In the lane, Bonny ran a little way ahead (“Careful!” said his father). A watchman said: “Kahaa jate ho, baba?”; he knew Bonny now, but received no acknowledgement in return except an increase in speed. Raat-ki-rani and nameless but characteristic creepers, a colony whose presence was taken for granted, flourished by the gate. He didn’t always obey everything his father said; it was Amala who used to be the symbol of authority at home, and the one who would invariably dispense it. Nothing that had happened yet had changed the way that he viewed his parents; he saw the present arrangement as an experiment. He couldn’t clearly distinguish between fifteen minutes and half an hour, let alone knowing what a longer period of time was.
“That’s a pretty big house,” said Bonny after his father had caught up with him, standing suddenly to look at a two-storeyed mansion, probably built in the twenties or thirties, repainted yellow. A banyan stood alone in the courtyard, and its shadow sat meditating beneath it. “Is the guy who owns it quite rich?”
There was an outbreak of shrill chattering in the branches. The slatted windows of the mansion looked back blankly at the boy.
“Might have been at one time,” said Jayojit. “Probably gone mad by now, all alone in that huge place.”
There was no sound; the birds were quiet again.
“Yeah; right,” said the boy.
Yet something had made him pause before the old house, not just because of its largeness, but its silence in the midst of all the small sounds.
“There’s a taxi,” said Jayojit, pointing to a shadow.
Abruptly, as if he’d become aware of the sunlight between the trees, Bonny narrowed his eyes. Then he looked at the taxi; last time they’d walked to Gariahat.
Jayojit’s mother had once told him, “Joy, there’s always a taxi at the corner of the lane”; now her words came back to him.
Two men, in their late twenties or early thirties, were sitting on the front seat, a geometry of detachment. The heat was like a presence in the taxi; one could sense it from outside. Jayojit knocked twice on the door at the back.
“Will you go?” he asked, bending forward.
The driver turned to look at him.
“Kahaa?” he asked, avoiding his eye.
“Gariahat.”
A pause; then the driver shook his head, and his companion shifted slightly.
“Bloody fool,” thought Jayojit, his silent but vehement voice surprising himself, and then gently steered Bonny towards the main road.
Some of the trees were still heavy with gulmohur blossoms. At intervals in the lane, they recurred, the ones in the distance a blurred mass of deep orange. They found a taxi on the main road going in the other direction.
“Gariahat?” said Jayojit, uncharacteristically tentative now; more tense than tentative. He’d lost the knack of talking to these people and it often made him rude. Light shimmered upon the doors of the taxi. The driver, older than him or approximately his age, gestured to the back, and leaned forward to swing down the meter; Bonny, entering, sat at the edge and rested his chin disconsolately on the shiny plastic of the front seat.
“The market,” Jayojit said in Bengali, loudly, as if he were speaking in a foreign language.
The taxi moved slowly; Bonny’s head vibrating gently with the motion.
On the way they passed, at intervals, two ice-cream carts pushed by men in blue uniforms who almost immediately became reflections in the driver’s mirror.
“What’s Kwality?” asked Bonny.
Meanwhile, the driver, all of a sudden animated, blew his horn at a slow-moving private car, driven by an old man before him.
“What’s Kwality?”
After a couple of repetitions, Jayojit said: “Oh, “quality!” Let’s see . . . that’s the value of a thing. How good or bad a thing is.”
“Oh,” said Bonny. As Jayojit began thinking to himself about the way everyday speech had entered the language of economics and vice versa—for instance, the word “value”— Bonny said, “Why’s it painted on those vans?”
“What is?”
“Kwality,” came the reply.
A moment later, illumination came. “Oh that’s the name of an ice-cream,” he said. He realized that he had become something of a pedant with his son, always doing his best to rescue him from spelling mistakes and misinformation; unrepentant, he said, “That’s not a real word! The word I was talking about is”—and he spelt “quality.”
“Ice-cream?” said Bonny, lifting his chin from the seat, as if, like doughnuts, ice-cream was too outrageous to mention here.
“You can have some later,” promised Jayojit. This was a commitment to be honoured at some unspecified moment.
“Can I have some now, baba?” asked Bonny, tilting his face into the shadow, towards his father.
“Not now, Bonny, sorry,” said Jayojit, slapping a housefly off his trousers, and then busily smoothing them again. “See, the ice-cream van’s gone”—his voice shook as the taxi tried to swerve unsuccessfully around a pothole—“and . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, as if he’d already conveyed what he wanted to say. As an afterthought, he said, “Gariahat might have ice-cream.”
Just outside, the sun lay like fire on the pavement; two peasants sat on their haunches upon a kerb.
There were children everywhere, scattered and released from school; a pavement stall selling newspapers.
They were approaching the market; the tramlines here met and gleamed.
“Turn left and stop there,” said Jayojit, pointing to the opposite side of the road.
They waited for a tram to pass, the taxi already tensed to compete with a neighbouring car to make the first movement. When the taxi jerked forward, Bonny clutched the seat with his fingers, puzzled, but the impulse to race was spent almost as soon as it was surrendered to, and they were no more in motion.
“How much?” Jayojit asked, opening the door and stepping out. “Careful, Bonny, don’t get out on that side”; afraid because of the buses like juggernauts.
The meter said nine rupees.
“Tero taka,” said the driver. Thirteen rupees; lucky number. Jayojit took out the notes from his wallet and handed them to the driver—they were from the second wad of cash he’d got across the counter after coming here, and the perforations from where the staples had been violently prised open still showed—who counted them, and fished in his pocket for change. There seemed to be confusion about whether, indeed, the driver had the change or not.
“Fourteen, fifteen,” he said finally, as if muttering a charm to the counting of a rupee and two fifty paisa coins, and completed the transaction by dropping them into Jayojit’s palm.
He turned and found that Bonny wasn’t there. Where in the world is he? He went through the narrow passage between two stalls, and saw a boy in a t-shirt standing before a shop: Bonny.
“Ei khokababu,” said a voice, “ei khokababu!”
“Don’t disappear like that,” said Jayojit to the unsurprised boy. “Okay?”
Bonny assented by saying nothing and lifting his eyes to look at his father; then he rubbed one eye with the back of a hand.
“Dada—take a look at these shirts!”
Bonny was wearing sneakers; he must be hot—it might be an idea to buy him a pair of sandals. Where was Bata?
They went past vendors selling fruit on beds of straw. Mangoes had just come into season, piled pale green on baskets, but theirs was a peculiar family, because the Admiral couldn’t stand mangoes and the mess they made, and Jayojit had inherited his father’s fastidiousness; his mother, over the last few years, had become stoic; and the money she thus saved compensated somewhat for her yearning for the first langra and himsagar. Finally, Jayojit paused and went inside a store and asked for Dove soap. His mother had said “Dove” wistfully when he’d asked her which soap they used these days; it used to be Pears, he knew, but on this visit, like a new discovery, it was Dove; and since it was more expensive, a rare indulgence. As if by coinci
dence, he now saw an advertisement on one of the glass windows of the cabinets inside. The model, in the make-believe opulence of her bath, looked familiar, but she couldn’t be, she was too young; he’d stopped noticing models for years now; the last model he could remember—and he was surprised at the trivial information his mind retained—was called Anne Bredemeyer. “Dove,” he said, without knowing who would respond; there were three men behind the counter who themselves had the searching air of visitors.
“Give us a Dove soap!” said a man in kurta and pyjamas to someone at the back, then turned to Jayojit, “Anything else?”
Jayojit looked at the medicine racks behind the man, looking back at Bonny to see if he was on the steps, noted the fan overhead, and scanned the shelves for shampoo. But it was conditioner he wanted; his hair was greying; the grey had been seeping into the black. But he didn’t see any conditioner, unless it was disguised as something else; he saw bottles that said “frequent use” and “for greasy hair.” His hair, if anything, was too dry. About five or more seconds had passed since the thin man had said “Aar kichhu?”—and now Jayojit found himself saying, “Colgate toothpaste achhe?” almost ironically, then pondering on a suitable reply to “Chhoto na bado?”—“Small or large?”; and as an afterthought, adding “talcum powder.”
He’d seen a commercial on television the day before yesterday in which a busybody of a child was brushing his teeth with Colgate.
“Which powder?” asked the man behind the counter, who was shrunken but fastidious.
“Any will do,” confessed Jayojit. “Pond’s,” he said; the word had just come to him out of nowhere.
“Pond’s,” the man said. He turned. “Jodu,” he called, “Pond’s talcum powder de!”
Another man came out from behind a cupboard and looked at Jayojit with the interested equanimity of one looking at himself in a mirror.
“Pond’s?” he said, as if he was not sure if he’d heard correctly, and retreated again.
More fumblings.
“That’s seventy rupees,” said the man at last, writing numbers secretively on the back of an envelope.
On the way back they stopped at a bookshop that Jayojit noticed behind a photocopying and STD booth. The sky had darkened a few minutes before they entered. The man who ran the shop, dressed in a creased dhoti and kurta, regarded the rain without wonder or accusation as it began to fall in isolated drops.
“Baba, I wanna touch it,” cried Bonny, jumping in the doorway by the bookshelves.
“Go on then.”
The shopkeeper looked up once again—as if at a noise in the distance—and looked downward. The lane was subsumed in a gloom which made the colours of the unremarkable multi-storeyed building before them more visible. “But the rains aren’t supposed to start till two weeks later,” thought Jayojit, irritated, thinking of the weather fronts and insubstantial bands of high pressure building up over the South and the coasts of Kerala; grateful, too, for the breeze. Contemptuous, he turned his back to the drama of the rains. He looked, unseeing, at the rows of Penguin Indias, and registered, remotely, as one would the words of an exotic language, the Marquezes, Vargas Llosas; next to them, slim books of horoscopes; arranged for a reader who wasn’t very clear about what he was looking for.
He began to look for a book at random; noted the motto “Everyman, I will be thy guide”; stared, with some scepticism, at some of the books by Indian writers; “They not only look light, they feel lightweight as well,” he thought, weighing one in his hand; he picked up a new paperback of A Suitable Boy with a theatrical air which there was no one to note. The last book he’d read was a volume treading, in the fog of post-structuralist theory, a tightrope between history and Keynesian economics; and he was going to give it a bad review for the university humanities journal. A colleague, an Italian American called Antonio who edited the journal, had sent it to him with a note: “Dear J, I know there are worse things in life than reading a deconstruction of classical economic theory (tell me about it!) but things aren’t half as bad as you think. Snap out of it, pal, and send me 1,500 words when you feel like it. Don’t leave it till the millennium. Best, Tony.” Antonio, settled with three children, married to a half-Vietnamese, half-French American, setting up the book for a bad review, knowing full well Jayojit’s distaste for airy-fairy “theory.” But Bonny was getting his t-shirt damp with the spray. Afraid of being reprimanded by his mother (he feared not so much his mother’s words as her silences), Jayojit said:
“Come in here, you!”
“Oh, baba!”
He hopped into the shop, throwing a glance at the books stacked everywhere. Jayojit brushed the moisture from the boy’s hair with his fingers. “Stand still!” Then: “Turn round”; the boy turning not so much obediently as displaying his swiftness; yet the tiniest bit afraid of his father’s brusqueness. “Okay.” He was thin now with burnt-up energy, but when he’d been born he’d been seven and a half pounds and his grandmother, his mother’s mother, had said, after the long night: “Ki bonny baby eta!” Yes, Bonny had been pink (“a little white mouse,” his mother had called him), with a hint of black hair which Amala repeatedly admired. They’d been in Claremont then, the nursing home had been on the outskirts, and the grandmother had come to be with her daughter. A week later, when it had come home, Jayojit had taken footage of the child, its first movements in the cot between the double bed and cupboard, and moments captured from its spells of sleep, on a camcorder, dipping into the baby’s life with the lens for two days, and then made videos for both sets of parents, who’d noted both the baby and the beauty of the house. The shopkeeper seemed not to notice the boy and the thirty-seven-year-old father’s exchange; keeping a vigil, he stared at Jayojit, his eyelids flickered respectfully, and, after opening his mouth to yawn, turned back to the books he was stacking on the table.
“How much is this?” asked Jayojit. He was holding a large hardcover in one hand; the picture of a cheetah, gold and black, jumped out of the cover. Its shadow leapt with the lightning.
The shopkeeper touched the book as if he intended, by some power of transformation, to make it seem like a saleable commodity. Wrapped in cellophane, its price was scribbled on the first page. “Five hundred and twenty rupees,” he said; some of his teeth were rust-brown with betel. His eyes held Jayojit’s. “Hm.” Jayojit turned the pages and consulted them heavy-handedly, superiorly. “Well, less than what I’d pay for it in New York,” he thought.
THE NEXT MORNING, the first day of the last week of May, he woke up feeling vulnerable and exposed. He hadn’t felt desire in a long time. Bonny’d been born, and at that time there had been a cutting off of sexual activity. Instead, when they had time, they would go to parks and sit on benches, admire the Fall’s redness that hung about the trees like an aura, talk about the new General Electric factory that was to come up in the outskirts and what it would do to jobs and to Claremont, and discuss moving to big cities in the East.
“When I was a kid, you know,” he told her when they were talking about the appeal of New York, and the fact that New York is attractive to every kind of Indian, from taxi drivers to dentists, “I used to think the Big Apple was the studio where the Beatles recorded their songs.”
She, in turn, warming to her memory of the Beatles, revealed to him how she’d liked Paul the best of the four, and how her friends would count how old they’d be when he was thirty-five. “I’m twenty-nine now,” she said, watching two children play with a frisbee. “He must be . . . forty-five.”
“You’ll still be quite young when he’s sixty-four,” said Jayojit.
She turned to him in mock disdain. “Poor joke, Mr. Chatterjee,” she said.
“I’m a Lennon fan myself,” he’d said, remembering the sixties in which both he and Amala had grown up, she in Calcutta and he in so many different places.
He lay there, thinking of what he’d dreamed of, and couldn’t return to it. Had he had indigestion? A crow perched on the silent air-conditione
r was crying out repeatedly. He gave himself to recalling, for a couple of minutes, what it was that accounted for this pressure of longing; as if it were someone else’s body, he discovered he had an erection beneath his shorts. He was bare-chested—he’d taken off his shirt during a power-cut in the morning—and his body-hair was ink-black spread against the fair skin.
He got up to urinate; washed his face; glanced at the watch; nine forty-five. It had rained when they were sleeping, a stealthy downpour; the water from the tap was cool. They might have had another child. Two to five minutes, that’s all it took. In retrospect, thank God they didn’t.
He didn’t dry his face immediately, but draped the towel around his neck, his forehead moist.
His mother was standing near the dining table.
“Once the rains come”—to her, evidently, the incontrovertible fact of rainfall wasn’t enough; the rains would only “come” when it was time for them to, the 10th of June—“I’ll have to dry these in the bathroom,” she said, looking at the clothes in the verandah.
“Why don’t you buy a washing machine?”
His mother looked up. “Joy, they have new ones in that shop in Gariahat—‘Pleasant’—I’ve seen them; they wring the clothes so dry that it takes only half a day to dry them.”
“I know,” said Jayojit, with the air of speaking of a celebrated personality with whom he was already on first-name terms. “Who makes them?” he asked.
“There’s that one,” she said vaguely, “BPL . . . No— IBF or IFB . . .” She sounded tired and unconvinced.
There was a difference between his parents with regard to appliances; his father distrusted them as he would a rival; his mother had no confidence in using them, but none the less desired them. There was no doubt that a washing machine would help; probably it was too expensive for them. Jayojit wondered if he could offer to buy them one.
“But what use will it be?” said the Admiral, dismissing the idea with a wave of one hand.
Mrs. Chatterjee would say nothing; she would not argue with her husband.
A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) Page 8