The Meagre Tarmac (7 page)

All of this I translated for my girlfriend, Rose. Then we sat at a sidewalk café and drank a glass of white wine, looking out on the Tower and the ant-sized climbers working their way up the sides, waving from the balconies. I was happy.

“I think you're a little too harsh on the Tower,” she said.

We reached Florence in the dark. There seemed little question that we would spend the night together, in her hotel or mine. Outside the bus-park only one food stall was still open. I bought apples and a bottle of wine. The young man running it did all his calculations in Italian, until I stopped him, in Bangla. “That's a lot of taka, isn't it?” and the effect was of a puppet master jerking a doll's strings. He mentioned the name of his village, this one far, far in the east, near Chittagong, practically in Burma. His accent was difficult for me, as was mine to him. “Bangla is the international language of struggle,” he said.

The unexpected immersion in Bengal had restored a certain confidence. It was the last thing, or the second-last thing, I'd expected from a trip into the wilds of Tuscany. I was swinging the plastic sack of wine and apples, with the urn tucked under my arm, and Rose said, “Let me take the urn.” I lifted my arm slightly, and she reached in.

“Oops,” she said.

My religion holds that the body is sheddable, but the soul is eternal. My uncle's soul still exists, despite the cremation. It has time to find a new home, entering through the soft spot in a newborn's skull. I felt he was still with me, there in Italy, but perhaps he'd remained back in California. The soul is in the ether, like a particle in the quanta; it can be in California one second, and Kolkata the next. But he'd wanted to find an Italian home, and now his matter lay in a dusty, somewhat oily mass on the cobblestones of Florence, amid shards of glass and ceramic. It will join some sort of Italian flux. It will be picked up on the soles of shoes, it will flow in the gutter, it will be devoured by flies and picked over by pigeons. If I am truly a believer in our ancient traditions, then it doesn't matter where he lies like a clot of mud while his soul still circles, awaiting its new house, wherever that house might be.

“It's all right,” I said. In fact, a burden had been lifted.

Her hotel was near at hand. This was an event I had not planned. It had been three years since any sexual activity, and that had been brief and not consoling. In the slow-rising elevator, she squeezed my hand. Sex with a gray-haired lady, however slim and girlish, lay outside my fantasy. How to behave, what is the etiquette? She'd taken off her glasses, and she was humming something wordless. Under her University of Firenze sweatshirt, I could make out only the faintest mounds, the slightest crease. Even in the elevator's harsh fluorescent light, I saw no wrinkles in her face.

As we walked down the corridor, she slipped me her key-card. My fingers were trembling. It took three stabs to open the door. The moment the door was shut, and a light turned on, she walked to the foot of the bed, and turned to face me. The bedspread was a bright, passionate red. It was an eternal moment: the woman's smile, her hands closing around the ends of her sweatshirt, and then beginning to pull it up. I dropped the bag of wine and apples. So this is how it plays, this is how people like us do it. Her head disappeared briefly under the sweater, and then she tossed the University of Firenze aside on the red bedspread and she stood before me, a thin woman with small breasts, no bra, and what appeared to be a pink string looped against her side.

“Now you know,” she said, and began kissing me madly. “Come to my bed of crimson joy.”

What I knew was this: she was bald. Her wig had been caught in the sleeve of her sweater. The pink string was a fresh scar down her ribcage, then curling up between her breasts. But we were on the bed and my hands were over her scalp, then on her breasts and the buttons of her jeans, and her fingers were on my belt and pants.

There is much to respect in this surrender to passion. After sex, there is humor, and honesty. I poured the wine and she retired to the bathroom, only to reappear in her red “Shirley MacLaine” wig. With her obviously unnatural, burgundy-colored hair, there's a flash of sauciness atop her comely face and body. And so passion arose once again. “I've got more,” she said. There was a black “Liza Minelli,” and a blonde.

When we sipped the wine, she told me she'd been given a year, maybe two. But who knows, in this world miracles have been known to happen.

It is overwhelming, the first vision of The David, standing a ghostly white at the end of a long, sculpture-lined hall. An adoring crowd surrounds him, whatever the hour or the day. Viewed from afar, in profile, he is a haughty, even arrogant figure. His head is turned. He is staring at his immediate enemy, Goliath.

“That pose is called contrapposto,” Rose whispered. She was wearing her red Shirley MacLaine wig, and she looked like a slightly wicked college woman. David's weight is supported on the right leg — the left leg is slightly raised — but the right arm is lank, and his curled hand cradles a smooth stone. The left arm is bent, and the biceps bunched. The leather sling lies on his shoulder and slithers down his back. Yet when I stood at his side, looking up directly into his eyes, the haughtiness disappeared. I read doubt, maybe fear. It's as though Michelangelo were looking into David's future, beyond the immediate victory. If I remember my Christian schooling, David would go on to become a great king and poet, the founder of a dynasty leading eventually to Jesus Christ, but he will lose his beloved son Absalom in a popular uprising against him and he will send a loyal general to his death in order to possess his wife. In the end, for all his heroism, he will grow corrupt in his pride and arrogance; his is a tattered regime. All of this I felt at that moment, and tried to communicate.

There is so much tragedy in his eyes. He knows he will accomplish this one great thing in the next few minutes, but regret will flow for the rest of his life. David is a monument to physical perfection, the antidote to the Leaning Tower.

And what about us? I wonder. She took my arm as we walked down the swarming sidewalk outside the Accademia. We passed through a great open square, near the Uffizi Palace. Crews were setting up folding chairs for an evening concert of Renaissance music.

“Will you come with me?” she asked.

Of course I would. I would see her mandolinist. We would get there early and sit in the front row. I would stand behind her after the concert, assuming she could make her way to the stage against the press of admirers, and she would ask him, “remember me?”

Maybe she would wear her gray ponytail wig. He would be more comfortable with that, more likely to remember her. In some way, I would learn more about her. “
Oh, Rose!
” he might exclaim. Or he might dismiss her with a flick of his fingers.

“If I'm still above ground next year, and if I came to your house, would you welcome me in?”

And I can only say, “I will open the door.”

THE QUALITY OF LIFE

1 .
I WAS IN THE HOTEL BATHROOM
, brushing and flossing, with
CNN
on loud.
“We'll call this another story about undocumented aliens in south Texas. But a story with a twist.
” Undocumented aliens get my attention. South Texas doesn't, much.

“Every week, Jacinto Juarez, known in this hot and humid corner of southeast Texas as JJ, and his son, Junior, known as Three-J, do what responsible farmers always do: take a tour of the property, check and mend the fences, inspect the livestock, take moisture readings and measure the growth of crops. Since they know every square inch of their two hundred and forty acres, some thirty-five miles southwest of Corpus Christi, they also check for the little things. And two weeks ago, JJ and Three-J noticed a very significant little thing:
this.
”

That brought me out from the bathroom.
This
appeared to be a large hole in a small bluff.

“JJ's property dips down to San Fernando Creek but the rich bottomlands are soft, not easily inspected. So, he planted some trees and even a stand of bamboo, and tended to leave it alone. But two weeks ago, right here, he noticed a recently excavated burrow, leading out to what he calls his private ‘wetland'.”

Mr. Juarez took over. “This here crick empties into a big estuary, then into Corpus Harbor. Just about any animal in the world could be hitching a ride on a tanker and if they jump ship there's no way they're leaving. My granddaddy used to organize jaguar hunts out here. I've seen more coyotes than I can count, and armadillos and javalinos by the thousands, but I never seen a burrow like this.”

“I set a trapline around it,” said Three-J, “and I baited it with some real smelly rabbit. Got a coyote pup about three hundred yards downstream, but it didn't come out of that burrow.”

“So,”
CNN
broke in, “JJ borrowed a night-vision camera. It took two weeks, and he's finally got his answer. But it's an answer that leaves us with a bigger question. Barring the possibility of its being an escaped exotic pet, or being fattened for a feast, did this mystery guest hitch a ride on an oil tanker from Venezuela — or did he make it all the way on his, or, I should say, on
her
own? Or is this another instance of global warming pushing fauna out of ancestral environments and forcing them north?”

And then, through the green, vaguely fluoroscopic footage of night vision goggles we watched the emergence of something truly new on our continent: a hundred and fifty pounds of aquatically adapted rodent, a pot-bellied pig-sized South American capybara, an immensely inflated guinea pig with slick hair and long skinny legs.

“Say hello to Cappy. And goodbye. Not knowing the nature of the beast, Jacinto Juarez instinctively reacted as a farmer, and shot it. In its native Venezuelan habitat, capybaras are ravenous browsers. Failure to find suitable grasses and aquatic plants might well drive him — or in Cappy's case, her — to pillage beans and corn. Doctors at the University of Texas-Brownsville who performed the necropsy confirmed that Cappy was pregnant with three near-full term offspring. She had been impregnated five months ago. Tonight in these lonely Texas barrens, there might be a male capybara searching wetlands for a mate.”

I returned to the bathroom, sick with a kind of empathy. To die in such a way, in such a place, after the great adventure of her life: oh, Mother!

2. This starts in cool and leafy Bangalore, a town where many trinkets of Empire have run their course. Long before the things we read about today, Bangalore was just a dowdy old army cantonment, the base of the Southern Command of the British, and then the Indian Army.

Bangalore's boulevards are wide enough to channel military parades, caissons, battle camels and ornamental elephants. It's a pleasantly situated, high altitude town of year-round salubriousness — dry in the monsoons, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, devoid of mosquitoes — sprinkled with parks, golf courses, military academies, imposing administrative buildings of red and yellow sandstone, and in the old days, whites-only clubs with cheap liquor. Its sole international raison d'être had to do with the British Army. Even after Independence, Bangalore did not destroy its Victoria statues.

Back in the 1870s, my enterprising great-great-grandfather, Mohan Nilingappa, recently arrived in Bangalore from our ancestral village up north, purchased a spacious bungalow, “Primrose Estate”, from a departing Englishman who'd lost his family in an epidemic. It was situated in an outlying community called Murphy Town. Anticipating a large family, Mohan added a north and south wing. “Primrose Estate” became “Nilingappa Bhavan.”

Nilingappa gospel has it that my g-g-grandfather never suffered a single humiliation at the hands of our colonial masters; was never mocked or excluded for his faith, his accent, or the color of his skin. Obviously, the Nilingappas, even in the 1870s, were so worthy that they alone, among the hundreds of millions of Indian subjects, avoided the abuse — official, and ad hoc — of colonial arrogance. My father loved the British. He'd studied in Edinburgh and he wore his pre-War Scottish tweeds right up to the minute of his death.

I doubt that the British have ever been capable of extending equal treatment to Indians. At most, the early Nilingappas might have profited from a certain indulgence for one simple reason: they were brewers. An army might march on its stomach, but it fights on its liquor, and Mohan Nilingappa held the purveyors' license to the cantonment.

During the Raj, satellite communities like Fraser Town and Murphy Town ringed the city. The old officer corps — the various Frasers and Murphys — built splendid residences behind high stucco walls. Christian hospitals, white clubs and Anglican churches followed. The Bangalore climate encouraged English-style gardening; hence, their horticultural societies and garden tours. Some of the retirees even stayed on in their cool and shaded bungalows and married young or recently widowed Indian and Anglo-Indian women. There was no reason to go back to England so long as loyal servants, English-trained cooks, golf foursomes and cheap liquor were easily requisitioned, and thanks to their off-colour wives and children, they couldn't go back anyway.

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.

The
CNN
crawl spews out its disjointed newsbits,
... successful ship-to-ship transfer of more than one thousand luxury cruise passengers suffering acute intestinal distress ... police in Kansas City announce arrest of suspect in string of area murders ...
Terror alert:
elevated ... drug-doping investigation widening, major sports figures implicated ...
In weather news ...
first hurricane alert of the Atlantic season as Alexei gains strength ...

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.