Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

“Lovely time or no lovely time,” his wife said, “it gives me a headache with that woman not coming these days and the clothes drying so late.”

The Admiral got up from his armchair and stretched himself. “Haven’t been out walking for a couple of days now,” he said. “But it’s risky these days in the morning.”

Last night he hadn’t slept well; it had been humid; he’d grunted as he’d turned from side to side, snored and then woken up; and, unknown to his wife, had, in the dark room, gone over the next months, envisioning the various scenarios. It was only when thinking of his grandson that he calmed down into acceptance; got up and grunted, “Ektu aram hoyechhe,” acknowledging, in a low tone, that the heat had ebbed. Mrs. Chatterjee was asleep; they had this habit, both of them, of addressing each other even when the other was out of earshot. Then, groping but familiar with the lefts and rights of the path, he’d gone into the kitchen to drink some cold water.

“I’d like to go somewhere during the monsoons. To a dryer place. It’s not that I don’t like the monsoons. It’s just that there’s too much water in South Calcutta.” But he couldn’t remember when he’d last had a holiday and he had no plans of having one. In his present state of mind, he didn’t particularly like being at home, but if there was one thing he liked less, it was going somewhere else.

“Strange thing for a seaman to say,” said Jayojit, a leg extended on the table.

“Oh, ships are extremely dry places. They have to be.” He paused, and said, “Suffered a lot from seasickness myself.”

“I suppose you could go and stay with Ranajit.”

With Ranajit, who’d grown up with his parents, moving wherever they did (“I can’t have two boys living away from me,” Mrs. Chatterjee had, distraught, insisted), the relationship between father and son had probably been closer but subject to more strain; Ranajit making the sacrifice of changing schools, of sets of friends whose oddities were no sooner memorized than they were replaced by another class, another school anthem.

“Oh no,” said the Admiral, waving one hand repeatedly. The room with its old painting (bought from a gallery from an artist they knew slightly; “Charity begins at home,” the Admiral had joked) and decorations was lit by the lightning outside the verandah. The Admiral said, “I don’t like going back to places where I’ve worked.”

JAYOJIT HAD TO RECONFIRM the Bangladesh Biman tickets.

On the way to Chowringhee the roads were strangely empty; he wondered if it was a holiday and then thought, “Of course it isn’t.” Ashutosh Mukherji Road and Bhowanipore were deserted, as on the day of a strike, and he decided it must be the time of the day. As the taxi passed the Aeroflot office, with its huge blue and white sign, he thought, with a sigh, of the stories he’d heard about it, which made him self-congratulatory even about having a Biman ticket. “Given a choice between a Muscovite and a Bangladeshi,” he thought as the taxi halted at a crossing, “I’d plump for the latter.” He shook with laughter when he remembered how a friend, on his way to Cambridge, England, had been humiliated when changing planes in 1986, and spent an endless night in an unheated Moscow airport. Then, as the taxi moved forward again, the smile was replaced by a look of exasperation when Jayojit recalled one of his father’s cousins, Pramathesh Jethu, who used to swear by Aeroflot—“It ’s good, solid food they serve you, I tell you; who wants fancy trappings?”—most probably because he was a member of the Communist Party of India in his youth, and had actually travelled three or four times in his seventy-two-year-old life to Russia; until he contrived to die, diplomatically, one year before the break-up of the Soviet Union.

The Biman office was crowded; the queues disintegrated in a mixture of high spirits and panic. Jayojit stood facing a poster with an elegant woman sitting by a fountain. This would be Rome or Vienna. The glass door opened whenever someone came in and the pavement outside became visible, and the noise of the traffic on Chowringhee amplified until the door closed again.

“Right!” he said when he’d got back. “I’ve performed the Himalayan task. The worst is over.”

It had actually made him mad with rage; there’d been a man (“If one can call him that,” thought Jayojit) behind him in the queue who’d taken a liking to him and kept prodding him in the back to ask in dialect: “Brother, which is the line for refund?” But Jayojit had a way of not showing his emotions. Now he’d brought with him the two tickets with the new tags stuck to the counterfoil. Attached was also a ragged computer printout infested with tiny numbers; the nocturnal, ever-unfamiliar language spoken at airports; 2300 for eleven o’clock; 0000 when midnight was meant.

“What time does it leave?” asked the Admiral, petulant at his own ignorance.

“Seven-thirty,” said Jayojit. “And then it reaches Dhaka at eight, I think. I can’t remember if they’re behind us or ahead of us. Anyway, it’s only a half an hour difference. The plane for New York, fingers crossed, leaves at eleven.” He paused after this cheerful recital, and then said, “They didn’t ask me whether I wanted vegetarian or non-vegetarian. Maybe I was expecting too much!”

“I hear they give ilish sometimes,” said his mother. “At least that is what I hear.” As if she were speaking of a wedding where it was rumoured a certain dish was bound to be served.

“Ilish in mustard,” said Jayojit with mock distaste. “We can eat it with our fingers!”

Coming out of the office he’d walked down Chowringhee, one with a stream of people indistinguishable from office-goers. He passed the Lighthouse Cinema and the Grand hotel; no perceptible breeze; not long ago he’d been amidst the traffic on the left and now he was hardly aware of it. He had wanted to buy a few things before he left — to give away as presents to some of those he knew in Claremont. And a few things for his own home.

“Cottage Industries?” he said. “They have one here, don’t they?”

“Yes,” said the Admiral, standing in the middle of the room and thinking, as if the city were whirling around him. “Haven’t been there for a long time.”

“It’s near the Metro Cinema,” said Jayojit’s mother.

“All those lovely Rajasthani bedcovers,” said Jayojit, “and pichwais and tables — they cost a fortune in America.” He’d laughed rather loudly and said to his father: “You have to hand it to these Rajasthanis, with those traditions going way, way back! In the end, what do we Bengalis have except a few first-class university degrees — and a good command of English?”

He came back with two mirrorwork cushion covers, a bedcover for himself, and two small brass birds for his neighbour, a cardiac surgeon. “You can buy endlessly from that place, and you have to hold yourself back,” he chuckled. There was a pichwai, in particular, he’d stood before silently, undecided whether to buy — it had reminded him of one that hung in his drawing room when he was married, and this was what, in the end, went against it — with a Krishna at the centre, surrounded by ten or twenty Krishnas and Radhas dallying with each other, their mystic union replicated like raindrops. He’d suddenly become aware that his mind had been caught in the rippling dance of the picture. “No time to waste,” he’d admonished himself.

He’d also bought a sari for his mother. It was a pretty sari, an off-white tangail with orange embroidery upon it, and a green border. “Joy, it must have cost a lot,” she said. He had lighted upon this tangail not because it had stood out but because it had held back; there had been an understated quality about it that had caught his attention. “Consider it a Puja present,” said Jayojit.