The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise Page A

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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œThen 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.