Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

That evening he’d said to her when she’d phoned him, “You know, I could call the police.” Without realizing it, he’d stopped calling her by her name, and hardly ever did so later. She, however, had begun to use his name as if it were a weapon with which she could now distance herself from him: “Why, what’ll you tell them, Joy?” Her voice was mock-serious.

He felt somewhat conspicuous as he turned back; he didn’t know why. Perhaps because people don’t wander about and not go anywhere; perhaps this was what made him feel strange and doubtful and that he stood out. Everyone else, whatever they looked like, had somewhere to go to, or seemed to; and if they were doing nothing or postponing doing something, as some of these people squatting by the pavement, who seemed to be in part-time employment, were doing, it was for a reason. But the small journey — in the heat, constantly assailed by traffic on the Ballygunge main road— and then the small arc back had somewhat settled his thoughts. No, it was still new to him, that’s what it was; as if he’d just stepped off the plane and this was his first day out, and everything — or this web that constituted, at the moment, “everything”—seemed louder and more real to him than normal.

Ballygunge is, he conceded with the uncertainty of one who has been acquainted with better places, in its way, beautiful. His parents knew people here once; and he concluded, without evidence to support him, that some of those people must be here, in these flats and houses. Why did they never meet: or did they, while he simply knew nothing about it? On the other hand, it might be that what they’d lived in — those compact decorated spaces — were company flats, in which case they might have moved to other parts of the city; another part of the country, even. A peasant in a dhoti and a turban was sitting on the pavement next to a makeshift cigarette stall and lighting a bidi with one of those ropes that burned stubbornly at the end.

As he turned into the lane he had to step aside adroitly for a car coming in; it blew its horn behind him.

A new Ambassador, a recent model that could have sprung, unchanged, from the older one, newly painted, its cream colour not yet dirty except for two indistinguishable scratches on the side; at the back, a girl whose age hovered anywhere between seventeen and twenty-one — in which case it was insulting to think of her as a girl, for no doubt she saw herself as a woman — managing her long, straight hair with an expert flick of her head.

Jayojit stared at the back of her head as it grew smaller. The car passed a bhelpuri vendor and Jayojit wondered if it would stop to make a purchase. No, it did not. Blowing its horn again, it turned right at the end of the lane.

But it’s a nice area, he decided generously; deceptively quiet. Nothing seemed to happen here in these mansions which belonged to people who’d once made a tidy sum of money. Money creates money; you could sense that as you went past the houses and their tall, imposing gates. The owners of these mansions had guaranteed their own self-perpetuating well-being, it seemed, for generations to come. Independence, the subsequent changes of history, did not seem to matter.

This one, for instance, impressive, especially in light of the fact that such a large house must be tremendously expensive to maintain; the bold letters JHUNJHUNWALA painted by the gate, a gecko, at a curious angle, meditating on the letters. Who was Jhunjhunwala? — Jayojit felt he should have known the name if only to ridicule it, to retrieve, from an uncertain memory, a nasty item of gossip, but it did not matter. There must be about ten or fifteen rooms in there — the curtains were drawn — with air-conditioners protruding at the back.

He came to the end of the lane, where the Ambassador had turned not long ago, where he saw a house that had once been equally impressive if not more. The name on the gate, he noticed, was that of an East Bengali landowner; but East Bengal had long ago been transformed into fantasy; the driveway was covered with leaves that no one had bothered to clear away; space and an impartially surviving light coexisted in equilibrium before the awning. No one had even bothered to sell the house.

The bhelpuri seller fussing and making his preparations; but all his movements were actually well judged and accurate. Before him his adult life’s work, and the day’s; the tamarind water, the crackers that he would crush, scattering the flakes on his small concoction. A portable investment; he didn’t need to be confined to any one place. But he had a clientele in this locality; he was waiting for it to make an appearance.

Jayojit walked back some of the way he’d come, as if retracing his route, and passed the man; the man noticed him with his apparently unintrusive abstracted eyes; he judged him, not unfriendlily, as a potential, a probable, customer; a loiterer who might also be integrated with his market. He made the first move, possibly making his first enquiry of the afternoon. His eyes were brown-grey, as if they held a little of the twilight of another town in them.

“Bhelpuri, babu? Jhaalmudi?” Tapping the market with all the finesse of a researcher and the seductiveness of an old retainer; trying to increase his clientele, though it doesn’t matter to him one way or the other.

“Kato?” The Bengali word for “How much” seemed out of place, too tentative and non-committal.

“Bhelpuri, babu?”

“Hay bhelpuri.”

“Dui taka”—two rupees.

An absurd price, almost as close to nothing as words themselves; but the confection must cost even less to make. Jayojit nodded and walked on, as if he’d been doing a survey; the man smiled slightly, not even a smile of puzzlement, but of the acceptance of one whose curiosity was already waning.

There were birds in the trees overhead, all shouting together. He remembered how he and Amala had, when visiting India (their visits home were regular and annual for the first three years), gone to Nainital in the second year of their marriage, to the wildlife sanctuary, hoping to be amazed by the glimpse of some rare beast — all beasts were rare to them — or the sight of a peacock dancing. What had struck Jayojit then more than anything else was the crescendo caused by the birds’ chattering and crying at dusk. At night, in the hotel, they’d been bitten by mosquitoes, and while examining Amala’s mosquito bites from the feet upwards— there was a bite on the thigh, in spite of the fact that she was wearing a salwaar kameez; “How the hell did it get there ?” she’d asked — there was a preamble that led to love-making, in which they’d almost forgotten about the mosquitoes. That was in 1986. Two years after Bonny’s birth in March 1987 (he would have been conceived a few months after they’d gone back from India to Claremont) their love-making dried up, almost without their noticing it. At first they joked about it, she laughing: “Think we should get into partner-swapping?”; he, when Amala occasionally took the initiative: “What? You want to interrupt Dallas ?” Sometimes, when Bonny’d just learnt how to speak, they’d kiss each other, even in front of the boy. Then unfamiliarity set in, though no one else would notice it, and they got used to even that. The child, instead of bringing them together, actually enabled them to separate into their own spheres of desire and loneliness. All along, whenever they quarrelled, they quarrelled with great precision in the English they’d grown up with; Bonny, smaller then, would listen to their analyses of each other with wandering attention, as if he were overhearing a foreign language.

What he judged most harshly was that Amala should get involved with her gynaecologist, himself a married man. He found Amala’s transformation impossible to understand or interpret; equally strange her claim, “He was kind to me.” He’d been with Amala himself to this doctor before Bonny’s birth; a not unpleasant-looking man in his forties who was balding slightly, and surely not charismatic; a whiff of bad breath reached Jayojit from his conversation once; difficult, almost impossible, to imagine how any woman in her right mind could prefer him to Jayojit; and later, Jayojit had said as much to the Admiral. Still later, thinking of this, the Admiral had quietly quoted a proverb to Jayojit in Sanskrit, translating himself: “Of woman’s character and man’s fate even God is ignorant; what knowledge then can mortals have of these things?”