A New World: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Amit Chaudhuri

  “Right,” said Jayojit, “I’m off to look for a taxi—only hope I can find one that isn’t falling apart!” He strode towards the lane, followed purposefully by Bonny; his parents waited on the steps, the Admiral squinting through his bifocals.

  They returned a few minutes later in a taxi; “There’s always one, thank God,” Jayojit said, getting out. A dog had begun to bark upstairs; not Mrs. Gupta’s pomeranian, but the Alsatian who lived on the first floor. The driver, a clean-shaven man in his early thirties, had looked after his vehicle well; the upholstery inside was clean, reflecting the sunlight, and the taxi’s black and yellow shone brightly; he lifted the suitcase with a sullen respect. There was a companion sitting in the front—a boy in his teens, who watched with sleepy interest as the driver hauled the suitcase to the rear. The back of the Ambassador seemed to expand to accommodate the dour-looking grandfather, the grandmother, Jayojit, who, for some reason, was talking constantly, and Bonny, who stood between his father’s legs, and when tired of doing so, sat down upon one of them.

  As they turned into the main road and the building vanished from sight, the Admiral rolled down his window a little to allow a breeze that had reached the main road to run through his hair. He leaned back slightly.

  “All right, baba?” asked Jayojit.

  His father nodded. But they were caught in a traffic jam in front of Modern High School, the massed cars still as a catacomb. Bonny turned to his father and whispered:

  “Baba, who’s that?”

  A small cut-out of Hanuman, pasted to the bottom of the windshield, had caught his eye. Hanuman, above the two motionless wipers, was in mid-flight, holding a mountain above him: the Gandhamadan parbat.

  “That’s Hanuman, the monkey god,” said Jayojit, balancing the laptop on one knee.

  “You mean, like, he’s the god of the monkeys?”

  “Well, yes, but let’s say that he’s a god who also happens to be a monkey,” said Jayojit.

  “He must be real strong,” said Bonny, curling his lip and smiling knowingly.

  A little later, as the traffic broke up and they turned into Park Circus, he asked his grandfather:

  “Dadu, do you feel hot in that beard?”

  The old man smiled and shook his head.

  “I’m used to it,” he said. “Like a dog is used to its coat.”

  Then Bonny was largely silent, staring at the fleeting two-storeyed houses in by-lanes, the shops in Park Circus, the occasional outbreaks of shanty settlements, the thatched huts along the bypass; he was unmoved by the smell when they passed the rubbish dump, though his grandmother quickly pressed a handkerchief to her face.

  By the time they reached the airport, the Admiral had been asleep for about twenty minutes; he woke up startled and bleary-eyed. Bonny was gone as soon as the taxi stopped, and returned brandishing a trolley, his chin above the handlebars.

  “Okay, I’ll take hold of the trolley, Bonny,” said Jayojit, after paying the driver. He checked to see if they’d left anything inside. “No, that’s fine,” he reassured no one in particular. Then, to Bonny, “You can hold it at one end.” So, partitioning the responsibility of the trolley between themselves, they pushed their way inside.

  Families were drifting around the hall, come to see off somebody. When the two, driving the wayward trolley, had finally reached the Bangladesh Biman counter at the extreme end of the check-in area, it was clear that there weren’t many passengers, probably because of the time of the year. Jayojit joined a disjointed queue of three people; and there was another queue of the same number. Nothing else; all the other check-in desks unattended and closed. Visitors weren’t allowed here; and, bereft of ordinary human society, the Biman passengers, who stood waiting with suitcases more imposing than themselves, had only their smiles and their passports (of two or three different colours, in their hands) to vouch for who they were. There was also something shabby about the walls and the small self-conscious trickle of international traffic, more like a leakage than a departure; yet almost each one of these people had lives they were going back to from the country they were visiting. The woman standing in front—an expatriate from the composition of her appearance; she was wearing blue jeans and vermilion in the parting of her hair, and a bindi on her forehead—turned her head and smiled at Jayojit. “Going to Heathrow?” she asked, in a warm mixture of a Bengali and a London accent. “No; New York,” he said. “And you?” “Oh I’m going to London,” she said, and laughed; she had slight buck teeth and striking long hair. The vermilion led Jayojit to briefly speculate about her husband, their children (if they had any), and their cold house and garden in the suburbs. “A much shorter journey than mine, then,” he said. She shrugged politely, not knowing with what words to respond to his jovial but superior manner. After a while, he said “Wait here” to Bonny, a picture of introspective ambivalence on the baggage trolley, and went off to pay the airport tax.

  When he came back, he found Bonny still sitting on the trolley in a trance next to the suitcase. Jayojit looked around swiftly to see if there was anyone he recognized; there was always the risk, on Bangladesh Biman, of meeting someone you might have known casually in your past, of performing the usual surprised greetings, of slipping into small talk in a piecemeal hodge-podge of Bengali and English about some wedding you were to have attended or some ailment you’d recently had treated and explaining, in front of the check-in desk, your presence here at this moment. But he needn’t worry, there was no one. He noticed a European woman, wearing a salwaar kameez, distinguishable from the others by her paleness, her brown hair, and her awkward, shy largeness.

  Later, with only the laptop and shoulder bag on the trolley, Jayojit headed back with Bonny towards his parents; this time he let Bonny steer it. The hall looked large and outspread, as if it were being viewed through a lens; you couldn’t see all of it at once. The airport itself, once both an international and domestic terminus, was undergoing some sort of subtle transformation since the new domestic airport had come into existence. The Admiral and his wife were sitting on the plastic chairs on the margins. They were eclipsed by a large family to their right—a widow wearing spectacles and a white sari, her middle-aged son and daughter-in-law, two young cousins, one of them holding a mineral water bottle, and a young couple and their child who, defined by some tension, some pull, that knit them more closely to each other than to the rest, were like an island gradually breaking away; it was clear that the rest had gathered to see them off. Between them they shared laughter and what seemed to the Admiral’s ears like banal, nouveau-riche chatter; the kind of patois, increasingly heard, that combines the indecipherable new street-talk with the immemorial, histrionic platitudes of tradition.

  “Well, that was much less difficult than I expected,” said Jayojit as he sat down next to his father.

  “Everything done?” said the Admiral, shifting his focus.

  “I hope so, sincerely,” laughed Jayojit, as he put the shoulder bag before him. “The suitcase has gone—into the hands of God.” His father nodded, cross but almost sympathetic. “There’s news though—bad or good, I don’t know— there’s a half-an-hour delay. Apparently Biman has only one plane for its Dhaka-Calcutta flight, and that has a ‘technical fault’ which can, however, be fixed.”

  “ ‘Technical fault!’” murmured the Admiral.

  Bonny said: “Baba, I’m going there”—he pointed to the centre of the hall. He ran towards the aquarium that had been kept there, pressed his nose against the glass while full-fed fish slid with oily stealth past his nose.

  “Baba, ma, we can have a cup of coffee, you know,” said Jayojit; he’d noticed a boy in the distance, going around with a kettle in one hand.

  “Coffee’s too sweet here,” said his father, and shook his head.

  But Jayojit’s mother nodded: “Coffee would be nice,” she said.

  So Jayojit called the boy with the kettle, and he and his mother had coffee in plastic glasses, with a white froth swimming
on the top, and it was much too sweet.

  “I think I’ll go and see if there’s anything in the bookshop, ” he said, getting up. “Ma, see that he doesn’t wander too far, will you?”

  It was brutal, leaving them at this moment, but he felt he must do something, go somewhere; on his way to the bookshop, he became aware, for the first time, of the radiance of the electric lights above washing them all, and that it had become dark outside. What had been the domestic terminus lay partially deserted except for truant, bored children who’d trespassed there with nothing to do, and one or two bored adults as well; he passed an art gallery displaying a local artist’s attempts at abstract expressionism, and a sort of crèche for mothers and children behind a ragged curtain. Entering the bookshop, he bent over the magazines, the faces of actresses, ministers, the dead who’d left the world surprised by an avalanche or stopped by a bullet, their faces printed with the last glow of life bright as the photographer’s flash during the photo taken later at leisure. “Tedious stuff,” he thought, picking one up dispassionately, “all these indigenous Newsweeks.” A boy of about ten or eleven, his mouth open, was pushing a revolving bookrack in a leisurely way with his finger; Jayojit turned and stood next to him, attempting to read the titles of the turning books. “Why do airports always have books by Raymond A. Moody Jr?”

  At last, he decided to buy some chocolates, and a copy of the Asian Age. At the counter, he studied the objects under the glass and said:

  “Two packets Nutties.”

  Someone was watching him. It was a woman in a wheelchair, a widow in a white sari; someone had left her by the entrance to the bookshop. She too was going to make a journey; Jayojit’s return of her gaze had no effect on her. She continued to stare at him, without hostility or friendliness.

  “Twenty-four rupees.”

  As Jayojit was paying for the Nutties, Bonny rushed into the shop:

  “Baba,” he cried loudly. “Dadu says do you want to get left behind?”

  “Be with you in a second,” promised Jayojit.

  The widow in the wheelchair smiled at Jayojit, in a way to suggest that they’d now been introduced.

  The Admiral and Jayojit’s mother had risen from their seats by the time Bonny and Jayojit had got back, and were looking blindly around them.

  “Joy,” said his father, “they’ve announced your flight twice already.”

  “Let them,” said Jayojit, “they won’t leave without us.”

  Through his bifocals, the Admiral was straining to make out the last bit of the departure area—which it wasn’t possible to do. Piped music—a Tagore song on a Hawaiian guitar; he might know the words.

  They came to the barrier where visitors must stop. Jayojit turned quickly and touched his parents’ feet; then he rose and smoothed his shirt. A group of people at the barrier— two men, a woman in a cheap, shiny sari, the security man in khaki, holding a rifle—watched as he bent and rose again. “Bloody idiots,” he thought. “Nothing to do.” Another part of his mind was untouched by their presence. They watched as Jayojit’s mother bent forward to hug Bonny, and eavesdropped on every word as she said to him:

  “Bye bye, shona. Bhalo theko. You will write to tamma, no?”

  “Okay,” he said, nodding dolefully. He lifted his face to be kissed, reluctantly.

  The bystanders smiled and watched as the grandfather now stooped to kiss the boy.

  “Bye bye, dadu,” he said, and smiled a rare smile. “Take care.”

  Bonny forbore the invasion of the Admiral’s warm beard into his face. Most of the onlookers had turned away; only one person continued to listen as Jayojit said:

  “Baba, ma. I’ll phone you once I’m there. Some time tomorrow.”

  His father nodded.

  In Dhaka, in the waiting lounge on the first floor, Jayojit dozed for half an hour; Bonny, meanwhile, watched MTV. Bonny and Jayojit occupied three seats; computer and shoulder bag, which Jayojit had laid on the seat in the middle, strategically separated father from son. This small separation was deliberate; it emphasized Jayojit’s basic sense of security about his son, that he could afford to let Bonny and himself exist in partial independence from each other, that he could also fall asleep a foot and a half away from Bonny without worrying in his sleep. But Jayojit had also experienced a slight feeling of dislocation when he’d realized that, although they’d left Calcutta at half-past seven, it was still seven-thirty in Bangladesh. He’d put down laptop and bag with the knowledge that he’d been given this extra half hour which he must do something with. “He moves, and he moves not,” he remembered moodily, reciting to himself, with grim satisfaction, the lines describing the Spirit in the Upanishads. “He is near, and yet he is far.” He’d read the Upanishads in English when he was twenty-two, for, despite being a Brahmin, at least in name, he knew no Sanskrit.

  Jayojit felt an unnatural hunger for the potato wafers they sold in the transit area. When he’d got up, he left Bonny in his seat and made a casual exploration of the lounge. Among the passengers was the Bengali lady he’d had a few words with, in a seat a couple of rows behind his. He sent her a smile of cordial, if non-committal, recognition, so important in these situations. A bespectacled couple were sitting in a corner, the man in a pin-striped shirt, silent. Further off, a long-haired woman wearing leggings was sitting by herself, her face inside a book. Walking to the glass windows on the left, he looked out, hoping to make out the colours of the landscape. But it was too dark. The glass was full of reflections—of seat covers, of women in shiny salwaar kameez outfits or in burkha, of children sitting on their mother’s or father’s laps.

  Returning, he found that the European woman—the one in the salwar kameez in Calcutta—was sitting opposite Bonny and talking to him.

  “And you’re going back to school?” she said. Looking up at Jayojit, she smiled and said:

  “Hi! I’m having a chat with your son here. I remember you two from Calcutta!” The way “Calcutta,” on her lips, rhymed with “rudder” revealed to Jayojit that she was American.

  Sitting down, Jayojit said pointedly:

  “Quite right; I remember you too. Actually, I couldn’t help noticing you in your—ethnic garb.”

  The woman laughed loudly and without reserve.

  “They’re very comfortable, aren’t they? By the way,” she said, smiling at him and then at Bonny, “I hope you don’t mind me sitting here.”

  “Not at all!” said Jayojit. He adjusted his glasses casually. “Bonny and I were getting bored, weren’t we? And old friends are welcome.”

  “Oh, thank you!” she said. “Where are you flying to, Mr.—?”

  “Chatterjee,” said Jayojit. “Jayojit Chatterjee. We’re going to New York, where we’ll be forced to change planes.”

  “Oh, I’m going to New York myself!” she said. Then she said mournfully to Bonny, tilting her head in mock apology: “But I’m getting off there.” As if the next question led logically from this statement, she asked: “I suppose you’re Bengali, Mr. Chatterjee?”

  “Well—” said Jayojit, laughing, “well, I guess you could say—well, yes—yes, I suppose I am!”

  This confused answer seemed to have both puzzled and charmed Jayojit’s companion; she laughed and said, after a moment:

  “I’m North American, as you can probably tell. Boston born and raised. I was doing Salvation Army work in Calcutta . . . for around three months. I loved it there. There’s so much going for it, in spite of—you know”—she shrugged—“everything.”

  People watched them as they walked past. Jayojit had never thought he’d like a Salvation Army worker if he ever met one; but now that he’d at last encountered one in the flesh, he found her neither pious nor complacent; and she was slightly plump, in innocent contrast to the poor she worked for.

  “By the way, my name’s Mary,” she said. “I know,” she laughed, “it’s a really predictable name for someone who works in the Salvation Army, right?”

  “Not at all
. . . I mean, I’m sure your parents didn’t know you’d join the Salvation Army when they christened you.”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  “What did you really think of Calcutta?” Jayojit asked. “Was it too much for you?”

  “I liked it!” she smiled, as if surprised herself. She had light brown eyes and the bridge of her nose had reddened with the sun. “It’s certainly like no other place I’ve been to! Next time I come I’m going to try and learn the language.”

  Bonny was listening to this exchange with a half-smile.

  “When’s next time?” said Jayojit, as if there were a chance he might run into her in Calcutta—a slender hope, because he would not be ministering to the poor on his next visit. He felt not the slightest attraction towards her, and was reassured to sense that she probably felt none towards him.

  “In a few months,” she said. “Maybe in the summer.”

  “Me too,” said Jayojit, surprised. He looked at Bonny. “My son and I— Well, who knows?”

  “Nothing wrong with these seats,” decided Jayojit, settling into his after pushing with brute force their hand-luggage and the laptop into the locker. Wearing his headphones, Bonny said: “I’m a doctor!”

  The ornate Bengali announcements startled Jayojit mildly; and Bonny remained tense and excited all through the take-off. Once they were in the air, he shouted to his father:

  “Are we flying, baba?” He looked concerned.

  “That’s right.”

  A woman came down the aisle with a tray in her hand; the aircraft was still tilted upward, and she made a cautious descent down the slope. Arms rose from the seats towards the glasses of orange juice. “Thank you,” said Bonny to the smiling woman when he’d got his; they drank it eagerly—it was sour and bitter.

  Getting up to go to the toilet, Jayojit looked round to see if there were any Indian Bengalis on the plane. There they were—so easy to identify, myopic, the men slight and in nondescript Western clothes, the women betrayed by the telltale trace of vermilion in their hair. Surrounded by the Bangladeshis, with their large families talking loudly, many of the children already fast asleep, the women heavily bangled, trinkets shining on their ears and noses, young men in smartly tailored suits, old men with goatees.