Free The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise Page A

dolphin’s or a bat’s, our eyes less than a bird’s in comprehending it. I have understood it in terms of science, the heavy elements necessary to life, the calcium, phosphorous, iron and zinc, settle on us from exploded stars. We are entwined in the vast cycle of creation and destruction; the spark of life is inextinguishable. Today human, but who knows about tomorrow? We are the fruit and the rot that infects it, the mango and the worm.
    Ray-Bans Ghosh now wants to put his crore of rupees to work in Toronto. Dear Abhi-babu, he writes, tear down this useless old house, put up luxury condos and you’ll be minting money. Front Room pishi, who misses nothing outside the window, reports that she has seen evil Gautam in various disguises sneaking about the property. Dear Abhi, she pleads, come back, that man will kill me if he can and your cousin Rina and her mother will bury me in the yard like a Christian or worse, and please send my love to Chhoto kaku and your lovely wife and children, whom I’ve still not met.
    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