The Meagre Tarmac (2 page)

“That's amazing!”

“She is the youngest person ever enrolled for credit in the history of Stanford. She is also a champion figure skater. My husband forgot to mention her, so I thought you might perhaps note that, if you have space.”

“I believe I mentioned she is very studious,” I say. Suddenly my wife forgets the evil eye.

Anya breaks off a bit of halwa.

I rise to turn off the central AC. The girl is underdressed for air conditioning, and I am disturbed by what I see happening with her breasts, under the boastful logo. They are standing out in points. Krithika returns to the kitchen.

“I am content, of course.” What else is there on this earth, I want to ask, than safeguarding the success of one's children? What of her father, the Russian deli owner? Is he happy? What is happiness for an immigrant but the accumulation of visible successes? He cannot be happy, seeing what has happened to his daughter. Does the Russian have friends? Does he barge into American houses? Do Americans swarm around his? Who are his heroes? Barry Bonds, Terrell Owens, Tiger Woods, Jerry Rice? We share time on the same planet; that is all. We will see how much the Americans love their sports heroes if any of them tries to buy a house on their street. Mukesh Mahulkar is big and strong and handsome and he is good in his studies and I'm sure his parents are proud of him and don't fear the evil eye. He'll play professional tennis and make a fortune and he won't spend it all on cars and mansions. He will invest wisely and he will be welcomed on any street in this country.

“My father works too hard. He's already had two heart attacks. My mother says he smokes like a fish. Drinks like a chimney. He dumps sour cream on everything. Everything in his mouth is salty, fatty meat, and more meat, and cream, and cheese and vodka. Forgive the outburst.”

“We are vegetarian. We do not drink strong spirits.”

“So's Mike. Veggie, I mean. He's teaching me.”

“You mean Mukesh, the tennis player?”

“His name is Mike. He's my boyfriend, Dr. Waldekar.”

The ache I feel at the mention of a boyfriend is like the phantom pain from a lost limb. If I could even imagine a proper companion for this Russian girl, he would be as white and smooth as a Greek sculpture, built on the scale of Michelangelo's David. The thought that it is a Mumbai boy who runs his hands over her body, under those flimsy clothes, makes my fingers run cold.

“I might as well come out with it, Dr. Waldekar,” she says. “We've broken up. His parents hate my guts.”

Good for them, I think. Maybe you should dress like a proper young lady. I knew a Mahulkar boy in Dadar. I knew others in it, but no Mahulkars of my generation in the Bay Area. So many have come. Given my early advantage, the opportunities I turned down, I am a comparative failure.

“This is my honors project, but ... it's personal, too. I love India and Indians, I love the discipline of Indians. No group of immigrants has achieved so much, in so little time, with such ease and harmony. I love their pride and dignity. I even love it that they hate me. I can respect it.” She is smiling, but I don't know if I should smile with her and nod in agreement, or raise an objection. She might be a good sociologist, but there is much she is missing in the realm of psychology. So she goes on, and I don't interrupt.

“But what I don't love is that Mike won't stand up to them, for me. You know what his father said? He said
American girls are good for practice, until we find you a proper bride.
When Mike told me that, we laughed about it. I'm friendly with his sister and I said to her,
your game's a little rusty. Think you need some practice?
and we laughed and laughed. Mike said he'd show me Mumbai, and I said I'd take him to Moscow. He's twenty-two years old, but the minute his father said to stop seeing me, he stopped. One day we're playing tennis, or at the beach or he's cooking Indian vegetarian and I'm learning, and then, nothing. Nothing.” She lets herself go, drops her head into the basin of her hands, and sobs. It is a posture I, too, am familiar with. Krithika rushes in from the kitchen, stops, frowns, then goes back inside. I will be questioned later: what did I do, say, what didn't I do, didn't say? She will suspect some misbehaviour.

So, I think, Mahulkar has found a bride for his son. This is very good news. Who could it be? Why hadn't I heard that the famous Mukesh Mahulkar was getting married? It means there is hope for every Indian father with a son like mine.

“Please, take water,” I say. I would be tempted to hold her, or pat her back, but my arms might not reach. It would be awkward, and perhaps misinterpreted. Now that she has pitched forward, I see deep into her bosom; she has a butterfly tattoo on one breast, well below the separation-line. A girl this big, and crying, in my living room, wearing such a T-shirt, has brought chaos from the street into our life.

“I'm so sorry,” she says. “That was inexcusable. You must think I came under false pretenses. Mike's getting married in Mumbai in three weeks. It's very hard, to be told, without warning, without explanation, that you're just ... unworthy.”

She has a beautiful smile. It's as though she had not been crying at all, or knew no sadness, or had a Russian childhood and a father with a mouthful of meat and vodka. I will ask around and discover the bride's name.

I stand. “I must ask you quietly to leave. I must pick up my daughter from practice. My son will be home soon.” I do not want her defiling my house, spreading her contagion into our sterile environment. She has no interest in successful immigrants, or in me. “I have no special Bombay advice to offer.” When I open the door, my fingers brush the white flesh of her back, just above the tattoo. I don't think she even feels it. She says only, “you have been very kind and hospitable. Please forgive me.”

I could not go home for my father's funeral. I did not see my son until he was four years old and had already bonded with my wife's family. I think he still treats me like an intruder. So does my wife. It has pained me all these years that I permitted my studies and other activities to take precedence over family obligations. I have been trying to atone for my indiscretions all these years.

In three of the four years I shared a house with Al Wong and the Mehta boy who went back and a Parsi boy who married an American girl and stayed, I remained steadfast to my research. I got a job at PacBell, where they immediately placed me in charge of a small research cell with people like myself, debt-free, security-minded team players. Suddenly, I had money. I bought a car and a small bungalow in Palo Alto, suitable for wife and child. No one in the group knew I was already married, and a father. We were all just in our twenties, starting out in the best place, in the best of times.

In my small group there was an American girl, a Berkeley graduate. Her name was Paula, called Polly. Pretty Polly, the boys liked to joke, which embarrassed her. On Fridays, our group would join with others for some sort of party. I would allow myself a beer or two, since carbonation lessened the taint of alcohol. Those sorts of restaurants made vegetarianism very difficult; I was admired for my discipline. Polly was naturally less restrained than I, especially after sharing a few pitchers of beer, a true California girl from someplace down south. Watching closely, I could gauge the moment when a quiet, studious girl, very reliable and hard-working, would ask for a cigarette, then go to the bathroom, come back to the table, and sit next to someone new. She sat next to me. One night she said, “You're a very handsome man, Dr. Waldekar.” No one had ever told me that, and to look fondly at one's reflection in a mirror is to invite the evil eye. “Take me home,” she said. “I don't know where you live,” I answered. She punched me on the arm. “Ha, ha,” she said, “funny, too.”

It's that transformation, not the flattery, that got to me. All week in the office, she was a flattened presence. She totally ignored me, and I, her. I imagined she was one of the good girls, living with her parents.

The passion that arises from workplace familiarity is hotter than hell. It
is
hell, because one must hide certain feelings, erase recurrent images, must put clothes back on a girl you've been with through the night. Above all, it must be secret. On Friday nights, she must not sit next to me. “May I call you Vivek, Dr. Waldekar?” she would ask. After the first time, I told myself it was the beer, but I knew it wasn't. The sexual acts that had resulted in the birth of my son back in India, a boy whose pictures I now had to hide, had seemed, in comparison to Polly, a continuation of tennis practice, slamming a ball against a wall and endlessly returning it. She took drugs, expensive drugs, and I was helpless to stop her, or complain.

“Go to her, if that will make you happy,” says Krithika. “I know your secrets.”

“What foolishness.”

“You were staring at her. You shamed me. You behaved disgustingly.”

“If you were interested in the facts you would know I threw her out.”

“Remember,” she mumbles, “I get half.”

I reach out for her, but she pulls away. This is the woman, the situation, I left Polly for. Eventually, I left PacBell because of her, which has worked out well for me. Polly left California because of me. Al Wong is the only person I confessed it to; I think he's mentioned it to Mitzie because of the ways she sometimes scrutinizes me.
What do you think of her, Vivek?
she'll ask me, as though I have a special interest in attractive women, instead of Al. Maybe she's mentioned it to Krithika. The promiscuous exchange of intimacies, which passes for friendship in America, is a dangerous thing. It is the sad nature of the terms of a marriage contract that the strongest evidence of commitment is also the admission of flagrant unfaithfulness.

One night fourteen years ago, I went up to sfo to meet Krithika and Jay who were arriving in my life after a thirty-hour flight from Bombay. I got there early and pressed myself close to the gate, but Sikhs from the Central Valley, rough fellows with large families and huge signboards, pushed me aside and called me names. It was a time of deep tensions between Hindus and Sikhs. If I had stood my ground, they threatened to stamp me into the floor. The Indian passengers poured through, fanning out in every direction, pushing carts stacked high with crates and boxes. Waiting families ducked under the barriers to join them, and I waited and waited, but no wife, no child. The terminal is always crowded, but the number of Indians diminished, to be replaced by Mexicans and Koreans. Perhaps she was having visa problems, I thought, or the bags had been lost.

After two hours, just as I'd decided to go back to my empty house, I heard my name on the public announcement.
Please pick up the courtesy phone, Vivek Waldeker.
Your wife wants you to know that since you were not here to meet them, she and her child have gone to a safe address provided by a fellow passenger, and she will contact you in the morning.

Two days later, I got that call. Perhaps you forgot you have a wife and son, she said. Perhaps you no longer remember me. She has remained on friendlier terms with that generous family who took her home on her first night in America than she ever has with me.

At four a.m. when the streets are dark and only the dogs are awake, the rattling of food carts begins. Barefoot men and boys dressed in white khadi push their carts heavy with oil, propane, and dozens of spiced tufts of chickpea batter ready for frying, all prepared during the night by wives and daughters. Each cart is lit by a naphtha lamp; each man fans out to his corner of the city near big office buildings, under his own laburnam, ashoka or peepal tree. Qasim died one morning as he pushed his cart through the streets of Mahim. His son Waqus appeared the next day, with his father's picture and a page of Urdu pasted to the cart's plastic shield. Even Hindus knew what it meant. My father took his retirement a month later — his superiors were truly sorry to see him go, since he was the obstruction that enriched everyone around him. He arranged my marriage, I received my Stanford scholarship and went to America, leaving a pregnant wife behind. After three years of bad health, Baba died. And I didn't attend the funeral services because I was trying to please an American girl who thought starting a fire in my father's body was too gross a sacrilege to contemplate.

IN HER PRIME

TIFFY HU AND I
are passing by the hedges behind the tennis courts, headed to skating practice, when a horrible truth strikes me: life is eternal. There's no escaping it, not even in death. I'm scuffling my shoes over the concrete slabs, over tufts of grass and weeds and the anthills and dried snail shells. Dogs do their business under the hedges. Flies drop their eggs.

Smudgy little birds perch on the fence and hop through the thorny branches.

“You coming, Prammy?”

“I'm thinking,” I say. What goes on in her little brain? It must be like the birds, hopping and chirping. Actually, I do know. It's sex, sex, sex.

A year ago, towards dusk, I was walking by this same place. A gray veil, like a frayed blanket, had moved up from the gutter and across the sidewalk. Birds were dive-bombing. As I got closer, the blanket dissolved into moving parts. Hundreds of mice, or maybe moles, were making a dash up from the sewers and across the naked sidewalk to their burrows under the hedge. It reminded me of a nature film, like wildebeest on their migration, attacked by crocodiles, or hatchling turtles pecked by seagulls.

We die and decompose. We never return and we will never sleep with virgins in a perfumed garden, or go to heaven or hell no matter what our sins or virtues, or drop into the airless nirvana my mother prays for. But this afternoon, the combination of birds and ants and tufts of grass makes me see that something of us does return. Our chemical shell is reabsorbed. It's as simple as the Law of Conservation of Matter. The elements keep going on, and on, and on and they recombine randomly, making birds and mice, grass and trees, and sometimes, even, every few thousands years I guess, a dog or a human being. Life is a default position. Wherever the promise of sustainability exists, something will find a way to inhabit it.

“Prammy?”

How many lives before I'm a self-conscious person again? There's no end to it until the sun quits, but then our elements are blasted into space and we drift in the dark for a few million years, like dandelion fluff, and our cells start splitting and a few billion years later we slither onto alien rocks in a galaxy far, far away. Without a gram of religious feeling in me, I'm suddenly a believer in eternal life. This is seriously weird.

The ice surface is a polished pearl, and I start by laying down a long, lazy sum, the ∫ from the Calculus, running the length of the rink, edge to edge. It's my signature: Pramila Waldekar was here. Nothing is hard if it can be reduced to numbers and everything, sooner or later, is just numbers. So long as I do my spins and axels inside the sum, I'll be safe. Today he's going to be hard on me, maybe because Tiffy is with me. “My Gods, you are not Aeroflot taking off from sfo, you are artist. You must rise from nuthink. From ice. All rise coiled inside.”

And I wonder if there is not a coefficient that includes speed, drag, and vertical lift. It's a matter of directing energy.

Poor Borya thinks it's an invoction to the ∫-hole on the top of a violin, a subtle dedication to his marvelous self. Back in Minsk, he played the cello. Sometimes he plays for me.

People are prime numbers, or they're not. The Beast is eighteen, which factors to 3x3x2, a perfect expression of his mental age. I'm thirteen: prime. Tiffy Hu is twelve, 3x2x2: what more to say? Borya is thirty-seven: prime. We are irreducible. Borya hasn't been prime since he was thirty-one and he won't be prime again till he's fortyone. What will I be like in my next prime, at seventeen? A fat cow, says Borya. A woman is never stronger than she is at twelve or thirteen. We are designed for our maximum speed and strength, before the distraction of breasts and hips. He only takes on girls between eight and ten; after that their contours change, their centers of gravity, their strength.

That's Borya's philosophy, and I endorse it. He also says a thirteen-year-old woman will never be more desirable. It's a Russian thing, maybe. I've read Lolita. On a normal practice day, after skating, we drive to his place in Palo Alto and do it in his basement apartment, in the house of Madame Skojewska. Madame is the widow of Marius Skojewski, a Slavic Studies professor at Stanford. Borya says Polish ladies are “very tender, very sophisticated. Russian people very narrow, very brutal.” In order to explain my comings-and-goings in Palo Alto, I asked Daddy to pay for Russian lessons, which he was happy to do.

Borya was surprised I wasn't a virgin. No girl with a brother like The Beast can be a virgin. No one watching us at the rink, listening to Borya's berating, his picking apart of my motivation, my technique, my discipline, would think us anything but bashful student and demanding teacher. With Tiffy Hu watching and waiting her turn, it's only skate, skate, skate: leap and twist and turn and spin, work up a sweat and then take her home with me for dinner.

The Beast is in. “Tiffy Hu!” he shouts, charming as always. “Hu's on first?” Tiffy doesn't get it. “Or should I be asking, who's first on Hu?”

“Ignore him,” I tell her. “How's your Russian?” I ask. It's a test. If he suspected anything about Borya and me, he'd ask,
how's yours?

He's got a Russian secret-girlfriend, a big golden Stanford sophomore goddess, too good for his sorry UC-Santa Cruz freshman ass. I'm starting at Stanford next year, skipping the entire, doubtless illuminating, American high-school experience. I'll be the youngest they've ever admitted. I'll be thirteen years, ten months.

The Golden Goddess used to go with the big Stanford tennis player, Mike (that is, Mukesh) Mahulkar. The Beast used to be his lob-and-volley partner. The Beast was a decent high-school player — he even won the state finals. Golden Goddess would spread a towel on the grass and watch them slug it out. Those long, golden legs, those skimpy tops — I could see The Beast was a little distracted. Then suddenly Mike and GG were no longer a couple — Mike's parents said she was just another practice-partner — and Mike was engaged to a proper caste-and-class appropriate Bombay cutie. The Beast, just a senior in high school, started hanging out with GG. Our parents would have nailed his door shut if they'd known. At least it left me free to explore other options.

My father and The Beast think Mike Mahulkar is going to be the next Big Name in international tennis. No way, I say. I charted two of Mike's games. He's totally predictable. Backhand, forehand, lob, rush the net. So many balls to the net, so many deep volleys, side to side, in a sequence even Mike doesn't know is mathematically predictable. You can lure him to the net and set him up for a passing shot. Of course The Beast can't, and so far no one in the amateur and college ranks can, but some Swede or Russian will humiliate him. I showed The Beast my pages of calculations. “Even you can beat him,” I said. “Here's the probabalistic algorithm for beating Mike Mahulkar,” and he said to me, “just go back to the ice.”

The Beast thinks the only difference between him and Mike is Mike's superior coaching and Stanford's weight room and flexibility training. Since we didn't have our own gym and staff of coaches, he doesn't stand a chance against the famous Mike Mahulkar. So Mike is strong and determined, but just forget that his game is boring and he'll meet someone out there who matches him in strength and sees into his game and sends him spinning back to country club status and an eventual
mba
.

We sit in silence around the dinner table. We always sit in silence. I cannot remember a time when anyone spoke. We're not like Americans, grabbing a bite here and there, stuffing ourselves with processed foods, injecting our flaccid bodies with empty calories in front of a television feeding us empty images. Therefore we are better than Americans with beef blood dripping from their fangs.

We never miss a meal. We are family. We are Indian. We are vegetarian. Every meal is a small production. Chop-chop, spice and dice, then fry, always fry. Even our bread and desserts are fried. Our walls glisten from airborne globules. My forehead glows. We sweat it. We practically bathe in vegetable oil. Our lifetime vegetable oil consumption, expressed as a function of water-use, is rising.

Of course I am the only true American in the family. The Beast was born in Bombay. He conveniently forgets this fact. I have my sliced red pepper, celery and carrots. Tiffy is scarfing down on the fried food.

She breaks the silence. “This is really good!” and my mother is pleased. This is the daughter she should have had. “All we get at home is greasy soup with noodles and pieces of vegetables swimming around in it.”

I could say all we get is the same stuff, chopped and fried in the same spices, every day for all eternity. I stopped last year. His Lordship is drinking a beer. The Beast has a Coke; Tiff, Her Ladyship and I have iced tea.

“Chinese food is very good. I have many Chinese friends,” says His Lordship. So far as I know, all he has is Al Wong, his friend since graduate school, and Al and Mitzi come over once a month and they go to Al and Mitzi's once a month, and they play bridge.

“Chinese food very healthy,” says my mother.

“Especially deep-fried egg roll,” says The Beast.
Don't say it
, I pray, but out it comes: “I mean egg loll and fly-lice.” He never disappoints. Tiff doesn't get it.

“Chinese people are like Indian people,” His Lordship explains. “Very loyal to family. Children very loyal to parents, parents very protective of their children.”

Tiff looks to me for help. “I never thought of that,” she says.

“I think we're very Greek, actually,” I say.

Mother says, “Greek people eat meat wrapped in leaves.”

“Greek myths,” I say.

“What myths?” His Lordship weighs in. “All European myths are comic book versions of Indian myths.”

“I was thinking of Atreus,” I say, to deafening silence.

On the walk back, Tiff asks, “What's that Atreus thing you said?” Just the usual incest and slaughter, I answer. Gross, says Tiff. Then she says, “your dad and Al Wong actually rented a house in Palo Alto? Lots of hot action, I'll bet.” Among Chinese, Al Wong is a little bit famous.

But she doesn't know my father. My father and hot action — in the linguistic interstices, all things are possible, I guess. And the third guy, a Parsi, went back to India. But then she says, “You won't get mad if I ask a personal question?” My life is nothing but very personal secrets. “Go ahead,” I say.

“You and Borya, you're getting it on, aren't you?”

“Getting it on? What does that mean, exactly?”

“I don't care if you are or if you aren't. I was wondering about, you know, his thing. How big is it?”

“Big, meaning long, or wide, or what? It's a meaningless question, Tiff. Big as a function of his pinky finger? Big as a function of his arm?”

“Forget about it,” she says. And I wonder if she already knows that she's next. And Tanya Ping is lined up, just after her. “Just, what's sex like?”

It's like a puppy of some rough, large breed that just keeps jumping up and licking your face. It's shaped like a candle, without a wick. Of course, Borya's Jewish, so the shape's a little off. “It makes you sleepy,” I say and Tiff nods, “that's what I thought.”

Maja Skojewska was Maja Pinska. “I grew up in a very liberal Jewish family,” she told me, in our informal Russian “classes”, and when I'm her age I'll probably be saying, “I grew up in a Hindu family.” Madame's idea of Russian lessons is to talk of her life, in Russian, interjecting Polish and English and before too many weeks she says, “See? You just asked me that in Russian!”

Her father was a schoolteacher, a great admirer of India. That's why she and her sister, Uma, have Indian names. When the Germans came to the school to get him, the priest said, we already turned him over. And there he was all along, working in the same school, only sooty black from shoveling coal. The Germans couldn't imagine a Jew working like a Pole, dirtying his hands like a Pole. Her husband-to-be was also a schoolteacher, a Polish Catholic (not to be redundant) but after the war he went to university, then to Moscow State for more study and after two books, he was invited to Oxford, and that's when they made their escape. The idea that little Maja Pinska would be eighty years old and tending her garden in California is testimony, she says, to a kind of stubborn life force.

On her table are bananas so unblemished that I thought they were wax. “That's the first thing I noticed when we got to England,” she says. Bananas! And the thrill of peeling a banana has never left her, after fifty years. And we sit a few minutes in silence, and she leans towards me and says (I'm sure it's in Russian, but it's as clear to me as English), “You know, Borya will drop you.”

“I know,” I say.

“I don't approve of what he does, but then I say, it's better you learn from him than from these boys I see on the streets.”

“Yes,” I say.

Sometimes I think of Madame's life, and mine, and that it's all a kind of trigonometry of history. Her life is a skyscraper, mine is just a thimbleful of ashes, but our angles are the same. My adjacent side is just a squiggle, and my opposite side barely rises above the horizon. But the angle is there. I feel that I can achieve monumental things if I can just live long enough.

Even with all his money, it took Al and Mitzi fifteen years to leave their cottage in Cupertino and splurge on a 23rd-floor apartment in downtown San Francisco. It's all glass, 360° panoramic views of the city, the Bay, the bridges, the Marin Headlands, Berkeley and Oakland. No interior walls, but for the bathroom and two bedrooms. They also have a country estate in Napa. Some evenings when the fog rolls in, we're suspended in a dream, disrupted only by bridge-table small talk. Other nights, the city sparkles. Al pours me a small glass of plum wine. Tonight, my father complains of his job. He's in nanotechnology, and his responsibilities are shrinking fast.