Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

“It’s not as bad an idea as you think.” A silence as on cue.

“I don’t think it’s a bad idea. But — once bitten twice shy, as they say.”

He didn’t mean his first, and only, marriage. He meant the meetings he’d had with Arundhati seven months ago. One meeting, then two, then three; more cups of tea. She respected him in her quiet way — he’d felt that; and he’d begun to like her. In spite of an “arranged marriage” having failed once, they were both prepared to give it a second go; he still didn’t have confidence in “love”; it was other things— understanding, mutual needs — that held a marriage together. “But not a Hindu wedding, God, no; I couldn’t take another one of those,” she’d said. “Just a registry.” Everything had been going smoothly and then, almost without warning, he’d realized, after a little more than a month, that something was holding her back, she’d changed her mind and wouldn’t go through with it.

His father, scowling in his beard, was more resilient than he was. The Admiral had already had a vision of the second wedding.

“By the way,” Jayojit asked — and he’d never put this question before; months had passed—“what happened to her?”

The Admiral had to furrow his eyebrows before he could understand what he was talking about. Once he’d understood, he waved one hand. In his other hand he held a tumbler in which he’d poured a peg of the Chivas Regal (“These damn monsoon breezes can make you feverish”) that Jayojit had brought.

“Don’t know.” Almost childish; and certainly prickly.

“No. I see,” Jayojit said.

Their conversations came back to him, like snatches drifting to him from a neighbouring window.

A watchman was guarding the still-skeletal structure. “How long?” he said to the watchman in Hindi. The watchman looked startled. “Kitna din lagega khatam hone ko?” As if he was planning to buy a flat here. “Saal lag jayega, saab,” the watchman. A whole year for completion! — had the contractor adopted some sort of go-slow policy? Property prices still weren’t as high as in Bombay: but they were high enough. He couldn’t make sense of it; maybe it was deliberate — so that prices might appreciate while the building was in construction. “Kya naam hoga?” he asked, making a perfect arc on the dust with one shoe. Lines appeared on the watchman’s forehead as he tried to think. Then the lines vanished; a smile parted the lips. “Manjusree Apartments, saab.” Ugly, old-fashioned name, thought Jayojit, but what you’d expect from a nouveau-riche building. They talked about the building delicately, as if it could hear them. He walked back towards the temple; everywhere there were creepers, with white blossoms, and gulmohur trees; he thought of some of the lanes in Delhi, genteel Greater Kailash. Had he been here last time? — he couldn’t remember things clearly from last time, confusion dominated, talk about courts. From the building coming up crows took off, probably disturbed by something; they might have built a nest there.

When it began to rain, he took refuge at the entrance to the auditorium by the Birla temple, beneath the images of elephants and gods. It was still bright; rain and sun at once, like an electric floodlight playing upon the water. Then, when it stopped, the moisture seemed to ascend as steam off the road.

Coming into his lane, he saw someone ahead of him. It was Mrs. Gupta; he realized about two weeks had passed since he’d last seen her. He wondered about her life after her husband’s death; for he presumed — vaguely remembered— that she had no children.

He was walking faster than her, so that, by the time they had entered the gates, he was just a little behind her. She must have felt his presence, because she glanced back at him swiftly.

“Ah — Mr. Chatterjee!”

They walked together the rest of the way. She told him how she’d had to take shelter beneath a tree, standing next to a man vending Hindi paperback novels, from the shower. “And yet, this time, Jayojit felt, the monsoons had never arrived properly.”

“No umbrella!” she said, opening the palm — small and startlingly fair — of one empty hand. “How could I know? No clouds, nothing!”

“Out visiting someone?” he asked politely as they came up the steps. He said this in Bengali. “Kaarur baadi giyechhilen? ” He stared at a small black dot on her forehead, which seemed to avert his gaze. Her eyes moved from one side to another, like an animal’s that has been genuinely surprised by a shower.

“Oh no,” she said. She had a plastic packet in one hand, and was wearing a printed sari, pretty but now faded. “No, I just went to a shop and bought a few things.”

“Luckily, this place is close to two markets,” she said in explanation. “My daughter, who lives in Alipore — the old ‘white town’—says there are no markets nearby, it’s a great problem sending out a servant to do the shopping.” That put paid to his notion about her being childless. Her eyes, to him, still expected much of life, but everything else about her seemed to inhabit a world of routine and slightly aimless repetition. She lifted the packet and he could see, through the plastic, a bottle of disinfectant liquid. “This is quite good!” she volunteered. “Mr. Chatterjee, we’re getting some of your conveniences here too!” In reply, he showed her the frisbee, and she stared at it very seriously. “Free gift,” he said. They waited together for the lift. The numbers on the little panel above the door to the lift decreased from six downward, and they seemed to be standing for a disproportionately long time. She seemed to be less forthcoming now than she’d been the other evening; probably had something on her mind. At any rate, although she must know something about his own life — his story being fairly well known — she had the kindness not to mention it; or was probably not interested; had her own life to think about. When the doors of the lift opened, he heard the loud hum of the fan inside, and said:

“After you.”

“BABA,” SAID JAYOJIT, counting the foils of the traveller’s cheques, “I may as well change these.” The Admiral looked up from the paper and considered them with suspicion, as if they were counterfeit money. Yet Jayojit didn’t want to have to go again; he calculated his remaining expenditure to be about 2,000 rupees, including the parting bakshish to Maya — his mother and he had discussed this; she, with characteristic prudence, had said seventy-five rupees; he’d decided, after some thought, on the more appropriate sum of a hundred and fifty — and the airport tax: in his head he computed the figure of roughly seventy dollars. (His mother was on the verandah, looking out at two part-time helps coming in.) Only the day before yesterday he’d been to Grindlay’s again to put money into his account and withdraw a further five thousand; this was the five thousand he gave each month to his parents, after protests on their side and laborious dismissals on his, to cover expenses. (It was true that he anyway dominated his parents; whether consciously or not, he couldn’t tell; but he often felt, for no justifiable or clear reason, he knew better. In fact, soon after he came back, this was the role he was asked, not in so many words, to assume.) There was another girl, fair and rather small, at the desk this time, with a conspicuous, large stick-on bindi on her forehead, not Sunita, the dark one, talkative and industrious by turns, who’d been there last time.

He’d needed trivial information: his balance of account. He’d felt lost; glanced in confusion and with something like contempt at the customers sitting meekly on the sofa; then this girl, at the table nearest him, had come to his rescue with a “Yes, sir, can I help you, please?” which he hadn’t heard the first time; like a line in a child’s poem, she’d had to repeat it. She’d given him a print-out, bending her head and ignoring the noise the printer made.