by Clark Blaise
Then came the great, unthinkable calamity. Independence. The majority of active-duty British officers sold their modest mansions to Indian professionals in the great exodus of 1947. My father had grown up as part of the only Indian family in a British neighborhood; all the neighbors I remember from the early 1960s were totally Indian. Murphy Town and Fraser Town were already morphing to “Marpi” and “Frajur” in my childhood. In my four Indian years I remember watching (with almost pornographic fascination) the afternoon perambulations of white-haired ladies in black dresses, under their parasols. “The widows’ parade,” my father called it, but later I learned they weren’t widows at all. These were the Anglo- Indian wives whose British husbands had abandoned them for their ancient taint of Indian blood.
3. My father, the doctor, was a cautious man who made one impulsive decision in his life and that single gesture re-plotted the starcharts of everyone in the family. Forty years later, I have three sharp memories of India and the Nilingappa family compound that defined the world for my first four years.
I’m three years old. Little Dabu, the five-year-old son of Big Dabu, the mali, and I, are protecting banana flowers from a troop of monkeys. My mother had promised a side dish of ballayephul palliya, banana-flower curry, my favorite, for supper. Big Dabu had sharpened long, thin staves for us. Old Dabu (Big Dabu’s father, Little Dabu’s late grandfather), and Big Dabu and untold fathers and uncles had been Nilingappa-family malis ever since Mohan came to town. That night, my father slapped me at the dinner table, and I ran from my heroically protected banana-flower curry after announcing my desire to become a mali when I grew up.
Then I’m four years old. I remember the meagre tarmac of the old aerodrome and a prop-driven Indian Airlines plane that will take us to Bombay and the Air-India connection to London and the Trans-Canada flight to Montréal. Our bags — my father’s old suitcases from his student days in Scotland, taller than I am — are lined up at the edge of the tarmac under a strip of awning. I remember the khaki-clad baggage-handler trying to chalk them, but I’m not allowing it. I keep wiping the chalk mark off; he says it’s the law, a matter of security and identification, but I see it as an invasion of our property. He laughs as he leans down and begs me in our language, Kannada: Baba, you must let me chalk the bags. It means you are safe to travel. You are going to America. You are the luckiest boy in the world. This memory has lingered, I think, because I must have sensed my future. The Nilingappas, monarchs of Murphy Town, were being driven into permanent exile.
My father equated Canada with his simpler, carefree Edinburgh days. A place to wear his tweeds and enjoy a pint. What else could “Commonwealth” mean?
Forty years later, luck has landed me in a hotel room in Montréal, looking out on a city I can’t begin to recognize. I tell myself I’m here for a funeral, except that the ceremony was three days ago, because no one knew how to find me. Or if they wanted.
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4. Despite my father’s professional status and comfortable income, he was only a second brother, and so his older brother had consigned our family to three rooms in the north wing. With my two older brothers we were a family of five, not counting our own cook and servants and their families. My younger uncle and his family had two rooms in the south wing. The rest, and it was considerable — a banquet hall, drawing rooms, salons, and tiled bathrooms with misting, brass boa constrictor water pipes and cobra showerheads capped with ruby eyes — was owned by my father’s unemployed oldest brother and his retired, minor, Kannada-language film star wife. My father suffered constant second-son humiliation in a dysfunctional joint family. My mother survived, thanks to old servants and younger uncle’s wife.
I was the youngest. My father said that “time to adjust” in the New World was on my side. I would be the great transmitter of Nilingappa family achievement to a new continent. Perhaps he only meant I would grow up without the trace of an Indian accent. In that lone prediction, he was correct. We left behind grandparents, younger uncle and his wife, my cousins, Big and Little Dabu, and the usual retinue of cooks, servants, watchmen, drivers and their related and unrelated hangers-on. In India I had never, not for a minute of my life, been out of the sight of family or family retainers. Suddenly I was alone among strangers, and the streets, the city, the park, and every room in our first Canadian apartment was threatening.
When I was five years old, already fluent in English after six months of avid television watching — that cascade of transmission — I went from being Alok Nilingappa to being registered in an English- Protestant school as Alec. In Montréal forty years ago, a “Protestant” school usually meant Jewish-dominant, and “English-Catholic” meant immigrant Italian and Greek. My father associated Protes tants with Edinburgh. French schools were available, but they were seriously Catholic, and he considered Roman Catholicism the religion of Goans and Anglo-Indians. What English-speaking immigrant to North America wants to turn out French-speaking children?
For my father, coming to Canada meant he could renew his fading memories of Scotland. How he loved the street names in English parts of the city! Clark, Craig, Drummond, Dufferin, MacEachran, Mackay, McGregor, Murray, Strathcona, Strathearn ... we always lived on Scottish-named streets.
My mother never adjusted. She fell into pious trances. She missed her retinue of servants. October snowflakes drove her indoors until blackfly season. She’d say the only thing worse than the joint-family — even a bad one — is life in a cold country without family or other friends or even the sight of other Indians. My brothers were New World successes. I became her anchor to India.
My brothers were old enough to speak and remember good Kannada when they left. They were already resistant to the temptation of “corrupting influences.” My oldest brother was one of “Midnight’s Children,” born in 1947. For him, who was thirteen and faintly moustached, there’d always be a trace of India in his speech, and a heart divided. But money is docile, money follows orders, money has no accent. A million by twenty-five seemed to him a realizable goal, but it might be more. He studied the stock pages of the morning Gazette. After Sir George Williams University, he went to Ottawa and got an MBA. He was a natural networker. The Liberals were in power, so he befriended well-placed Liberal staffers. Tories, too. He was the avatar of Mohan Nilingappa. It didn’t bother him to be called “that smart little Indian guy from Montréal” and other things behind his back. Eventually, he married Janelle, a Québec girl; they spoke French at home. And in time he became the seed money behind high-tech in Canada. Successes paid him back ten- and twenty-fold. Later on, he opened the way to the outsourcing boom in Bangalore. He eventually founded a chair in South Indian studies at Sir George.
And at fifty-nine, a week ago, he died.
My second brother was ten when we left. He too grew up in Montréal without an accent, and less of a divided heart. He went to McGill Law School, and — it being Québec — he practiced, eventually, in French. He joined René Lévesque’s Parti Québecois very early, when independence for Québec seemed both natural and inevitable, and became a prominent “ethnic” component in an otherwise homogenously Québecois party hierarchy.
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.”
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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.
Mea
nwhile, 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.