The Meagre Tarmac (3 page)

“Have you thought about something new?” Al asks. “I mean really new.”

“Yes, I have,” His Lordship responds. It's the first time I've ever heard such a thing. He always defends continuity. His father spent forty years in Maharashtra State Government service. What really new thing could he possibly do?

Every now and then, when Mitzi and Her Ladyship are out of the room, Al Wong will say, “What do you hear from our old friend?” He's got a needle, and he uses it. I can tell it's a jab to my father's self-esteem, but I don't know what it means. I think there's a lot of sado-masochism, not nostalgia, in their friendship. Sometimes it's good to be a quiet, studious, Indian daughter; I'm just furniture. Except for Borya and Madame, I'm accustomed to being ignored.

Most of the time, they just sit and complain, drink some wine and play their bridge. After half a glass, my mother will say, “What was the bid? I'm feeling so light-headed!” Al and my father were in grad school together and started out at PacBell together, and my father's still there. Al decided to go entrepreneur, and bought a computer franchise. He sold that at just the right time and bought and sold a few more things at their peak, and then he bought a hotel in Napa. He built it up with spas and a gourmet restaurant and hiking trails, and then he opened a winery:
AW Estates.
The hotel is where young Bay-Area Chinese professionals want to get married, or at least honeymoon or go on weekend getaways. He says there are so many young Bay-Area Asians at his hotel that it's like a second Google campus.
AW Estates
pinot is what young Chinese professionals drink. He's even got a line of plum wine for the older folks, a girl like me. Every thing he touches turns to gold.

I don't know how it started, but tonight there's an edge, an identifiable complaint, coming from my father. “I've been thinking,” he starts, and he leans forward, perhaps aware that I'm sitting ten feet away. “I'm thinking my children disrespect me.”

That's the news? Al says, “Mitzi and I never wanted children.” Once they made that decision, she went to law school and now she's a major litigator.

“I blame this country,” says my father.

“It's in the culture,” says Al. He came from Hong Kong. “We can't live their lives.”

“I believe my son is dating a person without my permission. I believe he is involved with a most inappropriate young lady.”

That's when Al says, maybe to break up the seriousness, “By the way, guess who's back from the East? Now she's an accountant. I've hired her to do my books.”

And then, just from His Lordship's grimace, it all makes sense. There
was
someone in those days of hot action in Palo Alto. Tiffy Hu smelled it out, and I've spent thirteen years in a fog. It's so exciting, so unexpected, I want to jump up and pump my fist.

“I think ...” my father says, then pauses, “I think that we must leave this country.”

If furniture could speak, it would shout, “What?!”

“Hey, man, that's an extreme reaction,” says Al. “I'm not talking of that one. I have been a bad father. Things have been going on under my nose, outside my control. Asian children should never be allowed to stay in this country past their childhood. I may have already lost my son, but I can still protect my daughter. If I can save one from shame and humiliation I will at least have done half my job.”

I clear my throat. “May I speak?”

His Lordship stares across the living room, as though an alarm clock he'd set and forgotten about had just gone off. Truly, I am invisible to him. “Pardon me, but that train has left the station.”

“We're not talking of trains,” he snaps.

“Okay. That horse has left the barn.”

I never thought I would, under any circumstance, defend my brother. His Lordship, says, “Kindly keep your opinions to yourself. You are not part of this conversation. This is about your brother.”

I'm up against something that is irrational. I can't argue against it. “No, it's not! It's not about him. That genie is out of the bottle. It's about me, isn't it?”

Al Wong passes his hand between my father's frozen gaze, and me. “Vivek,” he says, “she has a point.”

Some day I want to ask Al Wong, what was it that happened in that house in Palo Alto? What caused my father to cast a lifelong shadow on this family?

“Go to your mother,” my father says. I don't go directly to my mother. My fate in this family is, as they say, fungible. I approach the sofa where His Lordship is seated. “Let me say one more thing. If you try to make me go back to India and if you stop me from going to Stanford and you try to arrange a marriage with some dusty little file clerk, I'll kill myself.”

Things have been frosty these past few days. The Beast is back in Santa Cruz. While I'm at work on my ap History, and my parents are watching a rented Bollywood musical, the phone rings and my father picks it up, frowns, then holds it out towards me. “It's your teacher,” he says, and I expect a message from school, maybe an unearned day off, but it's Borya. He says, “Madame is asking for you.”

I tell him I have no way of getting there. And why would she be asking for me?

“I am driving,” he says, an amazing concession. He is not a hopin- the-car Californian. He's a skater, not a driver. I didn't even know he has a license.

Normally, I would never ask to leave the house after dark, but when I say, “Madame Skojewska is asking to see me. Mr. Borisov will pick me up,” my father barely lifts his eyes from the television.

“Where will you be?” he asks. I write down Madame's address and phone number. They don't know that Borya lives in her basement.

I recognize the car as Madame's, usually parked and dusty in her garage. She revs the engine once a week. It's been over a year since she bought a gallon. “A gallon a year, if I need it or not,” she joked.

Borya starts out in English, “We go to Stanford Hospital. Madame has ...” he strikes his chest, “heart.” Stanford Hospital is where I was born, but this doesn't seem a commemorative moment. And then, it must have occurred to him that we are not at the ice rink and that no one is watching, and that my months of Russian instruction permits adult interaction; he grabs my hand, kisses it, and says, “you know how she loves her bananas. She walked down to Real Foods, bought two bunches, and on her walk back home she suddenly collapsed.”

When we arrive at the hospital, he says “They said she was going, tonight.”

She's in the
ICU
, under a plastic tent. It reminds me of the flaps on baby-strollers, the plastic visors, the baby warm, secure and sleeping while rain is pelting. Just like that, sweet mystery of life and death. One day we were chatting like old friends,
See, you just asked me that in Russian!
and I felt I belonged in a time and place I'll never see,
I've never had a student like you, you sit so quietly, you don't repeat words, you don't ask why we say it the way we do — you just start speaking it like a native, like someone reborn.

A student like me is accustomed to praise from her teachers. But that's not the point; the point is, I impressed
her
and she's the only teacher I'm likely to remember. I remember years of teachers' meetings, standing alone at the edge of the classroom while a teacher pulls my parents aside. I see her gesturing, and my parents shaking their heads.
What did she say about me?
I ask when we're back home and my mother says, Some nonsense, and my father says
You have a good head, but you are prone to dreaming and you must work harder, or you will fail.
I know it's about the evil eye; I might accidentally hear some praise that will turn my head from proper feminine modesty.

“You know what she said about you, even today? Even this morning when she was headed out to buy her bananas? She said, ‘Borya, living long enough to teach that girl Russian is the greatest privilege of my life.'”

We stand behind the glass and it seems that Madame's eyes are open, and shining. I raise my hand and flutter my fingers; it's all I can do.
Do svidaniya, Madame
.

I think I know what it was, back in that rented house in Palo Alto when my father and Al Wong and the Parsi guy were Stanford students and my mother and the baby Beast were still in India. Al knows, Mitzi knows, my mother knows. He wants to go back to India because someone from his past, a woman perhaps, has suddenly come back. Some long shadow of shame has shaped our lives. It's about him, not me, though I'm the one who will pay the price.

When Madame died, I started thinking of other teachers.

When I was very young — five, I'd guess, in pre-school — I discovered algebra. First, it was the word itself, it tasted good in the mouth, like something to eat or drink. Fortunately, I had a teacher, “Miss Zinny” we called her (I think her good name was Zainab, and we were the only two South Asians in that class), who didn't laugh when I asked her what algebra was. The next day she brought her college math book and we spent my naptime working out the problems. I remember the excitement, the freedom in a phrase like “
Let
P
stand for ...
” or a declaration like “
let
A=C+1.
” Solve for the value of c. The consolation of algebra; everything is equal to something else. It was something I couldn't explain, but it's what I felt a few years later when I learned about imaginary numbers. It's about seeing the nine-tenths of the iceberg, and not being afraid. What I remember is the equals sign. Everything in the world can be assigned a value, and has an equivalent. I went home and told my mother, “Let p stand for potato. Let r be rice.”

“Then wash the rice, please,” she said.

THE DIMPLE KAPADIA OF CAMINO REAL

MY HUSBAND IS IN INDIA.
He says “back in India” and he'll call for me to follow as soon as he's found a job and a flat. It seems that I've spent my life waiting for his phone calls. Twenty years ago it was:
I have found a house for us. I have put in for your papers. You will be coming to California in three weeks. Tell Jay I've seen cowboys and Indians in California. Get a good new bag and pack it.
Now I wait for another call to put our Camino Real house on the market and take Pramila out of school and prepare her for a new life in India. There are many good convent schools, he tells me. I know there are many fine convent schools — I went to one at her age — but her needs are not like mine. She's supposed to start at Stanford next year, the youngest student (13 years, ten months) they've ever taken.

“She wants to go to Stanford for pride reasons only,” my husband says. “She'll learn. Pride is not good in a girl.”

He thinks he can make all of this happen while he's on his normal two-weeks' vacation and two additional weeks' deferred vacation- time. All the years we've spent here, and he still lives in the India we knew, when American dollars and a Green Card opened every door and “foreign-returned” meant you could command your destiny. Now Jay is going to university in Santa Cruz, and our daughter is starting at Stanford, and the Camino Real house is silent and even a little dusty because I don't see the need to keep it clean or even livable. Pramila barely eats, and I can get by on fruit and curd. Half the time, I don't know if she's home or not. No radio, no television. I miss the pounding of male urination, because with men around I know there's something predictable in the house.

Yesterday I went up to Macy's in San Francisco to replace a dead battery in my watch. Of course I didn't have to take a train to the city and there are places in Stanford and San Jose that are closer, but I don't associate San Jose with adventure and freedom, and these days I'm totally free, and restless. Macy's on Union Square was practically empty. A Mexican worker was polishing chrome and glass with just a squeegee bottle of blue liquid and a long rag. Salespeople were standing around in clumps of three and four and the islands of jewelry, the bottles of fragrance and the watches stood unattended. Only the Mexican kept moving and his polishing rag left a kind of glow behind him.

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.