The Meagre Tarmac (6 page)

Perhaps my Nirmala waits for me in Calcutta, perhaps in Tokyo or Maryland or the ancestral village in Bangladesh. Youngest Uncle will stay here just a while longer, if he may, keeping my house clean and ready for whatever God plans. He has bought himself some brushes and watercolors, and takes his instruction from the Goddess who guides his hand and trains him to see, he says, at last. His old middle room has been vacant these past several months. It will suit me.

This life, which I understood once in terms of science — the heavy elements, the calcium, phosphorous, iron, and zinc, settled on us from exploded stars — is but one of an infinity of lives. The city, the world, has come and gone an infinite number of times. One day I expect my Nirmala, whatever her name, to come to my door wherever that door will be, our eyes will lock, and I will invite her in.

BREWING TEA IN THE DARK

MY YOUNGEST UNCLE
and I and a busload of other Englishspeakers were on a tour of Tuscany, leaving Florence at dawn, then on to Siena, followed by a mountain village, a farm lunch, another mountain village, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and back to Florence after dark. I had planned to spread his ashes unobtrusively over a peaceful patch of sloping land, but each stop seemed more appealing than the one before, and so by lunchtime I was still holding on to the urn.

The mountain towns on our morning stops had been seductive. I could imagine myself living in any of them, walking the steep streets and taking my dinners in sidewalk cafés. I could learn Italian, which didn't seem too demanding. The fresh air and Mediterranean Diet could add years to my life.

The countryside of Tuscany in no way resembles the red-soil greenery of Bengal. Florence does not bring Kolkata to mind, except in its jammed sidewalks. My uncle wanted to live his next life as an Italian or perhaps as some sort of creature in Italy, maybe just as a tall, straight cypress (this is a theological dispute; life might be eternal, but is a human life guaranteed every rebirth?). Each time that he and his lady friend, Devvie, a painter, returned from Italy to California he pronounced himself more Italian than ever, a shrewd assessor of fine art and engineering, with a new hat, shoulder bag, jacket or scarf to prove it. He said Devvie was the prism through which the white light of his adoration was splintered into all the colors of the universe. (It sounds more natural in Bangla, our language). If that is true, many men are daubed in her colors. She taught him the Tuscan palette, the umbers and sienas.

At the farm lunch a woman of my approximate age — whose gray curls were bound in a kind of ringletted ponytail — sat opposite me at one of the refectory tables. She was wearing a dark blue “University of Firenze” sweatshirt over faded blue jeans. In the lissome way she moved, and in the way she dressed, she seemed almost childlike. I am forty-five, but slow and heavy in spirit.

She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I can't help noticing that urn you're carrying. Is it what I ...”

I had placed it unobtrusively, I'd thought, on the table between the wine glasses. It was stoppered and guaranteed airtight, a kind of Thermos bottle of ashes. I was afraid that if I put him on the floor an errant foot might touch him.

“Very perceptive,” I said. “It's my uncle.”

“Lovely to meet you, sir,” she said to the urn. Then to me, “You can call me Rose.”
Call me Rose?
I must have squinted, but she said, “You were talking to him back in Siena. You were sitting on a bench and holding it in your lap and I heard you. Of course, I couldn't understand what you were saying, but I'd never seen anything like it.”

“Why the mystery about your name?” I asked.

“You'll find out,” she said. Perhaps she changed her name every day, or on every trip, or for every man she met. I told her my name, Abhi, short for Abhishek.

The farm landscape reminded me of paintings on the walls of Italian restaurants: mounded vineyards framed by cypress trees, against a wall of purple hills sprinkled with distant, whitewashed villas. She moved like a dancer to the fence, then turned, and called to me.

“Why not right here?”

I walked over to the fence, but a goat wandered up to us, looking for food, and tried to butt me through the slats. Then he launched a flurry of shiny black pellets.

“Maybe not,” she said.

When we remounted the tour bus, the aisle seat next to me turned up vacant. “May I?” she asked. She told me that my morning seatmate had also made a connection with the urn and a possible bomb, or shortwave radio. He too had seen me talking in a strange language in Siena, probably Arabic.

During the next leg of the trip, she opened up to me: “You came here on a mission. So did I, in a way. I read that an old friend of mine was going to be in Florence for a Renaissance music festival. He plays the mandolin. And suddenly I wanted to see him again. Not to be with him — goodness, he has a wife and family — but I thought how funny it would be if we just happened to run into each other.”

I could not have imagined so much disclosure in a single outburst. I couldn't even understand her motivation. Funny? The impulsiveness of my fellow Americans is often mysterious to me, but I listened with admiration. We'd never met and we were on a bus in Tuscany, but she was spilling her secrets. Or did she consider me a harmless sounding post? Or did she have no secrets? And then I wondered had she — like me — been pried open by some recent experience? Perhaps our normal defenses had been weakened.

“Maybe you had a wake-up call,” I said. The things we do that elude all reason, because suddenly, we have to do them.

She seemed to ponder the possibility, then consigned it to a secret space for future negotiation. After a few moments she asked, “Where are you from?”

Always an ambiguous question: where are you really from? India? Am I from Kolkata? California? Bay Area? She said, “I work in a library in a small town in Massachusetts, two blocks from Emily Dickinson's house.”

She'd been married, but not to her mandolinist. She'd gone to New York to dance, she married, but she'd injured herself and turned to painting, and then she'd divorced and started writing. By her estimation she was a minor, but not a failed, writer. Like most Bangla-speakers of my generation, I've known a number of poets and writers, although most were employed in more mundane endeavors, by day. I had never considered them minor, or failed.

And then her narrative, or her confessions, stopped and I felt strangely bereft. I sensed she was waiting for me to reciprocate. What did I have to match her?

“Are you married?” she asked.

I began to understand that something thicker was in the air. “Why do you ask?”

“You have an appealing air,” she said.

It is my experience in the West that Indian men, afraid to press their opinions or exert their presence, are often perceived as soulful. Many's the time I've wanted to say, to very well-meaning ladies, just because I have long, delicate fingers and large, deep-brown eyes and a mop of black, unruly hair, do not ascribe to me greater sensitivity, sensuality, or innocence, or some kind of unthreatening, prefeminist manliness. Our attempts to accommodate a new culture are often interpreted as clumsy, if forgivable. I think my uncle and his painter friend enjoyed such a relationship, based on mutual misreading, but in his case all of the clichés might have been true. He was, truly, an innocent. Unlike him, I have no trouble saying “fuck” in mixed company.

“Do you have children?” she persisted.

I have a girl and a boy, who stay with their mother and her parents in San Diego. In my world, the love of one's family is the only measure of success, and in that aspect, I have failed. I said only, “yes.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “It's none of my business.”

My uncle was an afflicted man. He never married. His income paid for the education of all the boys in the family, and the dowries of all the girls. In a place where family means everything, and if part of the family is pure evil, even one's house can be a prison. Literally, a prison: he lived in a back bedroom, afraid even to be seen from the street. He was forced to pay his grandniece's husband ten thousand rupees a month, on the threat of his turning over certain documents to the cbi that would prove something. You ask why he didn't protect himself, why he didn't sue, why his passivity was allowed to confirm the most heinous charges? And I say, Indian “justice” is too slow and corrupt. Cases linger before judges awaiting their bribes. Cases go on as lawyers change sides, as they win stay after stay.

That grim prison was the house of my fondest memories, the big family compound on Rash Behari Avenue that our family began renting the moment of their arrival from the eastern provinces, now known as Bangladesh. Our neighborhood was an east Bengal enclave. We grew up still speaking the eastern dialect. We thought of ourselves as refugees, even the generation, like my grandparents', which had arrived before Partition. In soccer, we still supported East Bengal against the more-established Calcutta team, Mohun Bagan. It's the most spirited competition in all of sports, perhaps in the world.

Six years ago, I'd arrived for my annual visit, this time with a quarter-million dollars in year-end bonus money. It was the dot. com era nearing its end — although we thought it would go on forever — and I had been a partner in a start-up. When my uncle spilled out his story, and I could see the evidence all around me, I also had the solution in my pocket. I acted without thinking. No courts, no police, no unseemly newspaper coverage that would tarnish the family name. I simply bought the house and kicked the vermin out. But I had forgotten that my wife had a use for that money; a school she'd planned to start. I came back from Kolkata with my uncle in tow. She and the children left for San Diego a week later.

She slept on the long ride to Pisa. She slept like a child, no deep breathing, no snoring. I wished she'd turned her head towards me. I would have held her, even embraced her. It was the first time in years that I'd felt such a surge of protectiveness.

There is very little good I can say about Pisa. I'm of two minds about the Leaning Tower. It is iconic, but ugly. It's a monument to phenomenal incompetence, and now the world is invested in a medieval mistake. Actually, I'm not of two minds. It is an abomination. Preserving the mistake is a crime against the great Italian tradition of engineering. In the wide lawns around the Tower, various bands of young tourists, mostly Japanese, posed with their arms outstretched, aligning them for photos in a way to suggest they were holding up the crippled Tower.

We walked towards the Tower, past stalls of souvenir-sellers, most of them, if not all, Bangladeshi, hawking Leaning Tower T-shirts and kitchen towels. They called out to us in English, but I could hear them muttering among themselves in Bangla, “It's an older bunch. Put out the fancy stuff.”

I stopped by, drawn in by the language. We may be one of the pioneering languages of Silicon Valley, but we are also the language of the night, the cooks and dishwashers and hole-in-the-wall restaurants and cheap clothing stalls around the world. Then they studied me a little closer. “Hey, brother!” This came in Bangla. “Something nice for your girlfriend?” They held up white T-shirts, stamped with the Leaning Tower.

“What kind of gift is that?” I answered back. “She'd have to lean like a cripple to make it straight.”

They invited me behind the stalls. Rose came closer, but stayed on the edge of the sidewalk. I felt a little guilty — this was my call from the unconscious, the language-hook. I remembered my uncle, who had brought his devotional tapes to California, and many evenings I would return from work and the lights would be off, and he would be singing to his Hemanta Mukherjee tapes, and I would keep the lights off and brew tea in the dark.

Behind the display bins, the men had stored trunks and trunks of trinkets and T-shirts and towels and tunics, nearly all of them Pisa-related. On each trunk, in Bangla, they had chalked the names of cities: Pisa, Florence, Rome, Venice and Pompeii.

The three stall-owners were cousins. They introduced themselves: Wahid, Hesham and Ali, cousins from a village a kilometer from my grandparents' birthplace. They knew the town well, and the big house that had been ours, the zamindari house, the Hindu's house. Maybe their grandfathers, as small children, had worked there, or maybe they had just stolen bananas from the plantation.

“Then you are from the Ganguly family?” they asked me, and I nodded, bowing slightly, ”Abhishek Ganguly.” Hindu, even Brahmin: opposite sides of a one-kilometer world.

The buried, collective memory forever astonishes. Nothing in the old country could have brought our families together, yet here we were in the shadow of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, remembering the lakes and rivers, the banana plantation, my great-grandfather's throwing open his house on every Hindu and Muslim feast-day. In the olden days, in the golden east of Bengal where all our poetry originated, the Hindus had the wealth, the Muslims had the numbers, and both were united against the British.

My ancestral residence (which I've never seen; after Partition, my parents even tore up the old photos they'd carried with them), I learned, is now a school. The banana plantation is now a soccer field and cricket pitch. Wahid, Hesham, and Ali, and three remoter cousins — what we call “cousin-brothers”, which covers any degree of relatedness including husbands of cousins' sisters — have a lorry, and when the tourist season is over in Pisa they will strike their stalls and go to Florence and sell Statue of David kitsch, or to Venice and sell gondola kitsch. In the winter they will go to southern Spain and sell Alhambra kitsch.

But think of the distance these cheap but still over-priced T-shirts have traveled! Uzbek cotton, spun in Cambodia, stamped in China and sent to a middleman somewhere in the Emirates, to be distributed throughout Europe, matching the proper Western icon to the right city and the proper, pre-paid sellers. For one month they will return to Bangladesh, bringing gifts to their children and parents, and doubtless, enlarging their families.

The cousins had come to Italy four years ago, starting out by spreading blankets on the footpaths and selling China-made toys. Now they have transportable stalls and in a couple of years the six cousins will pool their money and buy a proper store, somewhere, and bring their wives and children over. Right now, they send half of their earnings back to their village, where the wives have built solid houses and the children are going to English-medium schools and want to become doctors and teachers. Their wives have opened up tea-stalls and stitching-shops. “We are Bengalis first, then Hindu or Muslim after,” said Wahid, perhaps for my benefit. “If anyone says he is first a Muslim or a Hindu, I give him wide berth. He has a right to his beliefs, but I do not share them.”