Free The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise

group.” So I slashed, I burned. Into the fire went everyone with an H-1B visa; back to Bombay with Lata Deshpande who was getting married in a month. Off to a taxi in Oakland went Yuri, who’d come overnight from Kazakhstan to Silicon Valley, thinking it a miracle. This Christmas there will be no job, even for me. Impulse breeds disaster, I’ve been taught.
    In a month or two we’ll be free to move back to Calcutta. Ray- Bans Ghosh informs me the “infestation” has been routed. But Youngest Uncle has found a girlfriend in America. Kaku and the Goddess; my walls glow with her paintings. The turpentine smell of mango haunts the night.
    In the summer of my fourteenth year, Youngest Uncle was given a vacation cottage in Chota Nagpur, a forest area on the border of Bihar and West Bengal. Ten members of the family went in May when the heat and humidity in Calcutta both reached triple digits. The cottage was shaded by a grove of mango trees too tall to climb. Snakes and birds and rats and clouds of insects gorged on the broken fruit. The same odour of rotting mango envelops the Goddess and the sharp tang of her welcome.
    She is a well-known painter in the Bay Area and represented in New York. The first time we visited, Youngest Uncle said, “You smell of mango,” and she’d reached out and touched him. “Oh, sweeties,” she said, “it’s just the linseed oil.” She never seems to cook. On garbage collection days there is nothing outside her door yet she can produce cold platters of the strangest foods. She has an inordinate number of overnight guests who doubtless return to their city existence, trailing mango fumes. My uncle brings her sweet lassi, crushed ice in sweetened yoghurt, lightly laced with mango juice. I hope that in place of a heart she does not harbor a giant stone.
    That summer in Choto Nagpur, I had a girlfriend. There was another cabin not so distant where another Calcutta family had brought their daughter for the high-summer school holidays. We had seen each other independent of parental authority, meaning we had passed one another on the main street of the nearest village, and our eyes had met — in my twenty-four years’ memory I want to say “locked” — but neither of us paused or acknowledged the other’s presence. The fact that she didn’t exactly ignore me meant I now had a girlfriend, a face to focus on and something to boast about when school resumed and the monsoons marooned us. I had the next thing to a wife, a Nirmala of my own. Knowing her name and her parents’ address in Calcutta and trusting that she was out there waiting for me when the time would come, I was able to put the anxieties of marriage aside for the next five years.
    When I was eighteen I asked Youngest Uncle to launch a marriage inquiry. I provided her father’s name and address — I’d even walked by their house on the way to school in hopes of seeing her again and perhaps locking eyes in confirmation. Youngest Uncle was happy to do so. He reported her parents to be charming and cultured people with a pious outlook, whose ancestral origins in Bangladesh lay in an adjoining village to our own. Truly an adornment to our family. It seemed that the girl in question, however, whose name by now I’ve quite forgotten, was settled in a place called Maryland-America and had two lovely children. And so, outwardly crushed but partially relieved, I took the scholarship to iit and then to Berkeley, met Sonali at a campus mixer thrown by outgoing Indo-Americans for nervous Indians, had my two lovely children, made millions and lost it and the rest is history, or maybe not.
    All of my life, good times and bad, rich and poor, married and alone, I have read the Gita and tried to be guided by its immortal wisdom. It teaches our life — this life — is but a speck on a vast spectrum, but our ears are less reliable than a dog’s, a