The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise

match her?
    â€œAre you married?” she asked.
    I began to understand that something thicker was in the air. “Why do you ask?”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œDo 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.”
    â€œI’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