Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

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.