Amit Chaudhuri: A New World

“Which bank do you use? Grindlays?” asked Jayojit.

“I had work at the State Bank today.”

“State Bank? Why on earth d’you use the State Bank?”

“They’ve started a new investment scheme, actually,” said the Admiral. “However,” he laughed grimly, “most people in the bank don’t even seem to know about it! I had to ask to see the manager — he gave me some papers. They’d even advertised it today.” He shook the Statesman , in wonder and contempt.

“What about share prices?” asked Jayojit. “The share market is doing well, isn’t it — new companies coming in?”

The Admiral shook his head. “My savings are mainly in government bonds. I have hardly anything in shares,” he said. “I don’t know enough about them.”

Jayojit nodded. Although he was an economist, he knew more about economic theory than shrewd investment, about global trends and third-world markets, but as to how they intersected with something particular and real, like his father’s personal life and decisions — that was different, and beyond the scope of his discipline.

“Why don’t you ask Haru kaku?” said Jayojit, thinking of a cousin of his father’s, a chartered accountant.

“Haru!” said his father, as if the name had startled him. “Haru’s long retired. Besides, I don’t believe everything he says.”

In principle, Jayojit was all for this new flood — of investors and companies coming into the country. During the time of the Rajiv Gandhi government, when the Prime Minister had been gathering advisors around himself, mainly from among his Cambridge friends, someone had recommended Jayojit, who was then teaching at Buffalo. Jayojit had sent him a plan, suggesting gradual liberalization; thus, he had been there, in a sense, at the beginning. In the new, as yet unfinished, brickwork of India’s new economic order, Jayojit had laid an early and important cornerstone. Nothing but economic reform, he believed, could change India from a country living on borrowings from the West into a productive and competitive one. Yet now, when he saw his father’s hesitation about investing in shares, for which he had neither the means nor the confidence, he had no advice to give him.

In the afternoon, the Admiral lay in his trousers and shirt on the bed, his head against two pillows, and slept. He snored, and then the snores dissolved once more into regular heavy breathing.

At about three o’clock someone rang the doorbell and Jayojit’s mother went to open the door. It was the maidservant; there was an exchange at the door in low voices, and the maid, eyes downcast, came into the flat. She went straight to the kitchen.

Apparently she was supposed to come once in the morning, to clean the floors, and once in the afternoon to wash the dishes. But she had failed to turn up this morning. Her explanation was that the Mitras, whose flat she worked in — she worked part-time in four flats in the building each day— hadn’t let her go.

“Their washerwoman didn’t come today, ma!” she protested.

Jayojit’s mother was certain she had been chattering downstairs with her friends. “Always acting the innocent,” she muttered. Her name was Maya — Jayojit had overheard his mother call her this.

Out she came now from the kitchen, and began to lightly dust the furniture. Then she stooped to pick up, in an unenquiring, unsurprised way, the small cars and vehicles, trailers, trucks, which Bonny had left on the floor; she put them on a side table. After sweeping the floor she closed the front door and left as quietly as she had come.

IT WAS SIMPLE — Jayojit wanted to spend as much time as possible with him. Although it was clear that he and his wife hadn’t got on from the very beginning, some urge to rehearse what their parents had done before them had taken hold of him, of her, and, without fully understanding what they were doing, they had brought a child into the world, in a small nursing home in a midwestern American town.

Bonny had been born three years after the marriage. The first two years were the years of amorous energy. Yet it had been absurd. Both Amala and Jayojit had grown up with the same background, listened to the same music, liked the Beatles; she, predictably, shied away from the Rolling Stones as so many girls he used to know in school had. He had clung to the loyalties he thought he was shaped by; she had seamlessly allowed herself to shed her early enthusiasms, which probably hadn’t been very intense in the first place, and, listening to the incomprehensible music of the eighties, would say, “What’s wrong with it?” At first, he found this touching. Both of them had decided, at some point in their lives, without articulating it to themselves, like a pact they’d made with several others without knowing it, that an arranged marriage was the best option.

Bonny now went to a school in San Diego, near where his mother lived. He was at that stage when only the simplest arithmetic — addition, subtraction, multiplication — was taught, when five-sentence compositions were assigned to be written. Jayojit had to meet the head teacher to request from the school an extra month off for Bonny’s holidays. “I don’t think it should be a problem, Dr. Chatterjee.” The lady knew he taught at a college. “Vikram’s bright; he should pick things up as easily at home as he does at school. You know, I envy you your trip. The furthest I’ve been into Asia is Paris.”

Jayojit had laughed on cue. Then, suddenly, curious for knowledge, he’d asked:

“How’s he doing? Anything in particular he’s good at. . or weak in, for that matter?”

He cherished the notion of his child’s success, although, in his own life, he’d come to disdain conventional ideas of success and achievement.

“He’s good at English, I’d say. I teach them English.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes.” Did she seem disappointed that Bonny hadn’t told him already? “He’s quite good. Other children have problems with little things like distinguishing between its and it apostrophes, and constructions like “had had”, but a few, like Bonny, don’t. He’s also good at making sentences and spelling.”

He began to go out for walks with Bonny in the afternoon.

The Admiral said, “Does dadu have homework to do? I could help him.”

“Not really, baba. He’s too young for homework; he has to do some drawings and listen to some stories, that’s all. Last month he wrote a two-sentence story about going to the beach.” He laughed. The Admiral listened gravely, as if to the description of a thesis. “Listen: ‘The beach is full of sand and it sure gets hot. Mary went out to the sea and got afraid.’” Jayojit had it by heart. “That apparently got an alpha.” Feigning surprise.

At times, in his old school, Bonny’d have to self-consciously play the “Indian” role when nations were being discussed, and he’d been told by his father: “Hey, d’you know what Vikram means: it means strong, powerful, heroic.”

“Really?” Bonny had said. “That’s weird.”

As they went out now they could hear voices coming from some of the other flats, where housewives were watching videos as their children slept. The noise of fights and crescendos took Jayojit aback at first.

Sometimes they did not take the lift and went down the stairs; Bonny, in particular, liked running down. Bits of garbage would be lying here and there on each landing.

When they had arrived downstairs, they were met by a hall. The hall was usually swept by breezes, especially now, in April. At one end, on the far right, there was a row of wooden post-boxes with numbers painted on them, where a postman could be seen sometimes at half-past four, and near the centre of the hall there was a ping-pong table.