A New World: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Amit Chaudhuri

  “They’ve been around in the U.S. for more than fifty years now,” said Jayojit, slightly impatient. “They don’t seem to have done too badly—so I presume they have some uses.”

  “But we have cheap labour, Joy,” said Admiral Chatterjee, as if making an important point.

  “Once, being married was to have cheap labour,” said Jayojit. A little coldly, he added, “That was a joke.”

  “You know what I mean,” said his father, still pursuing his original line of thought. “You know what I’m saying. It’s easier—and cheaper—to have what’s-her-name do the washing than to buy a washing machine.” He said, “Even if they sold these things in the Fort William canteen”—referring to the place where the Armed Forces could buy certain things at a reduced price—“which I doubt they do, it would still be dear.”

  The sharp conversation reminded Mrs. Chatterjee of her husband’s working days and of the time of her own relative youth. But she enjoyed the impassioned exchange between father and son, the language giving it an intimacy which they could only communicate to each other in words which not so much excluded her as turned her into a spectator.

  “That’s not a worry. If buying it’s the worrisome bit, there’s nothing to worry. Because I’m thinking of buying it.”

  The Admiral stared at him, absorbing this final bit of information, this decision that had been taken without him.

  “This is your doing,” he said, turning to his wife. “Tumi ki bolechho oke?” The accusing Bengali words sounded as unconfrontational as flute-music. For the first time in what seemed a while, Mrs. Chatterjee allowed herself a smile.

  “She hasn’t told me anything, baba! It’s my idea. The way you’re reacting is as if the washing machine was some suspect foreign gadget that arrived here yesterday. You know, it’s been around for more than ten years.”

  The Admiral became glum, like a child always used to having his own way finding himself again in a situation where all is not going as he wishes it to.

  “It’s out of the question. Besides, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  Jayojit sighed. It was difficult to negotiate with his father when he was in this dogmatic mood.

  “We’re living in a consumer society, baba,” said Jayojit. “We might as well make use of it.” So saying, he suddenly unbuttoned the top of his shirt and began to fan himself with an old magazine.

  “We are . . . we are,” said the Admiral, not sounding very pleased, as if the realization had dawned on him in a moment of final and unexpected insight.

  “I need a glass of water,” said Jayojit, getting up abruptly. “My throat keeps going dry in this heat.”

  “Not just one glass, baba!” said his mother. “You must have at least eight glasses a day, isn’t it?” She looked around, beaming. “And the same is true,” she said, “for a young man I know.”

  HEAT, COLD, HEAT, COLD... especially when the air-conditioner was switched on. And the Admiral, having gone in once to convey some message to Jayojit, had stepped out into a wall of heat.

  “This is not good for anyone,” he’d said. “This is why I don’t like this city. This swamp climate and that artificial coolness.” He scratched his beard. And though the city was the Admiral’s birthplace, he didn’t feel it was; he was always a newcomer here, slightly taken aback by the weather and the people.

  No wonder, then, that Bonny sneezed once or twice a couple of days later; he wasn’t used to sneezing; it made him feel slightly conspicuous.

  “What’s this, what’s this, when did this happen?” said Jayojit, showing his teeth in a smile.

  The Admiral looked displeased, as if he’d contracted a cold himself.

  “‘Running nose’ ache?” called Bonny’s grandmother from a distance, sounding concerned and professional.

  “Let’s see if you have a runny nose, pal,” said Jayojit, getting up from the sofa. The light of the laptop he’d sat facing for the last forty-five minutes went off. “No, it’s f-i-ine,” reassured Jayojit, scrutinizing the boy’s face. “It’s a little moist, but it’s all right, really.”

  He took his son to the museum that afternoon, and before the exhibits Bonny sneezed embarrassedly three or four times, and was at a loss to understand the beauty of Gandhara sculpture. Instead, he stared at an American couple in shorts, craning forward to examine a Buddha; they were something he could recognize. All the Buddhas were in meditation; half-smiling, they’d transcended the trauma of that first registering of disease, old age, and death with which the quest had begun; while Bonny peered at a card and said: “B.C. Hey, that’s Before Christ, baba!”

  Outside, in spite of the runny nose, they had ice-cream, Bonny a vanilla cone, Jayojit an orange stick.

  And returning, Jayojit told the Admiral without much amusement:

  “The most interesting relic was the museum itself.”

  Late that night, a blocked nose developed, and Jayojit, listening to Bonny’s breathing, had half a mind to switch off the run-down air-conditioning. When he went to the bathroom, the heat was disturbed by a flash of lightning, and then the sound of thunder. Jayojit experienced a stirring within him even as he tied the cords of his pyjamas.

  Returning, he saw his son was breathing with his mouth open. He felt his forehead to see if it was warm; held his hand against his own forehead to see which was warmer; there was a flash of lightning outside the window. The boy had no temperature.

  WITHOUT HIS SPECTACLES Jayojit looked blank; and he needed to take them off—a heavy tortoise-shell frame—and wipe them. But now it had begun to rain more frequently. Before it rained there was a breeze to herald the coming downpour. And this was making Jayojit sing:

  Da da da da nai chini go she ki

  Turu tu tu turu turu

  That morning he read an editorial in a damp newspaper about how economic liberalization was urgently required, but how, too, if introduced without caution, it might lead not only to the loss of what was seen to be Indian culture, but to uncontrollable economic disparity.

  Do we want to go the way of Brazil or South Korea? The former’s economic “progress” has been unstable to say the least, and darkened by undesirable social problems, while the latter has only consolidated itself. As Prof. Sen has pointed out, this consolidation is related to the successful campaigns for literacy and healthcare in that country: India must learn from this. The problem we face with liberalization is not, after all, the loss of our culture and native traditions. For what is Indian culture, anyway? It has been redefined at every stage in history by its contact with what at first was perceived as “foreign.” No, the problem is whether India can provide the basic infrastructure—not only industrial infrastructure, but the infrastructure of human resources—that can not only benefit from but contribute to liberalization.

  “What are you reading?” asked the Admiral, hovering about his son. Since the weather had cooled he had become more energetic.

  “I suppose it’s not uninteresting,” said Jayojit. “But mixed up. The eternal question: the chicken or the egg.”

  Jayojit had had a dream while in university, like his fellow students, about socialism and a just world order; but no longer; now the important questions were whether there could be justice without economic well-being, whether, in a poor country, healthcare and literacy needed to be a prerequisite to deregulation, or whether deregulation would provide the economic wherewithal for literacy and healthcare.

  Di di di nai chini go she ki

  . . . Jani ne, jani ne

  Later that afternoon, he even wondered if he should write the Statesman a letter; leisure had slowed down his thoughts, and he’d been too long away from the lecturing mode; like a teething child, faintly despondent, he needed to bite into something. He even had a sentence running in his head with which to begin: “Sir, with reference to your article in the leader, one must begin by sounding a note of caution about assuming that economic deregulation will be a panacea to all our problems; but it will, no doubt, be one to so
me of them.” This sentence ran in his head, its shape changing slightly.

  He considered putting it down on the computer on the dining-table. When he connected it to a socket, it flashed to life, its light at first hurting his eyes. Peering, he strained to read at a glance the crowd of icons; the cursor moved at his touch. Yet immediately he lost interest in the blank slate of the screen, and noticed that the time on the screen was wrong; it was the time in Claremont; “Damn thing.”

  He went to the apple which had a bit of it chewed off; the arrow settled on it lightly. His mother, on the sofa, was saying:

  “Bonny, let me see if you have grown taller.”

  “Not now, tamma.”

  “Why, what are you doing, shona?”

  He was retrieving a toy car that had gone underneath a cupboard.

  “I’m busy, tamma.” He was never not busy. Even the cold hadn’t slowed him down. Yet there were times when he just lay on his back, staring at the ceiling; was it the heat? He breathed deeply as he got up now, and wiped his nose.

  “Come here and let me see,” said his grandmother. “Thhammar kachhe esho.”

  “Okay.”

  After looking him up and down and nodding, as if she’d been right, Mrs. Chatterjee said:

  “How old will you be?”

  “How old?”

  “How old, next year, baba?” Teasing him, she looked at him. Just yesterday, before midday, when she’d closed her eyes for five minutes before the tiny gods and goddesses by the dressing-table, his face had come to her eyes. Sometimes she could see Amala in the boy’s straight eyebrows and in his small forehead.

  The boy considered this question with gravity.

  “Eight,” he said reluctantly.

  “When will you be taller than me?” Mrs. Chatterjee said.

  It began to rain. Bonny ran towards the verandah and pressed his face against the grille. “Wow,” he said.

  The Admiral stood in the balcony, allowing the wind to unsettle his hair. He switched on an electric light, and Bonny’s shadow fell to his left and enveloped part of the furniture.

  “Where’s it coming from?” the Admiral said, regarding what could either have been the grille or a point beyond it.

  Jayojit had changed the time from 5:32 a.m., in which the colon between the numbers pulsed repeatedly, to 3:32 p.m. by simply moving the band from Detroit, U.S.A., to Calcutta, India. He rubbed an eye; the light from the screen had begun to hurt his eyes ever since the sky’d become dark.

  His mother was now removing, rather unhappily, some of the damp clothes from the clothesline.

  Kites descended at times as low as this balcony. Then they took off again.

  It wasn’t clear whether this was simply a seasonal change; though it was true that they hadn’t been seen so close during the summer. Their wings hooded their bodies, and Jayojit had gone up quite close to one and noticed how pointed and talon-like its beak was. They usually sat on the parapets outside windows, or on the ends of pipes.

  The weather dictated other small changes. Mrs. Chatterjee had to move the plants in the verandah (which she appeared to ignore but which, as it turned out, she actually tended to carefully when no one else was around) to the right, where they could get more light. And the clothesline, on which the clothes used to act like weather-vanes to the wind and heat, was moved to Jayojit’s parents’ bathroom.

  A few times, of late, the Admiral had found his grandson playing hide-and-seek among the two clotheslines that had been hung in his bathroom. He’d bent to wash his face, and had heard a sound; unbending, he’d say, “Who’s that?” Bonny emerged from behind the drying clothes. “What’s this, dadu,” said the Admiral. “You’re here?” “You didn’t see me at first, did you, dadu?”

  “You have a regular garden here,” said Jayojit to his mother, relaxing in the verandah. “What are these plants?”

  “Oh, don’t ask me,” said Mrs. Chatterjee. “Mali used to come, but he doesn’t come these days. All for the good . . .” she pondered. “I have to pay Maya two hundred rupees, we can’t afford another one.” Always exaggerating this state of being hard up, he thought. She turned to look at a plant, as if she’d just noticed it. “That one’s eglonomia; that one,” shifting her gaze, “is money plant.”

  “Nice leaves,” said Jayojit, looking critically at the eglonomia. He tore off part of a leaf—it was dying—with a finicky, calculated movement. The sun dimmed, as if it had been snuffed out, and then kindled again as a cloud moved past.

  THE 29TH OF MAY. A small desk ANZ Readymoney calendar, with photographs of wildlife accompanying each month; it had come as a gift from the bank. Jayojit’s mother was choosy about calendars; calendars came and calendars went; there were calendars from steel plants and fledgling joint-ventures that were given away as gifts; this one she had kept on the wall-unit in the living room, next to an old, wooden, miniature tusker that was advancing somewhere, and which would look deprived of purpose without it next to it.

  Jayojit had gone out to the American Express office on Old Court House Street, whose façade was dominated by opaque sheets of glass, to change some traveller’s cheques, and then passed the Governor’s (once the Viceroy’s) house on the way back, to the Grindlays Bank in the south, where he had an account. He had opened the account three years ago, not so much on an impulse as guided by instinct, not to speak of fresh opportunities the bank was presenting to NRIs, so that interest rates were not only higher here than in the recession-ridden West, but that, more promisingly, the money could be converted, whenever he wished it, to foreign exchange. They sent him bank statements, of course; and cheque books.

  “I waited in the bank for a while—after all, it’s air-conditioned—reading all the ads for ANZ Readymoney. I thought, what the hell, it’s not pouring too heavily, I’ll risk it and take a cab.”

  After a while he said, as if admitting to something slightly embarrassing:

  “I like that branch.”

  The Admiral said:

  “Yes, I like it too. And that fellow who works there— Sanyal; Dr. Sanyal’s son. Always helpful.”

  Jayojit, though, when he walked through the glass doors into the air-conditioned space, forgot about Sanyal. Once you came into close contact with the staff, you realized that things were being run with some tardiness and confusion; not confusion, perhaps, but something like it. Jayojit disliked being ignored for too long; he realized, wryly, that he had the fragile pride of the dollar-earner in these matters.

  “Sir, could you wait for a few minutes?”

  A girl in a cotton sari, an outline of kohl around her eyes; he turned from her to gaze absently upon a rather innocent poster of a young, and apparently happy and affluent, couple filling in a form.

  The girl continued to write for about five minutes. She was not aware that he was looking at her again; until he let his attention drift and shifted his gaze towards the other people in the bank.

  “Sir?”

  He had begun to daydream; it was him she was calling. At last! She was looking straight at him. He shifted out of the sofa; he felt conscious of his largeness, but he used his imposingness unobtrusively on these occasions.

  There was an air-conditioner behind her. (But this must be so much nicer than home, thought Jayojit, trying to imagine what her home must be like.)

  “Sir, you wish to deposit fifteen hundred dollars into which account, savings or fixed?”

  Her voice was girlish, but detached and polite; in spite of its lack of volume and insistence, it was clearly audible among other voices and transactions.

  “Fixed,” he said after a moment. He was probably not as conversant with these terms as he should be.

  He was transferring this money because, over the next two years at least, he’d be here for part of the year; that, after all, was the arrangement. Bonny was to be with him. Better to have some money earning interest when he was away. She bent her head to write something again. Jayojit luxuriated in the breeze coming from the air-condi
tioner. He noticed that there was no vermilion in the middle parting. The pleasure this artificial breeze gave him never lessened; it relaxed him whenever he happened to be in its path.

  “I’ve never heard this name before,” she said, smiling. It was as if she’d let this slip out accidentally.

  The absence of vermilion did not necessarily mean she was unmarried; at least, not these days any more.

  “That’s true,” he said, reluctantly drawn into the conversation. “It is quite unusual.” He wondered again what “Jayojit” exactly meant, and why his parents had given him this name. “The one who is victorious over victory itself.” His parents must really have been straining to find a name that was new, a name not in common currency. And they had created this mutation. Then, as if in reaction, they’d given his younger brother quite a traditional name: Ranajit.

  As if she’d noticed something or somebody, she said:

  “Please give me a few minutes.”

  Jayojit turned and saw a middle-aged man who’d probably been waiting behind him for some time return to a sofa where other customers sat. He absently held his passport in one hand, in case she needed it. A couple of minutes had passed and a girl from an enclave within called, “Sunita, could you please complete this rupee draft, please?” Sunita, still attending to Jayojit, looked up and said, “It’s completed.” “No, no,” said the other girl (she was dressed in a salwaar kameez), “this one’s to Bombay.” The woman did not reply for a few seconds; she was looking at the form; and then, plangently, “Give me a few seconds, yaar,” she said. “Ten different things . . .” she muttered in a lower voice.

  After some moments had passed, she continued in that low voice, murmuring her surprise to herself:

  “Surajit I’ve heard of, and Ranajit—and I have a cousin called Biswajit . . .”

  At first he thought it was rain again, and then discovered it was the air-conditioner, its hum imitating the sound of a downpour. Unlikely name for Ranajit, though, for a less war-like person one wouldn’t find, nor one as absorbed in the small-scale promises of corporate work; or so Jayojit imagined.