A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) (7 page)

When Jayojit had gone back to the end of the lane, marching behind the shadows of the trees towards the main road, and turned back, he saw two boys emerge from the gates of the building and advance towards the bhelpuri seller: wearing t-shirts and shorts and keds, casually decisive. There was the slightest premonition of dusk.

Abrupt high-pitched voices, asking the man to serve up his stuff; the man only too eager to please, but inwardly composed, seeming to experience something like satisfaction; then wiping his hands slowly on an old and rather dirty piece of cloth.

“Jaldi, jaldi.” Impatience.

He himself felt tempted, but he’d promised himself not to get diarrhoea or gastro-enteritis if he could help it; or wind.

The two boys were busy.

THE DHOBI—returning washed and ironed clothes to Jayojit’s mother. He sat near the front door and untied his bundle. Jayojit, for some reason, had a memory of him; no, it couldn’t be last time he’d seen him—he must have seen him downstairs. He lifted the items of clothing, with a detached saintly air, but with an unobtrusive cunning as well, one by one and handed them to Mrs. Chatterjee, who inspected each with suspicion. It reminded Jayojit of the way he’d seen her, in the past, examining “bargains” with a tired but amenable gaze in various shops. Clean sheets, folded on top of each other, saris, pressed and starched, crisp with the heat; there were few things to rival washed clothes in their undisappointing recurrence.

“It’s the humidity I hate,” said Jayojit, fanning himself, without warning, with a piece of paper. “I wonder, especially, if it’s good for you, baba.”

The Admiral said nothing at this feeling of concern, unsought for; he watched with interest as his wife went inside their room, delayed reappearing, and came out with small change to pay the dhobi.

“Baba,” said Jayojit suddenly, with his eyes on the newspaper, “couldn’t one have got a flat on the other side?” He pointed to the right. “I’ve heard they’re slightly larger there—and cooler as well.” In fact he’d heard this piece of information from his mother. It now intrigued him.

The Admiral looked puzzled for a moment. “Yes, those flats
are
south facing,” he said, abstracted, as if he could see a flat before his eyes. He tried to remember, as one remembers a fact that has lost its original importance and place, but nevertheless cannot be forgotten, and said, “There was a . . . a—what do they call it—a lottery. We applied late.”

But Jayojit was not listening; he was momentarily absorbed in a report. He was nodding, but probably at something the reporter had said.

The Admiral had been posted at Cochin at the time he had booked the flat; the building had still not come up at the time. A “friend” of his called Dutta had, for some reason he could never fathom, phoned him and given him, at the time—1972—the information about the building. “Excellent flats. The building’s a government project, so it’s cheap. I’d advise you to act immediately, because there’s a great rush of middle-class buyers. Do you understand?” Strange, the people who do you a good turn; some of them don’t even matter to you; they come and go, like bit-players. Where was Dutta now? The Admiral didn’t really care; he had little time, anyway, to turn his gaze upon minor aspects of the past. But thank God for that phone call! That was a different country then, in the seventies, and his posting in Cochin, when one looked back on it, a paid holiday with grand trappings; there was glory too for the armed forces, because of the war over Bangladesh, though the navy didn’t really have to take part; it had just sat and watched with dignity. No one knew then how unaffordable property would be, especially now; how fortunate one was to have a home. And there was no “black” money involved because it was a government scheme; but it was a stroke of good luck that the Admiral had been successful in his application—without bribes or pulling strings. But, in those years, he hadn’t seen it as good luck, he’d almost expected, in a naive, trusting way, nothing else.

From the proposal to the final construction of the building, when the rooms became habitable, it had taken five years. Whenever the Admiral was in Calcutta in that period (to attend a function or visit some relative; to be put up at Fort William or at some relative’s place), he would come to this lane to take a look at the building as it came up, first the skeleton of the construction, then the gaps where the rooms were. He found the process oddly interesting and involving; it wasn’t always one had the opportunity to watch a vision, however ordinary, take shape. The lane, with the post office nearby, and the stately old mansions that were still there now, was subtly different; it was as if the lane were, in its way, passing from one phase of its history to another, in a way that was somehow connected to the completion of the building and his being there, a reticent but attentive witness.

What would happen in the future? Jayojit couldn’t see himself returning once his parents weren’t there, or ever settling down here himself—he’d gone too far into the continent of his domicile and been absorbed by it; and imagine the foolhardiness of returning to India! But his parents ending up here must be considered both fortunate, he thought, and one of the anomalies of life.

Jayojit took off his glasses and wiped the lenses that had misted over with perspiration. His face bore a remarkable similarity to his father’s, the same lines around the mouth, the nose curving gently, the same fair complexion, both faces marked by education, a privileged background, and, it was clear, some sort of achievement. The father’s was a brahmin’s face, rather old-fashioned in a way; in another setting, another time, it would have had a worldly but ceremonial aura; it had an inherited severity. The grey hairs on his beard had a frosty stillness. In both faces, especially on the father’s, there was a trace of dissatisfaction and naivety, suggesting that neither man could make friends easily.

The Admiral asked:

“Did you read the news today?”

The dhobi had gone. Jayojit’s mother had some of the folded clothes in her arms; like a familiar spirit, she was carrying them inside. In the trees outside, there was the sound of the constantly busy birds.

“Something about a British delegation,” said Jayojit. “Coming to survey their old territory.” He chuckled. “News” was still strange to him, like the repetitive cry of one of the shalik birds outside, an echo. When he was in Claremont, he kept track of everything that happened here, and his thoughts about this country had a completeness they no longer had once he was back.

“I don’t see the point, really. What do they intend to do: inspect the roads? You know they won’t really welcome them with open arms. The Chief Minister isn’t the problem. The trade unions and the party cadres are the problem! Do you think they’ll allow it? Not to speak of the hooligans in the Congress.” The Admiral had a sneaking, unconfessed admiration for the Chief Minister because he’d done his Bar-at-Law in England; he was a “gentleman.” Then, in Bengali, he said: “Meanwhile, look what’s happening to this city. You can’t walk on the pavement, can’t post a letter.” In English again, seriously, “I wouldn’t advise
you
to come back to it.”

Jayojit’s mother returned to broodingly retrieve the last load of laundered articles; “She’s become a household machine,” thought Jayojit, a little unfairly, as her shadow passed by him, “maybe she’s happy this way.” He knew how often she used to go shopping at the JK Market with her friend Manju in Delhi.

“I’m afraid there isn’t much chance of that in the near future,” said Jayojit to his father, and laughed, as if he had just remembered something.

The Admiral’s thoughts had moved on; he was staring into the distance. “You remember Bijon,” he said suddenly.

Jayojit started out of his own thoughts. Bijon used to work in an engineering firm in Delhi; his acquaintance with the Admiral was through some tenuous but palpable route; Jayojit’s mother’s late brother-in-law’s niece had a husband whose sister had married Bijon, who himself had no children; or some such laborious relationship. Somehow Bijon and the Admiral had become occasional drinking partners at the Services Club (the Admiral had now, that is, for the last six years, perforce, given up drinking).

“Why?” As if some private, guarded realm had somehow been violated by the question. Then: “No, of course I remember him.”

Bijon was supposed to have retired about two years ago and moved to Calcutta. He was not what one would call close to the Admiral; but over drinks they’d exchanged confidences that were self-revelatory in nature. You needed someone to exchange confidences with; even the Admiral.

“He’s gone to Dubai,” said the Admiral.

“Really?”

That hadn’t been part of the plan; but things seldom were. It was as if the Admiral had somehow been betrayed. He spoke of him as if he were a desert mirage, something quite ordinary that had turned out to be odd only by being insubstantial, arising and then fading in a vaguely recognizable, uncategorizable foreign landscape.

EARLY IN THE MORNING, when the Admiral and his wife woke up, they didn’t at first say a word to each other; it was as if they didn’t feel the need to. Above, the fan turned at full speed, giving the Admiral, for once, mild goose-flesh as he emerged from the night’s sheets. They had it planned between them; that Admiral Chatterjee would go in for his bath first, and then be the one to open the doors to the verandah in the sitting room. Two or three loud coughs administered his entry into the sitting room, refamiliarized him with its tidiness, its claim to be accessory to his present life; these coughs were physical but ritual in nature; in the other bedroom, neither Jayojit nor Bonny heard him over the internal hum of the air-conditioner. When they weren’t there, the coughs were directed at a nervous sense of absence, at the far-away. The Admiral then went in for a bath of cold water, water gathered in a bucket with which he then drenched himself from head to bottom, which he believed would keep him cool and sane for the rest of the morning; even his sacred thread, which he neglected to remove, became soggy. He didn’t like being disturbed in the midst of his quick ablutions, but this was more an idea than a reasonable suspicion, because there was no possibility that he would be. In the bedroom, Mrs. Chatterjee, very softly, as she often did these days, or ever since she had grown used to this negligible but returning loneliness, turned on the transistor radio to listen to devotionals. Something about these bhajans was apposite to her semi-wakefulness of the first half-hour of getting out of bed.

Then they went to walk in the lane with the air of those who’d grown, lately, accustomed to a routine, but still weren’t entirely reconciled to what the day might bring. They looked bourgeois and ascetic; as if walking in the silence were a polite activity not unrelated to some unrealizable desire for completeness. There were no cars to disturb them now; and if a car did enter the lane from the main road, the Admiral stood aside gravely to let it pass, while Mrs. Chatterjee, unmindful, last morning’s vermilion faded in her hair’s parting, went a little way ahead; though no one saw them, the Admiral behaved with an impatient propriety, uncommunicable to her, in relation to his wife, as if someone who mattered to him were watching them. They walked to one end of the lane, the birds shrieking above them; nothing had begun; only a couple of cleaners were in view, who, with buckets, had just begun washing the parked cars and wiping their windows.

It was impossible to tell from what it was like now just how hot it would become in two hours; this was one of the small deceptions of this time of the year. Even the trees and leaves and the sudden burst of gulmohurs kept them from this fact as they walked underneath them.

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.