The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise Page A

servants, watchmen, drivers and their related and unrelated hangers-on. In India I had never, not for a minute of my life, been out of the sight of family or family retainers. Suddenly I was alone among strangers, and the streets, the city, the park, and every room in our first Canadian apartment was threatening.
    When I was five years old, already fluent in English after six months of avid television watching — that cascade of transmission — I went from being Alok Nilingappa to being registered in an English- Protestant school as Alec. In Montréal forty years ago, a “Protestant” school usually meant Jewish-dominant, and “English-Catholic” meant immigrant Italian and Greek. My father associated Protes tants with Edinburgh. French schools were available, but they were seriously Catholic, and he considered Roman Catholicism the religion of Goans and Anglo-Indians. What English-speaking immigrant to North America wants to turn out French-speaking children?
    For my father, coming to Canada meant he could renew his fading memories of Scotland. How he loved the street names in English parts of the city! Clark, Craig, Drummond, Dufferin, MacEachran, Mackay, McGregor, Murray, Strathcona, Strathearn ... we always lived on Scottish-named streets.
    My mother never adjusted. She fell into pious trances. She missed her retinue of servants. October snowflakes drove her indoors until blackfly season. She’d say the only thing worse than the joint-family — even a bad one — is life in a cold country without family or other friends or even the sight of other Indians. My brothers were New World successes. I became her anchor to India.
    My brothers were old enough to speak and remember good Kannada when they left. They were already resistant to the temptation of “corrupting influences.” My oldest brother was one of “Midnight’s Children,” born in 1947. For him, who was thirteen and faintly moustached, there’d always be a trace of India in his speech, and a heart divided. But money is docile, money follows orders, money has no accent. A million by twenty-five seemed to him a realizable goal, but it might be more. He studied the stock pages of the morning Gazette . After Sir George Williams University, he went to Ottawa and got an MBA . He was a natural networker. The Liberals were in power, so he befriended well-placed Liberal staffers. Tories, too. He was the avatar of Mohan Nilingappa. It didn’t bother him to be called “that smart little Indian guy from Montréal” and other things behind his back. Eventually, he married Janelle, a Québec girl; they spoke French at home. And in time he became the seed money behind high-tech in Canada. Successes paid him back ten- and twenty-fold. Later on, he opened the way to the outsourcing boom in Bangalore. He eventually founded a chair in South Indian studies at Sir George.
    And at fifty-nine, a week ago, he died.
    My second brother was ten when we left. He too grew up in Montréal without an accent, and less of a divided heart. He went to McGill Law School, and — it being Québec — he practiced, eventually, in French. He joined René Lévesque’s Parti Québecois very early, when independence for Québec seemed both natural and inevitable, and became a prominent “ethnic” component in an otherwise homogenously Québecois party hierarchy.
    As a four-year-old, the full burden of assimilation fell on me. I had to learn the etiquette of survival in a bilingual, bicultural city, when one is not, strictly speaking, part of the paradigm. Like the Nilingappas of old, we lived comfortably but without intimacy among the English. My school was English, and we were drilled in French by Anglo teachers in the time-honoured manner of colonial administrators. The purpose of French instruction in the Protestant schools appeared to be inoculation against local usage. I never had my