None of this—this work—required special ability, he was sure; mainly dependability and some intelligence. She needed the money to buy her own saris and stick-on bindis. Maybe she had a boyfriend.
“My younger brother’s called Ranajit,” he said.
She adjusted her sari, as if she knew she was being watched.
“What’s the dollar like today?” he asked abrasively, as if asking after the health of a brash young relative who seldom fell ill.
She glanced behind her at a board, surreptitious, and murmured:
“Twenty-eight rupees today.” Then, looking down, she raised her face to him again.
“Sir, the interest rate’s 14.5 per cent presently,” she said, smiling.
“I should put all my money in here,” he quipped loudly.
“THE BOY’S STILL SNIFFLING, isn’t he?” said the Admiral. “He shouldn’t come to this city at all, it isn’t good for him.” Mrs. Chatterjee looked at her husband in disbelief, as if he’d uttered words which, like a prophecy, might come true; there is a saying in Bengali, “Ku daak deko na,” which warns against invoking unwanted things irresponsibly, in case the words have an effect and make them come into being.
After studying her grandson’s symptoms, she thought it wasn’t necessary to ask Dr. Sen to make the trip downstairs; as he was a semi-retired doctor, there were times, paradoxically, when he was more difficult to get hold of than a practising one; and, anyway, he’d prescribe Incidal or Cosavil, whose names Mrs. Chatterjee was familiar with. Looking after the Admiral had given her a compounder’s familiarity with the names of the commoner drugs.
Yet the periodic sniffing cleared up in two days; whether because of Mrs. Chatterjee’s inspired diagnosis or because the microbe had lived its life they didn’t know.
Meanwhile, Jayojit double-checked the date on his ticket; it was for the 6th of July.
“I suppose I should reconfirm it,” he said. “In person.” What he meant was that he didn’t trust Bangladesh Biman. He had a strong intuition that they wouldn’t be available on the phone. Even in Claremont, getting through to the Detroit office had taken a resigned, mechanical tenacity and, simply, time; even a sort of stupidity. The phone would keep ringing, ringing.
“You know where the office is?” said his father, touching his beard.
“Yeah, I have a fair idea,” said Jayojit, with something like a shrug.
The date had been arrived at at random, but they needed to get back around then, when it was still summer. Their “India trip” would have ended, a few of Bonny’s friends, some of whom were new “best friends” and lived near where he now lived with his mother and his mother’s “boyfriend,” and some of the old ones he might look up in Claremont, would have been sent to summer camp by their parents. Some had gone on round-the-world trips with their families, parents or older brothers and sisters (Jayojit hazily recalled Bonny telling him that a girl he knew in class would be in Kathmandu with her older sister around the same time they’d be in India; they planned to go up the lower foothills of the Himalayas); it was difficult to say about the summer—it was a season when people went on holiday and you had no idea when exactly they’d be back. At any rate, Bonny would return to his mother in August—“Is it August or September?” the Admiral had asked Jayojit yesterday; “No, August,” Jayojit had said—and he had no clear plans about what they’d do in Claremont till then.
“You could go back a week later,” said the Admiral; there was only the smallest hint of an appeal, implacable as a child’s, in his voice.
“I keep forgetting how quickly it gets dark here,” said Jayojit, as if it were yet another peculiarity he’d discovered.
“Well, we’re in the East,” said the Admiral, clearing his throat, speaking with the assurance of one who had been intimate with cartography. A light had been switched on in the sitting room.
Later, Jayojit went down to check if there was any mail in the letter-box. He did everything officiously, as if no task was unimportant; yet felt a mild apprehension when doing this self-imposed chore.
“Baba, wait for me!” said Bonny as he walked towards the door. “Wait for me,” he repeated from inside.
“You want to come?” There was mild disbelief in his voice. For Bonny avoided the children downstairs. A wary look came to his face whenever their voices reached upstairs, and he’d go to his room and reread one of the three or four books he’d brought with him.
As they stepped out of the lift, lights were switched on. And by five o’clock in the morning there would be daylight again, earlier than almost anywhere else; his mother, after switching on the transistor radio that was tuned to Calcutta A, would water the plants, and then his father and she, after the first cup of tea to which both were addicted, and without which this early hour was sluggish, might go out for a walk. Then, returning, more tea, bowel movements, a rhythm to which they blindly adhered.
He crossed the hall, appearing larger than he really was, and walked towards the row of letter-boxes; bending, he opened his father’s. The cries of children swelled behind him, and he almost expected to be collided with. There was nothing inside the narrow space, until he noticed a piece of paper folded vertically; an electricity bill; unblinking, his eyes went round it as he searched for the sum, one thousand five hundred and eighty rupees for the months of April and May (must be because the air-conditioner was running in his room these days); underneath it, he discovered there was an envelope. He bent forward and ran his finger clumsily through the top of the envelope, tearing it with short bursts of movement. Taking out a relatively small sheet of paper whose print could be seen faintly from its blank side, Jayojit read, with a look of amused disbelief:
Dear Madam,
We are pleased to say that Madamoiselle of Delhi is now in your area in Calcutta. Please visit us at between 9:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. on any day except Sunday and you will find a welcoming staff eager to cater to your interests. We have a wide range of salwaar kameez outfits, chunnis, Bolero jackets and we also stock decorations. Special discounts are available. Tailoring services are provided. Please lose no time in availing our services. We look forward to seeing you in the near future.
Yours sincerely,
Shaila Motwane
Some enterprising Sindhi woman. Shouldn’t it be “availing yourself of?” There was a chatty self-confidence in the tone that, in other circumstances, might have almost disarmed him.
He didn’t see Bonny at first; for a second he mistook another boy for him, and then saw that he was leaning where a wall had thrown a shadow, against a pillar; a few children, some of whom Jayojit somehow seemed to know by sight, were playing around him—a Sikh boy; another curly-haired boy. As Jayojit advanced, Bonny waved to him. Jayojit waved back and shouted, “Coming!” as the Sikh boy rushed past on roller-skates.
Near the steps was a group of teenagers in t-shirts. They were half-defined; in semi-darkness, as in the inside of a discothèque. They spoke softly to each other, not in Bengali, but in Hindi. “This is their city,” thought Jayojit ruefully. “Its future lies with them.”
“Want to play?” he said, leaning over his son and wiping his forehead.
“Not really, baba.”
Bonny’d never been shy at school or at home. He usually had two or three good buddies; Jayojit, from a past life, knew Ciaran, an Irish-American, and Ajay, a Gujarati doctor’s son.
“Want to play with me, then?” asked Jayojit. “What about it?”
He felt proud of the boy and, contradictorily, wanted to show him off while protecting him. Two boys were playing table-tennis on one side of the hall. They’d stop and one would announce “Five two!” or “Three love!,” the louder to give the score a legitimacy, then resume the game at once.
“Hey, Ajit,” said a girl, eleven or twelve years old, stepping towards the table.
“Kya hai, bhai?” said the larger boy, his movements lazy after the last point.
“Give me the key, I’m going up,” she said.
She blinked as the boy dug into his pocket.
“What happened to mummy?” asked the boy as he handed the key over, as if “mummy” were a constant nuisance.
Play started again. There was a moment of hesitation after the game ended; then Jayojit went up to one of them and said, stammering courteously:
“I say . . . can we have a few shots . . . if you guys don’t mind—just for a few minutes.”
“I don’t mind, uncle,” the thinner boy said. “It’s okay, huh, Ajit?”
The boy, who’d voiced his exasperation about his mother not long ago, responded with an unequivocal gesture.
“Thanks, guys,” said Jayojit, looming over the two. “Here, Bonny, see what you can do with this.”
They, Bonny’s hair sticking to his forehead with sweat, played the simplest game, quite unlike the storm the other two had created; an uncomplicated give-and-take; Bonny’s small frame had agility, but was still to acquire discipline. It wasn’t a game, just an exchange of shots, measured and calculated. When either missed, they chased awkwardly after the ball and started again immediately. Everywhere the noise of children about their own breathless business surrounded them. After five minutes, Jayojit handed his racquet to one of the boys:
“I say, thanks, guys.”
“You’re welcome, uncle.” The boys changed sides now.
“Let’s take a small walk, and then we can go back,” said Jayojit.
There was a breeze; it seemed to have rained somewhere. A couple were in the compound, a lady in a chiffon sari and a man in white kurta and pyjamas beside her.
The moon, almost full, hung above this side of the building, staring at the balconies and clotheslines. No doubt this was significant in the almanac, a day of prayer in North India. His mother had told him only this morning, “They”— meaning the women in a neighbouring Marwari family, a mother and her teenage daughter—“come to our flat to look at the moon from the bedroom window. Every year. Because it’s not visible from their flat. They’re very polite about it. The girl says, ‘Aunty, do you mind? It’ll only take five minutes.’ ”
“But why?” Jayojit had asked, incredulous, noticing his father loitering, introspective, by a cupboard.
“I don’t know. There’s something auspicious about it.”
Now the moon looked like a copper platter that a Marwari girl might have held in her hands. Climbing back up the steps to the hall, they found the boys gone and the table-tennis table free.
“Baba,” said Bonny, stopping before the table, “we can play here now!” Visibly relieved that the others had gone.
“With what?” cried Jayojit. “We can use our hands, but we’ll have to dream up a ball.”
They walked towards the lift.
“Want to race me up the stairs?” asked Jayojit, turning. “It’s good exercise.”
But the lift had arrived; a woman emerged, holding a pomeranian by a leash. Bespectacled, she was about to pass Jayojit when she glanced at him and stopped.
“Mr. Chatterjee, isn’t it?” she asked sharply.
“Yes,” said Jayojit; he’d recognized her with an odd feeling of ambivalence. “How are you, Mrs. Gupta?”
“Quite well,” she replied, smiling as if she’d let slip a white lie. “Not too bad. Back again from England?”
The pomeranian strained at the leash, and traced part of a circle; its paws made a glassy sound. Bonny gazed at the dog; he didn’t like pomeranians, they were too perfect and toy-like.
“America, actually,” Jayojit said, apologetic; storing her words for future use in an anecdote.
“Oh! of course—(actually it’s all the same to us here)!” she confided without embarrassment. “But I much prefer the English accent, don’t you? My God, I don’t understand the American one at all!”
“No.” He added, “It’s strange to our ears,” speaking like one who hadn’t been to that country himself, but also being truthful.
“And how long have you been here?” she asked brightly.
“A month and a half . . .” Time seemed to have passed more quickly in the last week than during the first half of the stay.
“One and a half months—in this weather! Really, what endurance you have, Mr. Chatterjee! Go back to America, go back to America!” She broke into a piercing laugh that seemed to have nothing to do with what she’d just said. Then, solicitously, “My niece in Cambridge is getting married,” she informed him.
The niece. Jayojit had never met her—he hardly knew Mrs. Gupta—but ever since she’d heard that he taught economics, she’d told him that she had a niece at Cambridge— and last time, with her husband looking on, had said, “But you have a Cambridge in Massachusetts, don’t you?,” as if briefly noting, and then choosing to give no importance to, a slightly compromising fact—and then felt obliged to provide him with auntly bulletins of her progress in England whenever she met him, which, as it happened, was two or three times a year; the niece, to his chagrin, had become a spirit who inhabited their conversations.
“That’s very good! Congratulations!” Then, wondering why it should be the aunt who should be congratulated: “When?”
“January,” she said.
“Cold time of the year—if it’s in England.”
“Oh yes! I plan to go for the wedding.” The way she said this made it seem that the wedding was going to take place around the corner. “I’ll eat a lot and keep warm.” Then, as if she’d saved the most interesting nugget for the last, “She’s marrying an Englishman,” a little romantically. “Anyway,” she sang, “I must go now.” The leash in her hand became straight and taut. “Mimi’s urging me to go! I hope to see you again! Come on, Mimi,” she added in English, as if it were a language that came naturally with the pomeranian. She had altogether ignored his son, standing next to him.
When Jayojit had come to visit his parents a few years ago it was her husband, a man who’d been reduced by a stroke to shouting out his sentences, she’d been walking. A tall man in trousers and a bush shirt; part of the face had been paralysed, but it was the part that moved and spoke that looked disfigured. Although agitated, he took care to show that the agitation was directed at no one but himself, and, lifting his eyes, would manage to convey a smile. Mrs. Gupta had gone about with him, her refusal to display any outward sign of discomfiture so marked that it was that that became noticeable. On the three days of Puja celebration, the man moved about with a light in his eyes, in a bush shirt he must have struggled to put on himself; and Mrs. Gupta flitted between the sound of the drums and the children in new clothes. On Jayojit’s last visit, soon after he’d arrived, alone, he’d learnt, in an aside during the first serious discussions they’d had about his divorce, that the gentleman had died; he’d had no time to register the fact; but when he’d seen Mrs. Gupta again a few days later, she’d somehow seemed bereft without the hobbling man next to her.
“WHAT A COMMOTION!” said Dr. Sen, shaking his head.
Two men were repairing a pipe.
Jayojit said: “I hope this doesn’t mean that there won’t be any water! We had a whole morning without water a few days ago.”
“Oh, no no,” the doctor said. “I think this is a leakage. It’s one of the things we discuss on Saturday.”
One of the men jumped back at a gush of water.
“Yes. The monthly meeting of the committee,” said Dr. Sen. He said, like one reporting a scandal, “The plumbing’s old. It hasn’t been looked into properly even once. They just ignore the problem, as if that’ll make it go away.” Jayojit hadn’t seen him so excited before; the doctor didn’t explain who “they” were.
Jayojit wasn’t to know that Dr. Sen was assertive before every meeting, but that during the meetings he kept quiet.
“But that’s what he does!” protested the Admiral. “I’ve seen him do it several times!” He looked glum but triumphant, like one who was to be vindicated yet again.
On Saturday, maidservants loitered downstairs; but by ten o�
�clock chairs had been arranged. Not that all the chairs would be needed, but they liked a sense of numbers, of largeness.
Dr. Sen was among the early; he situated himself randomly, but near a fan. Heat was an unattributed participant in the debates; those nearer the fan’s temperate zone were more reasonable. The people on the chairs increased, but no one seemed to know when or how the meeting would begin. Dr. Sen acknowledged an acquaintance with a nod, and glanced once more at his watch.
Some of those attending had reappeared after a longish interval; a widower, Bhattacharya, spent half the year with one of his two daughters in Texas and had had open heart surgery; here he was, recently bathed, slightly darker, looking as if he’d never travelled beyond Sealdah or Kharagpur.
“When did you come back, Mr. Bhattacharya?” said Dr. Sen, with disproportionate friendliness, since they’d spoken not more than twice before.
“Day before yesterday.”
Just like that. The flat he’d left empty and locked must have needed clearing up.
There were others whom the doctor didn’t recognize and who’d come to the meeting for the first time probably; they had the expectant, aimless air of people sitting on a park bench. Sengupta, who didn’t get along with anyone, was by himself just as everyone else was, but he exuded this inability to belong.
“What time was it supposed to start, Mr. Lahiri?”
Upstairs, the Admiral was inhaling as he combed his hair: “I suppose I’ll be late.”
“I don’t see why you have to go,” said his wife; he looked at her, surprised.
“I have a responsibility too, you know, living in this building.”
After a moment he conceded: “Sarkar’s not bad. More educated than the rest, though he still looks like a menial . . .” He paused aggressively after this, as if some ghost from the past might reprimand him. “Then there’s that fellow Ray, retired from Ahmedabad . . .” he put down the comb, “doesn’t speak much though. But he’s impressive-looking, always calm.” The Admiral was an admirer of the dignified mien. “Subramanian’s president this year. Not a bad sort. He talks too slowly.”
A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) Page 10