Dilemmas of the Diaspora

Family is all we know of infinity, the insolence of fate. We are born to strangers we must learn to love, in a town or country we would not have chosen, into a tribe that defines and restricts our growth. We spend a lifetime overcoming the givens, only to turn back from the distant vantage point of fifty years when the parents are gone, to look back and say: this is what I am, something no larger, no freer, than they made me.

Clark Blaise, I Had a Father

Although he is referring to himself, a peripatetic American born to French- and English-Canadian parents, Clark Blaise could be describing any of his characters in The Meagre Tarmac: Stories. Members of the Indian diaspora in such cities as New York, Pittsburgh, Montreal and Palo Alto, they are successful engineers, bankers, editors and actors. They owe their material comfort to expensive...