A New World: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Amit Chaudhuri

  Seven years ago, with the mild stroke, there had been a fleeting fear of paralysis; the Admiral’s right arm, the old saluting arm, had been mildly affected. Then, with physiotherapy and a gradual rationalizing of that fear, that had passed. Ridiculous—to have survived the Indo-Chinese conflict and the Pakistan wars, not only survived them, but to have contemplated them from some distance; and then to be cut down, not in battle, but by the excesses of one’s past— drinking, hypertension! Now, these new and old buildings, the new ones looking quite unfamiliar at this time of the day, rose around them. The Admiral remembered Mrs. Gupta’s husband who used to live on the seventh storey of their building, flat 7C, who’d had a stroke and one side of his face paralysed; and lived like that for six years. No longer here; he had died last February.

  The vibrating sound of trams was not far away; he’d been advised to take walks by two different doctors, one in the army hospital and another one, Dr. Sen, who lived in this building. “You can walk your way into health, sir,” the army doctor had said. And he felt like a young long-distance runner, cut off from both onlookers and competitors, engaged in a personal struggle; he felt this need to see Jayojit through; Jayojit was too hot-headed for his own good, that had become apparent.

  The thought of his other son, the younger one, Ranajit, married (happily, he hoped!) for four years and living in the arborous suburb, Vasant Vihar, in Delhi, disturbed him only remotely, as would a story he was reading with interest, but mainly to get to the end. No sign of children as yet; his daughter-in-law, Anita, was twenty-seven years old; couples waited and waited these days for the opportune moment to arrive as if it were some kind of secret, as if they were gamblers hedging their bets endlessly. Of course Ranajit didn’t tell him everything, and he wrote infrequently; he and Anita might be planning something—you “planned” everything these days, the husband and wife not so much conspirators but like bureaucrats in a command economy; unlike thirty or forty years ago; Ranajit and Jayojit hadn’t been planned or expected, they’d just “happened”—and neither the Admiral nor his wife would know until later.

  He’d like Jayojit to marry again. Joy was thirty-seven; he wasn’t young any more. If he married now, the Admiral believed, it would be like attending to a wound when it was still fresh.

  It was probably tendentious to think of it in that way, but if it hadn’t been for Bonny the match they’d organized last year might have worked. It wasn’t Bonny’s fault of course; it was just the way these things were. The Admiral was not orthodoxly religious—though he believed in the laws according to which providential happiness was given or withheld, and would sometimes return from a temple with a tilak beneath the mane of hair that had not long ago been hidden by a naval officer’s cap—and yet he’d hoped for an alliance with both the devotee’s humility and his serene expectation of disappointment; when the disappointment came, it took him by surprise. But that girl, Arundhati, had insisted that she found Bonny perfectly charming. “What d’you want to be when you grow up, Bonny?” she’d asked him, sitting forward on a sofa as he stood before her, plates of onion savouries on the table, a pale glass of lemon sharbat in her hand; and when he answered, at last, “I don’t know,” they’d laughed as if it were the most knowing, canny answer to the question.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how long did it last?” Jayojit had asked during one of their conversations, although he already had a fair idea from the person who’d introduced them. The aura of that marriage had preceded her, the story with vague correspondences to his own; all this related by a nondescript go-between, a gentleman wearing bifocals who worked at the middle level of a tea company. She lived on the ground floor of a house with a terrace, somewhere near a park on a by-lane not far from Southern Avenue; here, on the verandah, facing the dark horizon of the park, they were left to themselves (Bonny would be at home with his grandparents), not far from the lit windows of a neighbouring house. She had, in an unostentatious way, attended to herself before his visit, put on lipstick, an outline of kohl, and something on her face that made it pale against the dark.

  There had been a pause; and then, dismissing the memory the question might have brought to her, she’d said:

  “One year.” She was pouring him tea.

  “That’s a bloody short time, if you don’t mind my saying,” said forcefully to convey his indignation not at her but her former husband.

  Then she’d told him how (still conveying to him something of her disbelief ), after going to London with her husband, who was studying medicine there, she’d be left alone in the house without any money. They were in a house on Golders Green; he commuted each morning to King’s College Hospital. She used to sit watching television, or go for long walks. “Actually,” smiling, “I went to Oxford Street only thrice. I didn’t see the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. I wanted to go to the Tower to see all the jewels the Brits took from us and put on their crowns and—what do they call them—sceptres.”

  The clattering of cutlery could be heard inside. After a polite search for a cue, he’d asked her, returning her, without warning, to the present:

  “What’s the park like?” He regarded it in the partial illumination; it seemed both sinister and peaceful. She seemed slightly flustered, as if he’d crossed a boundary and said something personal.

  “Oh, the park . . .” She didn’t know how to put it to him without sounding melodramatic. “It isn’t safe any more. I haven’t been to it for years . . . When I was a child, it was quite nice, though . . .”

  Later, they’d gone in and joined her parents inside; the mother dressed in a tangail sari, the father bespectacled, sipping tea nervously, their shadow on the wall, excited by innocent speculation, partaking of the new romance as if they were at the cinema. They had tea at their own table guiltily. A car passed by outside, lighting the lane and the trees with its headlights.

  She was a junior advertising executive; her parents nowhere near as well-to-do as Amala’s. Yet when he asked her what the job was like, she’d say no more than, “It’s quite nice,” as if her vocabulary had deserted her with the effort of readjusting to this city (she’d lived here, now, for a little more than two years). Or it was probably that she was too respectful of his accomplishments, his achievements. That was during their third meeting in two weeks. He’d begun to like talking to her; the similar traumas they’d suffered had made them uninquisitive about each other, and comfortable about their small silences.

  She might be in the same job (Jayojit was wondering the other day, daydreaming as he seldom did); or moved to another company (as if there were so many other advertising companies to move to in this city in which business had ebbed into a low tide!); or—the last possibility was the likeliest— she might have got married, remarried, with fewer bonds to bind her to her past life than he still had, crossed a bridge really, in which case she need not necessarily be in this city, she might be in another.

  They had met once again, soon after, at a wedding.

  “Really? And how are you related . . .” She in a Bomkai sari (though he was no good at spotting sub-species of women’s garments; his mother had identified it later), exuding a kind of gratitude at his being there.

  He, perspiring, had explained his slender acquaintance, through his parents, with the bridegroom. They might have been making their way through a dark wilderness, so little time did they have alone with each other.

  Light reflected off the cars; their hoods were getting hot. On the main road, buses that were now beginning to get half-full were rushing onward with great urgency. The people in them were already hot, already anxious. The cleaners, by now, had finished their work and a few other latecomers had begun.

  They decided to go up; the Admiral glanced at his watch; it, this Swiss watch with its off-white dial he’d had for years, as remote and familiar as a morning star, said it was a quarter to seven. They’d walked for too long; both of them were certain that Jayojit must be awake. Who would give him tea? thought his fath
er; annoyed with his wife for not having uttered this question. The istriwalla watched them without actually seeing them, as if the morning had made them invisible; and the watchman fumbled and seemed to be waiting for a change to come and take his place. What a young boy he was . . . probably nineteen.

  WHEN EVENING CAME, loud conversations came from other flats, of which even whispers were audible. Sometimes the voices became agitated, or were interrupted by music, or there was a roar at times that turned out to be applause; everything was exaggerated, and not quite commensurate with whatever it was that the sounds were representing.

  Behind this, ancient but entirely of the present, was the sound of crickets.

  Jayojit had been lying on the sofa, reading, fatigued by the weather, until, hearing a noise in the lane, he got up to see what it was and locate it. But it wasn’t possible to see much of the lane from the verandah; only a section of it was visible through the trees.

  “Baba, can I look?” Bonny was standing next to him; he came to no higher than his father’s waist. He stood on tip-toe and arched his back.

  “There’s nothing to see,” said Jayojit. Cars were being parked—it was obvious from the continual and sudden sound of the horns—and the side of a Maruti, shining dully, could just be seen. In the small bit of the lane which they could see, women in silk saris, flickering in the bad light of the lane, passed by. From behind, the Admiral peered out, unappeasable but stoic, and went back in again.

  They could hear the shehnai. It was a tape, for soon the same raags began to be played again.

  “This is not the best time of the year to get married, surely,” declared Jayojit, waving a housefly away with excessive displeasure, as he turned from the verandah; Bonny was still craning his neck outward, his chin above the bannister, hoping to somehow make his face fit into part of the jigsaw puzzle of the grille.

  “It’s the Marwari house next to the building,” said Jayojit’s mother, her face turned away from him. “That big one.”

  Jayojit did not know the one she meant. He’d explored from the outside the large houses like memorials in the lane, but hadn’t seen the one next to the building, or perhaps his memory had refused to give individuality to the neighbouring houses.

  “I should have known.” He made a face, as if disparaging the wastefulness of the community mentioned, but from the safety and distance of irony, without quite the crude derision he’d overheard in conversations.

  They ate at eight-thirty; they would seldom eat later because of the Admiral’s health. Behind the sound of the cutlery—the Admiral habitually made a lot of noise, like one busily dispatching a meal in a railway canteen—the shehnai could be heard, high-pitched, almost intrusive; and then a watchman’s voice on a loudspeaker announcing the numbers of cars, speaking an urgent Hindustani version of English letters and numbers, became audible.

  “But who lives in that house?” asked Jayojit, midway through a spoonful of rice.

  “I don’t know their name,” said his mother.

  “No, no, not that one,” gesturing to the noise. “I meant the other big one opposite. The Jhunjhunwala house.”

  The Admiral looked up; he had been chewing on a small piece of vegetable. “His father started out as a supplier to the automobile industry”—he held up one hand as Jayojit snorted, “What automobile industry!”—“and now they’re in all kinds of things including cement.”

  “A-ha!” as if this had confirmed the essential murkiness behind the existence of that mansion.

  “Can I have some daal, tamma?” Bonny, his gaze nervous and transparent, surprised at his own voice, looked askance at his grandmother, who leaned forward to serve him.

  “Wonder of wonders,” said Jayojit, reaching ostentatiously and serving himself some vegetables. Behind his exaggerated movements was also a returning pain, not so much a backache or an ache in the joints as a discomfort that he was repeatedly trying to exorcise. “I didn’t know you had an appetite.”

  “He has investments abroad,” said the Admiral, continuing undeterred about Jhunjhunwala.

  Bonny was only eating daal; this mild gruel, with one green chilli afloat in it, had become the most desired, sometimes the only, component of his everyday diet. It seemed to demand less of him and leave him alone; and, instinctively realizing this, both his father and grandmother pretended not to care about the unvarying nature of his food. Fish-bones he had trouble with; he only accepted bhetki, and that didn’t always come from the market.

  He finished before the rest were done, and got up and went to the far side of the sitting room and, dabbling with the remote control, turned to MTV; unconcerned that the volume was low, he sat on the rug before it. The sound of the shehnai mixed with this other sound; a succession of images, quicker than a train of association, hurried through the screen. For the Admiral and Mrs. Chatterjee, the television was always on in the evening until a year ago; it didn’t matter if they were watching it or not; the colours of one of the five channels, a rainbow of the chatter and information of the new India, kept changing in one corner of the room. Then, last year, during the second, prolonged custody battle, they’d neglected a couple of episodes of a soap, forgot, as if they’d inadvertently swallowed a pill that erased recent memory, whether Hersh was sleeping with Jordan (you couldn’t tell, from the names, which sex who belonged to) or Richard had finally deserted Anastasia; they’d found they could no longer immerse themselves, or even find a centre, however temporary, in a proxy existence. One day, three months ago, when Mrs. Chatterjee was sitting absently before the TV with the remote control in her hand (she could never fathom how best to use it; she couldn’t cope with the choice it presented to her, and suffered when it was in her control), she saw a face and heard a voice that was dimly familiar. The blonde, sturdy-jawed woman was someone she’d met before: it was Anastasia. She was filled with longing for a bygone simplicity.

  THE NEXT MORNING Jayojit woke up at eight, still sleepy.

  “Did they keep you awake?” he asked, scratching his stubble.

  “I fell asleep,” confessed the Admiral.

  The rest of the day was hot and surprisingly silent. Late last night the lane had echoed, even when the shehnai had died away, with the loudspeaker, imperative and muffled, announcing numbers. Jayojit had caught himself listening to them again in the bathroom as his head jangled to the sound of his own toothbrush. This morning he’d discovered the bathroom light on, its lustre wasted in daylight. He thought ephemerally of the Marwari bridegroom and his new wife, imagined what they might look like, of the wife’s comeliness, and her shyness inevitably wearing away the way the light in the bathroom had merged into the daylight’s ordinariness, and that the two might even be preparing to get on to a plane. He read the papers twice, bored the first time, with the writing and with life in India, and in a more interested way the second time round; then he read an article about how well Indians were doing “abroad”; naturally, by “abroad” the reporter meant not so much Kuwait or Bangladesh but principally America. He not so much disagreed with it as felt the report belonged to another era, another planet. How naive and innocent and ultimately patronizing and misleading everything in it was! After he’d finished, he suddenly missed the vigilant candour of The Times and the New Republic (though he’d taken issue with its recent pro-Clintonism), which he had once subscribed to, in one of those private moods of exuberance he’d had in America and of whose nature his then-wife had been unaware, in 1992. He had forgotten, last year, for some reason unconnected to his inward, slightly enervating, reappraisal of circumstances, to renew the subscription.

  “You can always go to the American Centre,” said his father. “I don’t know if they’ll have the—what did you say it was?—the New Republic, though.”

  Last time he’d been to the American Centre, sceptically, guarding his emigrant status like an undisclosed secret; he was seized not so much by nostalgia as by confusion, and even the Chowringhee outside the glass looked like a photograph. People
were turning the pages of newspapers, browsing through videos; of course they didn’t have the New Republic. He’d gone to the toilet; and coming out, had encountered a strange picture comprising three colours, white, yellow, and green, which he hadn’t been able to understand. He grew impatient. His mind had been formed by his teachers at school and his father’s world, which in turn had been shaped by the late-colonial world (although his father had been against Empire, and was among the ratings who’d sympathized with the three accused of the INA and brought the Empire down by throwing down their arms). It was a mind that had little tolerance for ambiguity; each time it looked at things, it also looked into the mirror of certainties that had shaped it. Yet when the time had come for Jayojit to choose between Britain and America, he’d chosen the latter; though he never felt it was quite good enough for him. Even the other day, when he’d caught his parents returning from their walk early in the morning, he’d said: “How quaint of you two!” Explaining, he’d continued, “You know, in the States, no one walks any more. They drive; and once a week, when they want exercise, they go to the gym.”

  “What if they need—need some matches—or milk?” asked his mother, smiling in puzzlement.

  Worked up like the boy he once used to be, he said: “Oh, they phone! Home delivery! And then they go for a ‘workout’ and walk for hours on a treadmill.”

  “But why?” asked the Admiral, trying to piece the jigsaw together.

  Jayojit laughed and said: “They don’t want to be alone.”

  He headed for the lift in the afternoon; he’d woken from a nap; he couldn’t see Bonny anywhere.

  There was much less light in that corridor that went straight to the other end of this block; at the end of it was framed, as in a painting, a door with a lock on it. There was a staircase going up and down this way, and another staircase rising at the other end of the long corridor; a window at the staircase landing, and one at the other side, and it was light from these that filled the corridor. On both sides of the corridor there were three flats; from here, behind the doors, he’d heard the sound of videos and, once, of a music lesson in progress.