His mother smiled.
“Where’s baba?” he asked.
“He’s gone to the bank, to settle some matters,” she said, and Jayojit recognized, with an inward smile, a touching and naive piousness in her tone, as if she were speaking of some mysterious but trusted god who knew his business—no matter if he were a god who had almost died of a stroke seven years ago.
“In this heat?” asked Jayojit. “Is that good for him?”
“He always goes to the bank once a week,” his mother said, again with that piousness that could not understand criticism. “He takes the bus.”
“Is that necessary?” asked Jayojit, genuinely concerned. “How are you financially?”
“God alone knows, these things I don’t understand,” she said reticently. “You must ask your baba.”
Bonny had gone off to one side of the sitting room, and was playing between the armchairs and the sofa. There was no real difference between the sitting and dining room; they were part of the same hall, and only an imaginary partition existed between the two. The architect had thrown the dining space on the side of the kitchen and the small corridor to the front door, a pleasant limbo or island with its dining table and chairs; while the hall was pushed into the interior, and was adjoined to the semi-outdoors of the verandah. Here, not far away from his father and grandmother, and fully in their sights, Bonny had become transformed into another being, making noises with his mouth and throat, indicating the propulsion and motion of some agent of locomotion—perhaps an aeroplane. As he wandered among the furniture, he imitated moments of vertigo and others of equilibrium and rest.
“Well, I’d better get up now,” Jayojit said. “There are things to do.”
He had begun to feel the first movements in his bowels, and was oddly grateful and relieved; he was always lost when jet-lag caused his body to skip its more basic functionings.
“Have another luchi, Joy!” said his mother. She picked up one from the last droopy ones that hadn’t puffed up properly. “There are many more.”
“Ha ha . . . No, ma—there’s a limit to the luchis you can digest,” said Jayojit. Before he went into his room, he said, “Be careful, Bonny!”
The Admiral returned at half-past eleven, ringing the doorbell three times. When he came in, his beard was untidy and parts of his white shirt were dark with sweat and clung to his skin.
“Damn bank!” he said, walking towards his right to the bedroom. “Can’t make the scoundrels work—it’s these damn unions!”
He went inside the room without addressing his wife directly—he never spoke to her unless he had to—and, having put the papers inside, came out again after a minute. Still in his sweat-stained shirt, he switched on the fan and sat on the sofa in the sitting room with a newspaper.
“Is it really hot outside?” asked Bonny, standing by his grandfather’s right arm and waiting for an answer.
“Hot and dusty, dadu,” said his grandfather between breaths. “Hot and dusty.” He was still breathing hard, as if his heart were pumping and exercising in a way that it would if he were getting off a bus or still walking down the road.
He was a large man of medium height, and was overweight; though he hid his bulk from himself and others by wearing loose white bush shirts, it could nevertheless be seen, especially now when the shirt stuck to parts of him and revealed the heaviness of his contours. He was not uncomfortable with his body; it was part of his presence. Although doctors had told him to lose weight, he forgot their advice the moment they were out of earshot.
“Baba—you’re back!” said Jayojit, coming out of the room and padding towards his father in his rubber sandals. He looked large and cool. “How did it go?”
“It’s a miracle these banks work, and that any money flows through this state!” said the Admiral. “Everyone belongs to a trade union, and no one believes in service. You ask them a question, and they’re busy talking to each other about a cricket match or a relative’s wedding!” Used to being deferred to at home and at work, he had realized in his post-retirement years in Calcutta that his commanding presence was of no use at post offices and banks; in fact, the clerks seemed to sense he took his privileges for granted and resented it. At these places, he had to learn to tone down his voice, to wait patiently like everyone else in silence.
“Which bank do you use? Grindlays?” asked Jayojit.
“I had work at the State Bank today.”
“State Bank? Why on earth d’you use the State Bank?”
“They’ve started a new investment scheme, actually,” said the Admiral. “However,” he laughed grimly, “most people in the bank don’t even seem to know about it! I had to ask to see the manager—he gave me some papers. They’d even advertised it today.” He shook the Statesman, in wonder and contempt.
“What about share prices?” asked Jayojit. “The share market is doing well, isn’t it—new companies coming in?”
The Admiral shook his head. “My savings are mainly in government bonds. I have hardly anything in shares,” he said. “I don’t know enough about them.”
Jayojit nodded. Although he was an economist, he knew more about economic theory than shrewd investment, about global trends and third-world markets, but as to how they intersected with something particular and real, like his father’s personal life and decisions—that was different, and beyond the scope of his discipline.
“Why don’t you ask Haru kaku?” said Jayojit, thinking of a cousin of his father’s, a chartered accountant.
“Haru!” said his father, as if the name had startled him. “Haru’s long retired. Besides, I don’t believe everything he says.”
In principle, Jayojit was all for this new flood—of investors and companies coming into the country. During the time of the Rajiv Gandhi government, when the Prime Minister had been gathering advisors around himself, mainly from among his Cambridge friends, someone had recommended Jayojit, who was then teaching at Buffalo. Jayojit had sent him a plan, suggesting gradual liberalization; thus, he had been there, in a sense, at the beginning. In the new, as yet unfinished, brickwork of India’s new economic order, Jayojit had laid an early and important cornerstone. Nothing but economic reform, he believed, could change India from a country living on borrowings from the West into a productive and competitive one. Yet now, when he saw his father’s hesitation about investing in shares, for which he had neither the means nor the confidence, he had no advice to give him.
In the afternoon, the Admiral lay in his trousers and shirt on the bed, his head against two pillows, and slept. He snored, and then the snores dissolved once more into regular heavy breathing.
At about three o’clock someone rang the doorbell and Jayojit’s mother went to open the door. It was the maidservant; there was an exchange at the door in low voices, and the maid, eyes downcast, came into the flat. She went straight to the kitchen.
Apparently she was supposed to come once in the morning, to clean the floors, and once in the afternoon to wash the dishes. But she had failed to turn up this morning. Her explanation was that the Mitras, whose flat she worked in—she worked part-time in four flats in the building each day— hadn’t let her go.
“Their washerwoman didn’t come today, ma!” she protested.
Jayojit’s mother was certain she had been chattering downstairs with her friends. “Always acting the innocent,” she muttered. Her name was Maya—Jayojit had overheard his mother call her this.
Out she came now from the kitchen, and began to lightly dust the furniture. Then she stooped to pick up, in an unenquiring, unsurprised way, the small cars and vehicles, trailers, trucks, which Bonny had left on the floor; she put them on a side table. After sweeping the floor she closed the front door and left as quietly as she had come.
IT WAS SIMPLE—Jayojit wanted to spend as much time as possible with him. Although it was clear that he and his wife hadn’t got on from the very beginning, some urge to rehearse what their parents had done before them had taken hold of hi
m, of her, and, without fully understanding what they were doing, they had brought a child into the world, in a small nursing home in a midwestern American town.
Bonny had been born three years after the marriage. The first two years were the years of amorous energy. Yet it had been absurd. Both Amala and Jayojit had grown up with the same background, listened to the same music, liked the Beatles; she, predictably, shied away from the Rolling Stones as so many girls he used to know in school had. He had clung to the loyalties he thought he was shaped by; she had seamlessly allowed herself to shed her early enthusiasms, which probably hadn’t been very intense in the first place, and, listening to the incomprehensible music of the eighties, would say, “What’s wrong with it?” At first, he found this touching. Both of them had decided, at some point in their lives, without articulating it to themselves, like a pact they’d made with several others without knowing it, that an arranged marriage was the best option.
Bonny now went to a school in San Diego, near where his mother lived. He was at that stage when only the simplest arithmetic—addition, subtraction, multiplication—was taught, when five-sentence compositions were assigned to be written. Jayojit had to meet the head teacher to request from the school an extra month off for Bonny’s holidays. “I don’t think it should be a problem, Dr. Chatterjee.” The lady knew he taught at a college. “Vikram’s bright; he should pick things up as easily at home as he does at school. You know, I envy you your trip. The furthest I’ve been into Asia is Paris.”
Jayojit had laughed on cue. Then, suddenly, curious for knowledge, he’d asked:
“How’s he doing? Anything in particular he’s good at . . . or weak in, for that matter?”
He cherished the notion of his child’s success, although, in his own life, he’d come to disdain conventional ideas of success and achievement.
“He’s good at English, I’d say. I teach them English.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes.” Did she seem disappointed that Bonny hadn’t told him already? “He’s quite good. Other children have problems with little things like distinguishing between its and it apostrophes, and constructions like “had had”, but a few, like Bonny, don’t. He’s also good at making sentences and spelling.”
He began to go out for walks with Bonny in the afternoon.
The Admiral said, “Does dadu have homework to do? I could help him.”
“Not really, baba. He’s too young for homework; he has to do some drawings and listen to some stories, that’s all. Last month he wrote a two-sentence story about going to the beach.” He laughed. The Admiral listened gravely, as if to the description of a thesis. “Listen: ‘The beach is full of sand and it sure gets hot. Mary went out to the sea and got afraid.’” Jayojit had it by heart. “That apparently got an alpha.” Feigning surprise.
At times, in his old school, Bonny’d have to self-consciously play the “Indian” role when nations were being discussed, and he’d been told by his father: “Hey, d’you know what Vikram means: it means strong, powerful, heroic.”
“Really?” Bonny had said. “That’s weird.”
As they went out now they could hear voices coming from some of the other flats, where housewives were watching videos as their children slept. The noise of fights and crescendos took Jayojit aback at first.
Sometimes they did not take the lift and went down the stairs; Bonny, in particular, liked running down. Bits of garbage would be lying here and there on each landing.
When they had arrived downstairs, they were met by a hall. The hall was usually swept by breezes, especially now, in April. At one end, on the far right, there was a row of wooden post-boxes with numbers painted on them, where a postman could be seen sometimes at half-past four, and near the centre of the hall there was a ping-pong table.
“It’s amazing the time at which these men come,” Jayojit had thought as he’d watched, three days ago, a man arrived with a bag of letters at four o’clock. “But if you tell them anything, they won’t give your mail tomorrow.”
There were terrible stories about the post-office, how registered letters lay waiting, and how overseas mail, with blue stickers saying Par Avion, was delivered weeks late. “It’s worse than inconvenient, it can be downright fatal,” someone had said. Even phone bills didn’t come on time. Each time Jayojit wrote to his parents from America he felt a renewed sense of irritation and helplessness.
“Baba!” said Bonny urgently, pausing in the centre of the hall. Jayojit, preoccupied, stood there seeming to watch him, although his mind was elsewhere. He did not know how to think of these first days together of their visit, if “visit” it could be called.
As they crossed the hall and descended the four steps into the compound, they came out into the heat. The two or three maidservants who loitered here weren’t there. Before Jayojit and Bonny was a sort of lawn or garden with railings on all sides. There were trees in it—two palm trees which seemed to have taken refuge here from a more exotic habitat, a mango tree—and flowering shrubs and even clone-like potted plants. Late in the morning, once or twice, Jayojit had woken up from jet-lag at dawn to see the mali alone among the pots, unwittingly scaring birds away, watering the plants.
By the gates, a cat, curled up in the heat, looked warily at Bonny without raising its head; Bonny returned its gaze frankly. On the other side of the gate, a young watchman on his bench, whose moustache was so tender and dark that he might never have shaved it, watched the boy and his father, the combination of trousers, shorts, and sneakers.
“Where’s dadu and tamma?” asked Bonny, squinting upward, as if a vague memory had nudged him after a long time. He scratched his scalp where it had begun to perspire slightly.
But dadu and tamma must be asleep.
“They’re on that side,” said his father, a bright star of light reflecting off his spectacles. “You can’t see them from here.”
They both looked up at the apartment block facing them, with its numerous verandahs.
“We don’t live on this side, baba?” asked Bonny, disappointed for no reason.
“No, we don’t, Bonny,” said Jayojit. “If we did, we’d see this garden from our balcony, wouldn’t we?”
“I guess.” This was acquiesced world-wearily.
The watchman was still looking at the two; not meaning to be rude; indeed, his face was like a door that was open, friendly, unguarded. On closer observation, it was evident that he was staring at them without seeing them. It was as if he—a young man of about twenty-one—were asleep with his eyes open; at least until he stirred a little. He hadn’t seen them before, but this was not unusual; tenants were always coming and going from the building, as were owners of flats or members of their family. Bonny, for instance, had been here only twice in the last three years, and each time he’d been a different shape; really, a different person. And it was not difficult to tell when people had arrived from abroad; something about their clothes, and the way they spoke with each other, the way they appeared, transforming the life of whichever family they were visiting, and then vanished again, tipping the maidservant extravagantly.
The watchman was looking at the way Jayojit was standing and talking to his son. A servant passed by and then a car hesitated by the gate; the watchman got up, distracted, like a traveller in a departure lounge who realizes, after an unspecified interval, that his name’s being announced.
This space between the steps into the building and the main gates to the lane was where the sun beat down intensely. But clouds would be conjured up in the sky from nothing. On their second afternoon out, one or two big drops had dashed against the ground, becoming dark spots where they’d fallen on the driveway.
As they were looking up at the building, a dog in one of the first-floor balconies began to bark. It was an Alsatian; it seemed furious at being confined inside the flat.
“It’s a dog, baba,” Bonny informed his father.
Jayojit, tall, one part of him comparing this heat to the drier h
eat of the American South, wondered why people who lived in flats hardly big enough for a medium-sized family should keep dogs. This dog barked to the shadows in the outside world from the eternal but cluttered present of the balcony, amidst pots, a clothesline, and two plastic chairs like dwarves in the background.
“Hi!” The small voice was drowned by a fresh fit of loud barking.
“It’s a nice-looking dog, Bonny, but it doesn’t seem to be in a very good mood.”
There was a gulmohar tree in the lane, the flaming orange flowers erupting from within, and banyan trees, private and removed as ancient pilgrims. Some drivers were asleep inside Ambassadors; others were crowded together outside, handkerchiefs spread, playing cards. Near the gates, in the blue shadow not of the building but of a wall behind, there were two ramshackle structures: a tea stall, which catered, with thick slices of bread and biscuits, to the drivers, and a dhobi’s shop, where clothes from the building were ironed.
When Jayojit couldn’t sleep the first few nights, he’d reread the morning’s Statesman, the headlines become strange at the end of the day, when the appositeness that news had in the morning—calamities and predictions—had already passed into its daily afterlife.
There was one he’d been fooled by, an advertisement pretending to be a report, with the headline “Miraculous Antidote to Hair Loss Announced,” which he began to read with the same unquestioning acceptance with which he read the rest of the newspaper, before he came to its end and realized what it was. It began: “It was announced today that finally . . .” and had just the right mixture of breathlessness and objectivity. Very clever, thought Jayojit. After this, he folded the paper, switched off the lamp, and tried to sleep.
Waking at home, in his house in Claremont, used to be difficult, with Bonny gone, withheld from him like a promise, and Amala, his wife, gone. Some of the pictures she had bought—prints; pichwais with serene trains of elephants, the cowherd-god, dallying with the gopis, identified by the peacock-plume above the forehead—were still on the walls. Mornings were quiet in Claremont; it was as if they waited till radio alarm clocks began to play and people got up. He lay still before he rose in his house in Claremont, feeling quite separate from the man who’d written a book about economic development, who drove a Ford, who’d secured tenure.
A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) Page 3
