by Clark Blaise
I was nineteen and on the St. Xavier’s tennis team. But I’d learned the game at Calcutta Turf and Tennis, where I played incessantly with anyone of any age. I played singles with nationally ranked players and mixed doubles with any competitive girl. And the one I favored was Smriti Roy: tall, beautiful, witty, bright, and age/class/ caste-appropriate for marriage. Smriti was known as “India Tobacco Roy” because of her father’s status in the company. We had been mixed doubles partners for two years, rising through the club ranks, when it occurred to me and maybe to her that we were destined for a more permanent relationship.
It was one of those moments, in a modest, old-fashioned Calcutta sense, when a light goes on and you see everything that has been laid out as smooth and familiar is suddenly jagged and exciting. I remember it perfectly. I was at the net, Smriti at the baseline, and she slammed the ball into the net, just past my elbow. We lost a point, but she ran up to retrieve the ball even before I could scoop it, and when she bent over, and when she turned to toss it back to me, I saw for an instant the entirety of her body as though she had disrobed in front of me. She was as naked to me as if we had been in the shower. It was a lascivious moment in a young man’s chaste trajectory. It meant that new terms had been introduced into the rather simple-minded equation of work + study + success=fulfillment. And she saw my eyes assessing her in this new way, and she broke into a smile, which she immediately suppressed.
She signaled her intention rather directly. She indicated that she’d already spoken to her father about me; had I spoken to mine? I said I had (meaning that I intended to), and from that moment, the nature of our companionship changed. We still played tennis; we still had after-match shandygaffs in the Club bar, and with friends we managed to go on chaperoned retreats and to spend hours and hours in the intimate darkness of the Film Society. But in the distant suburbs of Calcutta and in rooms provided by friends, we fumbled with keys and tore each other’s clothes off with hunger and violence. Even today, the words “Dhakuria Lakes” can suck the air from any room. We had to rearrange furniture when we left.
When I was accepted to the IIT in Kharagpur, she said she would stay on in Calcutta, earning her Master’s in French. We’d both be involved in studies for another two years. When I would get back to Calcutta, presumably with a Master’s degree and the promise of a satisfactory job, we’d get married. During those two years, I never doubted that our parents would make the satisfactory arrangements and that Dasgupta Construction and India Tobacco would be merged in the biggest wedding of the season.
When I finally got back from those two lonely years, I suppressed the fact that I’d been offered a doctoral scholarship to Stanford. In bourgeois Calcutta, prolonging one’s studentship begins to look suspicious. There are codes: marry or study, but don’t do both. What do you intend, young man, marry my daughter then whisk her off to America? What will she do there, without cooks and servants? We re-ignited our affair almost immediately, but for some reason her name never came up in family discussions. Many years later, I found out that my mother disapproved of the tobacco connection, and that my father had heard “certain tales” that cast doubts on her chastity. I tried not to blush. She was out of the running. Then Dr. Arun Mitter, he of the tea estates — Calcutta’s most prestigious industry — pressed the case of his youngest daughter, Meena. She too was beautiful and brainy, and caste-appropriate, and willing to take on the challenge of a new continent. And so, in a gaudy ceremony lasting three days, I was married in time to take my wife to Stanford but it was not the wife I’d been planning to take.
The last contact I had with Smriti Roy was at Dum Dum Airport when she was heading off to London for a law scholarship. It was arranged suddenly, just a day or two after my wedding announcement. “I put my life on hold for you,” she said. “It’s time I put myself first.” Then she took my hand in her very firm grip and managed a little smile. “It wasn’t all a waste, was it? I hope you’ll be very happy with your little Meena.” I probably said something sappy like, “At least we’ll always have Dhakuria Lakes,” in homage to those hours of Film Society screenings.
Over the years, I’ve wondered about the suddenness of that trip. I’ve wondered about those “tales” my father alluded to. Everything in the old Calcutta had such brutal ramifications. Any act of love, however innocent, could rise up like a cobra. In those years, women of good standing didn’t run off alone to the West without rumors following. Sudden foreign travel=pregnancy. We’d certainly been heedless in much of our lovemaking.
From that airport moment on, we’ve lacked any contact except for the Calcutta gossip-mill. I heard that she’d married an African Muslim. India Tobacco Roy cut all ties. She took the name Firoza Imran. She had two sons, and raised them alone. She was a lawyer and a strongly left-wing member of parliament. “Firoza the Ferocious,” she’s called. My parents were too refined to comment on the religious and racial intermarriage, but took comfort in her socialism as a confirmation of all their doubts about her in the first place.
Had she conceived? What about her “second son”? It’s idle speculation now, but if I were ever to contact her I would have to ask. In the curious ways of the world as I’m trying to understand it, Smriti and I are still playing a kind of choreographed mixed doubles, well into our middle age. By the time I learned of all these things, “my little Meena” had left me for a string of men, all of them inappropriate but none of them Muslim or African, so far as I know. Hers was a rebellion against me, not our culture — a young wife in an alien country, and my single-minded ambition. Our lives have settled down to a defined shape and substance. Or at least mine did, until last month.
In those lost years before Meena came back, I was often in London. Many’s the time I looked up “F. Imran” in the Parliamentary Registry. I could have called, but of course, I was afraid. I was ashamed of myself, and guilty. Such a radical self- transformation can only spring from anger, rage even — against me, against her parents, against the upper middle classes, against Hindu Bengali bourgeois culture. Once, I saw her on the telly. Still an attractive face, but much of it was hidden by the headscarf.
There are so many secrets in marriage. Meena knows nothing of the most intimate moments of my life. And I can’t begin to imagine what she was doing in the years we were apart. And my son is from a different planet.
When I came back from visiting some of our facilities in south Asia, I was still of a mind to stay in California and enjoy my second firstmarriage and the baby, and our new house, and perhaps fund a few interesting projects in India from long-range. The customs agent flipped through my American passport, observed that I sure do a lot of traveling, to which I merely smiled, to which he reiterated, “A lot of South Asian travel,” to which I said, “Family, you know,” and he responded, “Family in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Malaysia and China?” and put a number on my declaration form. I’m scrupulous about keeping receipts and not exceeding the customs exemption.
This was at JFK. All I had to do was claim my bag and roll it to the domestic conveyor belt, none of it easy without a wheelchair, then move on to the domestic departures lounge. Nothing comes easily unless I’m met in SFO by my driver. But I didn’t make it to the conveyor belt. I was still waiting for my bag at the carousel when a uniformed officer came up to me, specifically to me, no one else, and said, “Let me see some I.D.”
He was holding a sheet of paper, which appeared to be a faxed photo. He kept looking down at it, then up to me. I still had my passport and customs form out, but he didn’t bother to open it. “Not some fake passport. Some other i.d.,” he demanded. I travel in loose-fitting Indian clothing, without pockets. My wallet was in my briefcase. When I started to bend over to pick it up, holding carefully to my cane as well, the officer said, “Not so fast there. I don’t want you to open that briefcase.”
Now I was starting to get irritated. “You asked for more i.d., and that’s where I keep it.”
; He looked down at his fax one more time, then at me, and something clicked. His mind was made up. “I said, back off the briefcase. And give me that stick.”
“I can’t stand without my cane.”
Very evenly he said again, “Give me the stick. Handle end first.”
“I refuse.”
He waved his hand over his head, and shouted, “Back-up!” and two younger guards materialized. They conferred, I heard “apprehended” and “uncooperative” and “resisting.”
“You’re coming with us, Abu.”
I took a deep breath, as I went through a list of options, all of which began or ended with variants of do you know who I am? Forbes 500! Hell, Forbes 35! I can call senators, mayors, cabinet members, lawyers and bankers. My captors would not take it well. “As you can see, I’m standing here peacefully waiting for my bag. I’m not going to leave it here. And I have a domestic connection in an hour.”
To which the lead-officer put his hand on the top of his holster. “Oh, you got a domestic connection, all right. I think you can forget going anywhere tonight. I said ‘come with me.’ You don’t want to resist an order from Homeland Security.”
I turned away from him and back to the carousel for just an instant, and in that moment, two more officers arrived, big fellows, and when they had me surrounded — by now, I’d gathered a crowd of waiting passengers and I could hear them murmuring, they got him ... to think he was on my flight, my god! — the first officer said, “Check out his feet. He’s got something under his socks. You, get down on the floor. Slowly remove your sandals. Then we’re going to peel back those socks.”
“The bloody hell you are,” I said, and with one swift chop to the back of my knees, they had me on the floor. The first officer was shouting at the second and third, “Lock his feet, lock his feet!”
Flashbulbs went off. I was flat on my back and the second and third officers had each grabbed one of my legs, and now they held my bandaged feet in their hands. My feet are medicated, wrapped, and kept under pressure bandages. I’ve had a dozen surgeries. If I’d had the strength I would have kicked hard and sent the officers flying backward. An instinct told me not to answer questions about my feet. Any explanation would turn on a self-incriminating fact: they indeed had been injured in a terrorist bombing. The fact that I was the victim and not the perpetrator was immaterial. The first officer knelt down and held the faxed photo in my face.
“Is this you? Do you deny it?” So certain was I of mistaken identity, of their bloody-mindedness, that I turned away from it. My briefcase was held in front of a dog that sniffed it, apparently confirming the presence of some alien nitrates, or spices, then lowered into a bomb-disposal Dumpster. He pushed the fax back in my face.
The picture was of me. Taken from a cellphone, I suspect.
“Flight attendants report you were disruptive. Do you dispute that?”
“Of course I do — for God’s sake,” I was crying now, screaming, “don’t touch my socks. Put my feet down.” Of course, they pressed harder.
“Secure the feet! Be careful, he’s got a weapon in there!”
I screamed, I roared. The pain was searing. They started squeezing my feet, laughing as I screamed.
“We’ve got a report that you were constantly messing with your feet during the flight. What’s going on there?”
“I have to keep loosening and tightening the bandages. I’m in pain, let me go!”
And the damned hound from hell was allowed to sniff my feet through the pressure-socks, and he must have sent an alert because I was jerked on my side and handcuffed, there on the floor of the JFK baggage room.
I’ve never been so happy to see a wheelchair. Over the past two years I’d graduated from chair to canes, and then a single cane, but when they whisked me and my entourage of officers, dog and Dumpster through the crowds and the doors and into an elevator, I simply closed my eyes and tried to dream of far-off places. Calcutta. Isfahan, the comforts of reversion. My arms were cuffed to the wheelchair. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, I’d been having dinner with the Minister of Technology in New Delhi, formulating a master plan to put India in the forefront of world technology. I wanted to call Meena from my cellphone, but it was in the Dumpster. If I had come in through sfo, I would have called the mayor, or my lawyer, but in New York, all I have is a sister-in-law in Queens.
I made up my mind not to say another word. When they peeled off the socks, I hoped the sight would disturb their sleep for years to come. When they rummaged through the briefcase, let them be impressed by the business cards, the various journals, scientific articles with my name on them, magazines with my picture on the cover, the official invitations, the newspaper articles, and the faxes from the State Department. When they booted up the computer, let them read the letters to and from colleagues around the world. When they opened my suitcase, let them take out my Indian suit and shirts, neatly folded, the medications, and the silk jacket I’d had made for Meena, by her old family tailor in Calcutta.
Of course, they had no interest in any of that. They flipped through the books and riffled the various pages of papers and magazines and tossed them aside. They were of a mind to hold my property, especially the computer hard drive, for detailed inspection and then proper disposal, probably by detonation. They were impressed by my feet — the purple scars, the intricate stitching — as anyone should be, but they ascribed the scars, as I feared, to bomb-making activity. “Play with fire, you’re going to get burnt, right, Abu? What were you doing in Pakistan — seeing your friend in the mountains?”
“You don’t have the slightest idea of who I am.”
“You’re using the name of Dasgupta.” They had their little laugh. “Dasgupta, what the fuck kind of name is that?”
Well, all right, I got through my night in hell. I missed the connecting flight to SFO and I got my bags back along with a wan apology, and a warning, about feet and flying. I should have been the one to thank them; they resolved my dithering with perfect logic and clarity. I was able to call Meena and tell her my flight from India was late, and I was staying near the airport and would be home in the morning. And that’s another secret she knows nothing about.
This girl is a very nervy character. One minute she’s attacking everything about India, it’s all corrupt, all rotten, and everything about America is great and good and even glorious, and the next, she’s weepy with nostalgia for just about everything in India that even I find appalling. My son and Meena seem to get pleasure and much amusement from her company, so it’s hardly up to me to make a fuss.
I’m sitting with my feet up in the dark living room in the middle of the night when the girl comes up the staircase, holding her empty water glass. “Oh, Dr. Dasgupta, you gave me such a fright! Can I get you something? Water?” She doesn’t know I can’t sleep, or the pains.
“I’m fine. I’m enjoying the view.” It’s a clear night; the amber lights of the Golden Gate are twinkling. The city sparkles. She drops to one knee and stares with me. She’s in her sleeping clothes, a T-shirt and sweatpants, no robe, no bra. It’s an innocent but suggestive scene. I’d hate to explain it if Meena were to come upon us.
“May I ask a question?”
She has an appealing directness, I’ll give her that.
“Are you thinking of going back to India?”
“I think most Indians have very strong ties.”
As soon as I say it, I think: but my wife doesn’t. She has strong memories of India, but when she visits, she’s unengaged and mainly irritated. She’s able to compartmentalize, or maybe just pinch off what she doesn’t need. Deadheading the past, like a good gardener.
“All of my life I dreamed of getting to America. Now that I’m here, I don’t know if I want to stay.”
I could say, a little cruelly, what makes you think you have the option? Tourist visas run out. Instead, I say, “’All of your l
ife?’ All eighteen, nineteen years?”
“I’ll be twenty in a few weeks.”
I’m beginning to feel a slight discomfort. I reach down for the India Abroad to cover myself. She cocks her head as though to read the headlines, then glances up at me, knowingly. She’s enjoying my discomfort. She should be downstairs, trying to seduce my son. Meena was twenty when I married her. Smriti was twenty when she left for England.
“Your son is a very good person. He saved my life, you know.”
“He tries to be, by his lights. But I don’t know anything about his life-saving skills.”
“I’ll tell you some other time. Some other night, perhaps.” And with that she walks over to the fridge for cold water and gives me a little wave, a fluttering of her fingertips, as she goes back downstairs. I have exceeded the achievement of Berj Melikian a thousand-fold, a million-fold, but I remain the lesser man. I will never fill a room like Berj Melikian, even with a thousand shareholders cheering. Man and boy will not turn out to cheer. It’s Houseman, not Hopkins, and I can’t stop the tears.
I haven’t moved in hours and have barely spoken, but my heart is racing, as though I’d climbed the very steep hill below me.
MAN AND BOY
AMERICA HAS GIVEN ME more than I ever wanted, more than I even thought I could want, and I will be forever grateful.
Thirty years ago I came to Stanford to gain engineering knowledge that I could put to practical use. Of course I was planning a comfortable life for my wife (whomever my father might choose) and children (should I be so blessed). Those things, the monetary things, have worked out beyond all accounting. None of that, on the scale I have enjoyed, would have been possible anywhere but America.