The Meagre Tarmac

by Clark Blaise

  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 Ga
ngulys 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.

  “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.