“Had a shower, Bonny?” he said.
“Uh-huh,” said the boy. “Baba, I don’t have any clothes,” he added, the towel covering his head like a hood.
“All right,” said Jayojit, with the air of one who is familiar with and used to such situations, “we’ll take your clothes out right now,” and he bent down on his knees to unlock the suitcase, and retrieved a new t-shirt from an apparently prodigious store of folded t-shirts, and a pair of shorts, and laid them carefully on the bed. The boy stared interestedly at his clothes.
In the kitchen, Jayojit’s mother was setting pieces of rui fish afloat in burning oil.
His mother was not the best possible cook, and these days she had a helper who did some of the cooking in the morning; this helper was not a very good cook either. But Jayojit was not too fussy about food and nor was the Admiral; for the latter, especially, home food was just a routine, and had to be healthy and cooked in a small amount of oil; excesses in connection with food were to be indulged in at the club Christmas or New Year’s Eve parties, where strangely shaped gâteaux were served, and people queued up for their portion of barbecued steak and sautéed vegetables.
Home food was safe and insipid, and had a tranquillity about it; today there was a watery lentil daal in a chinaware bowl, fried rui, a dalna which was a combination of sweet gourd and cabbage leaves among other things, and a preparation of pabdaa fish in mustard. It was an honest, even joyful, effort by his mother, though it had not quite worked; but it was not wholly tasteless either.
“The pabdaa is very fresh,” said Jayojit appreciatively. He was eating with his fingers.
His father, bent and serious, now and then dabbing his white beard with a napkin, was eating silently. He was old-fashioned; he rarely praised his wife’s cooking, but kept his ears pricked, like a child’s, for others’ praises. More and more his wife had become to him like a mother and a nurse, giving him his medicine with a glass of water, serving his food, to which he submitted with a helpless, sour-faced, child-like decorum, and overlooking, with good humour, his constant need to exercise his inconsequential tyrannical hold over this household, in which usually only he and his wife lived, with part-time servants coming and going each day. He ate with a fork and a spoon as he always did, laboriously, as if haunted by the expectation or memory of some pain—perhaps the mild stroke he had had seven years ago, which any day might recur. Above them, the fan with its three blades turned swiftly, generously, but invisibly, distributing air. Bonny sat next to his grandfather, perky after the bath; he had had nothing but daal and rice and a piece of the fried rui.
“The daal’s good,” he said, holding up his spoon.
“Have the other fish, shona,” said his grandmother. “Try the vegetables.”
“Let him have the daal, ma,” said Jayojit. “Just thank your stars he’s eating something!”
The boy stopped eating, the food still in his mouth, and looked around guiltily, but also pleased at this exchange about him, and at this description of himself as someone difficult and intractable; he was interested in his father’s portrait of himself.
Now the Admiral, having deftly divested the fish of its flesh with his fork and spoon, leaving only the bones, picked up the pabdaa head with his spoon, intending to chew it; the sound of his breathing surrounded him.
“Is dadu going to eat the head of that fish, baba?” asked the boy in concern.
“Dadu likes fish-head,” said Jayojit loudly, as if everything he said were important.
“Can I have a look at it?”
“Certainly,” said his grandfather. “Have a good look at it.”
So the boy stood up and peered at his grandfather’s plate, at the long pabdaa bone, and the fish-head with its eyes lying on the spoon.
“All right?” said the grandfather.
The boy nodded seriously and sat down again, and began to finish what was left of his daal and rice.
In the afternoon, when the meal was over, Jayojit’s father sat on a chair for some time; he was not supposed to lie down immediately after eating. His wife brought him pills which he swallowed noisily with a glass of water.
Now, in the afternoon heat before siesta, they seemed to feel the incompleteness of their family, and that it would not be now complete. Someone was missing. Both mother and father were too hurt to speak of it. In a strange way, they felt abandoned.
“Won’t you rest?” asked the Admiral after a while. “I think I’ll go and lie down,” he said.
“You do that, baba,” said Jayojit, getting up himself. Vikram was playing with two toy dinosaurs in the corridor; his father passed him on the way to the room.
Inside the room, Jayojit began to unpack the suitcase. He did not want to sleep; if he slept now, he would be asleep till midnight. So he began to hang up his shirts and trousers in the cupboard, and put handkerchiefs, vests, and underwear in the drawers; Bonny’s things went into the drawers as well. He was not as familiar with the house as he should be; his parents had moved here eight years ago, and he had visited only three times since then. His own feelings towards the flat were thus partially ones of familiarity and trust, and partially a complex of other feelings—of amusement and amazement at the mass-produced design, of both pity and avuncular affection for its bathrooms, tiles, furniture, verandah, and a basic admiration for, and acceptance of, its reliability. He realized that neither his mother nor father could see any of these things, and thus he too could not see them separately from the flat they had made their own.
One by one, he hung his shirts from the hanger, where they took on, inside the cupboard, a fleeting resemblance to his proportions. A sense of potential being, simple but true, now inhabited the cupboard. Some of the shelves were covered with newspaper; peering at them while arranging the clothes, Jayojit furrowed his eyebrows and snorted humorously. Something about Marxism and liberalization: the paper couldn’t be very old. The hard-core Marxists and trade unions wanted to know how the Chief Minister would reconcile liberalization with Marxist beliefs; Basu had offered China as an example. Then the paper was covered with clothes.
Next, he unzipped the shoulder bag and retrieved his shaving things and his and Vikram’s toilet accessories, Aquafresh toothpaste, Head and Shoulders shampoo, Body-line deodorant, a cylinder of Old Spice shaving foam, a Backwood Insect Cutter which he’d bought in case of mosquitoes; these things gleamed the most and looked the most foreign and desirable; even the toothbrushes were different and, curving oddly, seemed to belong to the future and some fragile, opulent culture. Jayojit kept padding off, barefoot, with an intent air, to the bathroom, and placing them on the small ledge of glass above the basin.
By half-past three, it was not so much the boy but the dinosaurs that had become exhausted; two small blue and pink creatures that had once ruled the world, they lay now on their sides upon the floor, their tails still curving, their heads bent and mouths open to roar, but strangely frozen and dumb. They were so small they could hardly be seen. Vikram sat upon an armchair, concentrating upon a storybook, turning the pages and looking at the pictures.
Later, the doorbell rang, and Jayojit’s mother could be heard opening the door and saying, “So late?” A maidservant came in; she was trying hard to hide her guilty look, and went quickly to the kitchen to wash the dishes.
“Where do you get them from?” asked Jayojit. She really looked as if she’d come straight from the village.
“They sit downstairs and work in the flats in the building,” said Jayojit’s mother. “If you dismiss one it’s difficult to get another, because they’re all friends.”
“Oh, so it’s a trade union!” said Jayojit cheerfully.
“Trade union, nonsense!” said Jayojit’s mother. “They’re just a bunch of shirkers who pretend to be friendly with each other.”
By evening Bonny had begun to feel sleepy. At half-past seven he fell asleep on the sofa without, to his grandmother’s disappointment, having had dinner.
“It’s all
right, ma,” said Jayojit, who had changed into a pink sleeping suit that looked ridiculous on his large frame; he went about barefoot in the kitchen getting himself a bottle of water for the night. Bonny was still in his shorts, but his father did not wake him; when he picked him up in his arms to put him into bed the boy mumbled something, and he said, “All right, baba, all right, Bonny.”
The boy knitted his eyebrows, turned his mouth, and sniffed, as if he could smell something. There was probably nothing more peaceful for him than these moments of subconscious awareness, suspended in his father’s arms, between two places of rest. Jayojit laid him on the bed. It was a two-bedroom flat, and theirs was the smaller room, but it had an air-conditioner in it: a luxury.
Ever since evening, the sound of television music and the voices of television characters had begun to come from the other flats, like a form of public dreaming. But when Jayojit turned on the air-conditioner, nothing could be heard but its hum.
THE ADMIRAL HAD A CAR, an old Fiat, but did not use it often. And he did not have a driver. Costs were too high these days; the cost of petrol, drivers’ salaries, things in general. The last driver was a man called Alam, a tired-looking man who’d slept his way through most of his employment.
The Admiral was always aggressively telling his wife to save, though she still found it difficult to adjust to the different rhythms of expenditure required after retirement. For a while he had been engaged as a consultant in a Marwari company, and then given it up; he had grown fed up going to the office daily for what he thought a paltry salary, and having to put up with what he discovered, after the navy, was a rather peculiar style of functioning. The next year he’d got rid of the driver and never employed one since; anyway, they all spoilt the car with their tinkering. When he’d been Admiral, stationed first in Cochin (in the Southern Naval Command; he’d retired as Rear-Admiral, in spite of being known to everyone as, in short, “Admiral”) and then in Delhi, it had been a dream-world; everything had been done for them; they’d had a huge bungalow wherever they went, a car, coloured the navy’s deep blue (to denote the sea) with two stars painted on the back—identifying his rank—and they’d never thought the value of money would depreciate so rapidly after retirement—they’d never thought of the value of money before. If you were unemployed or had retired, the Admiral said, it was better not to be in India but somewhere else. The institution, even the country, you had served did nothing for you; they gave you everything as long as you were working, but in old age you had to manage your life and your finances yourself.
A major drain on their savings had been the Admiral’s stroke; doctors, medicines, the hospital—the expensive business of keeping oneself alive. Of course, the government had contributed to hospitalization costs, but they could not be genuinely concerned—the Admiral’s health was only an abstraction to them. His principal preoccupations now concerned his savings, and that Jayojit should start afresh, or, after what had happened, at least lead the second half of his life decently. He thought about these matters every day.
He now stood at the bus stop on the main road, dressed in his favourite attire, white bush shirt and white trousers and strapped sandals. These clothes kept him cool in the heat. He was going to take a bus to the bank, where he had some enquiries to make about an investment bond.
Jayojit had woken up late, at eleven. He had had a bath, and then changed into a shirt and shorts. Wearing shorts exposed his large fair thighs and calves, covered with smooth strands of black hair. His mother seemed to notice nothing unusual about his clothes; parents accept that offspring who live abroad will appear to them in a slightly altered incarnation, and are even disappointed if they do not. As he came out of his room, in which the air-conditioner had run all night, he encountered a blast of hot air—the normal temperature at this time in the house.
“Ma!” he said. “Anything to eat?”
It was not that he was particularly hungry; and he had still not been to the toilet; his body seemed to be functioning to another time, or not properly to this one; but he had experienced this dislocation before and could ignore it. It was the previous night now in America; already America had become dream-like. He had heard sounds of frying in the kitchen, and found his mother inside standing before the cooker, and Bonny loitering beside her; he did not seem in the least troubled by jet-lag, but seemed to have been remade and reshaped by this new climate, standing there watching his grandmother.
“I’m making luchis,” said Jayojit’s mother, without turning around from the kodai before her. “Bonny shona has already had one with sugarcane gur—I melted it.”
“Baba,” said the boy, “it tastes just like maple syrup!”
“Have you brushed your teeth?” asked Jayojit.
“He’s done everything,” said his mother in Bengali. “He came out of the room at eight o’clock in the morning, and I took him inside again and he brushed his teeth. Then I took out his half-pants and vest and a new shirt from the drawer— you were fast asleep—and I brought him to my bathroom, where he had a bath. Isn’t that right, Bonny?”
Bonny, who had been staring mutely at his grandmother, as if he were lip-reading, nodded. He could follow the language—he had so often heard his mother and father talk in it in his first five years—but he could not speak it. It was both a disadvantage and an odd privilege that set him apart, and caused others around him here to make that small extra effort to communicate themselves to him.
“Then, some time ago, Bonny said you had woken up and gone to take a bath, and I began to fry the luchis.”
“Well, gur is not maple syrup,” said Jayojit to his son. He added, explanatorily, and with an inflection of pride, “He loves maple syrup.”
Earlier in the morning, a temporary help had come and cooked a dry vegetable preparation. This was waiting outside on the dining table in a covered porcelain bowl, slivers of pumpkin and potatoes fried with onions and black jeera. It had become pleasantly cool with the passing of time, and went well with the hot luchis, and contrasted temperately with the general heat. Jayojit sat on a chair and broke the luchis and ate, a giant in his shorts, one large leg crossed over another.
“I mustn’t eat too much, though,” he said. “I’m putting on weight.”
Ever since he had become single again he had begun to eat what he could in America, indiscriminately plundering the shelves in the supermarket for frozen food and pizzas. He had first read about TV dinners in Mad magazine when he was growing up: what glamour pizzas had, then! These days, in America, he looked at food, as he did many other things, emotionlessly, as something that could be put to use and cooked quickly.
“Where—I don’t think you have put on weight,” protested his mother, returning from the kitchen with a cup of tea.
She could not know of his secret life in that continent, of driving down the motorway, going to the supermarket, filling up a trolley with things, his orphanhood and distance from his country and parents, and that of other people like him, wandering around the aisles of the supermarket in shorts, with wives, or perhaps alone, with the ex-wife somewhere completely else, running into each other and saying, “How are you? Still around?” His mother could not even imagine it. There was a South Indian couple, the Nairs, he had run into three times at the supermarket he shopped at. They had had an arranged marriage (he had gone back to India to marry her); he was dark, pleasantly blunt-nosed, bespectacled, and had a moustache; she was curly-haired, large-eyed, and dark. Nair had a degree in biochemistry, and worked as a marketing man in a pharmaceutical company. They had met only once socially; but, in the vegetable section of the supermarket, they had discovered each other with surprised exclamations again and again. He had learnt that, unsurprisingly, they were vegetarians. The first time they had met at the lunch party, Jayojit had been with his wife Amala; but, at the supermarket, he was already alone, and they, after the first occasion, had not asked about her: word got around so quickly among the network of Indians they would have known. Jayojit e
njoyed Nair’s South Indian accent, its slow intimacy, and his wife wore slacks and a loose t-shirt and a large bindi on her forehead.
“And what did you do all morning?” said Jayojit to Bonny.
“He has been playing with his Jurassic Park rakkhosh,” said the boy’s grandmother. “All morning . . . They were lying on the floor last night and I put them on the table. This morning, he showed them to his dadu.”
“You scared of them, tamma?” asked the boy.
“Naturally I am! They are two rakkhosh!”
“Tamma knows about Jurassic Park, but she hasn’t seen it,” explained Bonny to his father. “It came to Calcutta two months ago, baba. Isn’t that neat?”
There had, in fact, been great excitement in the city with the coming of the film; crowds of people outside Nandan cinema.
“Ma,” said Jayojit, looking up suddenly, “can I have a glass of water?”
“Of course, baba,” she said, rising. “I’ll bring it right now.”
This made him remember that his father had never called him “baba” as many Bengali fathers do their sons—the age-old, loving, inexplicable practice of fathers calling their sons “father”—but always called him Jayojit, and nothing else; bringing an element of formality into their relationship, and also, he supposed, a note of respect for him. But, on the other hand, Jayojit had remarked silently that he sometimes called Bonny “dadu,” as if he were allowing himself to be more paternal, more Bengali, with his grandson; perhaps, with Bonny’s birth, he had begun a new phase in his life—who can tell the exact changes that take place in people, which are possibly unknown to themselves? Till they die, people keep trying to innocently adjust to life.
Jayojit’s mother returned with a glass of water, a tumbler from the old set they used to get free from the Services. He drank the refrigerated water, which had caused a dew of condensation to form on the glass, gratefully.
“Aah,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Tea is all right, but it makes one feel hot in this climate. What one needs is gallons of cold water!”
A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) Page 2