Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

The college campus was off the motorway, four large buildings, two cafeterias, God knew how many lecture theatres, and a parking lot as huge as a desert. The college produced its own t-shirts, with “Claremont” in Gothic letters inscribed upon them. When Amala had left him and gone to California, he used to wonder at how this town, with its McDonald’s outlet guarding the highway at night like a lit oasis, had come to be so integrally a part of his life.

The doorbell rang at eleven, and it was Maya. “Bus was late,” she said. Mrs. Chatterjee said nothing.

Later, when Maya was in the kitchen and out of earshot, she whispered to her son:

“I shall be rid of her at the first opportunity.”

Maya, as if in belated response, let fall a utensil with a crash into the kitchen sink.

The next day: water had collected at the end of the lane that opened on to the main road. If you went down the corridor outside the Admiral’s flat to the other end you might be able to espy some of the disorder that had been caused. Yet the post wasn’t late.

“O ma,” he said, digging urgently in his trouser pocket, “it’s still here. I forgot to give you this.”

She peered — she had reading glasses, but rarely used them — at the leaflet advertising bolero coats and salwaar kameez sets.

“What’ll I do with this?” Then, her mind moving on: “Anyway, it might come in handy.” Was she thinking of a cousin’s daughter, Mahashweta, the only young woman in the family to whom they had, any more, a tangential relationship, for whom she might want to buy something if she came to Calcutta in the future?

“You might do some shopping there yourself.”

Jayojit’s mother didn’t have a sense of humour; or something handicapped its expression — because with her grandson she was almost nothing but teasing.

“For what, baba? Those shops are only meant for girls!”

When he’d married Amala, the salwaar kameez had just come into fashion; it had multiplied everywhere like a popular tune. Now, in its maturity, its prints were still multifarious and pleasing, like an annual blossoming.

Nothing in the post today except a statement of interest for the Admiral. Three months after their wedding Amala had begun to write to her mother-in-law from Arlington. The letters came with Mrs. Chatterjee’s name on the envelope, Mrs. Sumitra Chatterjee, in a neat running hand at first unfamiliar. They were determinedly chatty but formal, and full of questions, perhaps to camouflage some sense of inadequacy, about how things were at “home”; and, slow but destination-bound, they took two or three weeks to get here. To Mrs. Chatterjee they had given a fleeting pleasure, and also the obligation of having to reply in simple, serious sentences that were, however, laboriously composed; for she was a poor letter-writer.

What had made him marry her? Was it her prettiness, which he’d been struck by the first time he’d seen her in their new house in Jodhpur Park? “Hi, I’m Amala.” Every word pronounced carefully, her lips becoming a small “o” at the middle syllable of her name. Then transformed, in Thyagaraja Hall, into a graven image, small and adorned, head shrouded by the sari. There had been some confusion about the details; West Bengalis carried the bride around the fire; in East Bengal — and he’d thought this was true of Bengal in general— she walked round it. Moreover, before the meeting of the eyes, the “shubho drishti,” in West Bengal, a large betel leaf was held in front of the bride’s face; this was news to him. And her face, lit intermittently by the camera’s flash — not very Bengali, almost North or North West Indian, no hint or tracery of high cheekbones, but, in her forehead and mouth, a suggestion of elsewhere (she’d told him that her ancestors were brahmins who’d moved to Bengal from Sind several generations ago, seeking sanctuary).

On their way to the States, she changed from a Patola to a pair of jeans in the airport—“Can you believe it, it’s the first time I’m going abroad?”; sitting late into the night, they’d talked about their families. In the eighties, travelling to the West or to America was still uncommon — after arriving, they’d been in Arlington for a few months before moving to Claremont, and she’d found the desert climate hard going: “Baap re, it’s hotter here than Cal!” “Cal” was Loreto House, the Sky Room, Middleton Row, New Market, Loudon Street, Tollygunge. In Claremont, he’d told her they were now only three hours away from Canada, and that year had been a year of expeditions; the Niagara Falls, roaring behind them as they posed for a photo, the underground shopping malls in Toronto. “Don’t you want to continue studying Pol Science?”—sometimes, for fun, he’d imitate some of her habits of speaking — and she’d made a face and said, “I want to be a housewife.”

She began by phoning her parents twice a week, speaking loudly over the mouthpiece as if she were talking to people in the next room (most of the conversations took place in his absence, or at odd times of the night in the living room; later, he’d imagine their content when stopping at the time and duration printed on the telephone bill; it was her mother, he knew, who was her confidante, and could chatter and whisper with her daughter as if she were her twin sister, while with her father Amala, on the phone, was still the flirtatious, slightly high-pitched, little girl, always being reprimanded for not realizing it was a long-distance call); nevertheless she was, and this was hardly noticeable at first, distancing herself from “Cal”. The satisfactions of life had made her clear-sighted: “Jayojit, you’re too cynical. Baba, you know you’re here for the money and the good life like the rest of us! What’s wrong with that?”

He went out in the afternoon, to buy a bottle of antacid to counter the dyspepsia his long spells of inactivity had brought on, and one of Nescafé instant coffee (which, contradictorily, increased the dyspepsia) — they’d run out of coffee this morning. He’d done everything on this trip to avoid meeting people he knew and to occupy himself in small ways so that he might forget the trip was coming to an end. Walking down had hardly an effect on him; he breathed soundlessly. On the second floor he was delayed by the sound of discordant music; taking a few steps into the corridor and craning his neck, he saw through an open doorway a gathering of Marwari women and children singing bhajans, the children on laps and a large woman beating out the rhythm on a pair of cymbals; he turned, and resumed his journey downward. At the end of the last flight (now he could see the lift descending on the ground floor from the landing, the doors parting by themselves and revealing the liftman half-asleep inside) his way was blocked by two women, maidservants, deep in conversation so that they didn’t notice him.

He went into the hall and compound and then towards the main road, thinking about the days left. This time he went past the Birla temple, with its fake North Indian architecture, and then walked on towards Gariahat. He walked past Mizoram House, and moved towards the area he’d visited repeatedly; the Grindlays Bank, Rash Behari Avenue, the bookshop he’d gone into once. At the crossing of Gariahat and Rash Behari Avenue, he, unable to hear himself think in the noise, bought a chequered duster from the pavement for twelve rupees. Then, from a chemist’s and provisions shop, he bought the antacid and the coffee, which, to his incredulity, cost fifty rupees, and, to compensate, came with a free frisbee of rudimentary appearance.

On his way back, he slowed down, and stared at a building in the early stages of construction; clusters of rods coming out of the earth. Where was it he’d seen it before? — from the other end of the fourth-floor balcony. Now trees and windows concealed it; but was it already in a more advanced state of construction than he’d seen it in, or was it his imagination? Barely conscious of them, he passed the old-world (by old-world he meant the fifties and the sixties, where everything seemed more sacrosanct than at any other point in India’s history, except perhaps its Golden Age) bungalows of the rich Marwari entrepreneurs, with their large gates; and then some more recent six- or seven-storeyed buildings with balconies. He’d realized recently (it had been inarticulate in him since God knows when, but he understood it only now) that, given a choice of being born at any time in India’s past, he’d have chosen to be born in the thirties, so that he could have a taste of the first years of post-Independence India: and he entertained this fancy almost as if it might be a possibility. Instead, he’d been born just after the mid-fifties. Now, unconnected to this, like the smell of dust, a snatch of a conversation returned; idly, he turned over again in his head the idea of a second marriage, which the Admiral had been proposing to him last evening.