to Crawford Market twenty years ago to buy my bag for America. It was my first case with hard sides and a lock. I remember the owner sending a little boy up a ladder to retrieve it, and then toweling off the dust and cobwebs. It cost a hundred rupees, back when rupees were five to a dollar. I still have it. It would cost four hundred dollars to replace it now.

  I’m so rarely in San Francisco that I thought of calling up our oldest friends, Al and Mitzi Wong, but then I thought: why? They are actually my husband’s oldest friends and maybe I should call them our only friends, because my husband is not a sociable man. Mitzi invited Pramila and me to move in with them for as long as my husband was away. They have a twenty-third floor loft in the middle of the city, shaped like the wedge of a pie. Imagine the part of the pie that falls over the edge of the pan as a solid wall of floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the Bay across to Berkeley and the hills — and imagine the Bay flecked with sailboats and ferries crossing both ways — and at the point of the wedge, where all the slices meet and the juices come bubbling up, as a kind of circular lobby with chandeliers and leather chairs and your own media center called “Cinema 23” stocked with dozens of dvds just for the six owners on the twenty-third floor. Al Wong also owns a hotel and winery in Napa. They are very generous people, but how could we show up, even if Pramila would come, with just my old Crawford Market suitcase?

  And, I must confess, it frightens me to look out their windows and not see streets or trees or hedges or parked cars along a sidewalk — just the fog drifting by and on a clear day the Oakland hills. Whenever we visit, I sit as far from the windows as possible with my back turned to them, and my hands still perspire and I can barely catch my breath. I think Pramila and Jay could sit on the window ledge and swing their legs over it.

  When my husband calls me, he says, the shops here are full. The streets here are clogged. You can’t imagine the prosperity of India. There are so many new shopping malls that even the international chains are put on waiting lists for floor space. There are signs in every window begging for sales assistants. Escalators are so crowded you have to wait five minutes at the bottom to squeeze on to one. Everyone is making money. Everyone is spending money.

  But Bombay isn’t cheap. It’s more expensive than the Bay Area. Even if we get two million for the Camino Real house, he’s afraid we’ll have to cut back a little on accommodations in Bombay. No garden. But we’ll have a roomy apartment on a high floor, above the street noise and pollution. Who needs air-conditioning when you have genuine sea breezes? He’s tried to make contact with some of his old batch-mates, but they’re all in Europe or America, except for Sunil Marchandani, do I remember him? I don’t recall the name, but apparently Sunil is high in the riggings of Birla Technology. They haven’t got together yet, but my husband knows there will be an offer because he’s Green Card with an American doctorate and twenty years’ devotion to PacBell. In the current climate, I’ve heard, we’ll be lucky to get a million-four.

  My full name is Krithika, but he knows me as Kay. “Hello, Miss Kay,” he usually says, and I answer, “Hello, Mr. Wally.” He is Wally of “Sam and Wally’s,” the only grocery store within walking distance. He’s usually outside tending the bushel baskets of fruit. Very good fruit, kept in the sunlight on the sidewalk, but not very good vegetables, kept inside on shaved ice. I don’t drive, and when my husband is here he is a reluctant chauffeur, so I drop by the food store several times a week. Wally’s cousin Harry runs the meat counter, so I have little contact with him. They’re part of an extended family, or maybe they just came from the same West Bank village. His brothers are Christian, but some of his nephews are Muslim. Maybe they belong to the same tribe. Castes make sense to me, but tribes do not; maybe they’re the same. Among themselves they speak Arabic, but to the customers they speak perfect English, like they’ve always been here.

  The cash-register girls are Hispanic. Wally is Waleed. Sam is Sameer. Harry is Haris. They have full, fleshy, assertive faces and bushy, graying mustaches. They remind me of the handsomeness of Muslim actors on the screens of my youth, like Dilip Kumar or moderns we watch at night on dvds, like Shah Rukh Khan.

  I’m shopping for apples and Wally is out front, tossing out anything soft or bruised. I say tossing, but it’s gentler than that, as though he’s selecting fruits that are just slightly overripe but can still be used. Maybe he has a wife who said bring me the bruised fruit and I will bake a banana cake. Bring me figs, bring me peaches, I will make compotes and syrups to pour on ice cream. So I’m watching him, and he says, “Hello, Miss Kay. Let me make you a basket of fruits.”

  I’m not accustomed to personal attention, but today I smile and say, “thank you, Mr. Wally.” His selection for me is ultra-careful. He seems to be talking to the fruit, not looking at me. “In Europe, shoppers aren’t allowed to handle fruit. Here, they grab at it with their fingertips, like ice-tongs. Fruit has to be cradled. It’s living flesh — you can’t pinch it. Pressure leaves a bruise on ripe fruit. When I first came here I was shocked. I almost slapped their hands, like bad children.” In ten seconds, I’ve learned more about him than I have in a dozen years. He laughs and hands me the small basket: apricots, nectarines, peaches, cherries and grapes. “Here, hand-selected. The best of the best.”

  “If only your vegetables were as good as your fruit,” I say, laughing, and reach for the basket and my hand closes over his. He is slow to remove it. In confusion I ask, “Where were you in Europe?”

  “Five years in Marseilles working for my uncle.” He continues culling the peaches and nectarines. “Fruits need to ripen. Vegetables you want to keep from ripening. We got a new shipment today, you like Brussels sprouts? Artichoke? Cauliflower? Snowy white cauliflower. Come to the back with me.” And we walk down the main aisle. He has his half-apron on; I’m carrying the basket of fruits with pictures of apples on the side, and he’s still talking. “Miss Kay, you’re bringing up all kinds of memories. When I was just a little boy, I used to save my money and spend it on Indian films. Yes, there was an Indian family in Nablus, and they owned a restaurant and a movie house. I loved those films. The Kapoors. Rajesh Khanna.”

  And then he does something very strange. He pivots, facing me, then throws his arms out straight like a scarecrow, and snaps his fingers. He’s dancing. “Oh, and the heroines were so lovely!” I would never expect a word like lovely to come spilling out of a grocer. But he’d lived in France and I’ve never even visited. “Hema Malini ... Dimple Kapadia ...”

  I have to giggle. Dimple Kapadia! I haven’t thought of her in thirty years. My father, my sisters and I used to go to films every Saturday. When he was young, back in Aurangabad, he wanted to be an actor or singer and he learned to dance and he still sings ragas in the morning, but he went to Bombay and became a tooth-puller instead. For one bright year when Dimple Kapadia was sixteen and I was ten, she was the biggest star in my world. “Bobby” was the biggest movie of the year. That same year, she married the biggest star in Bombay, Rajesh Khanna, and my sisters and I would read the film magazines about his philandering and her unhappiness, raising her two daughters, one called Twinkle, while he cavorted around with other starlets. After the divorce, Dimple returned to films, still a star but more as a character actress. She once did a topless scene, which was a big scandal but I didn’t see it.

  “We knew India was a poor country like us, even poorer, but in the films everyone was happy and we knew that everything would turn out the way it should. I thought if I couldn’t get to Europe or America, I would try to go to India.”

  What to say? We always thought that we would do anything to get out of India. We’d go to Zambia if we couldn’t get to America. My father turned down fifteen marriage offers from four countries before selecting my husband.

  “You know, Miss Kay, you have eyes like Dimple Kapadia.” He
says it directly to me, not to the bins of fruit, as close to me as an eye doctor. And then I did something I have never, ever thought of: I threw my arms around him and gave him a kiss, not an air-kiss on the cheek like I do with Al Wong, but a full, wet kiss on his thick lips, under his moustache. What is the purpose of explaining it? I simply did it. I had not planned it, nor did I even have the desire for it. It just happened. I bit the tip of his moustache.

  “Come with me upstairs,” he says, and I follow.

  The word “seraglio” comes to mind, a word I’ve never heard, or used, but I think I know its meaning. Have I been banished to a seraglio, or did I, a free, forty-one-year-old woman, willingly allow myself to be swept up by passion? It is a room of rugs; Persian carpets double deep on the floor, durries on the walls and ceiling and draped across the bed and chairs. It is an urban tent on the second floor rear of a Palestinian-California grocery store. A fan throbs overhead. There is no window. When I go to rug stores I always feel like lying down on the pile of carpets; a tall stack of rugs is the perfect mattress. I grow drowsy in their presence; maybe there’s something in the dyes that affects the eyes, or maybe it’s something older and deeper, something ancestral perhaps, the memory of windowless tents and carpets. My Dimple Kapadia eyes are losing their luster, the eyelids are descending and I settle myself on the wondrous bed, plush with carpets.

  He is over me, in me, around me, in seconds. My eyes are closed but I feel his hard hands and thick fingers unbuttoning my blouse, my skirt, and his hairy back, his mustache — the urgency — and I recognize that same thing in myself, I claw at everything I feel and I hear the popping of buttons, the ripping of cloth.

  It’s over so soon. Too soon, perhaps, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve never been raised so high, at the top of a roller-coaster ride, but none of it matters. I’ve brought a hardened, calloused man to this, to his panting breath, the clutching at his chest, his smile.

  “Ma!” Pramila calls, “for you.” And there’s a woman at my door, dark-haired but a little stout. Potato-shaped, I think. She’s American, with no accent. We are rarely visited by Americans without accents unless they’re selling something. “Hello, Mrs. Waldekar,” she says, “my name is Paula, and I’m an old friend of Al Wong. May I come in?”

  She seems harmless. I would call her fashionable, up to a point, wearing an expensive silk scarf pinned to one shoulder, but not particularly attractive. She says, “I was part of that original nanotech team at PacBell. That was then. Now, I’m Al’s new accountant.”

  “Would you like tea?” I ask. “Juice?”

  Her smile says no, not necessary. Pramila brings a glass of orange juice on a silver tray, just like a dutiful daughter well-trained in an Indian convent school. When we’re seated she says, “PacBell was twenty years ago, how time flies.”

  “My husband was working on that project,” I say. “Maybe you knew him?”

  “Yes, indeed, Dr. Waldeker was my immediate superior. I went east after that, got married, took an MBA degree, jobs came, jobs went. Husbands came, husbands went, no children. Sort of typical for the times, I guess. I’m spending a few days reintroducing myself to old friends ... and new.”

  I tell her that I was in India at the outset of the project. The good old days of nanotech at PacBell, with Al-before-Mitzi. There was a third guy in the house my husband and Al rented, a Parsi fellow from Bombay, who drifted off.

  “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.’”