THE LUCHIS continued to appear. If his mother had lived in the nineteenth century, she, in spite of her pale complexion and occasional fatigued look, would have been happiest and busiest in the kitchen; alone and happy, not involved in the changes disturbing history and coming over others”, anonymous lives.
“Ma, this has got to stop!”
“Joy, you will not get luchis over there.”
His mother had fixed ideas about what his life “over there” was like. She had never been abroad; it was an imaginary place for her, a territory that intersected with her life without ever actually touching it, and which had, for her, its own recognizable characteristics. Two years ago, she might have gone there for the first time, if they hadn’t had to abandon their trip quite abruptly. Now her bangles shook as she put two luchis on Jayojit’s plate. Bonny, sitting next to Jayojit, was having milk and cornflakes. His father was having, as he did from whenever it was Jayojit’s memory could stretch back to, a soft-boiled egg and dry toast. That toast had been subject to vicissitude, once it was lightly buttered, and sometimes covered with a skin of Kissan marmalade, freckled with orange rind; this had been the taste of breakfast, in war and in peace.
“But, baba,” Bonny said very gravely, “you can have cornflakes if you don’t want lu-chis.”
From ten o’clock to eleven, for the first ten days or so, Jayojit lay down full-length upon the sofa, his legs arched slightly, his hands holding the newspaper over almost one half of his body. In front of Jayojit’s reclining figure, in the verandah, had appeared a new set of clothes drying on the clothesline— Bonny’s and his—almost crisp with the heat from the morning, hanging indecisively.
“But you must not take out the little boy”—“ bachcha chhele” was how she referred to her grandson—“in the sun. How will he take it? And suddenly if he falls ill?” said Jayojit’s mother, agitated and having lapsed, without warning, into a worked-upness.
Jayojit dismissed this cursorily, his eyes still upon newsprint, eking out the fantasy of a holiday and saying casually to his mother:
“Oh, he’ll be okay, ma. Don’t fuss. He’s tough.”
Bonny overheard this with the air of a passer-by whose route had intersected, briefly, the conversation of strangers. He had gone, as usual, to the verandah, where his own blue drying shirt dangled over him indeterminately.
“Okay,” managed Jayojit after ten minutes, as if he’d drifted into a coma in the meanwhile. “Okay. You have a point. I’ll take care he doesn’t get too much exposure.”
Someone was not present, and part of the conversation, of the concern, was directed at that absent figure, or at least took her into account. She—Jayojit’s ex-wife; Bonny’s mother—was more and more real in her separate, everyday existence. Yet Bonny’s grandmother was too full of her own worry, her bosom working with affection, to think of this. She gazed at Bonny with the intensity of one who hadn’t seen him enough.
SOMETIMES, in the afternoon, Jayojit came out and stood in the corridor outside the flat, taking in the breeze. He wasn’t wholly comfortable; a door stared at him from the left-hand corner. Yet the flat was hotter than it should be, because it faced the west, while the corridor received the breeze coming from the south-east.
“That’s better,” said Jayojit. From here he got a partial view of the back of the building. Facing him were the many windows and verandahs at the rear of the flats, the dark, recurring backs of air-conditioners protruding outward; and, when he turned his head to the left, he could see part of a cricket field that belonged to a well-known club. He turned and, still standing there, faced their neighbour’s flat; the nameplate on the door simply said “Ghosh.” The man, whom Jayojit had seen no more than a couple of times, apparently ran some kind of small business in timber, and was often away in the hilly, presently strife-torn area of Assam (and yet how lovely and green and misty Assam had been when he’d gone visiting relatives with parents once as a boy); and his thin grey-haired wife, Jayojit’s mother had said, was called Pramila. Relations with the Chatterjees were cordial, if minimal. In all kinds of ways, these people were a million miles away from Jayojit’s parents and their world; their ambitions were different, their friends and referents were different, even the Bengali they spoke was different; they might have belonged to different countries. The lack of contact was also perhaps partly Jayojit’s family’s fault. For, since the divorce, the Admiral and his wife had withdrawn into themselves and gone into a sort of mourning; their flat had become a shell, and the neighbours’ flat, in their imagination, had moved further away. And yet, during that great leveller, the Durga Puja, Jayojit’s mother apparently met Mr. and Mrs. Ghosh downstairs at the festivities, became part of a crowd where all disparity and private, secluding grief were temporarily suspended, and were even delighted to “bump into” each other and exchange meaningless small talk during the three-day-long ceremonies. Each year it provided a brief but vivid illusion of life beginning again, to which everyone succumbed. What Jayojit could see now, as he stood here, was the back door to the Ghoshes’ kitchen, a door with criss-cross netting through which part of a crate and a bench were visible. It was true that they weren’t socially compatible, that before the Admiral’s retirement their chances of meeting would have been remote, the Admiral with his command belonging to a different world altogether; but this country had a way of, in the end, concealing disparity and banishing the past.
“Careful, don’t hit the door,” said Jayojit as Bonny began to play on that side of the corridor. His son looked up at him and continued to improvise his little game.
Jayojit could feel now, after two and a half weeks, that he was putting on weight. A suspicion found its way to his head which he’d never harboured before: had his father become so bulky because his mother had overfed him during his working life? He’d always assumed that his father, at some point in his life, had inadvertently eaten too much; but now he wondered if his mother had deliberately played a part. As for Bonny, he, with Jayojit’s approval, had moved, by the end of the first week, to the breakfasts he was used to having; cereal (a box of Champion Oats had been procured, when they’d been convinced these were no longer available, by the Admiral, with both perseverance and faith, from New Market), a glass of milk, fruit juice—the consoling and rare sweet lime, one of which yielded only a quarter glass of juice and for whose taste Bonny had no appreciation at all; though his grandmother kept trying to tempt him towards the luchis, cajoling and pleading with him.
“Don’t force him, ma,” said Jayojit with an indulgent sternness. “Don’t spoil him—he’s not used to oily meals of this kind in the mornings.”
She listened to him, abashed, as if he were her mother. In America he’d imbibed clear ideas, while having no idea that he had, of what to eat and what not to. Jayojit also wanted to spare her from preparing these breakfasts—she seemed to have a dogged capacity, even at this age, for working in the heat—but feeding her own son, really, seemed to give her pleasure at a time when hardly anything mattered to her. She would come out from the kitchen, her sari tightly wound around her, her face flushed. Although she appeared so submissive, there was a streak of obstinacy in her—both Jayojit and his father knew this. She would never make clear what conclusions she had reached emotionally, and, in everything, would cannily refer to the Admiral, either repeating what he said, or saying, “Ask him.”
By eight-thirty, when they had breakfast, the dining and sitting rooms would be hot; it was a miracle they could sit and eat here every day, registering no discomfort except a few loud exclamations about the heat. Dawn would end at half-past five, and the day had had ample time to become hot by eight-thirty.
Two weeks on, Jayojit explained to his mother, “From tomorrow, I’m going to have toast and tea—no more!” For he could feel the shape of his body changing; and he was afraid of triglycerides showing up in his bloodstream, as they had in some of his friends.
“O ma—what’s this!” she said in surprise. “But you don’t
even eat much for lunch! You must at least have one proper meal a day.”
“Ma, I’ve been eating better than I have for months—” and he meant it.
For two weeks he’d done little but read newspapers, and desired, in secret, to finish a book, until he sat before his laptop in the afternoon, with the chiks in the balcony more than three-quarters of the way down to keep out the heat. The chiks moved lightly, as if someone had just pushed them.
The screen lighted up; he browsed slowly through old files, his mind elsewhere. Every time he’d tried to return to, during the last two months, the project he was supposed to be working on, he found himself trying to escape it like a boy in a classroom drawn to looking out of a window during a lesson.
Before him, on the wall, there was a batik print of Ganesh that served the dual, not incompatible, purpose of being a decoration and bringing good fortune to the house. Beneath it, there was a table covered with a Rajasthani cloth with mirrorwork upon it. Each circle of glass reflected some bit of the room, no longer recognizable, independent of whatever it was it represented. These things had been bought on an impulse long ago—but the print was fairly recent— and had not so much to do with serious thought or judgement as trespassing into emporia and feeling heartless about leaving empty-handed. Then there was a Kashmiri shikara, slightly removed from its place, which is how Maya sometimes left things after she’d dusted them.
On the table there were photographs: one of Jayojit at the age of nineteen, become thin and tall (he had been pudgy as a boy), wearing thick black-framed spectacles, which were fashionable in those days; he was then at the Hindu College. Another of Jayojit and his brother Ranajit when they were thirteen and ten respectively, taken on a holiday in Madhya Pradesh, both the boys, in their long pants and keds, looking like colonizers on that ancient terrain; a wedding photo, bright with colour, of Ranajit and his wife. There were other smaller photographs, of cousins and relatives, and a series of pictures, in a large frame, of Bonny at different stages of his life; as a baby, as a child of two, when his hair, mysteriously, had been curlier than it was now, a boy of four in trousers with braces. The wedding pictures had disappeared, or become oddly improper. The pictures of Bonny were sans parents, as if he’d been conceived in a future when parents were not only no longer necessary, but were no more possible.
The only other picture of a couple among those photographs was one of Jayojit’s parents. It had been taken on their twenty-fifth marriage anniversary. The Admiral was noticeably less heavy in the photograph than now, his hair and beard a little less long. She was smiling faintly, almost shyly. Then there was a picture of the Admiral in uniform, taken some time in the eighties, a few years before Jayojit got married. There were also, separately, pictures of the Admiral’s parents; one of his mother and another of his father. Faded and obscure, and to all purposes forgotten, they still didn’t seem insignificant; they lived not in some afterlife, but some moment in history as difficult to imagine now as this moment would have been to imagine then. In its own and different way, that time must have been as shadowy and uncertain as any now, struggling, as well, to arrive at its brief being and truth; everything about that world must have been disequilibrious and dark to Jayojit’s grandfather. Jayojit knew that his grandfather had once run away from home to seek spiritual truth, and later, for some reason, returned to his parents. Then, not content to inherit land and his father’s estates, he’d gone to Dhaka and then to Calcutta and become a successful journalist. Thus, Jayojit’s father had been born in Calcutta, somewhere in the north, where it was impossible to go now because of the traffic. Jayojit himself had never seen his father’s mother; his father’s father had died when he was three.
His mother’s parents he could remember well. For years they used to live in a small mining town in Bihar. Sometimes he’d go to them with both his parents, sometimes with his mother. He’d notice, then, how fragile and unthinking his mother’s relationship seemed to be with his grandparents, how forgetful she became when she was with them, and then longed to go back after a month had passed, as if she had grown tired because she’d never completely be a girl again.
Once, when typing, he thought there was someone else in the room; looking up, he realized it was one of his mother’s saris, washed but not pressed, left in a bundle on the sofa; it had become a form on the edge of his vision. He looked up from the screen and gazed at the chik that was three-quarters of the way down to keep out the heat. Again and again, but with no obvious regularity in the intervals, the chik stirred, creaked, with the sigh of a south-easterly breeze; and beyond, the guttural murmurs of idle drivers, the punctilious beating of metal, hovered with an air of expectancy.
THAT AFTERNOON, he went out for a walk again; restless, with nothing to do, wondering how long the two months (of which thirteen days had gone already) would last. As he was setting out, he saw a group of schoolchildren returning in blue and white uniforms. They loitered in the hall before walking toward the lift; they seemed to be without a sense of urgency.
He walked past them, and he might have been invisible in his off-white trousers and check shirt. As he came into the sun, he narrowed his eyes instinctively.
He recalled that, as a child, he’d never known the meaning of this daily homecoming from school; instead, he’d wait till summer, say goodbye to his friends in Ooty (Aniruddha Sen, his constant companion in the Ninth Standard, came to mind undiminished with his long nose; apparently he was now a financial consultant in Birmingham), or postpone saying goodbye indefinitely, as the case might be (because promotions and the perpetual upward journey through new classes hurt almost physically when he was a boy, like a pang of birth), and then take a train to wherever his father happened to be posted. And then his mother would dote on him, almost consolingly, for two months, making not luchis as she did now single-handedly, but the cook preparing exotic rubbish: sweetcorn on toast; or versions of the roadside junk-food that was otherwise taboo to him.
This had been the subject of jocular ribbing in the early days with Amala.
“There’s a limit to carefulness, baba,” she’d said, rolling her eyes, for she herself had grown up in a family that allowed her to try out everything once; indeed, apparently she and her mother ventured out together in search of golgappas, getting out of their Ambassador near the vendors at Deshapriya Park.
He came to the main road now, confronted a tram, and turned right. This city irritated him; it was like an obstacle; yet he’d decided that it would give him the space for recoupment that he thought was necessary now. Nothing had changed from a year ago; only the pavement here seemed more dusty than he’d remembered and was like a path that ran parallel to the road. He walked on, until he saw three familiar shops in the distance, on the left, on the other side; a provisions store, a fast-food outlet, and a drugstore. He felt not so much a sense of déjà vu as one of ironic, qualified continuity. Then, further off, he saw a hoarding above a busy and troubled junction, where a stream of cars was divided into two or more directions, the conjunctive but disparate existences of Ballygunge Circular and Hazra roads, and saw that it had an advertisement, the same as last time, aimed at which set of eyes and personalities he didn’t know, for the ATM. The Hong Kong Bank copywriters had interpreted the ATM as Any Time Money, and it was the same advertisement except that it was a fresh slogan. It hovered in mid-air above a razed and derelict island.
He remembered his father saying to him during a telephone conversation, sounding as if the whole truth hadn’t sunk in: “Joy, are you sure I shouldn’t call her parents? Mr. Chakraborty could talk some sense into her . . .”
“Baba, there’s nothing to salvage,” he’d said, patiently waiting for the line to clear. “It’s finished.” He had to say this to remind himself it was so. “What worries me now,” he’d continued calmly, “is that she has Bonny with her.” To reassure his father at the other end, he’d said, “Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow to tell you what I’m doing about that.”
Tha
t evening he’d said to her when she’d phoned him, “You know, I could call the police.” Without realizing it, he’d stopped calling her by her name, and hardly ever did so later. She, however, had begun to use his name as if it were a weapon with which she could now distance herself from him: “Why, what’ll you tell them, Joy?” Her voice was mock-serious.
He felt somewhat conspicuous as he turned back; he didn’t know why. Perhaps because people don’t wander about and not go anywhere; perhaps this was what made him feel strange and doubtful and that he stood out. Everyone else, whatever they looked like, had somewhere to go to, or seemed to; and if they were doing nothing or postponing doing something, as some of these people squatting by the pavement, who seemed to be in part-time employment, were doing, it was for a reason. But the small journey—in the heat, constantly assailed by traffic on the Ballygunge main road— and then the small arc back had somewhat settled his thoughts. No, it was still new to him, that’s what it was; as if he’d just stepped off the plane and this was his first day out, and everything—or this web that constituted, at the moment, “everything”—seemed louder and more real to him than normal.
Ballygunge is, he conceded with the uncertainty of one who has been acquainted with better places, in its way, beautiful. His parents knew people here once; and he concluded, without evidence to support him, that some of those people must be here, in these flats and houses. Why did they never meet: or did they, while he simply knew nothing about it? On the other hand, it might be that what they’d lived in—those compact decorated spaces—were company flats, in which case they might have moved to other parts of the city; another part of the country, even. A peasant in a dhoti and a turban was sitting on the pavement next to a makeshift cigarette stall and lighting a bidi with one of those ropes that burned stubbornly at the end.
A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) Page 4