Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

“Expecting anything?”

“Not really,” said Dr. Sen, deprecatingly. As if admitting to an embarrassing, simplistic fact: “Well, a nephew of mine sends me the Smithsonian. It’s a very good magazine — you must know it. The pictures, the details! Even the paper ’s very good.” He shook his head, “The last issue had a t-tremendous chapter on ancient Egypt; lovely pictures of the mummies and the pyramids; strange things, pyramids, when you think about them; I hear they used to put the pharaohs” cats inside with the pharaohs — I don’t know how they found out about these things!”; the old Bengali romance for arcane, often useless bits of knowledge transformed his expression briefly. Then, becoming aware of the heat again, the emotion quickly spent, he complained: “But the new issue hasn’t come yet.”

Then, “Will you be here for much longer?” asked the doctor. In English, “You’re not thinking of settling here permanently ?”

“Oh no. Bonny’s school begins next month, the university semester’s also about to start again. Summer’s ending over there.”

“Time flies,” said Dr. Sen, again in English. “We didn’t really get a chance to talk this time—” Suddenly he smiled. “All for the good though — I haven’t had to make a visit! Admiral Chatterjee’s and Mrs. Chatterjee’s health must be all right, touch wood, and you and your son seem to have got by somehow without falling ill.”

Dr. Sen’s visits were a form of socializing for Jayojit’s parents. Last time, when the doctor had come to check Jayojit’s father’s blood pressure, they’d digressed into a conversation about mortality. It had begun with a discussion about the price of vegetables these days, and fish and prawns — the latter were almost prohibitive — and the price of meat. “Tell me,” Dr. Sen had asked, looking Jayojit up and down, “do you eat a lot of meat?”

“I guess I grew up as more of a meat-eater than a fisheater,” Jayojit had said. “Though Bengalis claim that it’s eating fish that makes them so brainy,” he laughed, “it doesn’t seem to have done any other part of their bodies much good. Anyway, why not say it? — I have to confess I’ve become quite dependent on junk food. Gone back to a second adolescence.”

“You know one thing,” the doctor had said, “a lower middle-class Bengali’s meal is one of the best a doctor can recommend. Low cholesterol, with harmless fish protein. It’s cheap and it’s good for you; you know certain kinds of fish fat are good for the heart. Anyway, I was reading somewhere,” he said (these doctors, even in semi-retirement, kept up with the latest medical journals), “that Americans eat m-much less meat than they have ever before and have fewer heart attacks. On the other hand, heh,” he laughed, partly in embarrassment at his own amusement, “Bengalis go there and find a plethora of meat, and eat much more of it than they ever have, and consequently die like flies.”

“I’m only an occasional steak-eater myself,” Jayojit said. “I don’t much go for huge chunks of red meat.”

The Admiral had interjected by grumbling: “What’s the point of living forever? Especially on a pension that can’t keep up with inflation.”

This had met with great laughter, especially from the doctor, who’d responded to the Admiral’s death-wish with, “That’s a good one, Admiral Chatterjee, but you mustn’t deprive me of a job.”

That was then — an oasis of nervous banality in the midst of a time in which their lives took on another definition. Now Jayojit said:

“No, Bonny was all right. No sore throats or stomach infections. A slight allergy, but it was short-lived. I guess it was because we didn’t move much out of the house. But,” he said in a fit of belated candour, “I hope you’ll find time to visit my parents soon. I worry a bit about my father’s health — oh, I know,” he waved one arm and smiled without humour, agitated in his shorts and sandals, “that it’ll be all right as long as he takes care of himself — and God knows I have other things to worry about!” (“True,” murmured the doctor.) “But I think they also need to talk to someone— don’t we all! If you could just look after them while we’re away — look after isn’t the right word, of course, look in on them, rather, I’d be very grateful.” All this delivered in the serious public school accent in which he’d once addressed headmasters and countered competing debaters, and which he hadn’t forsaken, or, rather, which hadn’t forsaken him, and accompanied him through lecture rooms, domestic quarrels.

“Nischoi, nischoi!” said Dr. Sen. “I was anyway planning to visit them quite soon. And,” he lowered his voice to a confiding whisper, and looked around him once, “the Admiral’s health is all right, don’t worry. He got a bit excited at the Building Society meeting — I can understand why. He should avoid excitement, mental excitement,” he widened his eyes, “that’s all. Let him,” he said casually, “take an Alzolam to soothe him occasionally. No harm done.”

“He’s always been rather excitable,” said Jayojit, looking back, for a moment, at his father’s life. What he’d meant was that the Admiral had raw nerves; always in battle position.

“When will you come here again?” asked the doctor. “How soon can you manage your next visit?”

“Around the same time I — we — came this year, I hope. Early April, in this awful heat.”

“Oh, very good!” said Dr. Sen, and chuckled. “Just in time for the mango season.”

“I hope things will have returned to normal by then,” said Jayojit in a public manner, not knowing exactly what he meant — eavesdropping, as it were, on his own words. He patted his stomach. “Like my weight for instance.”

JAYOJIT’S MOTHER was in the kitchen. Tonight’s leftovers would be eaten for lunch the next day; she would be too tired to cook again tomorrow. And once Jayojit and Bonny had gone in the evening, they — Jayojit’s parents — would have a light meal of the daal and vegetables that Maya had cooked earlier. Time was being rearranged in their heads and their son’s, connecting part of their life to another. Yesterday Jayojit had said, unusually for one who was quite formal about making requests of his parents, “Oh for a fish that has no bones,” and so parshe had been brought; the fish lay on the pantry ledge, waiting to be fried.

“Better take this shirt down from here,” said Jayojit, getting up from the sofa; the shadow the electric light made of his body spread on the rug. A shirt was hanging from the clothesline. “It seems to be dry now,” he said, touching it. He unclipped and took it down, giving it a look of protective recognition. “Or else I’ll forget it and leave it behind,” he said in explanation. He added: “I’ll iron it myself, later.” This little monologue, which he might have been directing to himself, was actually addressed to his father, sitting on a sofa before the television.

He folded the shirt, and, on the way to his room, picked up a worn book from one of the shelves; he weighed it as if it were an artefact. He laughed incredulously.

“What’s this?” he said. “Jackie! Is this any good?” he asked, admiring Jacqueline Onassis’s face a second time.

The Admiral looked up.

“Oh, your mother borrowed that,” he said, “ages ago from the club.” There was a hint of accusation in his voice. “Must return it. We’ll have to pay the fine.” Just as the first touch of calm came to her from the early devotionals trickling in a small whine through the static on the transistor, these books on politicians’ wives, some, like Margaret Trudeau, quite remote from her, once used to be part of the dream-life of her spare hours, while she’d be undaunted by four hundred pages of close English print.