As he walked towards a door he said:
“Settled here for generations. Speaks Bengali like you and me.”
Mrs. Chatterjee was only half-listening.
“Hasn’t he ever greeted you during the Pujas? You won’t be able to tell him apart from the rest.”
“I can’t remember who he is. Maybe he has greeted me during the Pujas.”
Subramanian and Sarkar sat facing them. Whenever Subramanian began to speak the Admiral looked up.
About twenty people. There were factions; for instance, there was Sengupta, who’d brought disrepute upon himself and the committee during his presidentship last year. The Admiral looked at the back of his head, and the scattering of faces. He could see that Sengupta was feeling left out, that he was preparing for a confrontation, but wouldn’t initiate it.
Dr. Sen was daydreaming. The Admiral had a premonition that he’d spend the meeting staring at the wall when, to his surprise, the doctor said: “Why should we give contracts to two different parties for—uh, for maintenance of pipes and cleaning the waterworks? I don’t understand.”
“Is that on the agenda for this meeting?” asked Sarkar, in the manner of one speaking of things pre-determined and transcending personal control.
“B-but it’s a question of reducing costs”; sounding like the first, tentative notes on an instrument.
They spoke for the next twenty minutes of someone who, in spite of repeated reminders, failed to pay his “out-goings” for the last three months. They referred to him, throughout, by his flat number. Now, reluctantly, they were planning to penalize 10C by cutting off his electricity supply; there was no choice in the matter.
A man in the third row was raising his arm; it was Sengupta; there was something tense about him, as if he were in the grip of a compulsion.
“Yes, Mr. Sengupta?” said Subramanian, refusing to acknowledge a threat.
Without standing up, Sengupta said, “Last year’s budget has already been exceeded, Mr. Subramanian.”
Subramanian moved his head to get a clearer view of Sengupta. Someone must have been in the first stages of catching a cold, or recovering from one, because he coughed repeatedly; Mrs. Gupta looked distracted, as if life had turned out to be in some way a minor, uninteresting affair.
“We’ve gone into this before,” said Subramanian, not ready to give up his control of the proceedings, but seeking to swerve delicately from a debate.
“That is not the answer I was looking for,” said Sengupta. This was evidently for the benefit of others. The Admiral was both bored and revived; he had stopped participating in these meetings, in rehearsing these platitudes about this fifteen-year-old building none of these people very much cared for; he knew that if he began to speak he would sputter and speak the truth. This was a different phase in his life, its significance, if it had any, not yet clear to himself; he no longer resisted the shape it took.
The matter was not resolved, and Sengupta’s bull-like charge ended in nothing. In the next few moments the conversation actually drifted away from the question without anyone making it do so. The truth was that Sengupta could only make brief and histrionic stands but couldn’t take up pursuit because he was vulnerable to questioning himself.
Half an hour later, the meeting was over.
“Is it more humid than last year?” the Admiral said to Dr. Sen, standing in front of the fan.
But Dr. Sen was taken with another matter.
“You see those post-boxes. I th-think they’re being vandalized. Two or three of them are broken—I d-don’t know why: deliberately, or to steal mail.”
The row of deaf postboxes stared back at them.
“You never stay till September,” said Jayojit’s mother, her smile private and ironical. “You always go before.”
“God’s sake, that’s what the year’s like,” said Jayojit; his mother seemed hurt, though she decided not to show it, at the outburst. He read her face; he was sorry. There was an anger in him, a frustration; whenever there was reason to be angry, he cut himself off. Instead, he reacted with impatience at some innocent remark, some item in the news; he’d come to a junction in his life where, over-alert, he was no more confident of being understood or of understanding others; but with his mother, especially during this visit, he had successfully held himself in check.
“You’ll miss the Pujas,” she said. Last year they’d sat at home and listened to the drums beating downstairs and in the distance. They didn’t visit anyone; instead, they spoke to Jayojit on the telephone.
“What are you doing, Joy?” his mother had asked. It was nine o’clock in the evening; a flurry of drums could be heard in the background, and the light that illuminated the balcony moved and had a tinge of colour to it.
“Nothing,” said Jayojit, sounding slightly at a loss. “Of course, there’s no holiday here, but I didn’t have any lectures today. I’ve been at home.”
“Rana phoned today,” she said.
There was a small pause as those words travelled across continents.
“Really? What did he say?”
“He said they had guests and Anita made payesh.”
“Really, made payesh? Rana’s a lucky fellow.”
When he was married, Amala and he’d go to Detroit (either Detroit or Cleveland; but they preferred Detroit; they knew more people there) for the Pujas. Last time, the Detroit Puja Committee had hired two school buildings for the festival; and he’d bowed before the pratima with her large eyes, placed at one end of the hall near the portraits of the school founders. How fervent Amala used to be during the anjali! He used to wonder what she was praying for. She’d open her eyes after the anjali with a startled look, like a swimmer who’s come up from underwater.
He didn’t believe—belief did not come into it, as he’d explored the hall, cradling Bonny in one arm, or pausing clumsily to put him to sleep. (Half-asleep in that din, he’d grown heavier in his arms.) But, over the last few years, he’d begun to believe in the efficacy of prayer; of aloneness, which is what prayer was. That, to him, in the centre of the noise, had been a discovery.
“But this is what they do after it rains a little,” grumbled Jayojit’s mother. She didn’t explain who “they” were. “It’s a good excuse.” Maya hadn’t come.
“Where does she live?”
“Oh—not far away!” said Mrs. Chatterjee, waving the question of distance away. “Ghugudanga.” It sounded like a village; difficult to believe it was in the heart of Ballygunge. There’d been some waterlogging the past two days; that might have made things hard; but he was silent.
When he was a boy he’d come home from Ooty before the rains began. Some of his classmates were English, sons of diplomats, or of managers of companies still, in those days, sixty per cent British-owned; they took the changes in the weather cheerfully, “Absolutely first-rate storm!,” as they did their teachers, “Chatterjee, I can never pronounce that man’s name, yours is so much easier.” Come the rains, they’d vanish as if they’d muttered a mantra that made them dissolve into the atmosphere. The monsoons, like some messenger hurrying through the land, throwing his moth-like shadow, would have come to the South before he made his journey, so that he’d already have seen the large drops on his way to Ban-galore, from where he set out for Delhi. Home was different places; Vishakapatnam, with the sea lashing the harbour, known by that quaint name at the time, Vizag; then Cochin; and Delhi, in Chanakyapuri, not far from Mrs. Gandhi. “Whatever you might think of her, she’s gutsy,” the Admiral had said. “The Russians respect her, the Americans fear her”; those words returning to him like the lines of a nursery rhyme. Even now, his father believed that India had declined since “that woman’s death.” Coming “home,” the habitation of the next four or five years in his adolescence, to these certainties; when his father was made Rear-Admiral, he recalled Nehru nostalgically, as if he were somehow responsible for all the good in people’s lives: “Met him, you know. Saluted him . . . was it in ’sixty-six? Bro
ken man, but handsome. No truth to what they said about him and Edwina.” One would never have known that he was a commander at the time, and had been in Nehru’s presence for only five minutes. Coming back from boarding school to a slightly altered set of parents, Joy’d still find some things unchanged, for instance his mother frequently reordering furniture in the bungalow, her movements as focused as a bird’s, moving the Taj Mahals and shikaras. Outside one of the houses, there was a garden with oleanders in it; that was either in Vizag or in Delhi. A navy cadet stood outside the house all day. And Joy would lock himself up in his room, with the air-conditioner on, because it was sweltering in Cochin and the cleverest way of battling the heat was not moving. He read books he was too young for. Sometimes Ranajit, who was left to wander about the bungalow and was quite content to do so, would begin to bang on the door with primitive urgency to be let in— “Dada! Dada!”—the cry strangely plaintive.
Contact with the armed forces had cured them of the boyhood make-believe of wanting to be soldiers; instead, it was something else that took shape in them. Ranajit was less opinionated than Jayojit; and he’d had a love-marriage. Jayojit, after almost topping the list at Stephen’s, had performed as expected at a scholarship interview, where he was questioned by, among others, Karan Singh, and had been surprised by his dark feminine eyes. The British Deputy High Commissioner, Pratt or Spratt, he couldn’t recall, had asked him who his favourite authors were, and his mind had gone momentarily blank, his authors had deserted him, only one returned to him shadowly and he uttered his name: “Pablo Neruda.”
“That’s very interesting,” the Englishman had said, adding wryly, “but wasn’t he a diplomat? It seems we do some good things sometimes.”
There was a gentle murmur of laughter round the table, in which Jayojit, just twenty-four years old, had joined nervously. Then the man had continued, “Do tell us why, Mr. Chatterjee.”
Jayojit always remembered his answer with a hearty laugh later: “Had absolutely no idea what I was saying. Told him: ‘Because he’s both political and sensuous. He reminds me of the Bengali poet Sukanta Bhattacharya.’ Can you believe such utter nonsense? I haven’t even read Sukanta.”
But believe him they had, and it was he who’d turned down the opportunity to go to Oxford and accepted, instead, a rare scholarship to California: “They have seasons there, baba!”
Karan Singh had, very mellifluously, asked him where he saw the future of Indian politics: “Do you think we’ll persist with the parliamentary system? Or adopt the presidential system?”
Jayojit half-listened; behind those kohl-dark eyes, he could only see the paradisial land of Kashmir. Not many years had passed since the Emergency; and, risking antagonizing the Congressman, he’d said: “I think our parliamentary system needs to change, sir, but not towards the presidential system. If anything, it needs to be decentralized.”
Wasted words; in the end he’d found himself in America, where not everyone knew where India was. Yet that scholarship had taken some of his friends to England; one, “Pugs” to his friends, had become an assistant editor of a national daily with the more sonorous name Rajen Mehra, and another a lecturer in Birmingham; yet another taught in the vast, wilderness-like campus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University—news came to him from unexpected sources, from hearsay, in which these fragments revealed a continuity. Meanwhile, Ranajit’s “romance” started when the family was in Delhi, when Jayojit had already left for the U.S. Ranajit was an undergraduate at the Hindu in 1982, would spend nights in secret at the hostel with his friends; and then his group of friends disintegrated and his mother decided he’d spend more time at home now, that he’d become “serious” about his exams. But he’d go for walks in Lodhi Gardens— although Delhi was already reputedly unsafe after dusk— with a girl called Anita who was then only in Class XII in the Mater Dei School; or have milkshakes at Nirula’s as blue-eyed tourists moved about in Connaught Place.
Jayojit could count the number of times he’d met his brother and sister-in-law after their wedding on the fingers of one hand. If anything was to blame, it was the ease of modern travel, which lulled people into believing that journeys to those closest to them could be postponed. His brother had called him “dada”; Anita, the few times she’d seen him, called him “Joyda.” They were to visit him at some point in the future in America. “Come in September if you must,” he’d said brusquely to his sister-in-law. “The Fall’s really as lovely as it’s supposed to be.”
It never rained like this where he lived. Not far away from Claremont, in Iowa, he’d heard there were thunder-storms; they were brought there by winds from the Gulf of Mexico. But where he lived, and where, till recently, Bonny and his mother had lived, there were contrary influences, for Claremont was washed by cool air from Canada. Once, when driving to college, he’d been caught in a hailstorm.
The college campus was off the motorway, four large buildings, two cafeterias, God knew how many lecture theatres, and a parking lot as huge as a desert. The college produced its own t-shirts, with “Claremont” in Gothic letters inscribed upon them. When Amala had left him and gone to California, he used to wonder at how this town, with its McDonald’s outlet guarding the highway at night like a lit oasis, had come to be so integrally a part of his life.
The doorbell rang at eleven, and it was Maya. “Bus was late,” she said. Mrs. Chatterjee said nothing.
Later, when Maya was in the kitchen and out of earshot, she whispered to her son:
“I shall be rid of her at the first opportunity.”
Maya, as if in belated response, let fall a utensil with a crash into the kitchen sink.
The next day: water had collected at the end of the lane that opened on to the main road. If you went down the corridor outside the Admiral’s flat to the other end you might be able to espy some of the disorder that had been caused. Yet the post wasn’t late.
“O ma,” he said, digging urgently in his trouser pocket, “it’s still here. I forgot to give you this.”
She peered—she had reading glasses, but rarely used them—at the leaflet advertising bolero coats and salwaar kameez sets.
“What’ll I do with this?” Then, her mind moving on: “Anyway, it might come in handy.” Was she thinking of a cousin’s daughter, Mahashweta, the only young woman in the family to whom they had, any more, a tangential relationship, for whom she might want to buy something if she came to Calcutta in the future?
“You might do some shopping there yourself.”
Jayojit’s mother didn’t have a sense of humour; or something handicapped its expression—because with her grandson she was almost nothing but teasing.
“For what, baba? Those shops are only meant for girls!”
When he’d married Amala, the salwaar kameez had just come into fashion; it had multiplied everywhere like a popular tune. Now, in its maturity, its prints were still multifarious and pleasing, like an annual blossoming.
Nothing in the post today except a statement of interest for the Admiral. Three months after their wedding Amala had begun to write to her mother-in-law from Arlington. The letters came with Mrs. Chatterjee’s name on the envelope, Mrs. Sumitra Chatterjee, in a neat running hand at first unfamiliar. They were determinedly chatty but formal, and full of questions, perhaps to camouflage some sense of inadequacy, about how things were at “home”; and, slow but destination-bound, they took two or three weeks to get here. To Mrs. Chatterjee they had given a fleeting pleasure, and also the obligation of having to reply in simple, serious sentences that were, however, laboriously composed; for she was a poor letter-writer.
What had made him marry her? Was it her prettiness, which he’d been struck by the first time he’d seen her in their new house in Jodhpur Park? “Hi, I’m Amala.” Every word pronounced carefully, her lips becoming a small “o” at the middle syllable of her name. Then transformed, in Thyagaraja Hall, into a graven image, small and adorned, head shrouded by the sari. There had been some confusion about the
details; West Bengalis carried the bride around the fire; in East Bengal—and he’d thought this was true of Bengal in general— she walked round it. Moreover, before the meeting of the eyes, the “shubho drishti,” in West Bengal, a large betel leaf was held in front of the bride’s face; this was news to him. And her face, lit intermittently by the camera’s flash—not very Bengali, almost North or North West Indian, no hint or tracery of high cheekbones, but, in her forehead and mouth, a suggestion of elsewhere (she’d told him that her ancestors were brahmins who’d moved to Bengal from Sind several generations ago, seeking sanctuary).
On their way to the States, she changed from a Patola to a pair of jeans in the airport—“Can you believe it, it’s the first time I’m going abroad?”; sitting late into the night, they’d talked about their families. In the eighties, travelling to the West or to America was still uncommon—after arriving, they’d been in Arlington for a few months before moving to Claremont, and she’d found the desert climate hard going: “Baap re, it’s hotter here than Cal!” “Cal” was Loreto House, the Sky Room, Middleton Row, New Market, Loudon Street, Tollygunge. In Claremont, he’d told her they were now only three hours away from Canada, and that year had been a year of expeditions; the Niagara Falls, roaring behind them as they posed for a photo, the underground shopping malls in Toronto. “Don’t you want to continue studying Pol Science?”—sometimes, for fun, he’d imitate some of her habits of speaking—and she’d made a face and said, “I want to be a housewife.”
She began by phoning her parents twice a week, speaking loudly over the mouthpiece as if she were talking to people in the next room (most of the conversations took place in his absence, or at odd times of the night in the living room; later, he’d imagine their content when stopping at the time and duration printed on the telephone bill; it was her mother, he knew, who was her confidante, and could chatter and whisper with her daughter as if she were her twin sister, while with her father Amala, on the phone, was still the flirtatious, slightly high-pitched, little girl, always being reprimanded for not realizing it was a long-distance call); nevertheless she was, and this was hardly noticeable at first, distancing herself from “Cal”. The satisfactions of life had made her clear-sighted: “Jayojit, you’re too cynical. Baba, you know you’re here for the money and the good life like the rest of us! What’s wrong with that?”
A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) Page 11