Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

“Dadu, do you feel hot in that beard?”

The old man smiled and shook his head.

“I’m used to it,” he said. “Like a dog is used to its coat.”

Then Bonny was largely silent, staring at the fleeting two-storeyed houses in by-lanes, the shops in Park Circus, the occasional outbreaks of shanty settlements, the thatched huts along the bypass; he was unmoved by the smell when they passed the rubbish dump, though his grandmother quickly pressed a handkerchief to her face.

By the time they reached the airport, the Admiral had been asleep for about twenty minutes; he woke up startled and bleary-eyed. Bonny was gone as soon as the taxi stopped, and returned brandishing a trolley, his chin above the handlebars.

“Okay, I’ll take hold of the trolley, Bonny,” said Jayojit, after paying the driver. He checked to see if they’d left anything inside. “No, that’s fine,” he reassured no one in particular. Then, to Bonny, “You can hold it at one end.” So, partitioning the responsibility of the trolley between themselves, they pushed their way inside.

Families were drifting around the hall, come to see off somebody. When the two, driving the wayward trolley, had finally reached the Bangladesh Biman counter at the extreme end of the check-in area, it was clear that there weren’t many passengers, probably because of the time of the year. Jayojit joined a disjointed queue of three people; and there was another queue of the same number. Nothing else; all the other check-in desks unattended and closed. Visitors weren’t allowed here; and, bereft of ordinary human society, the Biman passengers, who stood waiting with suitcases more imposing than themselves, had only their smiles and their passports (of two or three different colours, in their hands) to vouch for who they were. There was also something shabby about the walls and the small self-conscious trickle of international traffic, more like a leakage than a departure; yet almost each one of these people had lives they were going back to from the country they were visiting. The woman standing in front — an expatriate from the composition of her appearance; she was wearing blue jeans and vermilion in the parting of her hair, and a bindi on her forehead — turned her head and smiled at Jayojit. “Going to Heathrow?” she asked, in a warm mixture of a Bengali and a London accent. “No; New York,” he said. “And you?” “Oh I’m going to London,” she said, and laughed; she had slight buck teeth and striking long hair. The vermilion led Jayojit to briefly speculate about her husband, their children (if they had any), and their cold house and garden in the suburbs. “A much shorter journey than mine, then,” he said. She shrugged politely, not knowing with what words to respond to his jovial but superior manner. After a while, he said “Wait here” to Bonny, a picture of introspective ambivalence on the baggage trolley, and went off to pay the airport tax.

When he came back, he found Bonny still sitting on the trolley in a trance next to the suitcase. Jayojit looked around swiftly to see if there was anyone he recognized; there was always the risk, on Bangladesh Biman, of meeting someone you might have known casually in your past, of performing the usual surprised greetings, of slipping into small talk in a piecemeal hodge-podge of Bengali and English about some wedding you were to have attended or some ailment you’d recently had treated and explaining, in front of the check-in desk, your presence here at this moment. But he needn’t worry, there was no one. He noticed a European woman, wearing a salwaar kameez, distinguishable from the others by her paleness, her brown hair, and her awkward, shy largeness.

Later, with only the laptop and shoulder bag on the trolley, Jayojit headed back with Bonny towards his parents; this time he let Bonny steer it. The hall looked large and outspread, as if it were being viewed through a lens; you couldn’t see all of it at once. The airport itself, once both an international and domestic terminus, was undergoing some sort of subtle transformation since the new domestic airport had come into existence. The Admiral and his wife were sitting on the plastic chairs on the margins. They were eclipsed by a large family to their right — a widow wearing spectacles and a white sari, her middle-aged son and daughter-in-law, two young cousins, one of them holding a mineral water bottle, and a young couple and their child who, defined by some tension, some pull, that knit them more closely to each other than to the rest, were like an island gradually breaking away; it was clear that the rest had gathered to see them off. Between them they shared laughter and what seemed to the Admiral’s ears like banal, nouveau-riche chatter; the kind of patois, increasingly heard, that combines the indecipherable new street-talk with the immemorial, histrionic platitudes of tradition.

“Well, that was much less difficult than I expected,” said Jayojit as he sat down next to his father.

“Everything done?” said the Admiral, shifting his focus.

“I hope so, sincerely,” laughed Jayojit, as he put the shoulder bag before him. “The suitcase has gone — into the hands of God.” His father nodded, cross but almost sympathetic. “There’s news though — bad or good, I don’t know— there’s a half-an-hour delay. Apparently Biman has only one plane for its Dhaka-Calcutta flight, and that has a ‘technical fault’ which can, however, be fixed.”

“ ‘Technical fault!’” murmured the Admiral.

Bonny said: “Baba, I’m going there”—he pointed to the centre of the hall. He ran towards the aquarium that had been kept there, pressed his nose against the glass while full-fed fish slid with oily stealth past his nose.

“Baba, ma, we can have a cup of coffee, you know,” said Jayojit; he’d noticed a boy in the distance, going around with a kettle in one hand.

“Coffee’s too sweet here,” said his father, and shook his head.

But Jayojit’s mother nodded: “Coffee would be nice,” she said.

So Jayojit called the boy with the kettle, and he and his mother had coffee in plastic glasses, with a white froth swimming on the top, and it was much too sweet.

“I think I’ll go and see if there’s anything in the bookshop, ” he said, getting up. “Ma, see that he doesn’t wander too far, will you?”

It was brutal, leaving them at this moment, but he felt he must do something, go somewhere; on his way to the bookshop, he became aware, for the first time, of the radiance of the electric lights above washing them all, and that it had become dark outside. What had been the domestic terminus lay partially deserted except for truant, bored children who’d trespassed there with nothing to do, and one or two bored adults as well; he passed an art gallery displaying a local artist’s attempts at abstract expressionism, and a sort of crèche for mothers and children behind a ragged curtain. Entering the bookshop, he bent over the magazines, the faces of actresses, ministers, the dead who’d left the world surprised by an avalanche or stopped by a bullet, their faces printed with the last glow of life bright as the photographer’s flash during the photo taken later at leisure. “Tedious stuff,” he thought, picking one up dispassionately, “all these indigenous Newsweek s.” A boy of about ten or eleven, his mouth open, was pushing a revolving bookrack in a leisurely way with his finger; Jayojit turned and stood next to him, attempting to read the titles of the turning books. “Why do airports always have books by Raymond A. Moody Jr?”

At last, he decided to buy some chocolates, and a copy of the Asian Age . At the counter, he studied the objects under the glass and said:

“Two packets Nutties.”