Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

“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.

He’d like Jayojit to marry again. Joy was thirty-seven; he wasn’t young any more. If he married now, the Admiral believed, it would be like attending to a wound when it was still fresh.

It was probably tendentious to think of it in that way, but if it hadn’t been for Bonny the match they’d organized last year might have worked. It wasn’t Bonny’s fault of course; it was just the way these things were. The Admiral was not orthodoxly religious — though he believed in the laws according to which providential happiness was given or withheld, and would sometimes return from a temple with a tilak beneath the mane of hair that had not long ago been hidden by a naval officer’s cap — and yet he’d hoped for an alliance with both the devotee’s humility and his serene expectation of disappointment; when the disappointment came, it took him by surprise. But that girl, Arundhati, had insisted that she found Bonny perfectly charming. “What d’you want to be when you grow up, Bonny?” she’d asked him, sitting forward on a sofa as he stood before her, plates of onion savouries on the table, a pale glass of lemon sharbat in her hand; and when he answered, at last, “I don’t know,” they’d laughed as if it were the most knowing, canny answer to the question.