Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

“If you don’t mind my asking, how long did it last?” Jayojit had asked during one of their conversations, although he already had a fair idea from the person who’d introduced them. The aura of that marriage had preceded her, the story with vague correspondences to his own; all this related by a nondescript go-between, a gentleman wearing bifocals who worked at the middle level of a tea company. She lived on the ground floor of a house with a terrace, somewhere near a park on a by-lane not far from Southern Avenue; here, on the verandah, facing the dark horizon of the park, they were left to themselves (Bonny would be at home with his grandparents), not far from the lit windows of a neighbouring house. She had, in an unostentatious way, attended to herself before his visit, put on lipstick, an outline of kohl, and something on her face that made it pale against the dark.

There had been a pause; and then, dismissing the memory the question might have brought to her, she’d said:

“One year.” She was pouring him tea.

“That’s a bloody short time, if you don’t mind my saying,” said forcefully to convey his indignation not at her but her former husband.

Then she’d told him how (still conveying to him something of her disbelief), after going to London with her husband, who was studying medicine there, she’d be left alone in the house without any money. They were in a house on Golders Green; he commuted each morning to King’s College Hospital. She used to sit watching television, or go for long walks. “Actually,” smiling, “I went to Oxford Street only thrice. I didn’t see the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. I wanted to go to the Tower to see all the jewels the Brits took from us and put on their crowns and — what do they call them — sceptres.”

The clattering of cutlery could be heard inside. After a polite search for a cue, he’d asked her, returning her, without warning, to the present:

“What’s the park like?” He regarded it in the partial illumination; it seemed both sinister and peaceful. She seemed slightly flustered, as if he’d crossed a boundary and said something personal.

“Oh, the park. .” She didn’t know how to put it to him without sounding melodramatic. “It isn’t safe any more. I haven’t been to it for years. . When I was a child, it was quite nice, though. .”

Later, they’d gone in and joined her parents inside; the mother dressed in a tangail sari, the father bespectacled, sipping tea nervously, their shadow on the wall, excited by innocent speculation, partaking of the new romance as if they were at the cinema. They had tea at their own table guiltily. A car passed by outside, lighting the lane and the trees with its headlights.

She was a junior advertising executive; her parents nowhere near as well-to-do as Amala’s. Yet when he asked her what the job was like, she’d say no more than, “It’s quite nice,” as if her vocabulary had deserted her with the effort of readjusting to this city (she’d lived here, now, for a little more than two years). Or it was probably that she was too respectful of his accomplishments, his achievements. That was during their third meeting in two weeks. He’d begun to like talking to her; the similar traumas they’d suffered had made them uninquisitive about each other, and comfortable about their small silences.

She might be in the same job (Jayojit was wondering the other day, daydreaming as he seldom did); or moved to another company (as if there were so many other advertising companies to move to in this city in which business had ebbed into a low tide!); or — the last possibility was the likeliest— she might have got married, remarried, with fewer bonds to bind her to her past life than he still had, crossed a bridge really, in which case she need not necessarily be in this city, she might be in another.

They had met once again, soon after, at a wedding.

“Really? And how are you related. .” She in a Bomkai sari (though he was no good at spotting sub-species of women’s garments; his mother had identified it later), exuding a kind of gratitude at his being there.

He, perspiring, had explained his slender acquaintance, through his parents, with the bridegroom. They might have been making their way through a dark wilderness, so little time did they have alone with each other.

Light reflected off the cars; their hoods were getting hot. On the main road, buses that were now beginning to get half-full were rushing onward with great urgency. The people in them were already hot, already anxious. The cleaners, by now, had finished their work and a few other latecomers had begun.

They decided to go up; the Admiral glanced at his watch; it, this Swiss watch with its off-white dial he’d had for years, as remote and familiar as a morning star, said it was a quarter to seven. They’d walked for too long; both of them were certain that Jayojit must be awake. Who would give him tea? thought his father; annoyed with his wife for not having uttered this question. The istriwalla watched them without actually seeing them, as if the morning had made them invisible; and the watchman fumbled and seemed to be waiting for a change to come and take his place. What a young boy he was. . probably nineteen.

WHEN EVENING CAME, loud conversations came from other flats, of which even whispers were audible. Sometimes the voices became agitated, or were interrupted by music, or there was a roar at times that turned out to be applause; everything was exaggerated, and not quite commensurate with whatever it was that the sounds were representing.

Behind this, ancient but entirely of the present, was the sound of crickets.

Jayojit had been lying on the sofa, reading, fatigued by the weather, until, hearing a noise in the lane, he got up to see what it was and locate it. But it wasn’t possible to see much of the lane from the verandah; only a section of it was visible through the trees.

“Baba, can I look?” Bonny was standing next to him; he came to no higher than his father’s waist. He stood on tip-toe and arched his back.

“There’s nothing to see,” said Jayojit. Cars were being parked — it was obvious from the continual and sudden sound of the horns — and the side of a Maruti, shining dully, could just be seen. In the small bit of the lane which they could see, women in silk saris, flickering in the bad light of the lane, passed by. From behind, the Admiral peered out, unappeasable but stoic, and went back in again.

They could hear the shehnai. It was a tape, for soon the same raags began to be played again.

“This is not the best time of the year to get married, surely,” declared Jayojit, waving a housefly away with excessive displeasure, as he turned from the verandah; Bonny was still craning his neck outward, his chin above the bannister, hoping to somehow make his face fit into part of the jigsaw puzzle of the grille.

“It’s the Marwari house next to the building,” said Jayojit’s mother, her face turned away from him. “That big one.”

Jayojit did not know the one she meant. He’d explored from the outside the large houses like memorials in the lane, but hadn’t seen the one next to the building, or perhaps his memory had refused to give individuality to the neighbouring houses.

“I should have known.” He made a face, as if disparaging the wastefulness of the community mentioned, but from the safety and distance of irony, without quite the crude derision he’d overheard in conversations.

They ate at eight-thirty; they would seldom eat later because of the Admiral’s health. Behind the sound of the cutlery — the Admiral habitually made a lot of noise, like one busily dispatching a meal in a railway canteen — the shehnai could be heard, high-pitched, almost intrusive; and then a watchman’s voice on a loudspeaker announcing the numbers of cars, speaking an urgent Hindustani version of English letters and numbers, became audible.