Amit Chaudhuri: A New World

Later, the doorbell rang, and Jayojit’s mother could be heard opening the door and saying, “So late?” A maidservant came in; she was trying hard to hide her guilty look, and went quickly to the kitchen to wash the dishes.

“Where do you get them from?” asked Jayojit. She really looked as if she’d come straight from the village.

“They sit downstairs and work in the flats in the building,” said Jayojit’s mother. “If you dismiss one it’s difficult to get another, because they’re all friends.”

“Oh, so it’s a trade union!” said Jayojit cheerfully.

“Trade union, nonsense!” said Jayojit’s mother. “They’re just a bunch of shirkers who pretend to be friendly with each other.”

By evening Bonny had begun to feel sleepy. At half-past seven he fell asleep on the sofa without, to his grandmother’s disappointment, having had dinner.

“It’s all right, ma,” said Jayojit, who had changed into a pink sleeping suit that looked ridiculous on his large frame; he went about barefoot in the kitchen getting himself a bottle of water for the night. Bonny was still in his shorts, but his father did not wake him; when he picked him up in his arms to put him into bed the boy mumbled something, and he said, “All right, baba, all right, Bonny.”

The boy knitted his eyebrows, turned his mouth, and sniffed, as if he could smell something. There was probably nothing more peaceful for him than these moments of subconscious awareness, suspended in his father’s arms, between two places of rest. Jayojit laid him on the bed. It was a two-bedroom flat, and theirs was the smaller room, but it had an air-conditioner in it: a luxury.

Ever since evening, the sound of television music and the voices of television characters had begun to come from the other flats, like a form of public dreaming. But when Jayojit turned on the air-conditioner, nothing could be heard but its hum.

THE ADMIRAL HAD A CAR, an old Fiat, but did not use it often. And he did not have a driver. Costs were too high these days; the cost of petrol, drivers’ salaries, things in general. The last driver was a man called Alam, a tired-looking man who’d slept his way through most of his employment.

The Admiral was always aggressively telling his wife to save, though she still found it difficult to adjust to the different rhythms of expenditure required after retirement. For a while he had been engaged as a consultant in a Marwari company, and then given it up; he had grown fed up going to the office daily for what he thought a paltry salary, and having to put up with what he discovered, after the navy, was a rather peculiar style of functioning. The next year he’d got rid of the driver and never employed one since; anyway, they all spoilt the car with their tinkering. When he’d been Admiral, stationed first in Cochin (in the Southern Naval Command; he’d retired as Rear-Admiral, in spite of being known to everyone as, in short, “Admiral”) and then in Delhi, it had been a dream-world; everything had been done for them; they’d had a huge bungalow wherever they went, a car, coloured the navy’s deep blue (to denote the sea) with two stars painted on the back — identifying his rank — and they’d never thought the value of money would depreciate so rapidly after retirement — they’d never thought of the value of money before. If you were unemployed or had retired, the Admiral said, it was better not to be in India but somewhere else. The institution, even the country, you had served did nothing for you; they gave you everything as long as you were working, but in old age you had to manage your life and your finances yourself.

A major drain on their savings had been the Admiral’s stroke; doctors, medicines, the hospital — the expensive business of keeping oneself alive. Of course, the government had contributed to hospitalization costs, but they could not be genuinely concerned — the Admiral’s health was only an abstraction to them. His principal preoccupations now concerned his savings, and that Jayojit should start afresh, or, after what had happened, at least lead the second half of his life decently. He thought about these matters every day.

He now stood at the bus stop on the main road, dressed in his favourite attire, white bush shirt and white trousers and strapped sandals. These clothes kept him cool in the heat. He was going to take a bus to the bank, where he had some enquiries to make about an investment bond.

Jayojit had woken up late, at eleven. He had had a bath, and then changed into a shirt and shorts. Wearing shorts exposed his large fair thighs and calves, covered with smooth strands of black hair. His mother seemed to notice nothing unusual about his clothes; parents accept that offspring who live abroad will appear to them in a slightly altered incarnation, and are even disappointed if they do not. As he came out of his room, in which the air-conditioner had run all night, he encountered a blast of hot air — the normal temperature at this time in the house.

“Ma!” he said. “Anything to eat?”

It was not that he was particularly hungry; and he had still not been to the toilet; his body seemed to be functioning to another time, or not properly to this one; but he had experienced this dislocation before and could ignore it. It was the previous night now in America; already America had become dream-like. He had heard sounds of frying in the kitchen, and found his mother inside standing before the cooker, and Bonny loitering beside her; he did not seem in the least troubled by jet-lag, but seemed to have been remade and reshaped by this new climate, standing there watching his grandmother.

“I’m making luchis,” said Jayojit’s mother, without turning around from the kodai before her. “Bonny shona has already had one with sugarcane gur — I melted it.”

“Baba,” said the boy, “it tastes just like maple syrup!”

“Have you brushed your teeth?” asked Jayojit.

“He’s done everything,” said his mother in Bengali. “He came out of the room at eight o’clock in the morning, and I took him inside again and he brushed his teeth. Then I took out his half-pants and vest and a new shirt from the drawer— you were fast asleep — and I brought him to my bathroom, where he had a bath. Isn’t that right, Bonny?”

Bonny, who had been staring mutely at his grandmother, as if he were lip-reading, nodded. He could follow the language — he had so often heard his mother and father talk in it in his first five years — but he could not speak it. It was both a disadvantage and an odd privilege that set him apart, and caused others around him here to make that small extra effort to communicate themselves to him.

“Then, some time ago, Bonny said you had woken up and gone to take a bath, and I began to fry the luchis.”

“Well, gur is not maple syrup,” said Jayojit to his son. He added, explanatorily, and with an inflection of pride, “He loves maple syrup.”

Earlier in the morning, a temporary help had come and cooked a dry vegetable preparation. This was waiting outside on the dining table in a covered porcelain bowl, slivers of pumpkin and potatoes fried with onions and black jeera. It had become pleasantly cool with the passing of time, and went well with the hot luchis, and contrasted temperately with the general heat. Jayojit sat on a chair and broke the luchis and ate, a giant in his shorts, one large leg crossed over another.

“I mustn’t eat too much, though,” he said. “I’m putting on weight.”

Ever since he had become single again he had begun to eat what he could in America, indiscriminately plundering the shelves in the supermarket for frozen food and pizzas. He had first read about TV dinners in Mad magazine when he was growing up: what glamour pizzas had, then! These days, in America, he looked at food, as he did many other things, emotionlessly, as something that could be put to use and cooked quickly.