Amit Chaudhuri: A New World

Later, as Bonny was drying himself, and investigating a scab on his elbow which had begun to itch, Jayojit came into the room; the conversation — the “adda”—outside between father and son had temporarily come to an end; both had had to tear themselves away; how Jayojit thirsted, without knowing it, for the pleasures of adda when he was in America! “I’ll be back to continue this conversation from where we left off,” he warned his father as he rose from his chair; now he sat on the bed, untying his shoelaces with a look of great satisfaction, as if it were the climax to his journey, ready to go in for a bath himself.

“Had a shower, Bonny?” he said.

“Uh-huh,” said the boy. “Baba, I don’t have any clothes,” he added, the towel covering his head like a hood.

“All right,” said Jayojit, with the air of one who is familiar with and used to such situations, “we’ll take your clothes out right now,” and he bent down on his knees to unlock the suitcase, and retrieved a new t-shirt from an apparently prodigious store of folded t-shirts, and a pair of shorts, and laid them carefully on the bed. The boy stared interestedly at his clothes.

In the kitchen, Jayojit’s mother was setting pieces of rui fish afloat in burning oil.

His mother was not the best possible cook, and these days she had a helper who did some of the cooking in the morning; this helper was not a very good cook either. But Jayojit was not too fussy about food and nor was the Admiral; for the latter, especially, home food was just a routine, and had to be healthy and cooked in a small amount of oil; excesses in connection with food were to be indulged in at the club Christmas or New Year’s Eve parties, where strangely shaped gâteaux were served, and people queued up for their portion of barbecued steak and sautéed vegetables.

Home food was safe and insipid, and had a tranquillity about it; today there was a watery lentil daal in a chinaware bowl, fried rui, a dalna which was a combination of sweet gourd and cabbage leaves among other things, and a preparation of pabdaa fish in mustard. It was an honest, even joyful, effort by his mother, though it had not quite worked; but it was not wholly tasteless either.

“The pabdaa is very fresh,” said Jayojit appreciatively. He was eating with his fingers.

His father, bent and serious, now and then dabbing his white beard with a napkin, was eating silently. He was old-fashioned; he rarely praised his wife’s cooking, but kept his ears pricked, like a child’s, for others’ praises. More and more his wife had become to him like a mother and a nurse, giving him his medicine with a glass of water, serving his food, to which he submitted with a helpless, sour-faced, child-like decorum, and overlooking, with good humour, his constant need to exercise his inconsequential tyrannical hold over this household, in which usually only he and his wife lived, with part-time servants coming and going each day. He ate with a fork and a spoon as he always did, laboriously, as if haunted by the expectation or memory of some pain — perhaps the mild stroke he had had seven years ago, which any day might recur. Above them, the fan with its three blades turned swiftly, generously, but invisibly, distributing air. Bonny sat next to his grandfather, perky after the bath; he had had nothing but daal and rice and a piece of the fried rui.

“The daal’s good,” he said, holding up his spoon.

“Have the other fish, shona,” said his grandmother. “Try the vegetables.”

“Let him have the daal, ma,” said Jayojit. “Just thank your stars he’s eating something!”

The boy stopped eating, the food still in his mouth, and looked around guiltily, but also pleased at this exchange about him, and at this description of himself as someone difficult and intractable; he was interested in his father’s portrait of himself.

Now the Admiral, having deftly divested the fish of its flesh with his fork and spoon, leaving only the bones, picked up the pabdaa head with his spoon, intending to chew it; the sound of his breathing surrounded him.

“Is dadu going to eat the head of that fish, baba?” asked the boy in concern.

“Dadu likes fish-head,” said Jayojit loudly, as if everything he said were important.

“Can I have a look at it?”

“Certainly,” said his grandfather. “Have a good look at it.”

So the boy stood up and peered at his grandfather’s plate, at the long pabdaa bone, and the fish-head with its eyes lying on the spoon.

“All right?” said the grandfather.

The boy nodded seriously and sat down again, and began to finish what was left of his daal and rice.

In the afternoon, when the meal was over, Jayojit’s father sat on a chair for some time; he was not supposed to lie down immediately after eating. His wife brought him pills which he swallowed noisily with a glass of water.

Now, in the afternoon heat before siesta, they seemed to feel the incompleteness of their family, and that it would not be now complete. Someone was missing. Both mother and father were too hurt to speak of it. In a strange way, they felt abandoned.

“Won’t you rest?” asked the Admiral after a while. “I think I’ll go and lie down,” he said.

“You do that, baba,” said Jayojit, getting up himself. Vikram was playing with two toy dinosaurs in the corridor; his father passed him on the way to the room.

Inside the room, Jayojit began to unpack the suitcase. He did not want to sleep; if he slept now, he would be asleep till midnight. So he began to hang up his shirts and trousers in the cupboard, and put handkerchiefs, vests, and underwear in the drawers; Bonny’s things went into the drawers as well. He was not as familiar with the house as he should be; his parents had moved here eight years ago, and he had visited only three times since then. His own feelings towards the flat were thus partially ones of familiarity and trust, and partially a complex of other feelings — of amusement and amazement at the mass-produced design, of both pity and avuncular affection for its bathrooms, tiles, furniture, verandah, and a basic admiration for, and acceptance of, its reliability. He realized that neither his mother nor father could see any of these things, and thus he too could not see them separately from the flat they had made their own.

One by one, he hung his shirts from the hanger, where they took on, inside the cupboard, a fleeting resemblance to his proportions. A sense of potential being, simple but true, now inhabited the cupboard. Some of the shelves were covered with newspaper; peering at them while arranging the clothes, Jayojit furrowed his eyebrows and snorted humorously. Something about Marxism and liberalization: the paper couldn’t be very old. The hard-core Marxists and trade unions wanted to know how the Chief Minister would reconcile liberalization with Marxist beliefs; Basu had offered China as an example. Then the paper was covered with clothes.

Next, he unzipped the shoulder bag and retrieved his shaving things and his and Vikram’s toilet accessories, Aquafresh toothpaste, Head and Shoulders shampoo, Body-line deodorant, a cylinder of Old Spice shaving foam, a Backwood Insect Cutter which he’d bought in case of mosquitoes; these things gleamed the most and looked the most foreign and desirable; even the toothbrushes were different and, curving oddly, seemed to belong to the future and some fragile, opulent culture. Jayojit kept padding off, barefoot, with an intent air, to the bathroom, and placing them on the small ledge of glass above the basin.

By half-past three, it was not so much the boy but the dinosaurs that had become exhausted; two small blue and pink creatures that had once ruled the world, they lay now on their sides upon the floor, their tails still curving, their heads bent and mouths open to roar, but strangely frozen and dumb. They were so small they could hardly be seen. Vikram sat upon an armchair, concentrating upon a storybook, turning the pages and looking at the pictures.