The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise Page B

brothers’ sturdy grounding in our Kannada language. To make the obvious pun, I had only Canada, and only half of that.
    Before 1965 even got established, my father would pass his mandatory Canadian medical boards and set himself up in a practice. In India, he’d been a researcher with severely limited “clinic” hours; in Montréal he became a trusted family doctor. In those early years, when Indians were barely a presence in North America, he was seen as wise as well as competent, avuncular but authoritative. He could say to patients who’d traded in certainties all of their lives, “We of course can never be certain,” and they would nod “of course not.”
    ... Canada regains top prize ... UN releases annual Quality of Life results ... criteria based on personal income, environment, crime, housing availability and affordability, health care, life expectancy, infant mortality, political stability, educational standards and gender equality ... Rounding out top ten ... former #1 Norway falls to second, followed by 3. Australia, 4. Sweden, 5. Netherlands, 6. Belgium and 7. Denmark ... United States ranks 8; Japan 9 and Iceland rounds out top ten ...
    In the Canada of my childhood, we might have smiled, or felt slightly embarrassed at such a ranking. What about the North, Newfoundland and the Maritimes? we might have asked. Stability? When our largest province wants to break away? When the courts are busting up public health? What cities did these UN guys visit, Vancouver and Toronto?
    Now, three days back, I think the hordes of young people I see in the bistros and cafés would say, “ Regain? When did we ever lose it?”
    5. When I was seven years old, Expo ’67 came to town. Suddenly we had a Métro system. The underground splendor of Place Ville- Marie was replicated in our neighborhood by Alexis Nihon Plaza and Westmount Place. Every stop on the Métro groomed its own gaudy, year-round-summertime, subterranean city. My oldest brother, Rajah, was twenty, then at Sir George. He talked himself into a job in the Indian pavilion at Expo. Early networking, this time with his fellow “workers”, the privileged sons and daughters of high-ranking Indian politicians who’d somehow managed to place their children in such cushy circumstances. Middle brother, Suresh, was seventeen, the summer before he was to start out east, at Dalhousie. My mother decided I was deficient in Hindu knowledge, and so she began a project of epic proportions, bundling me up in bed with her and reading the Mahabharata in Kannada. My father went back to Bangalore for the summer, “to avoid the noise and crowds of Expo,” he said.
    The great Indian epic concerns an endless war between the armies of two brothers, the Pandavas and Kauravas. The battles are thrilling in their detail, even through the screen of my mother’s telling in a language that will never be more than a second screen for me. “No hatred is greater than inside a family,” she said. “Brothers will fight until no one is left, no home, no fields, no wife, no children.” It was not much of a leap to read the epic as an intimate family melodrama, my father against his older brother. Older Uncle wanted to sell the estate; my father and younger uncle were against it, and willing to take their case to court.
    Bangalore in 1967 was still the sleepy cantonment it had always been. But rumors of new money were filtering in, largely based on people like us, NRIS, non-resident Indians who wanted to return to India for retirement, but had grown accustomed to Western-style luxury after saving mountains of foreign exchange in the UK , Canada and US . Trusts were consolidating packages of farmland around Bangalore and floating huge building loans against inflated, overseas, hard-currency subscriptions. Not a brick had been laid, nor roads, nor services, and the land deeds were all in dispute and the