—Okay then, Finley, he said, pronouncing my name with what I may or may not be paranoid in assuming to be a touch of distaste.
It’s not a terrible name. It’s not something, at least, I can help. I was named, as people generally are, and the naming forces were beyond my control.
Did I mention yet that Binelli made me a Russian? By way of my papers, he did. He did that knowing full well my feelings on the matter. This is important to say now because Murphy asked where it was from, Finley.
I said I didn’t know, but my papers made me Russian. And then he laughed and laughed and laughed.—Russian? he said over and over.—Russian?
And then he stopped laughing all of a sudden and said,—That figures, and then that was all for our first conversation. We’ve had many since then. And with the tyrannically needy tedium thus appeased, there I’ll let the digression end.
7
Mr. Uppal, Professor Uppal—the correction had been made over introductions and then flogged to death throughout the port course each and every single time I referred to him thereafter as Mister, with admittedly a sort of autistic inability to make the mental change required to correct the salutation—born Early Uppal, was late.
8
On the matter of Mr. Uppal:
Professor Uppal:
Born Early Uppal, year unknown, but one could surmise a good fifty-to-sixty-to-sixty-five years ago and count painfully backward and guess at a decade, if one were to care enough to go through the trouble.
I perhaps should, but do in fact not.
Care.
Enough or to.
It would only, after all, require yet another unnecessary digression, this time involving maths no less, for which other reports may happily clear room, encourage, even, with their tidy charts and year-end projections and cheerful calculations but for which this report has no time. Starting already behind, as it were, and not inclined in the least to frivolity.
He was to have been more grandly named, this young Uppal, this first Uppal child to result from the union of Singh and Elda Uppal (née Holliday); he was also, however, to have been more grandly born and thus deserving, poor creature, of the imposing and unwieldy moniker which was to have been bestowed upon his squalling brown head. For Singh and Elda Uppal had conceived, right alongside this hopeful fetus, a plan to rise swiftly and with a certain irascible fervor through the ranks of high society—not the shabby high society of their native land either, no, but of a society whose very dregs outshone the royalty of their own high society in immeasurable wattage. And the ease with which this rising was to occur seemed so simple, such a no-brains-necessary sort of plot, that they looked upon their neighbors and friends with a scorn that increased as quickly and magnificently as Elda’s girth—more so, even, as she was a slip of a woman to begin, and though nearly doubling in weight through the abbreviated course of her pregnancy, did so with such delicate subtlety that it hardly from day to day seemed as though an expansion was occurring at all.
Pride goeth before a fall is, I have little doubt, an expression that has been translated into their and likely every known language of all the lands, but like most people, it simply never occurred to the Uppals that their disdain for their peers would ever stick out a stocky well-fed limb to trip them. Theirs was a disdain they took no pains whatsoever to hide, as they packed their meager possessions and ate grandly and without regard for the future their rations of rare delicacies and as Elda blew their scrappy savings on the finest silks available at market and sewed herself into the most magnificent saris and other, more unusual, articles of clothing, patterns copied from coveted, covertly passed-about photographs from lands afar, smudged and worn from the many eager fingers of the village’s would-be fashionistas and sharp-tongued naysayers alike.
No one perhaps related to them either the fable of a certain grasshopper and ant, and the point would certainly have been lost on them anyway, neither Uppal resembling in the slightest a grasshopper and cautionary tales generally most effective at any rate before the idea against which one is being cautioned has been fertilized and is gaining heft and weight with the merciless momentum of an unborn baby.
They had spent almost their last monies on two one-way tickets out. Out of town, out of country, headlong toward a land where a baby’s birth granted papers and all the rights and privileges thereof not only to a baby but to parents who’d after all proved their worth by concocting such an intelligent scheme in the first place. The papers—which Singh hoped quietly would be edged in powdered gold—were the baby’s right and due, born with no decision or malicious forethought upon the host country’s terra firma, and more of a reward to the parents, for keen demonstration of industry and ambition, two of the land in question’s most respected ideals. The Uppals were ripe with industry and ambition, and ripe with child and ripe with impressive sympathy-girth—Singh had put on more weight than his wife, with the lavish lifestyle they enjoyed in those salad days of incubation and the devil-may-care plunderage of their resources—and felt more and more as though the country they were invading would be grateful for their company.
And it was on the very day of what they had come to think of as their triumphant crossing to the land of milk and honey, the land of the gilded paper ticket to the fair, their ticker-tape parade home-coming, that the one factor they had relied on for their free pass, the small seed that had bore such industrious fruit of ingenuity, became their ruin. Elda’s water broke, two months early, in the carriage on the way to the station, and, though she tried valiantly to forge ahead, braving the humiliation of a soaking sari and screaming impressively at the ladies and then the men and then the armed and amused guards who stood between her and the last and most imperative step in her path to glory and riches, she was denied admission and birthed instead the impatient baby in a customs office, attended by three disgusted and impeccably turned-out cabin hostesses who spoke throughout of the atrocities being inflicted on their brand-new uniforms and who would likely be held responsible for damages.
I do not know who was held responsible for the atrocitied uniforms.
What is clear however is that the child, with more good-natured humor than one would expect from the foiled and frustrated pair of Uppals, was called simply Early instead of the string of successively impressive names originally chosen, the many initials of which had been already sewn into silken baby clothes with golden thread and which E.U. would wear without confusion for the duration of his babyhood.
P.U. I suppose. His preference, not mine.
9
On the occasion of my second meeting with Mr. Uppal, Professor Uppal, a meeting for which I was one hundred percent more prepared, having been armed, as it were, with at last the proper details of place and name and time et cetera, without which one might as well send in an amateur, I was received with exemplary formality by a uniformed manservant and deposited into the hands of Dame Uppal.
Dame Uppal was what one might refer to as a Handsome Woman, which has never to me seemed much of a compliment. I do not, therefore, mean to suggest a compliment by my use of the term. Handsome is not something a woman should be.
I passed the time awaiting Early’s late arrival in a sitting room with Dame Uppal. She did not offer me snacks, sodas, canned fruits, trays of meats—cured or otherwise—or anything much in the way of hospitality.
She instead lay on the divan in a sort of meticulous disarray. If you find this suggestive of nothing so much as an oxymoron, you are reading correctly. Catching my drift, so to speak. She lay on the divan as if disarrayed on purpose—hair