The Meagre Tarmac (14 page)

Around ten o'clock they raided the refrigerator. He wore his underpants; she put on a bathrobe, but didn't tie it. He still wasn't hungry, but she found frozen lasagna for two in a takeout aluminum tray with a cardboard top. As he might have guessed, she was endearingly incompetent in the kitchen. They drank wine at the breakfast table while Chutt stared and the lasagna baked. They ate directly off the aluminum. Then came the truncated life-stories: her parents had sent her to Switzerland for high school. She'd learned French, and started acting in French, she married her Canadian and moved to Vancouver and started acting in both English- and French-language television, ironing out her various accents. And then learning a new one, Québec-French, for
Planet-X
.

Yes, she'd had affairs with many actors — names that should have raised his eyebrows — mostly for “group cohesion” she called it, but when necessary, for employment. “You know what they say: an actor's face and her body are public property.” Bombay seemed a very long time ago, and very far away. She hadn't visited home in nearly six years. “Well,” she said, “Pansy Batliwala's come a long, long way.”

And what about Cyrus Chutneywala? He mentioned Squirrel Hill, his secondary school years in Bombay at Sassoon Trust, his Master's degree from an IIT and his Wharton mba, his disgrace with Linda Pinto, the banishment to Pittsburgh and four years in the wilderness, then the arrival of Harriet Mehta and a job offer to California. What a pathetic resume. Cyrus Chutneywala was going around in circles.

“If it's L.A. we might be in business,” she said. “Al loves it.”

“I'm afraid it's nearer to Silicon Valley. San Francisco, maybe.”

“Vancouver South, we used to call it.”

And then there was the silence of an unfamiliar apartment in a new city, after sex with a stranger. There had been a rush to open up and tell everything, and then nothing was left. They had no small talk, nothing shared. He had the feeling that the next person to speak, and the next thing to be said would be, somehow, unanswerable.

“Are you ready for our little talk, Mr. Chutneywala?” And her face was suddenly older, not flirtatious. “Let me say, first of all, you're very appealing, does your Becka tell you that enough? You're so skinny — I like that! You've probably never spent thirty seconds pumping iron, have you? And nature didn't cheat you. I think all the boys I've been with must be on steroids or something. They look like the David statue. A little too much like David. Hands too big, business too small.”

David who? he wanted to ask. What kind of business? All of his life he'd known skinny men, men like his father and uncles, skinny men but with round little bowling balls for tummies. It's an Indian male thing. He hadn't developed a potbelly yet, but he would. Maybe he'd jog, or take up tennis.

“But what I want to know is, where do you see yourself in five years? Running a bigger bank and making scads of money and still chasing pretty girls? Or retired from banking and running a
B&B
? Or maybe you'll be back in India in a huge Bombay high-rise and married to a nice Parsi girl? Or what about Pittsburgh, married to your Becka? I'm not saying we can't have a good time, it's just that a lot of shadows are hanging over you. You feel guilty about being here with me. You feel guilty about Parsis — you think you should save the whole race, don't you? Maybe you saw me as a way of answering the Parsi call and still having a good time. You're ashamed of Pittsburgh, but you're afraid of California. We can't be a couple, with all those shadows. What do you say?”

He poured himself more wine. His mouth was dry, his lips numb. And still she stood before him with her bathrobe half-open. It is an image he will retain for a lifetime. How could any man answer charges from a beautiful woman standing nearly naked two feet away?

“You haven't said where you see yourself in five years.”

“I know one thing. In five years I won't be a cutie anymore. I might be a star, or I could be hosting a Vancouver talk show. If it's going to happen for me, it's going to happen in the next two years. And I'll do what I have to do.”

With that, she seemed to wink and begin to move from the kitchen, across the living room. What could he do but follow?

3.

Darya and he were sitting in the atrium, waiting for the director. She was unrecognizable behind giant sunglasses, except as an unspecific celebrity who should be recognized. Across the atrium, Miss Wu was still at her station, eighteen straight hours after Chutt had first entered, if she hadn't taken an overnight break.

“I want you to know,” she said, “if your father makes a marriageoffer to my father within the next three weeks, I will tell him to accept. We can have the lagan after we wrap the film, either in Bombay or here.”

A full Parsi
lagan
, like his parents': he hadn't thought of the staggering complications. He'd attended many Parsi weddings, including his sister's with her German groom; four days of ceremonial bowing and scraping and still it hadn't lasted. Priests, relatives, presents for everyone, religious vows, the proper clothes, inside a temple or in a rented
baug
. Pittsburgh probably didn't have a Fire Temple. Toronto, from his superficial observation, probably did. All of his life he'd been terrified by Parsi rituals, especially anything associated with vultures tearing apart the bodies of recently departed.

“There must be a rental hall in Toronto,” he said.

“Plenty,” she said.

In other words: Three weeks from now, I, Cyrus Chutneywala, can be married to the most beautiful woman in the world. Could anything be less ambiguous? It left him with a cold feeling up his leg. In further words: I'm sitting in the greeting-area of a strange hotel/apartment complex in Toronto, waiting for the director and co-star of a movie I'm blocked from watching, where my wife-inwaiting will be screwed for public viewing by the handsomest man in the world.

“Why?” he asked.

The wide, dark glasses stared back.

He clarified, “Why a formal Parsi wedding?”

“Maybe because we're Parsis?” she said. “I've already gone through the justice-of-the-peace thing. I've never unpacked my marriage sari. It sits there sadly in my trunk.”

“Why three weeks?”

“Because I really should go celibate till the wedding. Three weeks is about my limit.”

No long engagement? No chaperoned trips to Bombay to meet the relatives? Then he thought of the horror awaiting him in Pittsburgh: how to tell Becka, how to dodge the plates and cutlery. Chutt to himself: think it over. Isn't she just a little too fine, a little too much, for you? Isn't she candy, gold or flowers, a Mozart, a Picasso, to any man she meets? And aren't you suddenly acting just a little smug and superior?
See what the rest of the world thinks of me! They think I'm worthy of such a woman!
Harriet Singh thinks I'm brilliant, worth a cool half-million before bonuses, or even negotiation. Becka thinks I'm secretly sexy.

Maybe I'm secretly ashamed of Becka. Maybe that's why we don't appear together. An unworthy thought crept up from the depths of his worst self: just wait till the boys at the bank get a load of her!

Followed by a second thought: would I have to move to Toronto or whatever, just to keep other men away?

Oh, the torture of it all! And to all those questions he could answer:
three weeks.
Where's your algorithm for determining true value now?

At eight o'clock the company van arrived, and from it unpacked Al Neeling first, then a smallish, bearded man in a turtleneck sweater and leather jacket, a young woman and a vaguely familiar older man. Miss Wu ran to open the door. Darya stood and started walking towards them, leaving Chutt on the sofa. The group went through the rituals of sweeping hugs and loud air-kisses, even Miss Wu who seemed tangential to the whole operation.

Darya snapped her fingers, and motioned him to join her. “Every body, this is my friend Cyrus, visiting for the weekend.” Then she introduced them, “This is Jean-Luc Carrier, the director, and his assistant, Marie-Louise Tremblay, and of course you already know Al Neeling and no one in the world needs an introduction to Bill Shatner.”

He did, of course, but didn't show it. “Bill!” he exclaimed.

“Potsy!” Shatner responded.

Potsy? He let it pass. “You're the one playing the outer-space skeptic, aren't you?” Chutt persisted.

“My life ... my acting life ... is one long monument ... to ... outer space skepticism. No exploration ... no space travel. Above all, no aliens.” Perhaps it was his stagy, comic delivery. Everyone laughed.

“I'm afraid I haven't been keeping up with your life, sir,” said Chutt.

“No. Apparently, not, Potsy. Where did you say you're from?”

“Pittsburgh.”

“Ah.”

It was a long, drawn-out “ah,” eloquent in its way, maybe a little pitying.

Darya had one last idea. “Cyrus is going back to Pittsburgh today.
Potsy
, really, Bill,” she giggled. “Let's get one good picture of all of us together.”

Abdul the van-driver was waved inside from his cigarette-break to handle Darya's little silver camera. And so the picture was arranged, back on the sofa: Darya and Al taking the middle, flanked by Bill and Marie-Louise, with Chutt and Miss Wu on the two arms and Jean-Luc Carrier, the director, standing behind them all, hands on the shoulders of his principle actors.

“Allons,
” he said. “Very long, very important day. Very nice meeting you, Mr. Potsy.”

And then they were standing alone in the spacious atrium, Cyrus Chutneywala and Marcia Wu. “Do you need to change your reservation? I can call your carrier.”

Getting back to Pittsburgh early was a little frightening. Staying an extra hour in Toronto, alone, was positively repulsive. “Let me think about the reservation. What do Canadians mean when they call someone a Potsy?”

She giggled. “It's not a Canadian thing. Potsy's our little name for Darya's boyfriends. Her real name's Pansy, so anyone who goes with her automatically becomes a Potsy. You know, pots and pans.”

Just when he'd puffed himself up to a full head of anger and resentment, he was spewing off the walls and ceiling like a popped balloon. I can't even do righteous indignation anymore.

Miss Wu was packing her briefcase. Two books filled it; she had to carry the third.
International Trade. Ontario Medical Legislation. Capital Markets.
“I'm getting a joint Law and
MBA
.” She flexed her arm. “It builds muscle.”

In the next few hours, before flying back, Chutt learned to appreciate dim sum on a Sunday morning in a Toronto Chinatown, as selected by Marcia Wu. She'd had a walk-on cameo in the movie, “can't do a science fiction movie these days without a few Asian faces, right?” He learned that the
CN
Tower, once the “tallest freestanding structure in the world”, had been shrinking over the decade because of Guangzhou and Dubai, but from the observation deck one could still make out the vague beginnings of a place called Hamilton. The skyscrapers had food courts featuring at least a dozen cuisines. He saw where some of the white people lived, in miles upon miles of large and small brick houses and apartment houses stretching into the distance. The names of streets and suburbs reminded him of England. He learned from Miss Wu — Marcia, Marcie — that he had an appealing, almost boyish way about him, more like a classmate and not a professor and certainly not an established banker. She liked his naiveté, and his questions made her laugh. She said he made her feel like a slightly older, more sophisticated woman.

ISFAHAN

WHEN I WAS JUST A BOY
in Calcutta, my father knew a famous industrialist. They were all members of the Bengal Club, and many's the evening I would spend at my father's table while he and his closest friends circulated, gins and Scotches in hand. I'm one of the privileged youngsters who grew up in the Reynolds Room, under Sir Joshua's portrait. One of my father's oldest friends was a Calcutta- Armenian, Berj Melikian. I was only eight or nine and I'd greet him with a bow, “
Berj Melikian, may his tribe increase!
” and he would take the cigar out of his mouth and bow like a vizier out of paintings from the Mughal past, when our Muslim conquerors had swept into India from Persia, bringing their Shirazi- and Isfahani-Armenian bankers and doctors with them. From his bow he would say,
Young Pranab Dasgupta, I take the dust from your feet, sir!
then make a playful grab for my shoes, which I deftly dodged. He was the most exotic man in the world to me, dark as any Indian, but solidly built, a thick-shouldered bull with a small mountain of a nose. “Armenian” defined the distant shore of human possibility. He seemed straight from the pages of my favorite history books.

Berj Melikian had won the central government's most prestigious business award for leading the nation in export percentage. He was something unheard of in India at that time: a 100% exporter. I imagined stacks of dollars pouring into the Indian treasury — which I thought of as an enlarged version of the dented biscuit tins kept by tea-stalls and sari-shops — the country growing rich and poverty eliminated, all because of my friend, Berj Melikian. That night, I swore to myself that I would be the Berj Melikian of my generation. And I am, that and more. When he entered the Reynolds Room everyone cheered and raised their Scotches,
Hip, Hip!! The Rockefeller of India!!

We learned a poem in our St. Xavier's days. “To an Athlete, Dying Young.” Hopkins, is it — or Houseman?
“The day you won the town the race/We chaired you through the market-place/Man and boy turned out to cheer ...”
I cry whenever I think of Berj, the bowing little boy, and that poem.

His pig-iron foundry out in Asansol was the world's largest manufacturer of blank manhole covers. In those years, no concern was given to pollution; the prize had gone to the dirtiest and crudest operation in the country. He'd shown everyone how India makes money in the competitive world: find a place already hopelessly polluted, find workers who will suffer any privation, undercut the going Slovakian or Mexican price, and roll out pig iron by the thousands of tons. And if the the specs are just a little off ? So what — it's pig iron! It's just a blank manhole cover!

For many years we thought that the path to national riches lay in sectors called
NIMBY.
Thirty-five years later we've reduced the size and weight of prosperity from three hundred-pound manhole covers to feather-light cds. Every young lady in a call center carries a ton and a half of manhole covers in her purse. The ideas that whiz across the broadband at the speed of light have incredible density behind them.
May their tribe increase!

We have a young lady in our house these days. A friend of my son, a girl he met in India on a photo shoot who followed him home, with his encouragement. Girls do not interest him
per sé,
but this one he found sympathetic. He took her picture in a dusty northern town and then gave her some names and addresses. She ran away from home and a pending marriage, and here she is.

After the fire we moved into rented rooms just off Haight Street so that I could be closer to the therapists. The soles of my feet were left on that smoldering deck, carrying my wife to safety. Now we're on Clarendon on top of the city with a three-bridge view. A view to die for, the agent said. When I can't sleep, I sit here in the living room reading or merely looking down on the city, the lights outlining the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridges, the lumpy grid of city streets and the downtown towers. So heroic of city planners, holding fast to a grid despite all the ups and downs of San Francisco, as though they were in Kansas City and not in the middle of a smalltime mountain range. I keep my feet on the ottoman, wincing even as the air circulates over the tips of my toes.

The pain is most intense at night. I try to meditate my way through it. I concentrate on positive moments. The Calcutta Turf and Tennis Club: I remember running on the clay courts, sliding to retrieve, racing to the net, leaving my feet on the serve, and strangely, the nerve ends do not rebel. I remember the hours, the hundreds of hours of practicing my cricket bowling and batting, running like the wind, bounding into the crease, or twisting my body simply to lay my bat on the ball and protect the wicket. I feel no pain. But when I think of our hiking on Mount Diablo or walking the beach at Carmel, I imagine every twig and stone and grain of sand embedding itself in the scar tissue, opening up new cuts, new infections, and I'm back once more, pipped at the post, as we used to say, sucking my teeth in pain.

I remember a night in the summer of 2001, the ten-year celebration bash for our little communications giant. In that decade, we had grown from a Stanford garage start-up to a worldwide colossus. At the banquet, the board got me to sing a Valley version of “My Way.” We did a little soft-shoe. I kicked my legs up in a modified cancan. A thousand people applauded and cheered. My feet, my poor cinder-crusted feet, don't pain at the memory.

Idle thoughts, reading a book on Indian vs. American marketing strategies, on melding the best of both worlds, looking down on the lighted arches of the bridges and the city streets at night, like a picnic blanket lit by fireflies. I grew up under one system, and came to profit from another. I am the premier product of both worlds, but the child is winning out over the man.

I stopped thinking it was possible to please both models at about the time I started withdrawing from the day-to-day operations. My wife, who'd left me ten years earlier, came back. Berj Melikian died at fifty-two, and I couldn't attend the funeral. Then came the fire, of suspicious origins. I remarried my divorced wife. I'm a new father again. America blew up. I don't know where any of this is heading. I want to stop the pain in my feet and the torment in my head.

In short, I'm not reading a management book at all. I'm reading my autobiography, laid out in charts and graphs.

I made my fortune from the transmission of data in a new and faster way, which is no more inventive to me now than building a lighter, cleaner manhole cover. I want to spend the second half of my life on more productive matters. An Asian Common Market, something to dwarf the eu and nafta. At my desk, in my rehab, or just standing on the back deck and watching the city unfold at my feet, I think of other projects in other cities. I have never lacked focus, but now it's deserting me. I feel under assault from this country I call home.

Two months ago, I visited our operations in Pakistan, Calcutta, Gurgaon and Bangladesh. My managers pleaded with me to come back and take control, but I resisted. Our managers don't need me. These days in India, if making money is your goal it's difficult not to succeed. Each year we plan for thirty percent growth and each year the final figures come in at eighty or more. Workforce increases by a factor of three. I don't need help in making money. I need direction in how to spend it.

When I was getting started back in that little student apartment in Palo Alto, we took our ideas to a bank, asking for half a million dollars, and we were turned down. That was my Calcutta training poking through. My professor directed me to one of the early venture capitalists, a non-Indian who'd had a hand in Apple and Hewlett-Packard and nearly everything of consequence in Silicon Valley. Why would such a proven picker-of-winners even take time to listen to a twenty-five-year-old immigrant? He heard me out, read my proposals, and wrote a cheque for five million dollars. We returned him twenty million within the year. That is the sort of person I wish to become.

I sit here, sometimes all night, when the house is quiet and the city seems under a spell. My son is right, but he doesn't know why: I
do
suffer from post-9/11 trauma. Scales have fallen from my eyes. He thinks I am blind to Indian corruption, that I should give up thoughts of returning, but corruption is an irrelevant irritant. High tech is inherently incorruptible. “Corrupt” is the dirtiest word in high tech.

Tonight, after dinner, he staged a little exhibition of his Indian photographs. “Gay India” he's going to call it. Some are quite affecting. A picture he took of that girl is, in fact, arresting. She sits at a coffee house table where there are flies perched on the top of her coffee cup, and the sunlight coming through dingy windows seems to settle on what could be tears. It's a black and white photo, but the north India heat of April seeps through, and you can imagine the din and the coffee fumes, and you can't help but ask why is this girl about to cry?

And here she is in our house, denying all sadness. “That picture was taken on a happy day. I thought I'd be getting married.”

“She was responding to my lecture on photography. Tears of sheer boredom,” says my son.

There is another shot, taken in a Bombay public men's room. Police are hauling men out of the stalls, some in business suits, their faces are being ground into the floor-slop. You can smell it. And he was there, with his camera and no one stopped him. He is so in the minute, or should I say, so in the five hundredth-of-a-second, that I have no point of contact. Fragile marriage, no grandchildren, here or in India — what's the use of staying on? The Dasgupta family of Calcutta will die out. Twenty years before my daughter grows up, and I'll probably be gone. And my wife is showing signs of becoming like her late father, trusting to god or to fate, head-in-the-clouds, seeing eternity-in-a-grain-of-sand. I am surrounded by people who live outside my understanding of time and space.

I pick up a back issue of
India Abroad
. “New Hope for Indian Cricket” runs one headline, and the accompanying picture shows a young man with a Muslim name, Rashid Imran, already known to the Test Match faithful as “Rash the Flash,” whose features are clearly African. Globalization comes to Indian cricket, a place where I'd least expected it, and so I read on. The Flash is Indo-African, born in London to an Indian mother and a Ugandan father. And suddenly the magazine begins to tremble in my hands because I know that mother. Some version of The Flash could have been my son.

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.