Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

Returning from the room, Jayojit said:

“Well, we didn’t get to go to the club this time.”

“No,” said the Admiral. He seemed quieter than usual; he felt heavy and sluggish — as if in anticipation of the journey he would have to make in a couple of days, to the post office, to see why his pension cheque hadn’t arrived at the beginning of the month.

“Maybe next time,” said Jayojit, flitting from shelf to shelf, checking for items he might have missed, picking up one of Bonny’s prehistoric monsters: a pterodactyl.

He didn’t like the club. He wasn’t a member himself; and not being one, had to accompany his parents as a guest, a sort of overgrown child, allowed to sit with them but not to sign the bills or pay for the snacks and the drinks. Reluctant waiters would come to take their orders, and, intermittently, people would drift through elegant arches towards their table to speak to his parents, spotting them under fans that hung from long rods, as they were passing. When they found out that he was a “Non Resident Indian,” some would squint with curiosity, as once people might have regarded holy men or charlatans. Two years ago, he’d been bent over a sweet lime soda next to his father when he’d been asked the tiresome question (he supposed it was unavoidable) by a man holding a glass of Club Cola in his hand: “But, Mr. Chatterjee, do you know Amartya Sen?” He’d stopped bothering telling people he was “Dr. Chatterjee”; Sen, supposedly introduced as a conversation-opener was, for him, a conversation-stopper. Really, he and Sen had nothing in common (given the fact that they were both Bengali, and economists), except that, now, they had had the experience of a failed marriage as well. Sen, with chastening resilience, had married again, while Jayojit was still trying to grope for a balance in the second phase of his life, and the idea of marriage seemed to him to involve too much spiritual effort. “No,” he’d answered politely, perhaps a little abruptly, “I met him at a conference twice — he may or may not remember me.”

Children were allowed to sit in the outer lobby of the club (they weren’t allowed further inside) on a sofa, and here they played amongst themselves, not far away from portraits of the club’s presidents, climbing on to the weighing scales. There was a children’s room somewhere in the club, but Jayojit would never let Bonny sit there, while they ate and sipped fizzy drinks; this was another reason he hadn’t been to the club this time.

Before Bonny was born, when he and Amala had gone there together with his parents, Amala would spend time observing the women; for the saris they wore were old-fashioned, the blouses clumsily made. “Bengali women let go so easily,” she’d say. “They become so otherworldly.” A woman would pass by, and Amala would glance at her hairstyle, and a smile would come to her eyes.

The club had recruited younger members since then. It had even opened a rather quaint barber-shop which no person in his right senses patronized. And, actually, Amala knew quite a few people amongst its members, certainly more than he did; “Oh hi!” they’d say, “How’s mesho?” enquiring after her father.

The kitchen had been silent for the last five minutes; no more of the effervescence of the kodai; a smell of mustard-oil hung in the air.

“Bonny!” called Jayojit, craning his neck.

There was the customary silence before this cry registered itself.

“Yes, baba!”

“Come here!”

The boy ran out into the hall, still holding a pencil in one hand, suggesting he’d been interrupted in mid-performance.

“Want to go down and have a game of ping-pong?” Jayojit asked.

He’d bought a couple of racquets from a shop on Rash Behari Avenue.

“I don’t know, baba.” He’d put one end of the pencil in his mouth.

Jayojit shrugged his large shoulders dramatically:

“Well, if you don’t want to. .”

The boy’s face fell.

“Oh, go on,” said the Admiral.

But, downstairs, they found that one half of the table-tennis table had disappeared; the other half, with its pale green borders, remained, forlorn, truncated, a useless relic by itself.

“Oh no!” cried Bonny. “Where’s it gone?”

Jayojit looked around him, unable to conjure up the other half of the table. The table had been removed during the meeting, but he was pretty sure it had been returned to its place later. So absorbed had father and son been with their problem that they hadn’t noticed the couple at the other end of the hall, who were walking a child. They had come closer now, an elderly couple in their sixties, led by a toddler of about two.

Following the child, the grandfather, a slight bespectacled clerical man wearing a brown shirt, his face averted but conscious of Jayojit’s questioning gaze, walked leaning forward, but confident that his grandson could manage on his own, and that even if he fell, providence would keep him from serious hurt. Jayojit kept a half-smile of acknowledgement on his face, in case the man turned to look at him. “Slowly, dadu,” said the man to the grandson. Jayojit didn’t remember seeing them before.

Behind her husband, the grandmother walked more irregularly, a mass of confusions, now turning to look behind her, slipping her foot more firmly into her sandal, resuming her walk.

In the other room, his parents had gone to bed. He turned on the air-conditioner; it made a sound, like a throat-clearing, as machines sometimes do. Bonny was lying on his back, interlocking the fingers of both hands together, and, with a look of great concentration, prising them slowly apart.

“Better turn off the light,” said Jayojit, vacillating by the bedside. “There’s lots to do tomorrow.”

When he switched off the light, for a moment he could see nothing — the room disappeared. It never became so dark in the room in Claremont; some light, inquisitive and worldly, always entered through the curtains. The steady sound of the air-conditioner held him in his place; he began to make his way towards the bed, trying to imagine, from his memory, its location.

JAYOJIT OVERSLEPT for some reason. Bonny strode into the room and admonished him in a dream: “Oh, get up, baba, you’re lazy.” He couldn’t remember having had a dream— his sleep had been a blank; it had taken him to no other worlds. Rising swiftly, he turned off the air-conditioner; it went off, with a sigh, like an afterthought. Inside the bathroom, he encountered a heat that had accumulated overnight and which the air-conditioning hadn’t penetrated. Car horns could be heard until he turned on the tap; even then, over the water, a crow’s cry reached his ears. Wiping his face with the towel, he raised his face and inhaled the dampness in the bathroom.

He emerged after brushing his teeth, and said to his mother in his lecturer’s vernacular:

“And what’s been happening in the interregnum?”

She didn’t reply.

When Jayojit had just begun to read the headlines, Bonny said:

“Baba, tooth’s shaking.”

It was the second time that this had occurred; as soon as he’d said the words, he opened his mouth, flashing his milk teeth, revealing the cavity that led to the source of his voice; with his eyebrows knitted, and a look slightly inebriated, he nudged the tooth with his tongue. It was a lower canine.

“I see it. Let it alone,” said Jayojit, seeing the sensation of the loose tooth could become a narcotic. “You’re becoming an old man,” he added, and sipped his coffee.

“Tamma, look,” Bonny said to his grandmother; she’d been hovering over a plant in the verandah, standing between it and the sunlight.

“O-o-oh,” she sighed dramatically, straightening and looking down at him. Yet her inside was pulled by a pain that was quite unlike that of the tooth, that had begun more than two years ago and would be with her now.