Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

“We’re going to go to Gariahat,” he said to Bonny. The boy was in the toilet; he ran out, attempting determinedly to fit a button into his shorts’ buttonhole. It was their third trip to that place; each time Jayojit found an appropriate reason.

Last year he’d savoured, in the humidity of the late and vanishing monsoons, some of the smoking foods on the pavements. The reason he’d been experimental was because the food was fried; and it had settled lightly in his stomach and left him unscathed; and left no imprint on the surface of his mind.

Jayojit’s mother was worried.

“How will you go?” she asked; her face recorded her unhappiness. This, despite the fact that he’d been there six days ago on a private misadventure.

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll find a way,” said Jayojit, tying his shoelaces.

“Don’t take the bus, baba,” said his mother; as if she were advising against needless self-endangerment. “Whatever you do.”

“No chance of that — don’t worry.”

The Admiral, as if he’d overheard, came out of the bedroom and said:

“I can give you the keys to the car.” This was uttered as if it were a startling, slightly embarrassing, confession. “It’s a bit old, but the Fiat’s an excellent car — doesn’t have the Ambassador’s reputation for sturdiness, but it’s actually much sturdier. I’m not sure if it’s got enough petrol though.” The Fiat had been acquired cheap before retirement; and its engine had vibrated mildly until it had arrived at its state of voluntary repose, when its windows were cleaned twice a week from the outside.

Last time Jayojit had just walked; now his father stood before him, undecided.

“Ha!” he said, waving one hand, declaiming to the balcony. “No thank you! No, I don’t think I’m quite ready to take on the Calcutta traffic. .”

Something in his father’s tone caught Bonny’s attention; he stopped to watch him with large eyes.

“It’s much better there, isn’t it?” said the Admiral.

Only one place was referred to as there these days; but at one time it used to be the Admiral’s in-laws’ home.

“In general,” said Jayojit, his voice louder than usual. But his old cynicism about America soon got the better of him, and he felt unable to commend any of its virtues without causing discomfort to a part of himself; he added, “If you don’t get run into from behind by some schizophrenic motorist.”

In the lane, Bonny ran a little way ahead (“Careful!” said his father). A watchman said: “Kahaa jate ho, baba?”; he knew Bonny now, but received no acknowledgement in return except an increase in speed. Raat-ki-rani and nameless but characteristic creepers, a colony whose presence was taken for granted, flourished by the gate. He didn’t always obey everything his father said; it was Amala who used to be the symbol of authority at home, and the one who would invariably dispense it. Nothing that had happened yet had changed the way that he viewed his parents; he saw the present arrangement as an experiment. He couldn’t clearly distinguish between fifteen minutes and half an hour, let alone knowing what a longer period of time was.

“That’s a pretty big house,” said Bonny after his father had caught up with him, standing suddenly to look at a two-storeyed mansion, probably built in the twenties or thirties, repainted yellow. A banyan stood alone in the courtyard, and its shadow sat meditating beneath it. “Is the guy who owns it quite rich?”

There was an outbreak of shrill chattering in the branches. The slatted windows of the mansion looked back blankly at the boy.

“Might have been at one time,” said Jayojit. “Probably gone mad by now, all alone in that huge place.”

There was no sound; the birds were quiet again.

“Yeah; right,” said the boy.

Yet something had made him pause before the old house, not just because of its largeness, but its silence in the midst of all the small sounds.

“There’s a taxi,” said Jayojit, pointing to a shadow.

Abruptly, as if he’d become aware of the sunlight between the trees, Bonny narrowed his eyes. Then he looked at the taxi; last time they’d walked to Gariahat.

Jayojit’s mother had once told him, “Joy, there’s always a taxi at the corner of the lane”; now her words came back to him.

Two men, in their late twenties or early thirties, were sitting on the front seat, a geometry of detachment. The heat was like a presence in the taxi; one could sense it from outside. Jayojit knocked twice on the door at the back.

“Will you go?” he asked, bending forward.

The driver turned to look at him.

“Kahaa?” he asked, avoiding his eye.

“Gariahat.”

A pause; then the driver shook his head, and his companion shifted slightly.

“Bloody fool,” thought Jayojit, his silent but vehement voice surprising himself, and then gently steered Bonny towards the main road.

Some of the trees were still heavy with gulmohur blossoms. At intervals in the lane, they recurred, the ones in the distance a blurred mass of deep orange. They found a taxi on the main road going in the other direction.

“Gariahat?” said Jayojit, uncharacteristically tentative now; more tense than tentative. He’d lost the knack of talking to these people and it often made him rude. Light shimmered upon the doors of the taxi. The driver, older than him or approximately his age, gestured to the back, and leaned forward to swing down the meter; Bonny, entering, sat at the edge and rested his chin disconsolately on the shiny plastic of the front seat.

“The market,” Jayojit said in Bengali, loudly, as if he were speaking in a foreign language.

The taxi moved slowly; Bonny’s head vibrating gently with the motion.

On the way they passed, at intervals, two ice-cream carts pushed by men in blue uniforms who almost immediately became reflections in the driver’s mirror.

“What’s Kwality?” asked Bonny.

Meanwhile, the driver, all of a sudden animated, blew his horn at a slow-moving private car, driven by an old man before him.

“What’s Kwality?”

After a couple of repetitions, Jayojit said: “Oh, “quality!” Let’s see. . that’s the value of a thing. How good or bad a thing is.”

“Oh,” said Bonny. As Jayojit began thinking to himself about the way everyday speech had entered the language of economics and vice versa — for instance, the word “value”— Bonny said, “Why’s it painted on those vans?”

“What is?”

“Kwality,” came the reply.

A moment later, illumination came. “Oh that’s the name of an ice-cream ,” he said. He realized that he had become something of a pedant with his son, always doing his best to rescue him from spelling mistakes and misinformation; unrepentant, he said, “That’s not a real word! The word I was talking about is”—and he spelt “quality.”

“Ice-cream?” said Bonny, lifting his chin from the seat, as if, like doughnuts, ice-cream was too outrageous to mention here.

“You can have some later,” promised Jayojit. This was a commitment to be honoured at some unspecified moment.

“Can I have some now, baba?” asked Bonny, tilting his face into the shadow, towards his father.

“Not now , Bonny, sorry,” said Jayojit, slapping a housefly off his trousers, and then busily smoothing them again. “See, the ice-cream van’s gone ”—his voice shook as the taxi tried to swerve unsuccessfully around a pothole—“and. .” He left the sentence unfinished, as if he’d already conveyed what he wanted to say. As an afterthought, he said, “ Gariahat might have ice-cream.”

Just outside, the sun lay like fire on the pavement; two peasants sat on their haunches upon a kerb.