The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise

single gesture re-plotted the starcharts of everyone in the family. Forty years later, I have three sharp memories of India and the Nilingappa family compound that defined the world for my first four years.
    I’m three years old. Little Dabu, the five-year-old son of Big Dabu, the mali, and I, are protecting banana flowers from a troop of monkeys. My mother had promised a side dish of ballayephul palliya , banana-flower curry, my favorite, for supper. Big Dabu had sharpened long, thin staves for us. Old Dabu (Big Dabu’s father, Little Dabu’s late grandfather), and Big Dabu and untold fathers and uncles had been Nilingappa-family malis ever since Mohan came to town. That night, my father slapped me at the dinner table, and I ran from my heroically protected banana-flower curry after announcing my desire to become a mali when I grew up.
    Then I’m four years old. I remember the meagre tarmac of the old aerodrome and a prop-driven Indian Airlines plane that will take us to Bombay and the Air-India connection to London and the Trans-Canada flight to Montréal. Our bags — my father’s old suitcases from his student days in Scotland, taller than I am — are lined up at the edge of the tarmac under a strip of awning. I remember the khaki-clad baggage-handler trying to chalk them, but I’m not allowing it. I keep wiping the chalk mark off; he says it’s the law, a matter of security and identification, but I see it as an invasion of our property. He laughs as he leans down and begs me in our language, Kannada: Baba, you must let me chalk the bags. It means you are safe to travel. You are going to America. You are the luckiest boy in the world. This memory has lingered, I think, because I must have sensed my future. The Nilingappas, monarchs of Murphy Town, were being driven into permanent exile.
    My father equated Canada with his simpler, carefree Edinburgh days. A place to wear his tweeds and enjoy a pint. What else could “Commonwealth” mean?
    Forty years later, luck has landed me in a hotel room in Montréal, looking out on a city I can’t begin to recognize. I tell myself I’m here for a funeral, except that the ceremony was three days ago, because no one knew how to find me. Or if they wanted.
    The CNN crawl spews out its disjointed newsbits, ... successful ship-to-ship transfer of more than one thousand luxury cruise passengers suffering acute intestinal distress ... police in Kansas City announce arrest of suspect in string of area murders ... Terror alert: elevated ... drug-doping investigation widening, major sports figures implicated ... In weather news ... first hurricane alert of the Atlantic season as Alexei gains strength ...
    4. Despite my father’s professional status and comfortable income, he was only a second brother, and so his older brother had consigned our family to three rooms in the north wing. With my two older brothers we were a family of five, not counting our own cook and servants and their families. My younger uncle and his family had two rooms in the south wing. The rest, and it was considerable — a banquet hall, drawing rooms, salons, and tiled bathrooms with misting, brass boa constrictor water pipes and cobra showerheads capped with ruby eyes — was owned by my father’s unemployed oldest brother and his retired, minor, Kannada-language film star wife. My father suffered constant second-son humiliation in a dysfunctional joint family. My mother survived, thanks to old servants and younger uncle’s wife.
    I was the youngest. My father said that “time to adjust” in the New World was on my side. I would be the great transmitter of Nilingappa family achievement to a new continent. Perhaps he only meant I would grow up without the trace of an Indian accent. In that lone prediction, he was correct. We left behind grandparents, younger uncle and his wife, my cousins, Big and Little Dabu, and the usual retinue of cooks,