A New World: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Amit Chaudhuri

  “I’m only an occasional steak-eater myself,” Jayojit said. “I don’t much go for huge chunks of red meat.”

  The Admiral had interjected by grumbling: “What’s the point of living forever? Especially on a pension that can’t keep up with inflation.”

  This had met with great laughter, especially from the doctor, who’d responded to the Admiral’s death-wish with, “That’s a good one, Admiral Chatterjee, but you mustn’t deprive me of a job.”

  That was then—an oasis of nervous banality in the midst of a time in which their lives took on another definition. Now Jayojit said:

  “No, Bonny was all right. No sore throats or stomach infections. A slight allergy, but it was short-lived. I guess it was because we didn’t move much out of the house. But,” he said in a fit of belated candour, “I hope you’ll find time to visit my parents soon. I worry a bit about my father’s health—oh, I know,” he waved one arm and smiled without humour, agitated in his shorts and sandals, “that it’ll be all right as long as he takes care of himself—and God knows I have other things to worry about!” (“True,” murmured the doctor.) “But I think they also need to talk to someone— don’t we all! If you could just look after them while we’re away—look after isn’t the right word, of course, look in on them, rather, I’d be very grateful.” All this delivered in the serious public school accent in which he’d once addressed headmasters and countered competing debaters, and which he hadn’t forsaken, or, rather, which hadn’t forsaken him, and accompanied him through lecture rooms, domestic quarrels.

  “Nischoi, nischoi!” said Dr. Sen. “I was anyway planning to visit them quite soon. And,” he lowered his voice to a confiding whisper, and looked around him once, “the Admiral’s health is all right, don’t worry. He got a bit excited at the Building Society meeting—I can understand why. He should avoid excitement, mental excitement,” he widened his eyes, “that’s all. Let him,” he said casually, “take an Alzolam to soothe him occasionally. No harm done.”

  “He’s always been rather excitable,” said Jayojit, looking back, for a moment, at his father’s life. What he’d meant was that the Admiral had raw nerves; always in battle position.

  “When will you come here again?” asked the doctor. “How soon can you manage your next visit?”

  “Around the same time I—we—came this year, I hope. Early April, in this awful heat.”

  “Oh, very good!” said Dr. Sen, and chuckled. “Just in time for the mango season.”

  “I hope things will have returned to normal by then,” said Jayojit in a public manner, not knowing exactly what he meant—eavesdropping, as it were, on his own words. He patted his stomach. “Like my weight for instance.”

  JAYOJIT’S MOTHER was in the kitchen. Tonight’s leftovers would be eaten for lunch the next day; she would be too tired to cook again tomorrow. And once Jayojit and Bonny had gone in the evening, they—Jayojit’s parents—would have a light meal of the daal and vegetables that Maya had cooked earlier. Time was being rearranged in their heads and their son’s, connecting part of their life to another. Yesterday Jayojit had said, unusually for one who was quite formal about making requests of his parents, “Oh for a fish that has no bones,” and so parshe had been brought; the fish lay on the pantry ledge, waiting to be fried.

  “Better take this shirt down from here,” said Jayojit, getting up from the sofa; the shadow the electric light made of his body spread on the rug. A shirt was hanging from the clothesline. “It seems to be dry now,” he said, touching it. He unclipped and took it down, giving it a look of protective recognition. “Or else I’ll forget it and leave it behind,” he said in explanation. He added: “I’ll iron it myself, later.” This little monologue, which he might have been directing to himself, was actually addressed to his father, sitting on a sofa before the television.

  He folded the shirt, and, on the way to his room, picked up a worn book from one of the shelves; he weighed it as if it were an artefact. He laughed incredulously.

  “What’s this?” he said. “Jackie! Is this any good?” he asked, admiring Jacqueline Onassis’s face a second time.

  The Admiral looked up.

  “Oh, your mother borrowed that,” he said, “ages ago from the club.” There was a hint of accusation in his voice. “Must return it. We’ll have to pay the fine.” Just as the first touch of calm came to her from the early devotionals trickling in a small whine through the static on the transistor, these books on politicians’ wives, some, like Margaret Trudeau, quite remote from her, once used to be part of the dream-life of her spare hours, while she’d be undaunted by four hundred pages of close English print.

  Returning from the room, Jayojit said:

  “Well, we didn’t get to go to the club this time.”

  “No,” said the Admiral. He seemed quieter than usual; he felt heavy and sluggish—as if in anticipation of the journey he would have to make in a couple of days, to the post office, to see why his pension cheque hadn’t arrived at the beginning of the month.

  “Maybe next time,” said Jayojit, flitting from shelf to shelf, checking for items he might have missed, picking up one of Bonny’s prehistoric monsters: a pterodactyl.

  He didn’t like the club. He wasn’t a member himself; and not being one, had to accompany his parents as a guest, a sort of overgrown child, allowed to sit with them but not to sign the bills or pay for the snacks and the drinks. Reluctant waiters would come to take their orders, and, intermittently, people would drift through elegant arches towards their table to speak to his parents, spotting them under fans that hung from long rods, as they were passing. When they found out that he was a “Non Resident Indian,” some would squint with curiosity, as once people might have regarded holy men or charlatans. Two years ago, he’d been bent over a sweet lime soda next to his father when he’d been asked the tiresome question (he supposed it was unavoidable) by a man holding a glass of Club Cola in his hand: “But, Mr. Chatterjee, do you know Amartya Sen?” He’d stopped bothering telling people he was “Dr. Chatterjee”; Sen, supposedly introduced as a conversation-opener was, for him, a conversation-stopper. Really, he and Sen had nothing in common (given the fact that they were both Bengali, and economists), except that, now, they had had the experience of a failed marriage as well. Sen, with chastening resilience, had married again, while Jayojit was still trying to grope for a balance in the second phase of his life, and the idea of marriage seemed to him to involve too much spiritual effort. “No,” he’d answered politely, perhaps a little abruptly, “I met him at a conference twice—he may or may not remember me.”

  Children were allowed to sit in the outer lobby of the club (they weren’t allowed further inside) on a sofa, and here they played amongst themselves, not far away from portraits of the club’s presidents, climbing on to the weighing scales. There was a children’s room somewhere in the club, but Jayojit would never let Bonny sit there, while they ate and sipped fizzy drinks; this was another reason he hadn’t been to the club this time.

  Before Bonny was born, when he and Amala had gone there together with his parents, Amala would spend time observing the women; for the saris they wore were old-fashioned, the blouses clumsily made. “Bengali women let go so easily,” she’d say. “They become so otherworldly.” A woman would pass by, and Amala would glance at her hairstyle, and a smile would come to her eyes.

  The club had recruited younger members since then. It had even opened a rather quaint barber-shop which no person in his right senses patronized. And, actually, Amala knew quite a few people amongst its members, certainly more than he did; “Oh hi!” they’d say, “How’s mesho?” enquiring after her father.

  The kitchen had been silent for the last five minutes; no more of the effervescence of the kodai; a smell of mustard-oil hung in the air.

  “Bonny!” called Jayojit, craning his neck.

  There was the customary silence before this cry registered itself.

  “Yes, baba!”

 
“Come here!”

  The boy ran out into the hall, still holding a pencil in one hand, suggesting he’d been interrupted in mid-performance.

  “Want to go down and have a game of ping-pong?” Jayojit asked.

  He’d bought a couple of racquets from a shop on Rash Behari Avenue.

  “I don’t know, baba.” He’d put one end of the pencil in his mouth.

  Jayojit shrugged his large shoulders dramatically:

  “Well, if you don’t want to . . .”

  The boy’s face fell.

  “Oh, go on,” said the Admiral.

  But, downstairs, they found that one half of the table-tennis table had disappeared; the other half, with its pale green borders, remained, forlorn, truncated, a useless relic by itself.

  “Oh no!” cried Bonny. “Where’s it gone?”

  Jayojit looked around him, unable to conjure up the other half of the table. The table had been removed during the meeting, but he was pretty sure it had been returned to its place later. So absorbed had father and son been with their problem that they hadn’t noticed the couple at the other end of the hall, who were walking a child. They had come closer now, an elderly couple in their sixties, led by a toddler of about two.

  Following the child, the grandfather, a slight bespectacled clerical man wearing a brown shirt, his face averted but conscious of Jayojit’s questioning gaze, walked leaning forward, but confident that his grandson could manage on his own, and that even if he fell, providence would keep him from serious hurt. Jayojit kept a half-smile of acknowledgement on his face, in case the man turned to look at him. “Slowly, dadu,” said the man to the grandson. Jayojit didn’t remember seeing them before.

  Behind her husband, the grandmother walked more irregularly, a mass of confusions, now turning to look behind her, slipping her foot more firmly into her sandal, resuming her walk.

  In the other room, his parents had gone to bed. He turned on the air-conditioner; it made a sound, like a throat-clearing, as machines sometimes do. Bonny was lying on his back, interlocking the fingers of both hands together, and, with a look of great concentration, prising them slowly apart.

  “Better turn off the light,” said Jayojit, vacillating by the bedside. “There’s lots to do tomorrow.”

  When he switched off the light, for a moment he could see nothing—the room disappeared. It never became so dark in the room in Claremont; some light, inquisitive and worldly, always entered through the curtains. The steady sound of the air-conditioner held him in his place; he began to make his way towards the bed, trying to imagine, from his memory, its location.

  JAYOJIT OVERSLEPT for some reason. Bonny strode into the room and admonished him in a dream: “Oh, get up, baba, you’re lazy.” He couldn’t remember having had a dream— his sleep had been a blank; it had taken him to no other worlds. Rising swiftly, he turned off the air-conditioner; it went off, with a sigh, like an afterthought. Inside the bathroom, he encountered a heat that had accumulated overnight and which the air-conditioning hadn’t penetrated. Car horns could be heard until he turned on the tap; even then, over the water, a crow’s cry reached his ears. Wiping his face with the towel, he raised his face and inhaled the dampness in the bathroom.

  He emerged after brushing his teeth, and said to his mother in his lecturer’s vernacular:

  “And what’s been happening in the interregnum?”

  She didn’t reply.

  When Jayojit had just begun to read the headlines, Bonny said:

  “Baba, tooth’s shaking.”

  It was the second time that this had occurred; as soon as he’d said the words, he opened his mouth, flashing his milk teeth, revealing the cavity that led to the source of his voice; with his eyebrows knitted, and a look slightly inebriated, he nudged the tooth with his tongue. It was a lower canine.

  “I see it. Let it alone,” said Jayojit, seeing the sensation of the loose tooth could become a narcotic. “You’re becoming an old man,” he added, and sipped his coffee.

  “Tamma, look,” Bonny said to his grandmother; she’d been hovering over a plant in the verandah, standing between it and the sunlight.

  “O-o-oh,” she sighed dramatically, straightening and looking down at him. Yet her inside was pulled by a pain that was quite unlike that of the tooth, that had begun more than two years ago and would be with her now.

  “You want to leave the tooth for tamma?” called Jayojit from behind the paper.

  “Tamma,” asked Bonny, “are all dadu’s teeth real?”

  “All are not real,” said his grandmother, watering the hushed flat-leafed plant, “but some of them are real.”

  “Like, he doesn’t put them in a glass?”

  “No, shona,” said his grandmother.

  Maya came at about half-past ten and covered the bed in Jayojit’s room with a Gujarati bedspread.

  “Maya,” Jayojit said, turning to her, “I’m leaving this evening. I’ve left your bakshish with ma.”

  “When will you come back again?” she asked, with such innocence, as if he were going on a pleasure trip and she were as ignorant of this family’s recent history as they were of hers.

  “Ei—next year,” he said, looking back into the suitcase. He didn’t want a conversation now; he’d withdrawn into his private sphere where he meditated on a future that he didn’t expect, or hadn’t wanted, to confront. Turning his face towards her again, he instructed her, “Work properly when we’re away, and look after ma.”

  His mother had complained to him again that every few days Maya pleaded absence from work, either because of some obscure excuse to do with the weather or the children’s health, or because one of the innumerable local gods that presided over the poor—kitchen god, fertility god—had a Puja imminent and must be appeased. Given that his mother was exaggerating, he had noticed, in a dream-like way, Maya’s impenetrable absences, and sensed that the laws governing her life were other than those that pertained to what he called “ordinary” life.

  Unmoved, Maya declared:

  “Chhoto babu will be taller when he comes next time. He won’t remember me.”

  And I’ll have a larger paunch, and you may not be in this job any more, thought Jayojit.

  For lunch, they ate the parshe they’d had the previous night. Jayojit’s mother had had Maya buy a packet of sandesh from a sweet shop. “I know you like these,” she said. “Take them with you. You or Bonny might want to eat one at the airport,” she added. “For God’s sake,” said the Admiral in English, “don’t bother him with trivial things at this moment!”

  “No, ma’s quite right,” said Jayojit. “I do like sandesh. But there are customs officials at JFK who always keep an eye open for foreign-looking food, even fruit—you know, mangoes, custard-apples.”

  “But these are harmless, Joy,” said his mother. “They’re unadulterated and good for you. Doctors prescribe them to their patients.”

  “True,” said the Admiral, speaking from somewhere else.

  “What will I do with these then?” she asked.

  “Why—you and baba eat them! Have them with tea!” he said. “I’ll eat one now,” he said, and bit into a sandesh himself.

  The Admiral abnegated the world and stole an hour-long nap, Jayojit’s frequent conversations with his mother failing to wake him. By three o’clock, Bonny was dressed, and his pale feet, which had often padded about naked inside the flat, were hidden away inside socks and sneakers.

  “I’m not gonna sleep tonight on the plane,” he warned his father. “I’ll watch the movie.”

  “Of course you will,” said Jayojit; he was still in his shorts and sandals, as if he, at the last moment, had decided to stay back, or he were travelling to Barbados, and all he needed was a camera. “Have you picked up your dinosaurs?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Your cars?” What about your books?”

  “I dumped them in the suitcase,” he said. “But I want to take one with me, baba.”

  “Okay. I�
��ll put it in my bag,” said Jayojit. “All right?”

  There was a groan from the bedroom; the Admiral had got up and realized what time it was. He slipped his large feet into his sandals and stumbled to the bathroom to wash his face. Meanwhile, Jayojit let the cover of the suitcase flop shut; and once more stood face to face with the tartan design against the blue background. He zipped it shut.

  He whistled in the bath—he had obdurate dry hair, which didn’t require frequent washing, hair peppered with a grey that seemed to be increasing almost daily. This metallic grey had come over him imperceptibly, and much fascinated his son, and pained his mother. Coming out of the bathroom, he said, buttoning his shirt, “Fine: we’re ready to leave. Where’s Bonny?” Then, seeing the ragged heap of his old clothes—shirt, underwear, vest—he said “Damn!’ and had to bend down to open the suitcase again. Pressing them into a small bundle, he pushed them to one side, next to a much-perused copy of his book, Ethical Parameters in Development. The clothes passed like a cloud over the title. His laptop rested against his shoulder bag.

  The Admiral had changed into another of his white shirts; hair carefully combed, he lumbered into the sitting room; he sat there as if he were a guest; coughed a couple of times, and glanced at his grandson in the verandah. Jayojit’s mother had worn a starched tangail, and fastened her hair with a large clip. Jayojit dragged out the suitcase to the front door; it seemed to possess suddenly, after months of invisibility, a stubbornness and independence. “Oof! It feels heavier than when we came here,” said Jayojit. To Bonny, he called, “We’re leaving!” Bonny took his eyes away from the bit of the lane he was watching and walked towards them.

  Once they were downstairs, they were noted, without much interest, by a few schoolchildren returning home, in blue and white uniform, and probably commented upon.