Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

She glanced behind her at a board, surreptitious, and murmured:

“Twenty-eight rupees today.” Then, looking down, she raised her face to him again.

“Sir, the interest rate’s 14.5 per cent presently,” she said, smiling.

“I should put all my money in here,” he quipped loudly.

“THE BOY’S STILL SNIFFLING, isn’t he?” said the Admiral. “He shouldn’t come to this city at all, it isn’t good for him.” Mrs. Chatterjee looked at her husband in disbelief, as if he’d uttered words which, like a prophecy, might come true; there is a saying in Bengali, “Ku daak deko na,” which warns against invoking unwanted things irresponsibly, in case the words have an effect and make them come into being.

After studying her grandson’s symptoms, she thought it wasn’t necessary to ask Dr. Sen to make the trip downstairs; as he was a semi-retired doctor, there were times, paradoxically, when he was more difficult to get hold of than a practising one; and, anyway, he’d prescribe Incidal or Cosavil, whose names Mrs. Chatterjee was familiar with. Looking after the Admiral had given her a compounder’s familiarity with the names of the commoner drugs.

Yet the periodic sniffing cleared up in two days; whether because of Mrs. Chatterjee’s inspired diagnosis or because the microbe had lived its life they didn’t know.

Meanwhile, Jayojit double-checked the date on his ticket; it was for the 6th of July.

“I suppose I should reconfirm it,” he said. “In person.” What he meant was that he didn’t trust Bangladesh Biman. He had a strong intuition that they wouldn’t be available on the phone. Even in Claremont, getting through to the Detroit office had taken a resigned, mechanical tenacity and, simply, time; even a sort of stupidity. The phone would keep ringing, ringing.

“You know where the office is?” said his father, touching his beard.

“Yeah, I have a fair idea,” said Jayojit, with something like a shrug.

The date had been arrived at at random, but they needed to get back around then, when it was still summer. Their “India trip” would have ended, a few of Bonny’s friends, some of whom were new “best friends” and lived near where he now lived with his mother and his mother’s “boyfriend,” and some of the old ones he might look up in Claremont, would have been sent to summer camp by their parents. Some had gone on round-the-world trips with their families, parents or older brothers and sisters (Jayojit hazily recalled Bonny telling him that a girl he knew in class would be in Kathmandu with her older sister around the same time they’d be in India; they planned to go up the lower foothills of the Himalayas); it was difficult to say about the summer — it was a season when people went on holiday and you had no idea when exactly they’d be back. At any rate, Bonny would return to his mother in August—“Is it August or September?” the Admiral had asked Jayojit yesterday; “No, August,” Jayojit had said — and he had no clear plans about what they’d do in Claremont till then.

“You could go back a week later,” said the Admiral; there was only the smallest hint of an appeal, implacable as a child’s, in his voice.

“I keep forgetting how quickly it gets dark here,” said Jayojit, as if it were yet another peculiarity he’d discovered.

“Well, we’re in the East,” said the Admiral, clearing his throat, speaking with the assurance of one who had been intimate with cartography. A light had been switched on in the sitting room.

Later, Jayojit went down to check if there was any mail in the letter-box. He did everything officiously, as if no task was unimportant; yet felt a mild apprehension when doing this self-imposed chore.

“Baba, wait for me!” said Bonny as he walked towards the door. “Wait for me,” he repeated from inside.

“You want to come?” There was mild disbelief in his voice. For Bonny avoided the children downstairs. A wary look came to his face whenever their voices reached upstairs, and he’d go to his room and reread one of the three or four books he’d brought with him.

As they stepped out of the lift, lights were switched on. And by five o’clock in the morning there would be daylight again, earlier than almost anywhere else; his mother, after switching on the transistor radio that was tuned to Calcutta A, would water the plants, and then his father and she, after the first cup of tea to which both were addicted, and without which this early hour was sluggish, might go out for a walk. Then, returning, more tea, bowel movements, a rhythm to which they blindly adhered.

He crossed the hall, appearing larger than he really was, and walked towards the row of letter-boxes; bending, he opened his father’s. The cries of children swelled behind him, and he almost expected to be collided with. There was nothing inside the narrow space, until he noticed a piece of paper folded vertically; an electricity bill; unblinking, his eyes went round it as he searched for the sum, one thousand five hundred and eighty rupees for the months of April and May (must be because the air-conditioner was running in his room these days); underneath it, he discovered there was an envelope. He bent forward and ran his finger clumsily through the top of the envelope, tearing it with short bursts of movement. Taking out a relatively small sheet of paper whose print could be seen faintly from its blank side, Jayojit read, with a look of amused disbelief:

Dear Madam,

We are pleased to say that Madamoiselle of Delhi is now in your area in Calcutta. Please visit us at between 9:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. on any day except Sunday and you will find a welcoming staff eager to cater to your interests. We have a wide range of salwaar kameez outfits, chunnis, Bolero jackets and we also stock decorations. Special discounts are available. Tailoring services are provided. Please lose no time in availing our services. We look forward to seeing you in the near future.

Yours sincerely,

Shaila Motwane

Some enterprising Sindhi woman. Shouldn’t it be “availing yourself of?” There was a chatty self-confidence in the tone that, in other circumstances, might have almost disarmed him.

He didn’t see Bonny at first; for a second he mistook another boy for him, and then saw that he was leaning where a wall had thrown a shadow, against a pillar; a few children, some of whom Jayojit somehow seemed to know by sight, were playing around him — a Sikh boy; another curly-haired boy. As Jayojit advanced, Bonny waved to him. Jayojit waved back and shouted, “Coming!” as the Sikh boy rushed past on roller-skates.

Near the steps was a group of teenagers in t-shirts. They were half-defined; in semi-darkness, as in the inside of a discothèque. They spoke softly to each other, not in Bengali, but in Hindi. “This is their city,” thought Jayojit ruefully. “Its future lies with them.”

“Want to play?” he said, leaning over his son and wiping his forehead.

“Not really, baba.”

Bonny’d never been shy at school or at home. He usually had two or three good buddies; Jayojit, from a past life, knew Ciaran, an Irish-American, and Ajay, a Gujarati doctor’s son.

“Want to play with me, then?” asked Jayojit. “What about it?”

He felt proud of the boy and, contradictorily, wanted to show him off while protecting him. Two boys were playing table-tennis on one side of the hall. They’d stop and one would announce “Five two!” or “Three love!” the louder to give the score a legitimacy, then resume the game at once.

“Hey, Ajit,” said a girl, eleven or twelve years old, stepping towards the table.

“Kya hai, bhai?” said the larger boy, his movements lazy after the last point.