Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

When he was married, Amala and he’d go to Detroit (either Detroit or Cleveland; but they preferred Detroit; they knew more people there) for the Pujas. Last time, the Detroit Puja Committee had hired two school buildings for the festival; and he’d bowed before the pratima with her large eyes, placed at one end of the hall near the portraits of the school founders. How fervent Amala used to be during the anjali! He used to wonder what she was praying for. She’d open her eyes after the anjali with a startled look, like a swimmer who’s come up from underwater.

He didn’t believe — belief did not come into it, as he’d explored the hall, cradling Bonny in one arm, or pausing clumsily to put him to sleep. (Half-asleep in that din, he’d grown heavier in his arms.) But, over the last few years, he’d begun to believe in the efficacy of prayer; of aloneness, which is what prayer was. That, to him, in the centre of the noise, had been a discovery.

“But this is what they do after it rains a little,” grumbled Jayojit’s mother. She didn’t explain who “they” were. “It’s a good excuse.” Maya hadn’t come.

“Where does she live?”

“Oh — not far away!” said Mrs. Chatterjee, waving the question of distance away. “Ghugudanga.” It sounded like a village; difficult to believe it was in the heart of Ballygunge. There’d been some waterlogging the past two days; that might have made things hard; but he was silent.

When he was a boy he’d come home from Ooty before the rains began. Some of his classmates were English, sons of diplomats, or of managers of companies still, in those days, sixty per cent British-owned; they took the changes in the weather cheerfully, “Absolutely first-rate storm!” as they did their teachers, “Chatterjee, I can never pronounce that man’s name, yours is so much easier.” Come the rains, they’d vanish as if they’d muttered a mantra that made them dissolve into the atmosphere. The monsoons, like some messenger hurrying through the land, throwing his moth-like shadow, would have come to the South before he made his journey, so that he’d already have seen the large drops on his way to Ban-galore, from where he set out for Delhi. Home was different places; Vishakapatnam, with the sea lashing the harbour, known by that quaint name at the time, Vizag; then Cochin; and Delhi, in Chanakyapuri, not far from Mrs. Gandhi. “Whatever you might think of her, she’s gutsy,” the Admiral had said. “The Russians respect her, the Americans fear her”; those words returning to him like the lines of a nursery rhyme. Even now, his father believed that India had declined since “that woman’s death.” Coming “home,” the habitation of the next four or five years in his adolescence, to these certainties; when his father was made Rear-Admiral, he recalled Nehru nostalgically, as if he were somehow responsible for all the good in people’s lives: “Met him, you know. Saluted him. . was it in ’sixty-six? Broken man, but handsome. No truth to what they said about him and Edwina.” One would never have known that he was a commander at the time, and had been in Nehru’s presence for only five minutes. Coming back from boarding school to a slightly altered set of parents, Joy’d still find some things unchanged, for instance his mother frequently reordering furniture in the bungalow, her movements as focused as a bird’s, moving the Taj Mahals and shikaras. Outside one of the houses, there was a garden with oleanders in it; that was either in Vizag or in Delhi. A navy cadet stood outside the house all day. And Joy would lock himself up in his room, with the air-conditioner on, because it was sweltering in Cochin and the cleverest way of battling the heat was not moving. He read books he was too young for. Sometimes Ranajit, who was left to wander about the bungalow and was quite content to do so, would begin to bang on the door with primitive urgency to be let in— “Dada! Dada!”—the cry strangely plaintive.

Contact with the armed forces had cured them of the boyhood make-believe of wanting to be soldiers; instead, it was something else that took shape in them. Ranajit was less opinionated than Jayojit; and he’d had a love-marriage. Jayojit, after almost topping the list at Stephen’s, had performed as expected at a scholarship interview, where he was questioned by, among others, Karan Singh, and had been surprised by his dark feminine eyes. The British Deputy High Commissioner, Pratt or Spratt, he couldn’t recall, had asked him who his favourite authors were, and his mind had gone momentarily blank, his authors had deserted him, only one returned to him shadowly and he uttered his name: “Pablo Neruda.”

“That’s very interesting,” the Englishman had said, adding wryly, “but wasn’t he a diplomat? It seems we do some good things sometimes.”

There was a gentle murmur of laughter round the table, in which Jayojit, just twenty-four years old, had joined nervously. Then the man had continued, “Do tell us why, Mr. Chatterjee.”

Jayojit always remembered his answer with a hearty laugh later: “Had absolutely no idea what I was saying. Told him: ‘Because he’s both political and sensuous. He reminds me of the Bengali poet Sukanta Bhattacharya.’ Can you believe such utter nonsense? I haven’t even read Sukanta.”

But believe him they had, and it was he who’d turned down the opportunity to go to Oxford and accepted, instead, a rare scholarship to California: “They have seasons there, baba!”

Karan Singh had, very mellifluously, asked him where he saw the future of Indian politics: “Do you think we’ll persist with the parliamentary system? Or adopt the presidential system?”

Jayojit half-listened; behind those kohl-dark eyes, he could only see the paradisial land of Kashmir. Not many years had passed since the Emergency; and, risking antagonizing the Congressman, he’d said: “I think our parliamentary system needs to change, sir, but not towards the presidential system. If anything, it needs to be decentralized.”

Wasted words; in the end he’d found himself in America, where not everyone knew where India was. Yet that scholarship had taken some of his friends to England; one, “Pugs” to his friends, had become an assistant editor of a national daily with the more sonorous name Rajen Mehra, and another a lecturer in Birmingham; yet another taught in the vast, wilderness-like campus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University — news came to him from unexpected sources, from hearsay, in which these fragments revealed a continuity. Meanwhile, Ranajit’s “romance” started when the family was in Delhi, when Jayojit had already left for the U.S. Ranajit was an undergraduate at the Hindu in 1982, would spend nights in secret at the hostel with his friends; and then his group of friends disintegrated and his mother decided he’d spend more time at home now, that he’d become “serious” about his exams. But he’d go for walks in Lodhi Gardens— although Delhi was already reputedly unsafe after dusk— with a girl called Anita who was then only in Class XII in the Mater Dei School; or have milkshakes at Nirula’s as blue-eyed tourists moved about in Connaught Place.

Jayojit could count the number of times he’d met his brother and sister-in-law after their wedding on the fingers of one hand. If anything was to blame, it was the ease of modern travel, which lulled people into believing that journeys to those closest to them could be postponed. His brother had called him “dada”; Anita, the few times she’d seen him, called him “Joyda.” They were to visit him at some point in the future in America. “Come in September if you must,” he’d said brusquely to his sister-in-law. “The Fall’s really as lovely as it’s supposed to be.”

It never rained like this where he lived. Not far away from Claremont, in Iowa, he’d heard there were thunder-storms; they were brought there by winds from the Gulf of Mexico. But where he lived, and where, till recently, Bonny and his mother had lived, there were contrary influences, for Claremont was washed by cool air from Canada. Once, when driving to college, he’d been caught in a hailstorm.