Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

Someone was watching him. It was a woman in a wheelchair, a widow in a white sari; someone had left her by the entrance to the bookshop. She too was going to make a journey; Jayojit’s return of her gaze had no effect on her. She continued to stare at him, without hostility or friendliness.

“Twenty-four rupees.”

As Jayojit was paying for the Nutties, Bonny rushed into the shop:

“Baba,” he cried loudly. “Dadu says do you want to get left behind ?”

“Be with you in a second,” promised Jayojit.

The widow in the wheelchair smiled at Jayojit, in a way to suggest that they’d now been introduced.

The Admiral and Jayojit’s mother had risen from their seats by the time Bonny and Jayojit had got back, and were looking blindly around them.

“Joy,” said his father, “they’ve announced your flight twice already.”

“Let them,” said Jayojit, “they won’t leave without us.”

Through his bifocals, the Admiral was straining to make out the last bit of the departure area — which it wasn’t possible to do. Piped music — a Tagore song on a Hawaiian guitar; he might know the words.

They came to the barrier where visitors must stop. Jayojit turned quickly and touched his parents’ feet; then he rose and smoothed his shirt. A group of people at the barrier— two men, a woman in a cheap, shiny sari, the security man in khaki, holding a rifle — watched as he bent and rose again. “Bloody idiots,” he thought. “Nothing to do.” Another part of his mind was untouched by their presence. They watched as Jayojit’s mother bent forward to hug Bonny, and eavesdropped on every word as she said to him:

“Bye bye, shona. Bhalo theko. You will write to tamma, no?”

“Okay,” he said, nodding dolefully. He lifted his face to be kissed, reluctantly.

The bystanders smiled and watched as the grandfather now stooped to kiss the boy.

“Bye bye, dadu,” he said, and smiled a rare smile. “Take care.”

Bonny forbore the invasion of the Admiral’s warm beard into his face. Most of the onlookers had turned away; only one person continued to listen as Jayojit said:

“Baba, ma. I’ll phone you once I’m there. Some time tomorrow.”

His father nodded.

In Dhaka, in the waiting lounge on the first floor, Jayojit dozed for half an hour; Bonny, meanwhile, watched MTV. Bonny and Jayojit occupied three seats; computer and shoulder bag, which Jayojit had laid on the seat in the middle, strategically separated father from son. This small separation was deliberate; it emphasized Jayojit’s basic sense of security about his son, that he could afford to let Bonny and himself exist in partial independence from each other, that he could also fall asleep a foot and a half away from Bonny without worrying in his sleep. But Jayojit had also experienced a slight feeling of dislocation when he’d realized that, although they’d left Calcutta at half-past seven, it was still seven-thirty in Bangladesh. He’d put down laptop and bag with the knowledge that he’d been given this extra half hour which he must do something with. “He moves, and he moves not,” he remembered moodily, reciting to himself, with grim satisfaction, the lines describing the Spirit in the Upanishads. “He is near, and yet he is far.” He’d read the Upanishads in English when he was twenty-two, for, despite being a Brahmin, at least in name, he knew no Sanskrit.

Jayojit felt an unnatural hunger for the potato wafers they sold in the transit area. When he’d got up, he left Bonny in his seat and made a casual exploration of the lounge. Among the passengers was the Bengali lady he’d had a few words with, in a seat a couple of rows behind his. He sent her a smile of cordial, if non-committal, recognition, so important in these situations. A bespectacled couple were sitting in a corner, the man in a pin-striped shirt, silent. Further off, a long-haired woman wearing leggings was sitting by herself, her face inside a book. Walking to the glass windows on the left, he looked out, hoping to make out the colours of the landscape. But it was too dark. The glass was full of reflections — of seat covers, of women in shiny salwaar kameez outfits or in burkha, of children sitting on their mother’s or father’s laps.

Returning, he found that the European woman — the one in the salwar kameez in Calcutta — was sitting opposite Bonny and talking to him.

“And you’re going back to school?” she said. Looking up at Jayojit, she smiled and said:

“Hi! I’m having a chat with your son here. I remember you two from Calcutta!” The way “Calcutta,” on her lips, rhymed with “rudder” revealed to Jayojit that she was American.

Sitting down, Jayojit said pointedly:

“Quite right; I remember you too. Actually, I couldn’t help noticing you in your — ethnic garb.”

The woman laughed loudly and without reserve.

“They’re very comfortable, aren’t they? By the way,” she said, smiling at him and then at Bonny, “I hope you don’t mind me sitting here.”

“Not at all!” said Jayojit. He adjusted his glasses casually. “Bonny and I were getting bored, weren’t we? And old friends are welcome.”

“Oh, thank you!” she said. “Where are you flying to, Mr. — ?”

“Chatterjee,” said Jayojit. “Jayojit Chatterjee. We’re going to New York, where we’ll be forced to change planes.”

“Oh, I’m going to New York myself!” she said. Then she said mournfully to Bonny, tilting her head in mock apology: “But I’m getting off there.” As if the next question led logically from this statement, she asked: “I suppose you’re Bengali, Mr. Chatterjee?”

“Well—” said Jayojit, laughing, “well, I guess you could say — well, yes — yes, I suppose I am!”

This confused answer seemed to have both puzzled and charmed Jayojit’s companion; she laughed and said, after a moment:

“I’m North American, as you can probably tell. Boston born and raised. I was doing Salvation Army work in Calcutta. . for around three months. I loved it there. There’s so much going for it, in spite of — you know”—she shrugged—“everything.”

People watched them as they walked past. Jayojit had never thought he’d like a Salvation Army worker if he ever met one; but now that he’d at last encountered one in the flesh, he found her neither pious nor complacent; and she was slightly plump, in innocent contrast to the poor she worked for.

“By the way, my name’s Mary,” she said. “I know,” she laughed, “it’s a really predictable name for someone who works in the Salvation Army, right?”

“Not at all. . I mean, I’m sure your parents didn’t know you’d join the Salvation Army when they christened you.”

“ That’s true,” she said.

“What did you really think of Calcutta?” Jayojit asked. “Was it too much for you?”

“I liked it!” she smiled, as if surprised herself. She had light brown eyes and the bridge of her nose had reddened with the sun. “It’s certainly like no other place I’ve been to! Next time I come I’m going to try and learn the language.”

Bonny was listening to this exchange with a half-smile.

“When’s next time?” said Jayojit, as if there were a chance he might run into her in Calcutta — a slender hope, because he would not be ministering to the poor on his next visit. He felt not the slightest attraction towards her, and was reassured to sense that she probably felt none towards him.

“In a few months,” she said. “Maybe in the summer.”

“Me too,” said Jayojit, surprised. He looked at Bonny. “My son and I— Well, who knows?”

“Nothing wrong with these seats,” decided Jayojit, settling into his after pushing with brute force their hand-luggage and the laptop into the locker. Wearing his headphones, Bonny said: “I’m a doctor!”