As he turned into the lane he had to step aside adroitly for a car coming in; it blew its horn behind him.
A new Ambassador, a recent model that could have sprung, unchanged, from the older one, newly painted, its cream colour not yet dirty except for two indistinguishable scratches on the side; at the back, a girl whose age hovered anywhere between seventeen and twenty-one—in which case it was insulting to think of her as a girl, for no doubt she saw herself as a woman—managing her long, straight hair with an expert flick of her head.
Jayojit stared at the back of her head as it grew smaller. The car passed a bhelpuri vendor and Jayojit wondered if it would stop to make a purchase. No, it did not. Blowing its horn again, it turned right at the end of the lane.
But it’s a nice area, he decided generously; deceptively quiet. Nothing seemed to happen here in these mansions which belonged to people who’d once made a tidy sum of money. Money creates money; you could sense that as you went past the houses and their tall, imposing gates. The owners of these mansions had guaranteed their own self-perpetuating well-being, it seemed, for generations to come. Independence, the subsequent changes of history, did not seem to matter.
This one, for instance, impressive, especially in light of the fact that such a large house must be tremendously expensive to maintain; the bold letters JHUNJHUNWALA painted by the gate, a gecko, at a curious angle, meditating on the letters. Who was Jhunjhunwala?—Jayojit felt he should have known the name if only to ridicule it, to retrieve, from an uncertain memory, a nasty item of gossip, but it did not matter. There must be about ten or fifteen rooms in there—the curtains were drawn—with air-conditioners protruding at the back.
He came to the end of the lane, where the Ambassador had turned not long ago, where he saw a house that had once been equally impressive if not more. The name on the gate, he noticed, was that of an East Bengali landowner; but East Bengal had long ago been transformed into fantasy; the driveway was covered with leaves that no one had bothered to clear away; space and an impartially surviving light coexisted in equilibrium before the awning. No one had even bothered to sell the house.
The bhelpuri seller fussing and making his preparations; but all his movements were actually well judged and accurate. Before him his adult life’s work, and the day’s; the tamarind water, the crackers that he would crush, scattering the flakes on his small concoction. A portable investment; he didn’t need to be confined to any one place. But he had a clientele in this locality; he was waiting for it to make an appearance.
Jayojit walked back some of the way he’d come, as if retracing his route, and passed the man; the man noticed him with his apparently unintrusive abstracted eyes; he judged him, not unfriendlily, as a potential, a probable, customer; a loiterer who might also be integrated with his market. He made the first move, possibly making his first enquiry of the afternoon. His eyes were brown-grey, as if they held a little of the twilight of another town in them.
“Bhelpuri, babu? Jhaalmudi?” Tapping the market with all the finesse of a researcher and the seductiveness of an old retainer; trying to increase his clientele, though it doesn’t matter to him one way or the other.
“Kato?” The Bengali word for “How much” seemed out of place, too tentative and non-committal.
“Bhelpuri, babu?”
“Hay bhelpuri.”
“Dui taka”—two rupees.
An absurd price, almost as close to nothing as words themselves; but the confection must cost even less to make. Jayojit nodded and walked on, as if he’d been doing a survey; the man smiled slightly, not even a smile of puzzlement, but of the acceptance of one whose curiosity was already waning.
There were birds in the trees overhead, all shouting together. He remembered how he and Amala had, when visiting India (their visits home were regular and annual for the first three years), gone to Nainital in the second year of their marriage, to the wildlife sanctuary, hoping to be amazed by the glimpse of some rare beast—all beasts were rare to them—or the sight of a peacock dancing. What had struck Jayojit then more than anything else was the crescendo caused by the birds’ chattering and crying at dusk. At night, in the hotel, they’d been bitten by mosquitoes, and while examining Amala’s mosquito bites from the feet upwards— there was a bite on the thigh, in spite of the fact that she was wearing a salwaar kameez; “How the hell did it get there?” she’d asked—there was a preamble that led to love-making, in which they’d almost forgotten about the mosquitoes. That was in 1986. Two years after Bonny’s birth in March 1987 (he would have been conceived a few months after they’d gone back from India to Claremont) their love-making dried up, almost without their noticing it. At first they joked about it, she laughing: “Think we should get into partner-swapping?”; he, when Amala occasionally took the initiative: “What? You want to interrupt Dallas?” Sometimes, when Bonny’d just learnt how to speak, they’d kiss each other, even in front of the boy. Then unfamiliarity set in, though no one else would notice it, and they got used to even that. The child, instead of bringing them together, actually enabled them to separate into their own spheres of desire and loneliness. All along, whenever they quarrelled, they quarrelled with great precision in the English they’d grown up with; Bonny, smaller then, would listen to their analyses of each other with wandering attention, as if he were overhearing a foreign language.
What he judged most harshly was that Amala should get involved with her gynaecologist, himself a married man. He found Amala’s transformation impossible to understand or interpret; equally strange her claim, “He was kind to me.” He’d been with Amala himself to this doctor before Bonny’s birth; a not unpleasant-looking man in his forties who was balding slightly, and surely not charismatic; a whiff of bad breath reached Jayojit from his conversation once; difficult, almost impossible, to imagine how any woman in her right mind could prefer him to Jayojit; and later, Jayojit had said as much to the Admiral. Still later, thinking of this, the Admiral had quietly quoted a proverb to Jayojit in Sanskrit, translating himself: “Of woman’s character and man’s fate even God is ignorant; what knowledge then can mortals have of these things?”
When Jayojit had gone back to the end of the lane, marching behind the shadows of the trees towards the main road, and turned back, he saw two boys emerge from the gates of the building and advance towards the bhelpuri seller: wearing t-shirts and shorts and keds, casually decisive. There was the slightest premonition of dusk.
Abrupt high-pitched voices, asking the man to serve up his stuff; the man only too eager to please, but inwardly composed, seeming to experience something like satisfaction; then wiping his hands slowly on an old and rather dirty piece of cloth.
“Jaldi, jaldi.” Impatience.
He himself felt tempted, but he’d promised himself not to get diarrhoea or gastro-enteritis if he could help it; or wind.
The two boys were busy.
THE DHOBI—returning washed and ironed clothes to Jayojit’s mother. He sat near the front door and untied his bundle. Jayojit, for some reason, had a memory of him; no, it couldn’t be last time he’d seen him—he must have seen him downstairs. He lifted the items of clothing, with a detached saintly air, but with an unobtrusive cunning as well, one by one and handed them to Mrs. Chatterjee, who inspected each with suspicion. It reminded Jayojit of the way he’d seen her, in the past, examining “bargains” with a tired but amenable gaze in various shops. Clean sheets, folded on top of each other, saris, pressed and starched, crisp with the heat; there were few things to rival washed clothes in their undisappointing recurrence.
“It’s the humidity I hate,” said Jayojit, fanning himself, without warning, with a piece of paper. “I wonder, especially, if it’s good for you, baba.”
The Admiral said nothing at this feeling of concern, unsought for; he watched with interest as his wife went inside their room, delayed reappearing, and came out with small change to pay the dhobi.
“Baba,” said Jayojit suddenly, with his eyes on
the newspaper, “couldn’t one have got a flat on the other side?” He pointed to the right. “I’ve heard they’re slightly larger there—and cooler as well.” In fact he’d heard this piece of information from his mother. It now intrigued him.
The Admiral looked puzzled for a moment. “Yes, those flats are south facing,” he said, abstracted, as if he could see a flat before his eyes. He tried to remember, as one remembers a fact that has lost its original importance and place, but nevertheless cannot be forgotten, and said, “There was a . . . a—what do they call it—a lottery. We applied late.”
But Jayojit was not listening; he was momentarily absorbed in a report. He was nodding, but probably at something the reporter had said.
The Admiral had been posted at Cochin at the time he had booked the flat; the building had still not come up at the time. A “friend” of his called Dutta had, for some reason he could never fathom, phoned him and given him, at the time—1972—the information about the building. “Excellent flats. The building’s a government project, so it’s cheap. I’d advise you to act immediately, because there’s a great rush of middle-class buyers. Do you understand?” Strange, the people who do you a good turn; some of them don’t even matter to you; they come and go, like bit-players. Where was Dutta now? The Admiral didn’t really care; he had little time, anyway, to turn his gaze upon minor aspects of the past. But thank God for that phone call! That was a different country then, in the seventies, and his posting in Cochin, when one looked back on it, a paid holiday with grand trappings; there was glory too for the armed forces, because of the war over Bangladesh, though the navy didn’t really have to take part; it had just sat and watched with dignity. No one knew then how unaffordable property would be, especially now; how fortunate one was to have a home. And there was no “black” money involved because it was a government scheme; but it was a stroke of good luck that the Admiral had been successful in his application—without bribes or pulling strings. But, in those years, he hadn’t seen it as good luck, he’d almost expected, in a naive, trusting way, nothing else.
From the proposal to the final construction of the building, when the rooms became habitable, it had taken five years. Whenever the Admiral was in Calcutta in that period (to attend a function or visit some relative; to be put up at Fort William or at some relative’s place), he would come to this lane to take a look at the building as it came up, first the skeleton of the construction, then the gaps where the rooms were. He found the process oddly interesting and involving; it wasn’t always one had the opportunity to watch a vision, however ordinary, take shape. The lane, with the post office nearby, and the stately old mansions that were still there now, was subtly different; it was as if the lane were, in its way, passing from one phase of its history to another, in a way that was somehow connected to the completion of the building and his being there, a reticent but attentive witness.
What would happen in the future? Jayojit couldn’t see himself returning once his parents weren’t there, or ever settling down here himself—he’d gone too far into the continent of his domicile and been absorbed by it; and imagine the foolhardiness of returning to India! But his parents ending up here must be considered both fortunate, he thought, and one of the anomalies of life.
Jayojit took off his glasses and wiped the lenses that had misted over with perspiration. His face bore a remarkable similarity to his father’s, the same lines around the mouth, the nose curving gently, the same fair complexion, both faces marked by education, a privileged background, and, it was clear, some sort of achievement. The father’s was a brahmin’s face, rather old-fashioned in a way; in another setting, another time, it would have had a worldly but ceremonial aura; it had an inherited severity. The grey hairs on his beard had a frosty stillness. In both faces, especially on the father’s, there was a trace of dissatisfaction and naivety, suggesting that neither man could make friends easily.
The Admiral asked:
“Did you read the news today?”
The dhobi had gone. Jayojit’s mother had some of the folded clothes in her arms; like a familiar spirit, she was carrying them inside. In the trees outside, there was the sound of the constantly busy birds.
“Something about a British delegation,” said Jayojit. “Coming to survey their old territory.” He chuckled. “News” was still strange to him, like the repetitive cry of one of the shalik birds outside, an echo. When he was in Claremont, he kept track of everything that happened here, and his thoughts about this country had a completeness they no longer had once he was back.
“I don’t see the point, really. What do they intend to do: inspect the roads? You know they won’t really welcome them with open arms. The Chief Minister isn’t the problem. The trade unions and the party cadres are the problem! Do you think they’ll allow it? Not to speak of the hooligans in the Congress.” The Admiral had a sneaking, unconfessed admiration for the Chief Minister because he’d done his Bar-at-Law in England; he was a “gentleman.” Then, in Bengali, he said: “Meanwhile, look what’s happening to this city. You can’t walk on the pavement, can’t post a letter.” In English again, seriously, “I wouldn’t advise you to come back to it.”
Jayojit’s mother returned to broodingly retrieve the last load of laundered articles; “She’s become a household machine,” thought Jayojit, a little unfairly, as her shadow passed by him, “maybe she’s happy this way.” He knew how often she used to go shopping at the JK Market with her friend Manju in Delhi.
“I’m afraid there isn’t much chance of that in the near future,” said Jayojit to his father, and laughed, as if he had just remembered something.
The Admiral’s thoughts had moved on; he was staring into the distance. “You remember Bijon,” he said suddenly.
Jayojit started out of his own thoughts. Bijon used to work in an engineering firm in Delhi; his acquaintance with the Admiral was through some tenuous but palpable route; Jayojit’s mother’s late brother-in-law’s niece had a husband whose sister had married Bijon, who himself had no children; or some such laborious relationship. Somehow Bijon and the Admiral had become occasional drinking partners at the Services Club (the Admiral had now, that is, for the last six years, perforce, given up drinking).
“Why?” As if some private, guarded realm had somehow been violated by the question. Then: “No, of course I remember him.”
Bijon was supposed to have retired about two years ago and moved to Calcutta. He was not what one would call close to the Admiral; but over drinks they’d exchanged confidences that were self-revelatory in nature. You needed someone to exchange confidences with; even the Admiral.
“He’s gone to Dubai,” said the Admiral.
“Really?”
That hadn’t been part of the plan; but things seldom were. It was as if the Admiral had somehow been betrayed. He spoke of him as if he were a desert mirage, something quite ordinary that had turned out to be odd only by being insubstantial, arising and then fading in a vaguely recognizable, uncategorizable foreign landscape.
EARLY IN THE MORNING, when the Admiral and his wife woke up, they didn’t at first say a word to each other; it was as if they didn’t feel the need to. Above, the fan turned at full speed, giving the Admiral, for once, mild goose-flesh as he emerged from the night’s sheets. They had it planned between them; that Admiral Chatterjee would go in for his bath first, and then be the one to open the doors to the verandah in the sitting room. Two or three loud coughs administered his entry into the sitting room, refamiliarized him with its tidiness, its claim to be accessory to his present life; these coughs were physical but ritual in nature; in the other bedroom, neither Jayojit nor Bonny heard him over the internal hum of the air-conditioner. When they weren’t there, the coughs were directed at a nervous sense of absence, at the far-away. The Admiral then went in for a bath of cold water, water gathered in a bucket with which he then drenched himself from head to bottom, which he believed would keep him cool and sane for the rest of the morning; even his sac
red thread, which he neglected to remove, became soggy. He didn’t like being disturbed in the midst of his quick ablutions, but this was more an idea than a reasonable suspicion, because there was no possibility that he would be. In the bedroom, Mrs. Chatterjee, very softly, as she often did these days, or ever since she had grown used to this negligible but returning loneliness, turned on the transistor radio to listen to devotionals. Something about these bhajans was apposite to her semi-wakefulness of the first half-hour of getting out of bed.
Then they went to walk in the lane with the air of those who’d grown, lately, accustomed to a routine, but still weren’t entirely reconciled to what the day might bring. They looked bourgeois and ascetic; as if walking in the silence were a polite activity not unrelated to some unrealizable desire for completeness. There were no cars to disturb them now; and if a car did enter the lane from the main road, the Admiral stood aside gravely to let it pass, while Mrs. Chatterjee, unmindful, last morning’s vermilion faded in her hair’s parting, went a little way ahead; though no one saw them, the Admiral behaved with an impatient propriety, uncommunicable to her, in relation to his wife, as if someone who mattered to him were watching them. They walked to one end of the lane, the birds shrieking above them; nothing had begun; only a couple of cleaners were in view, who, with buckets, had just begun washing the parked cars and wiping their windows.
It was impossible to tell from what it was like now just how hot it would become in two hours; this was one of the small deceptions of this time of the year. Even the trees and leaves and the sudden burst of gulmohurs kept them from this fact as they walked underneath them.
A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) Page 5