A New World: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Amit Chaudhuri

  “HE DOESN’T LIKE FISH,” said Mrs. Chatterjee. She had a martyred look.

  “Well, I’ve had my fill of fish,” said Jayojit, patting his stomach.

  “You don’t feel hungry when it’s hot,” said Bonny, struggling to emphasize every important word.

  The Admiral’s hair was lifted by the breeze. “It’s a lovely time of the year,” he said.

  “Lovely time or no lovely time,” his wife said, “it gives me a headache with that woman not coming these days and the clothes drying so late.”

  The Admiral got up from his armchair and stretched himself. “Haven’t been out walking for a couple of days now,” he said. “But it’s risky these days in the morning.”

  Last night he hadn’t slept well; it had been humid; he’d grunted as he’d turned from side to side, snored and then woken up; and, unknown to his wife, had, in the dark room, gone over the next months, envisioning the various scenarios. It was only when thinking of his grandson that he calmed down into acceptance; got up and grunted, “Ektu aram hoyechhe,” acknowledging, in a low tone, that the heat had ebbed. Mrs. Chatterjee was asleep; they had this habit, both of them, of addressing each other even when the other was out of earshot. Then, groping but familiar with the lefts and rights of the path, he’d gone into the kitchen to drink some cold water.

  “I’d like to go somewhere during the monsoons. To a dryer place. It’s not that I don’t like the monsoons. It’s just that there’s too much water in South Calcutta.” But he couldn’t remember when he’d last had a holiday and he had no plans of having one. In his present state of mind, he didn’t particularly like being at home, but if there was one thing he liked less, it was going somewhere else.

  “Strange thing for a seaman to say,” said Jayojit, a leg extended on the table.

  “Oh, ships are extremely dry places. They have to be.” He paused, and said, “Suffered a lot from seasickness myself.”

  “I suppose you could go and stay with Ranajit.”

  With Ranajit, who’d grown up with his parents, moving wherever they did (“I can’t have two boys living away from me,” Mrs. Chatterjee had, distraught, insisted), the relationship between father and son had probably been closer but subject to more strain; Ranajit making the sacrifice of changing schools, of sets of friends whose oddities were no sooner memorized than they were replaced by another class, another school anthem.

  “Oh no,” said the Admiral, waving one hand repeatedly. The room with its old painting (bought from a gallery from an artist they knew slightly; “Charity begins at home,” the Admiral had joked) and decorations was lit by the lightning outside the verandah. The Admiral said, “I don’t like going back to places where I’ve worked.”

  JAYOJIT HAD TO RECONFIRM the Bangladesh Biman tickets.

  On the way to Chowringhee the roads were strangely empty; he wondered if it was a holiday and then thought, “Of course it isn’t.” Ashutosh Mukherji Road and Bhowanipore were deserted, as on the day of a strike, and he decided it must be the time of the day. As the taxi passed the Aeroflot office, with its huge blue and white sign, he thought, with a sigh, of the stories he’d heard about it, which made him self-congratulatory even about having a Biman ticket. “Given a choice between a Muscovite and a Bangladeshi,” he thought as the taxi halted at a crossing, “I’d plump for the latter.” He shook with laughter when he remembered how a friend, on his way to Cambridge, England, had been humiliated when changing planes in 1986, and spent an endless night in an unheated Moscow airport. Then, as the taxi moved forward again, the smile was replaced by a look of exasperation when Jayojit recalled one of his father’s cousins, Pramathesh Jethu, who used to swear by Aeroflot—“It ’s good, solid food they serve you, I tell you; who wants fancy trappings?”—most probably because he was a member of the Communist Party of India in his youth, and had actually travelled three or four times in his seventy-two-year-old life to Russia; until he contrived to die, diplomatically, one year before the break-up of the Soviet Union.

  The Biman office was crowded; the queues disintegrated in a mixture of high spirits and panic. Jayojit stood facing a poster with an elegant woman sitting by a fountain. This would be Rome or Vienna. The glass door opened whenever someone came in and the pavement outside became visible, and the noise of the traffic on Chowringhee amplified until the door closed again.

  “Right!” he said when he’d got back. “I’ve performed the Himalayan task. The worst is over.”

  It had actually made him mad with rage; there’d been a man (“If one can call him that,” thought Jayojit) behind him in the queue who’d taken a liking to him and kept prodding him in the back to ask in dialect: “Brother, which is the line for refund?” But Jayojit had a way of not showing his emotions. Now he’d brought with him the two tickets with the new tags stuck to the counterfoil. Attached was also a ragged computer printout infested with tiny numbers; the nocturnal, ever-unfamiliar language spoken at airports; 2300 for eleven o’clock; 0000 when midnight was meant.

  “What time does it leave?” asked the Admiral, petulant at his own ignorance.

  “Seven-thirty,” said Jayojit. “And then it reaches Dhaka at eight, I think. I can’t remember if they’re behind us or ahead of us. Anyway, it’s only a half an hour difference. The plane for New York, fingers crossed, leaves at eleven.” He paused after this cheerful recital, and then said, “They didn’t ask me whether I wanted vegetarian or non-vegetarian. Maybe I was expecting too much!”

  “I hear they give ilish sometimes,” said his mother. “At least that is what I hear.” As if she were speaking of a wedding where it was rumoured a certain dish was bound to be served.

  “Ilish in mustard,” said Jayojit with mock distaste. “We can eat it with our fingers!”

  Coming out of the office he’d walked down Chowringhee, one with a stream of people indistinguishable from office-goers. He passed the Lighthouse Cinema and the Grand hotel; no perceptible breeze; not long ago he’d been amidst the traffic on the left and now he was hardly aware of it. He had wanted to buy a few things before he left—to give away as presents to some of those he knew in Claremont. And a few things for his own home.

  “Cottage Industries?” he said. “They have one here, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” said the Admiral, standing in the middle of the room and thinking, as if the city were whirling around him. “Haven’t been there for a long time.”

  “It’s near the Metro Cinema,” said Jayojit’s mother.

  “All those lovely Rajasthani bedcovers,” said Jayojit, “and pichwais and tables—they cost a fortune in America.” He’d laughed rather loudly and said to his father: “You have to hand it to these Rajasthanis, with those traditions going way, way back! In the end, what do we Bengalis have except a few first-class university degrees—and a good command of English?”

  He came back with two mirrorwork cushion covers, a bedcover for himself, and two small brass birds for his neighbour, a cardiac surgeon. “You can buy endlessly from that place, and you have to hold yourself back,” he chuckled. There was a pichwai, in particular, he’d stood before silently, undecided whether to buy—it had reminded him of one that hung in his drawing room when he was married, and this was what, in the end, went against it—with a Krishna at the centre, surrounded by ten or twenty Krishnas and Radhas dallying with each other, their mystic union replicated like raindrops. He’d suddenly become aware that his mind had been caught in the rippling dance of the picture. “No time to waste,” he’d admonished himself.

  He’d also bought a sari for his mother. It was a pretty sari, an off-white tangail with orange embroidery upon it, and a green border. “Joy, it must have cost a lot,” she said. He had lighted upon this tangail not because it had stood out but because it had held back; there had been an understated quality about it that had caught his attention. “Consider it a Puja present,” said Jayojit.

  She was really more interested in the other things, however, turning them over, scrutinizing
them with a firm gaze, trying to make the imaginative leap, to see them through the eyes of the people Jayojit would give them to. From this arose an unarticulated thought within her, concerning what kind of friends he had, and what beauty they found in these Indian handicrafts. “Look at these, ma, they’re lovely,” said Jayojit, unfolding the cushion covers. A taste for regional handicrafts had developed in him since he’d begun to live abroad, and one day he’d begun to look at one table cloth, one cushion cover and another with new eyes, comparing, evaluating. His mother liked the bedspread in her quiet way, and was attempting to picture, in her mind’s eye, what it would look like in her son’s bedroom. “It’ll look very bright over there,” she said at last. Jayojit refolded the cushion covers.

  Bonny had picked up one of the brass birds, and was trying to make it fly.

  “Put it back, Bonny,” said his father. “It’s not a toy.” Then he said to his mother, “This Cottage Industries is big, all right, but the Delhi one’s much bigger, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, what are you saying, Joy,” a shadow passed over her face and she smiled reminiscently, “it’s about three times this one’s size.”

  He remembered he’d overslept on one of those days last year when he’d had an appointment with his lawyer in the morning. It was a late summer’s day; dahlias in bloom, hawthorn, roses on the hedges. His neighbour was in the garden; he’d retired now, but was still a consultant to a few hospitals, and he lectured as well, and gave to charities; once or twice Jayojit had been startled to see a horse in the garden, and the doctor’s six-year-old granddaughter sitting upon it. As he came out on to the doorstep, the cheerful cardiologist said:

  “Hi, Jay. Everything okay?” The suburb they were in was on an elevation, and a road dipped and descended towards the town. (“The second poshest area in Claremont,” Bonny’d surprised Jayojit by saying a month before his mother left with him; strange what children will pick up from adult talk.) From strategic vantage-points the little map of Claremont could be seen below, including Gary the lawyer’s five-storey office: Bernstein, Paretski and Smith; and then the surrounding country unfolding.

  Jayojit had smiled and said:

  “Everything’s fine, Leo.”

  Leo’s life had arrived at some kind of a plateau, a flatness where there was only horizon, at least that’s what it looked like from the outside. Three marriages; numberless children and children’s children—thousands, millions of hearts repaired, and his own red with haemoglobin. Jayojit’s own lot, despite his assurance to Leo, had been like one of the quinine pills he’d had to swallow hastily during this visit to Calcutta. He liked talking to this large, red man; none of the chitter-chatter he heard in the universities; feminism, which he considered an intellectual plague (how many arguments he’d had when he’d voiced his views!); careers and conferences. Late in the afternoon, Jayojit got up to begin arranging things for the departure, including the brass birds he’d bought for his neighbour. He opened the cupboard doors, peering inside, taking out a few of his shirts, closing them again, his mind, like an insomniac’s in the repose of the afternoon, returning to odd bits of conversation, including a ridiculous discussion he’d found himself having with a Jewish colleague, one of those men who called themselves “feminist”, in which he’d argued vociferously that America had taken away the constraints of the institution of marriage but replaced them with nothing else. “We can’t live without constraints,” he’d said. “Even the—no, especially the free-market economy is held together by tiny rules more subtly graded than the caste system!”

  Then, going into the kitchen, he poured himself a glass of water from a bottle that had been left in the pantry. It had a flat taste; it was water in appearance and name only—he opened the fridge and shook out a few cubes from the ice tray into the glass. He drank impatiently, as he did everything, as if he were using up the moment.

  In the half-open fridge, into which he once more put the ice tray, shone the small light; he closed the door; when he was a boy, returning home for the summer, he’d wonder, as if it were a matter far more important than his studies, whether the light stayed on even after the door was closed, and, if so, what the fridge’s sealed but lit world was like in the inside. It was an old fridge—he coughed solitarily and supposed he could buy his parents a new one; maybe on his next visit, when things had settled down a little. The smells from today’s lunch’s leftovers had escaped the fridge, came faintly to him, reminding him of what he’d eaten not more than two hours ago. He’d seen the food, daal with a shadow fallen over it, the patient head of a pabdaa fish, its eye chilled in its socket, placed on the racks in small stainless steel bowls.

  Stepping out, he saw his mother asleep, her face in the pillow, her arm around Bonny. The sight, for no particular reason, made him smile, as if he’d accidentally beheld an odd and funny sight. He himself, surgically halving his growing up, as if it were a living thing which could somehow be distributed democratically, between Ooty and wherever his parents happened to be, hadn’t had much chance to experience closeness.

  Going out into the hall, he noticed something glinting on the table. Bending, he saw it was part of the counterfoil for one of his father’s medicines—this one was for high blood pressure, Enapril; he’d heard the name on his mother’s tongue; she pronounced it “Annapril,” abstractedly and in passing, as if it were some Christian woman’s name. He picked it up and threw it into the dustbin.

  Jayojit’s father was snoring. It wasn’t a comfortable sound; it was an irregular wheezing, as if the Admiral had carried over some complaint to the world of his sleep. Near the verandah, Jayojit became conscious, for the first time, that the wall of heat had gone; it was still hot, no doubt, but the powerful heat which attended the verandah was absent. He saw now that it was actually raining, a spray-like drizzle that whirled in the air before it fell.

  Before the sun went down, Jayojit and Bonny were standing in the verandah when Jayojit saw a kite through the grille. It had perched on a dripping pipe, its brown feathers catching the remaining sunlight; the sun journeyed behind it, towards the cricket fields of the club. “It’s an eagle, an eagle! I saw it another day, too!”

  “That’s a kite,” said Jayojit, glancing down at his son’s head.

  “It’s an eagle,” said Bonny. “I’ve seen them in San Diego.”

  “It’s a kite,” said Jayojit again. “Not the kind of kites people fly. It’s a bird called a kite.”

  “What are you two talking about?” asked Jayojit’s mother, standing in the hall. “I could hear your voices.”

  He’d gone downstairs, and he ran into Dr. Sen.

  “Out for a walk?” he said, ambling towards him.

  The doctor’s complexion looked a shade darker than usual. He ran a hand over his forehead, disturbed, in an uncharacteristic, nervous gesture, a few tracings of hair on his bald head.

  “For a walk . . . heh—no, not at this time of the day,” he said, shaking his head and smiling. “Besides, you know, one can’t walk about in Calcutta these days. There are one or two places,” he waved around himself, as if delineating his set of choices, “not many.” He looked at Jayojit, smiled, beholding him with the eyes of one who, in the midst of change, can only offer a sort of continuity, and said, “No, I had come to see if I had any letters.” And he did have a few letters in his hand.

  “Expecting anything?”

  “Not really,” said Dr. Sen, deprecatingly. As if admitting to an embarrassing, simplistic fact: “Well, a nephew of mine sends me the Smithsonian. It’s a very good magazine—you must know it. The pictures, the details! Even the paper’s very good.” He shook his head, “The last issue had a t-tremendous chapter on ancient Egypt; lovely pictures of the mummies and the pyramids; strange things, pyramids, when you think about them; I hear they used to put the pharaohs” cats inside with the pharaohs—I don’t know how they found out about these things!”; the old Bengali romance for arcane, often useless bits of knowledge transformed his expressi
on briefly. Then, becoming aware of the heat again, the emotion quickly spent, he complained: “But the new issue hasn’t come yet.”

  Then, “Will you be here for much longer?” asked the doctor. In English, “You’re not thinking of settling here permanently ?”

  “Oh no. Bonny’s school begins next month, the university semester’s also about to start again. Summer’s ending over there.”

  “Time flies,” said Dr. Sen, again in English. “We didn’t really get a chance to talk this time—” Suddenly he smiled. “All for the good though—I haven’t had to make a visit! Admiral Chatterjee’s and Mrs. Chatterjee’s health must be all right, touch wood, and you and your son seem to have got by somehow without falling ill.”

  Dr. Sen’s visits were a form of socializing for Jayojit’s parents. Last time, when the doctor had come to check Jayojit’s father’s blood pressure, they’d digressed into a conversation about mortality. It had begun with a discussion about the price of vegetables these days, and fish and prawns—the latter were almost prohibitive—and the price of meat. “Tell me,” Dr. Sen had asked, looking Jayojit up and down, “do you eat a lot of meat?”

  “I guess I grew up as more of a meat-eater than a fisheater,” Jayojit had said. “Though Bengalis claim that it’s eating fish that makes them so brainy,” he laughed, “it doesn’t seem to have done any other part of their bodies much good. Anyway, why not say it?—I have to confess I’ve become quite dependent on junk food. Gone back to a second adolescence.”

  “You know one thing,” the doctor had said, “a lower middle-class Bengali’s meal is one of the best a doctor can recommend. Low cholesterol, with harmless fish protein. It’s cheap and it’s good for you; you know certain kinds of fish fat are good for the heart. Anyway, I was reading somewhere,” he said (these doctors, even in semi-retirement, kept up with the latest medical journals), “that Americans eat m-much less meat than they have ever before and have fewer heart attacks. On the other hand, heh,” he laughed, partly in embarrassment at his own amusement, “Bengalis go there and find a plethora of meat, and eat much more of it than they ever have, and consequently die like flies.”