The Meagre Tarmac (16 page)

Now I want to be Manik-da. Not to make pictures, but to count in the same way to my city, to be once again connected. All my life I've been a hero-worshipper. I know I can't put this in print, but what I want is to be beloved in Kolkata, like Ray, like Netaji, like others I have known. But I left Kolkata, and all I have is money, and money never makes you happy, or loved.

My editor says, be ruthlessly honest. Be so honest that you might have to change the names and locations and maybe even call it a novel and not an autobiography.

Kolkata, with all its dangers, brings peace to my soul. America, with all its protections, is the more dangerous place. It has deranged me. It has taken away my son and my wife. It has left me in a wheelchair, pushed by a girl of twenty. Security and danger are reversed for me. A gated community in California is the most dangerous place in the world.

After Meena divorced me, she lived with many men. In those years, I also made many missteps. I called it “growing.” When I was a so-called “free man”, and one of the Bay Area's “most desirable bachelors”, I tried to live up to the billing. This time, Meena refused to go back to India with me. She's the true American. She was able to shed her old Indian identity, which I couldn't do. She fell in with American feminism. I could only redeem my error-prone life through the application of lavish charities.

I've been through Heathrow, that ghastly catacomb, hundreds of times. And during the hours I've been left alone, I've sat with the telephone on my lap, thinking of Smriti Roy, the woman I didn't marry, the woman with a “spotless reputation” that I alone besmirched. In England she became Firoza Imran,
MP
. We haven't spoken in twenty-two years, the day she left from Dum-Dum for a new life in London. For one year in Kolkata, we frolicked like Australopithecines just down from the trees.

She's Muslim, headscarf and all, a junior cabinet minister on the left wing of Labour and a divorced mother of two. One son is half- African, Rashid Imran, “Rash the Flash”, a footballer, son of her Ugandan ex-husband. But who's the father of the other?

I've always believed, when I saw her that last time at Dum-Dum and she said, “I guess I'll wake up in Heathrow”, that she was pregnant. Now, I'm free. A bright young Parsi banker has locked my fortune into a Foundation. My wife and children are well looked-after. I'm Executive Director of my own Foundation, meaning I can spend my money but no one else's.

This time I made the call. Her secretary put me on hold, then said, “Miss Imran wishes to know your name and business and residence address.” I said, “My name is Pronab Dasgupta. She will know.”

After a click, Smriti spoke, “So, you finally want to talk.” Her accent was perfectly English. Twenty-odd years in England, why wouldn't it be?

“I'm very sorry for not having called,” I said.

“Why ever should you? I never thought of calling you.”

“I'm going back to India, permanently.”

“So, you've left your Meena? Poor thing, thrown out on the footpath without a penny? And I hear you have a much younger lady with you. What are they called these days, trophies?”

“She's my secretary.” I'd been in England less than an hour. How could she know?

“Pronab, dear, try not to lie. If not to me, at least not to yourself.”

“She's a friend of my son's and she helped around the house. But she got homesick for India. There's nothing between us.”

I waited for her response, but the air was dense and challenging. I counted her breaths, as she must have been counting mine. Finally I said, “I'm not lying.”

But I was lying. I heard it in my voice. Nothing had occurred between us, but the will was there. She flirted. And I keep thinking about it. A middle-aged man in a wheelchair, a pretty girl pushing him; I could read the faces and smirks of passersby.

“How ghastly for you,” she said. “So near, and yet so far. Twenty, is she? Go ahead, there's no guilt, is there?”

“Smriti? May I call you that?” She didn't object. “I'm going back to Kolkata. I've set up a Foundation and I'm going to distribute all the money I made in America to the places where we had factories. Bangladesh, Malaysia, Cambodia, Bihar, Orissa, Bengal. Yes, I'm a guilty immigrant. I'm a very lonely, very rich, very guilty immigrant. And if you ever find yourself tired of Britain or looking for new work, I'll make you the managing director ...”

I couldn't tell if she'd hung up. “Smriti?”

“Excuse me, my jaw keeps dropping. Your arrogance is truly staggering. First, Pronab, there is no Smriti. She's gone, as though she never was. You think you're so persuasive that all you have to do is ask and I'll pack up my life here and go back with you, isn't it? You want me to impersonate Smriti Roy, but she's been dead for twenty years. Don't you see how disturbed you are, how seriously fuckedup, to use your vernacular? I'll be here till the voters throw me out, and then I'll go back to my law practice.”

I carry an image, the two of us naked, our borrowed room slightly askew, and I am holding her breasts and she backs into me, and the music begins again and we're at it, helplessly. What I want to ask, I can't. Your other child, the older one, who is he, where is he? Is he ours?

“Firoza ... I'll get used to it.”

“That's one small step.”

“If I write, you'll respond?”

“I always respond. I'm a politician.”

“I mean more than letters. I want to put my life in focus.”

“A book? Sounds enchanting. If you're really serious, I'll give you the name of an editor. She even lives in Goa.”

I can't say it's a tragedy, especially not a collective tragedy for all the Indian immigrants of my generation, but we had no American childhood, no Archie-and-Veronica high-school romances and no “adolescent” memories at all. We had one long childhood, more or less homogenized since we lived in the same city in the same kind of neighborhoods and went to the same schools, and our childhood ended abruptly with college, and college ended with marriage.

When we arrived in America we were newly minted, without the movies and songs and sports and television shows that form the very essence of American character. We could learn to imitate Americans, but we never understood “It”, the essence. Back in St. Xavier's we thought we knew everything. We were taught to be upright men in a fallen universe. We were taught that nothing of importance in the world had escaped our notice. And that is true: nothing of value had escaped us. All that we missed was the trivia, the silliness — in other words, the essentials. I felt like a well-trained spy, convincing in every outward manifestation, but inwardly afraid of exposure.

We were cleared to begin our lives anew in America, free of inhibitions, guilt or family obligations. And (of course) we soared, but we were untethered to any earth. There is a time in one's life when the skipped years come back to claim us. The house I bought had a wine cellar. And with a cellar you're obliged to fill it. And when it's filled, you have to drink it.

I came back to Kolkata, a city so radically changed, so expanded in its suburbs, so redeveloped in its core, so crammed with high-rises, so attractive in new ways with shopping malls, markets, parks, yet still respectful of the staid, quiet ways of my childhood — and, yes, still overcrowded, still filthy — that I had to rent a hotel room for two months just to reacquaint myself. Neighborhoods that had been deeply suspect, areas we would have avoided in my childhood had become the New Kolkata, home to high-rise luxury, garden paths, pools and nine-hole golf courses. Bursting, I might add, with money like mine, earned in the West, the returnees demanding Western amenities, Sub-Zero refrigerators, flat-screen televisions, dishwashers, and of course, blinkers against the myriad varieties of local misery.

I am walking again. On the street (given the perils of broken sidewalks), I still lean on a cane, but inside I walk unaided. My balance is a little shaky, but there's no pain. It's taken a year and many visits from an ancient homeopath, a “nerve doctor”, who mixes pastes and applies them to my feet for an hour or two, then washes them off with fragrant oils. I have never been so well attended. My brothers and sisters have risen to a certain metropolitan prominence; they fill in the gossip-gaps and information-underload from my twenty years' absence. They also provide me with reliable drivers, cooks, and maids.

They ask: do I miss America? Their children, my nieces and nephews, are nearly all settled in the States: doctors, lawyers, researchers and economists. Half of Kolkata, half of all India, it seems, are States-settled. My oldest brother, now retired from Dasgupta Electronics, spends six months with his daughter and her family in Florida, comes home for Durga Pujah, then leaves for another six months to stay with his son and family in Ohio. They make such dual-track adjustments seem so natural, as though boys from the old Sunny Park and St. Xavier's were raised on exotic expectations of travel and cross-continental settlement. In the old days, my oldest sister, widowed just short of her sixtieth birthday, would have worn nothing but white, would eat nothing but rice and yoghurt and live out her life in a poky little flat, maybe with the company of a widowed servant. Now she stays in Kolkata for the “autumn whirl”, the social season, then heads off to Italy and France on wine and art tours.

I have made my first targeted contributions. Three schools are nearing completion, one in Bangladesh, one in Orissa, the third in Bihar. Bricks and pipes are easy to procure; finding honest contractors and dedicated principals and teachers and politicians not seeking bribes — bribes on top of bribes, someone bribed on my end to push the project while others are bribed to stop impeding it — that's the hard part. The impossible part, my brothers say.

So yes, there are many American things I miss, like accountability and an honest bureaucracy.

It's beautiful in Goa. The editor that Firoza suggested, Ms. da Cunha, is a taskmaster. She is my age, but heavy and in a shapeless dress, shorthaired, with simple loop earrings. She met me at the airport and drove me to her seaside bungalow. The car smelled of cigarettes, but she did not smoke, at least in my presence.

Another woman, British I'd guess, welcomed us in, and I understood immediately their domestic situation. Out on the verandah, I saw the thick manuscript I'd sent her. We took our seats, her friend served us drinks, and then she began: “The world is not interested in another rags-to-riches autobiography, especially not from the Third World. The next World's Richest Man will be Indian — so what?”

“I will change,” I said.

“I want the part of your life before you controlled it. I want the old Calcutta. I want the frustrated energies of old Calcutta, the paths that were blocked, the mindless pieties paid to Netaji and to the British. The luxuries and the Naxals, the reverence to Ray and Tagore, the privileged life led on the margins of danger, the falling into love and lust (but change the names!) those are the foundations of any story. The bad old neighborhoods were far more interesting before they got gentrified. How you built your fortune — leave that to the business pages. How you lost your marriage, let them go. Especially the problem you have with a gay son — cut it! What are the real things that gnaw at you, Pronab? — that's what we never hear from immigrants, that's what we want to know. There are men from India, from China, from all over the world just like you, brilliant men, accomplished men, still nursing grievances, nursing unrequited lust, bitterly going through the motions. They carry scars; they're hollowed out. I know them. I'm one of them. We've bridged huge gaps, but parts are still missing. Few of us, and I include myself, have known peace.”

Half of my book, the easy part, had just been cut out.

Over another set of drinks, and another, she said, “I'm a friend of Firoza, as you know. I know all about you. Thanks to you, she said, ‘no vow is sacred'. We used to chat in the back taxis on the way to parties and devise tortures for you. ‘May his toes grow into a single sharp scimitar.' But I'm also a friend of Smriti. I was a constant companion in London that first year. You might not believe this, but she and I were once the ‘It' girls. We were young and cute and available. We were exotics. London wasn't yet Londonstan. We were everywhere and we were seen with everyone.”

Every word a knife to my heart.

“Then as you know, it caught up with her.”

I nodded, as if I knew.

“He wanted her to abort it, but she refused. So, baby Willie. That was the turning point for her. But he's a joy, isn't he?”

“Willie,” I said, nodding sagely.

“That's when we began our little affair. I loved Smriti more deeply than I've loved anyone in my life. It was sudden, and it took us both by surprise. I've stayed on that course, but she couldn't. That's why she married Abdul and changed her life completely.”

We discussed this over drinks, under a fan on a cool verandah, overlooking the glassy sea.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Clark Blaise (1940—), Canadian and American, is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. A longtime advocate for the literary arts in North America, Blaise has taught writing and literature at Emory, Skidmore, Columbia,
NYU
, Sir George Williams,
UC
-Berkeley,
SUNY
-Stony Brook, and the David Thompson University Centre. In 1968, he founded the postgraduate Creative Writing Program at Concordia University; he after went on to serve as the Director of the International Writing Program at Iowa (1990—1998), and as Presdent of the Society for the Study of the Short Story (2002-present). Internationally recognized for his contributions to the field, Blaise has received an Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy (2003), and in 2010 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Blaise now divides his time between New York and San Francisco, where he lives with his wife, American novelist Bharati Mukherjee.