Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

“But who lives in that house?” asked Jayojit, midway through a spoonful of rice.

“I don’t know their name,” said his mother.

“No, no, not that one,” gesturing to the noise. “I meant the other big one opposite. The Jhunjhunwala house.”

The Admiral looked up; he had been chewing on a small piece of vegetable. “His father started out as a supplier to the automobile industry”—he held up one hand as Jayojit snorted, “What automobile industry!”—“and now they’re in all kinds of things including cement.”

“A-ha!” as if this had confirmed the essential murkiness behind the existence of that mansion.

“Can I have some daal, tamma?” Bonny, his gaze nervous and transparent, surprised at his own voice, looked askance at his grandmother, who leaned forward to serve him.

“Wonder of wonders,” said Jayojit, reaching ostentatiously and serving himself some vegetables. Behind his exaggerated movements was also a returning pain, not so much a backache or an ache in the joints as a discomfort that he was repeatedly trying to exorcise. “I didn’t know you had an appetite.”

“He has investments abroad,” said the Admiral, continuing undeterred about Jhunjhunwala.

Bonny was only eating daal; this mild gruel, with one green chilli afloat in it, had become the most desired, sometimes the only, component of his everyday diet. It seemed to demand less of him and leave him alone; and, instinctively realizing this, both his father and grandmother pretended not to care about the unvarying nature of his food. Fish-bones he had trouble with; he only accepted bhetki, and that didn’t always come from the market.

He finished before the rest were done, and got up and went to the far side of the sitting room and, dabbling with the remote control, turned to MTV; unconcerned that the volume was low, he sat on the rug before it. The sound of the shehnai mixed with this other sound; a succession of images, quicker than a train of association, hurried through the screen. For the Admiral and Mrs. Chatterjee, the television was always on in the evening until a year ago; it didn’t matter if they were watching it or not; the colours of one of the five channels, a rainbow of the chatter and information of the new India, kept changing in one corner of the room. Then, last year, during the second, prolonged custody battle, they’d neglected a couple of episodes of a soap, forgot, as if they’d inadvertently swallowed a pill that erased recent memory, whether Hersh was sleeping with Jordan (you couldn’t tell, from the names, which sex who belonged to) or Richard had finally deserted Anastasia; they’d found they could no longer immerse themselves, or even find a centre, however temporary, in a proxy existence. One day, three months ago, when Mrs. Chatterjee was sitting absently before the TV with the remote control in her hand (she could never fathom how best to use it; she couldn’t cope with the choice it presented to her, and suffered when it was in her control), she saw a face and heard a voice that was dimly familiar. The blonde, sturdy-jawed woman was someone she’d met before: it was Anastasia. She was filled with longing for a bygone simplicity.

THE NEXT MORNING Jayojit woke up at eight, still sleepy.

“Did they keep you awake?” he asked, scratching his stubble.

“I fell asleep,” confessed the Admiral.

The rest of the day was hot and surprisingly silent. Late last night the lane had echoed, even when the shehnai had died away, with the loudspeaker, imperative and muffled, announcing numbers. Jayojit had caught himself listening to them again in the bathroom as his head jangled to the sound of his own toothbrush. This morning he’d discovered the bathroom light on, its lustre wasted in daylight. He thought ephemerally of the Marwari bridegroom and his new wife, imagined what they might look like, of the wife’s comeliness, and her shyness inevitably wearing away the way the light in the bathroom had merged into the daylight’s ordinariness, and that the two might even be preparing to get on to a plane. He read the papers twice, bored the first time, with the writing and with life in India, and in a more interested way the second time round; then he read an article about how well Indians were doing “abroad”; naturally, by “abroad” the reporter meant not so much Kuwait or Bangladesh but principally America. He not so much disagreed with it as felt the report belonged to another era, another planet. How naive and innocent and ultimately patronizing and misleading everything in it was! After he’d finished, he suddenly missed the vigilant candour of The Times and the New Republic (though he’d taken issue with its recent pro-Clintonism), which he had once subscribed to, in one of those private moods of exuberance he’d had in America and of whose nature his then-wife had been unaware, in 1992. He had forgotten, last year, for some reason unconnected to his inward, slightly enervating, reappraisal of circumstances, to renew the subscription.

“You can always go to the American Centre,” said his father. “I don’t know if they’ll have the — what did you say it was? — the New Republic , though.”

Last time he’d been to the American Centre, sceptically, guarding his emigrant status like an undisclosed secret; he was seized not so much by nostalgia as by confusion, and even the Chowringhee outside the glass looked like a photograph. People were turning the pages of newspapers, browsing through videos; of course they didn’t have the New Republic. He’d gone to the toilet; and coming out, had encountered a strange picture comprising three colours, white, yellow, and green, which he hadn’t been able to understand. He grew impatient. His mind had been formed by his teachers at school and his father’s world, which in turn had been shaped by the late-colonial world (although his father had been against Empire, and was among the ratings who’d sympathized with the three accused of the INA and brought the Empire down by throwing down their arms). It was a mind that had little tolerance for ambiguity; each time it looked at things, it also looked into the mirror of certainties that had shaped it. Yet when the time had come for Jayojit to choose between Britain and America, he’d chosen the latter; though he never felt it was quite good enough for him. Even the other day, when he’d caught his parents returning from their walk early in the morning, he’d said: “How quaint of you two!” Explaining, he’d continued, “You know, in the States, no one walks any more. They drive; and once a week, when they want exercise, they go to the gym.”

“What if they need — need some matches — or milk?” asked his mother, smiling in puzzlement.

Worked up like the boy he once used to be, he said: “Oh, they phone! Home delivery! And then they go for a ‘workout’ and walk for hours on a treadmill.”

“But why?” asked the Admiral, trying to piece the jigsaw together.

Jayojit laughed and said: “They don’t want to be alone.”

He headed for the lift in the afternoon; he’d woken from a nap; he couldn’t see Bonny anywhere.

There was much less light in that corridor that went straight to the other end of this block; at the end of it was framed, as in a painting, a door with a lock on it. There was a staircase going up and down this way, and another staircase rising at the other end of the long corridor; a window at the staircase landing, and one at the other side, and it was light from these that filled the corridor. On both sides of the corridor there were three flats; from here, behind the doors, he’d heard the sound of videos and, once, of a music lesson in progress.

He might have come out to smoke a cigarette, but the anti-smoking campaign had got through to him, not so much because of fear but a belated sense of morality; he did not smoke — he had given it up ten years ago.