He went out in the afternoon, to buy a bottle of antacid to counter the dyspepsia his long spells of inactivity had brought on, and one of Nescafé instant coffee (which, contradictorily, increased the dyspepsia)—they’d run out of coffee this morning. He’d done everything on this trip to avoid meeting people he knew and to occupy himself in small ways so that he might forget the trip was coming to an end. Walking down had hardly an effect on him; he breathed soundlessly. On the second floor he was delayed by the sound of discordant music; taking a few steps into the corridor and craning his neck, he saw through an open doorway a gathering of Marwari women and children singing bhajans, the children on laps and a large woman beating out the rhythm on a pair of cymbals; he turned, and resumed his journey downward. At the end of the last flight (now he could see the lift descending on the ground floor from the landing, the doors parting by themselves and revealing the liftman half-asleep inside) his way was blocked by two women, maidservants, deep in conversation so that they didn’t notice him.
He went into the hall and compound and then towards the main road, thinking about the days left. This time he went past the Birla temple, with its fake North Indian architecture, and then walked on towards Gariahat. He walked past Mizoram House, and moved towards the area he’d visited repeatedly; the Grindlays Bank, Rash Behari Avenue, the bookshop he’d gone into once. At the crossing of Gariahat and Rash Behari Avenue, he, unable to hear himself think in the noise, bought a chequered duster from the pavement for twelve rupees. Then, from a chemist’s and provisions shop, he bought the antacid and the coffee, which, to his incredulity, cost fifty rupees, and, to compensate, came with a free frisbee of rudimentary appearance.
On his way back, he slowed down, and stared at a building in the early stages of construction; clusters of rods coming out of the earth. Where was it he’d seen it before?—from the other end of the fourth-floor balcony. Now trees and windows concealed it; but was it already in a more advanced state of construction than he’d seen it in, or was it his imagination? Barely conscious of them, he passed the old-world (by old-world he meant the fifties and the sixties, where everything seemed more sacrosanct than at any other point in India’s history, except perhaps its Golden Age) bungalows of the rich Marwari entrepreneurs, with their large gates; and then some more recent six- or seven-storeyed buildings with balconies. He’d realized recently (it had been inarticulate in him since God knows when, but he understood it only now) that, given a choice of being born at any time in India’s past, he’d have chosen to be born in the thirties, so that he could have a taste of the first years of post-Independence India: and he entertained this fancy almost as if it might be a possibility. Instead, he’d been born just after the mid-fifties. Now, unconnected to this, like the smell of dust, a snatch of a conversation returned; idly, he turned over again in his head the idea of a second marriage, which the Admiral had been proposing to him last evening.
“It’s not as bad an idea as you think.” A silence as on cue.
“I don’t think it’s a bad idea. But—once bitten twice shy, as they say.”
He didn’t mean his first, and only, marriage. He meant the meetings he’d had with Arundhati seven months ago. One meeting, then two, then three; more cups of tea. She respected him in her quiet way—he’d felt that; and he’d begun to like her. In spite of an “arranged marriage” having failed once, they were both prepared to give it a second go; he still didn’t have confidence in “love”; it was other things— understanding, mutual needs—that held a marriage together. “But not a Hindu wedding, God, no; I couldn’t take another one of those,” she’d said. “Just a registry.” Everything had been going smoothly and then, almost without warning, he’d realized, after a little more than a month, that something was holding her back, she’d changed her mind and wouldn’t go through with it.
His father, scowling in his beard, was more resilient than he was. The Admiral had already had a vision of the second wedding.
“By the way,” Jayojit asked—and he’d never put this question before; months had passed—“what happened to her?”
The Admiral had to furrow his eyebrows before he could understand what he was talking about. Once he’d understood, he waved one hand. In his other hand he held a tumbler in which he’d poured a peg of the Chivas Regal (“These damn monsoon breezes can make you feverish”) that Jayojit had brought.
“Don’t know.” Almost childish; and certainly prickly.
“No. I see,” Jayojit said.
Their conversations came back to him, like snatches drifting to him from a neighbouring window.
A watchman was guarding the still-skeletal structure. “How long?” he said to the watchman in Hindi. The watchman looked startled. “Kitna din lagega khatam hone ko?” As if he was planning to buy a flat here. “Saal lag jayega, saab,” the watchman. A whole year for completion!—had the contractor adopted some sort of go-slow policy? Property prices still weren’t as high as in Bombay: but they were high enough. He couldn’t make sense of it; maybe it was deliberate—so that prices might appreciate while the building was in construction. “Kya naam hoga?” he asked, making a perfect arc on the dust with one shoe. Lines appeared on the watchman’s forehead as he tried to think. Then the lines vanished; a smile parted the lips. “Manjusree Apartments, saab.” Ugly, old-fashioned name, thought Jayojit, but what you’d expect from a nouveau-riche building. They talked about the building delicately, as if it could hear them. He walked back towards the temple; everywhere there were creepers, with white blossoms, and gulmohur trees; he thought of some of the lanes in Delhi, genteel Greater Kailash. Had he been here last time?—he couldn’t remember things clearly from last time, confusion dominated, talk about courts. From the building coming up crows took off, probably disturbed by something; they might have built a nest there.
When it began to rain, he took refuge at the entrance to the auditorium by the Birla temple, beneath the images of elephants and gods. It was still bright; rain and sun at once, like an electric floodlight playing upon the water. Then, when it stopped, the moisture seemed to ascend as steam off the road.
Coming into his lane, he saw someone ahead of him. It was Mrs. Gupta; he realized about two weeks had passed since he’d last seen her. He wondered about her life after her husband’s death; for he presumed—vaguely remembered— that she had no children.
He was walking faster than her, so that, by the time they had entered the gates, he was just a little behind her. She must have felt his presence, because she glanced back at him swiftly.
“Ah—Mr. Chatterjee!”
They walked together the rest of the way. She told him how she’d had to take shelter beneath a tree, standing next to a man vending Hindi paperback novels, from the shower. “And yet, this time, Jayojit felt, the monsoons had never arrived properly.”
“No umbrella!” she said, opening the palm—small and startlingly fair—of one empty hand. “How could I know? No clouds, nothing!”
“Out visiting someone?” he asked politely as they came up the steps. He said this in Bengali. “Kaarur baadi giyechhilen? ” He stared at a small black dot on her forehead, which seemed to avert his gaze. Her eyes moved from one side to another, like an animal’s that has been genuinely surprised by a shower.
“Oh no,” she said. She had a plastic packet in one hand, and was wearing a printed sari, pretty but now faded. “No, I just went to a shop and bought a few things.”
“Luckily, this place is close to two markets,” she said in explanation. “My daughter, who lives in Alipore—the old ‘white town’—says there are no markets nearby, it’s a great problem sending out a servant to do the shopping.” That put paid to his notion about her being childless. Her eyes, to him, still expected much of life, but everything else about her seemed to inhabit a world of routine and slightly aimless repetition. She lifted the packet and he could see, through the plastic, a bottle of disinfectant liquid. “This is quite good!” she volunteered. “Mr. Chatterjee, w
e’re getting some of your conveniences here too!” In reply, he showed her the frisbee, and she stared at it very seriously. “Free gift,” he said. They waited together for the lift. The numbers on the little panel above the door to the lift decreased from six downward, and they seemed to be standing for a disproportionately long time. She seemed to be less forthcoming now than she’d been the other evening; probably had something on her mind. At any rate, although she must know something about his own life—his story being fairly well known—she had the kindness not to mention it; or was probably not interested; had her own life to think about. When the doors of the lift opened, he heard the loud hum of the fan inside, and said:
“After you.”
“BABA,” SAID JAYOJIT, counting the foils of the traveller’s cheques, “I may as well change these.” The Admiral looked up from the paper and considered them with suspicion, as if they were counterfeit money. Yet Jayojit didn’t want to have to go again; he calculated his remaining expenditure to be about 2,000 rupees, including the parting bakshish to Maya—his mother and he had discussed this; she, with characteristic prudence, had said seventy-five rupees; he’d decided, after some thought, on the more appropriate sum of a hundred and fifty—and the airport tax: in his head he computed the figure of roughly seventy dollars. (His mother was on the verandah, looking out at two part-time helps coming in.) Only the day before yesterday he’d been to Grindlay’s again to put money into his account and withdraw a further five thousand; this was the five thousand he gave each month to his parents, after protests on their side and laborious dismissals on his, to cover expenses. (It was true that he anyway dominated his parents; whether consciously or not, he couldn’t tell; but he often felt, for no justifiable or clear reason, he knew better. In fact, soon after he came back, this was the role he was asked, not in so many words, to assume.) There was another girl, fair and rather small, at the desk this time, with a conspicuous, large stick-on bindi on her forehead, not Sunita, the dark one, talkative and industrious by turns, who’d been there last time.
He’d needed trivial information: his balance of account. He’d felt lost; glanced in confusion and with something like contempt at the customers sitting meekly on the sofa; then this girl, at the table nearest him, had come to his rescue with a “Yes, sir, can I help you, please?” which he hadn’t heard the first time; like a line in a child’s poem, she’d had to repeat it. She’d given him a print-out, bending her head and ignoring the noise the printer made.
Today’s rate in the Statesman, in a row of crowded figures, was Rs. 29.00 to a dollar. Like mercury in an imaginary thermometer, this number rose and fell and rose. He turned back to the first page to double-check the date and that it was indeed the day’s newspaper; then he returned to the page at the back to scan, painfully, once more for the figure he’d noted not long ago.
Jayojit left Bonny at home with his grandparents. “This is not a fun trip,” he said.
He was wearing a light pink twill shirt that had, somehow, been left untouched during this trip.
It had rained in the morning, a dark drama of distant noises that had spent itself after the dawn; wheels had slashed through the wet road and left marks that had still not dried. He did not have to search for a taxi; there was one on the main road; the driver, he noticed, had only one good eye, and was wearing thick spectacles behind which his eyes swam liquidly. “Old Court House Street,” Jayojit said, leaning back heavily. The driver nodded; he had a learned, superannuated look about him.
Old Court House Street he associated not with the American Express Bank, but with the Great Eastern Hotel, to which he’d been as a child of ten; they’d gone on someone’s birthday, probably his mother’s. At the time it wasn’t the celebrated catacomb it was now, but still a hotel where people stayed; but Jayojit’s picture of it came from word of mouth and family anecdote, because he actually had no memory of it or of the famous Chinese restaurant they were supposed to have gone to. In fact, he wasn’t even sure where his father was posted at the time and what they were doing in Calcutta.
“Take it through Lower Circular Road,” said Jayojit. Morning traffic faced them everywhere; to offer a route from a limited number of alternatives was not to be any more ensured of a quicker journey than to turn a few names in your head and mutter one hopefully.
They passed the Chief Justice’s bungalow, an island flanked by potted plants. Absent-mindedly, he felt the rim of the brown paper envelope he was holding in one hand and which he’d lifted from a pile of the Admiral’s correspondence; he’d put his passport and the traveller’s cheques inside it (must be careful not to lose it), he two kilograms lighter and a few shades unreally darker in the passport photograph taken in a booth in Claremont’s small downtown drug store three years ago, when the old passport in a drawer had suddenly expired and given up its ghost, and he had been at a loss about how to apply for a new one, and had daydreamed, or day-nightmared, of forms and registered-post slips.
They were stuck behind a bus; with every vibration, it sent a burst of exhaust fumes into the taxi. The driver seemed unperturbed; embracing the steering wheel with both hands, he seemed to be staring at the advertisement for a cooking oil on the back of the bus. He inhaled the air which absorbed the exhaust as soon as it had threatened to darken it.
Above the buildings, one behind the other, Eveready battery, Sonodyne television videos, etched against a net-like background which would begin to glow at twilight. Obediently, as if he’d been commanded to, he read the messages. There was a large Asian Paints sign, already heralding the Pujas, which this year would begin in late September. Two large eyes, presumably Durga’s, filled the hoarding, and the message, Celebrate With Asian Paints.
“Traffic today,” said the driver.
There was a pause. At the driver’s ironic observation, the other noises receded accommodatingly, and the driver’s voice somehow grew louder than the orchestral background of engines.
“Yes,” Jayojit said, lamely. He never knew what to do when someone spoke to him uninvited. His self-confidence actually hindered him when he was asked to interact with a person well outside his social sphere. Then, against his better judgement, although he knew the question was as rhetorical as the driver’s gambit, added, “Always like this in the morning?”
“Much more,” said the driver in broken Bengali. “Let a drop of rain fall and you will see what happens.” For good measure, he appended the generalization, neither turning back nor looking at the rear-view mirror, “Chowringhee not good road.”
Passing the Chief Justice’s bungalow had reminded Jayojit of Amala’s father; it was both surprising and fortunate that they hadn’t run into each other since the divorce. They’d had many common friends, moved in the same circles . . . Indeed, both his father and Amala’s were on first-name terms with the Chief Justice. By the time of the marriage, Jayojit had a good relationship going with Mr. Chakroborty; so that, at the time of the ceremony (Mr. Chakroborty bare-chested and dhoti-clad), they’d exchanged a smile at the start and the man had shrugged his shoulders, as if they were two proud brahmins enacting but tolerantly disowning the rigmarole of Hindu ceremony. Jayojit had attended the wedding something like a tourist; he was one of those who had no time for tradition, but liked, even in a sentimental way, colour and noise; so he’d reacted to the smoke and fuss of ritual with the irritation of a visitor in a traffic-jam, but had said, with genuine delight, “Absolutely wonderful: Bismillah Khan!” when he’d heard the sound of the shehnai. Last time Jayojit had heard—he couldn’t remember from whom—that Amala’s father had become a lawyer at the Supreme Court and was posted at Delhi. Amala’s father was quite a bit younger than Jayojit’s—probably twelve or thirteen years—a man whose family had settled in these parts for generations. Amala’s father had eventually moved out of the ancestral house in Tollygunge; Jayojit had been more than once to the two-storeyed house in Jodhpur Park the man had constructed for his own family, the ground floor divided into a sitting room and a s
tudy; on the first floor were the bedrooms, bookshelves, and dining room.
But this time, Jayojit hadn’t been in that area even once. He could never, anyway, distinguish one lane from another in Jodhpur Park, nor make any sense of the way the houses were hurriedly, almost frantically, numbered, as if the planner, when conceiving of this serene and perfectly pleasant area, had had a train to catch.
A horn blew near his ear. “Saala!” whispered the driver, and wrenched the gear; it’s these elderly ones that are the most violent, thought Jayojit in surprise. The envelope rested in his left hand; he moved it to his lap.
Outside the Express building, he parted with a rupee coin to a boy of twelve or thirteen. On the first floor, it was cool, as if he’d climbed the stairs to mountainous Tibet, or found himself near Shangri-La. But he had a faint premonition and a memory of the country he’d come from not long ago. There wasn’t much of a queue; three people, who had the air of harmless scavenging birds about them, and must therefore be travel agents, and the back of a European’s head, fine, pale gold. A bearded Bengali sitting on the sofa with his daughter. Something about the colour of her skin, milky-pale, next to her father’s light brown, suggested her mother was European. He turned from them. Jayojit looked about until his eyes found what they were seeking; the buying rate on the board: Rs. 29.30 to the dollar—thirty paise more than what the Statesman, in its more conservative speculation, had promised.
A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) Page 12
