Amit Chaudhuri: A New World

“It’s amazing the time at which these men come,” Jayojit had thought as he’d watched, three days ago, a man arrived with a bag of letters at four o’clock. “But if you tell them anything, they won’t give your mail tomorrow.”

There were terrible stories about the post-office, how registered letters lay waiting, and how overseas mail, with blue stickers saying Par Avion, was delivered weeks late. “It’s worse than inconvenient, it can be downright fatal,” someone had said. Even phone bills didn’t come on time. Each time Jayojit wrote to his parents from America he felt a renewed sense of irritation and helplessness.

“Baba!” said Bonny urgently, pausing in the centre of the hall. Jayojit, preoccupied, stood there seeming to watch him, although his mind was elsewhere. He did not know how to think of these first days together of their visit, if “visit” it could be called.

As they crossed the hall and descended the four steps into the compound, they came out into the heat. The two or three maidservants who loitered here weren’t there. Before Jayojit and Bonny was a sort of lawn or garden with railings on all sides. There were trees in it — two palm trees which seemed to have taken refuge here from a more exotic habitat, a mango tree — and flowering shrubs and even clone-like potted plants. Late in the morning, once or twice, Jayojit had woken up from jet-lag at dawn to see the mali alone among the pots, unwittingly scaring birds away, watering the plants.

By the gates, a cat, curled up in the heat, looked warily at Bonny without raising its head; Bonny returned its gaze frankly. On the other side of the gate, a young watchman on his bench, whose moustache was so tender and dark that he might never have shaved it, watched the boy and his father, the combination of trousers, shorts, and sneakers.

“Where’s dadu and tamma?” asked Bonny, squinting upward, as if a vague memory had nudged him after a long time. He scratched his scalp where it had begun to perspire slightly.

But dadu and tamma must be asleep.

“They’re on that side,” said his father, a bright star of light reflecting off his spectacles. “You can’t see them from here.”

They both looked up at the apartment block facing them, with its numerous verandahs.

“We don’t live on this side, baba?” asked Bonny, disappointed for no reason.

“No, we don’t, Bonny,” said Jayojit. “If we did, we’d see this garden from our balcony, wouldn’t we?”

“I guess.” This was acquiesced world-wearily.

The watchman was still looking at the two; not meaning to be rude; indeed, his face was like a door that was open, friendly, unguarded. On closer observation, it was evident that he was staring at them without seeing them. It was as if he — a young man of about twenty-one — were asleep with his eyes open; at least until he stirred a little. He hadn’t seen them before, but this was not unusual; tenants were always coming and going from the building, as were owners of flats or members of their family. Bonny, for instance, had been here only twice in the last three years, and each time he’d been a different shape; really, a different person. And it was not difficult to tell when people had arrived from abroad; something about their clothes, and the way they spoke with each other, the way they appeared, transforming the life of whichever family they were visiting, and then vanished again, tipping the maidservant extravagantly.

The watchman was looking at the way Jayojit was standing and talking to his son. A servant passed by and then a car hesitated by the gate; the watchman got up, distracted, like a traveller in a departure lounge who realizes, after an unspecified interval, that his name’s being announced.

This space between the steps into the building and the main gates to the lane was where the sun beat down intensely. But clouds would be conjured up in the sky from nothing. On their second afternoon out, one or two big drops had dashed against the ground, becoming dark spots where they’d fallen on the driveway.

As they were looking up at the building, a dog in one of the first-floor balconies began to bark. It was an Alsatian; it seemed furious at being confined inside the flat.

“It’s a dog, baba,” Bonny informed his father.

Jayojit, tall, one part of him comparing this heat to the drier heat of the American South, wondered why people who lived in flats hardly big enough for a medium-sized family should keep dogs. This dog barked to the shadows in the outside world from the eternal but cluttered present of the balcony, amidst pots, a clothesline, and two plastic chairs like dwarves in the background.

“Hi!” The small voice was drowned by a fresh fit of loud barking.

“It’s a nice-looking dog, Bonny, but it doesn’t seem to be in a very good mood.”

There was a gulmohar tree in the lane, the flaming orange flowers erupting from within, and banyan trees, private and removed as ancient pilgrims. Some drivers were asleep inside Ambassadors; others were crowded together outside, handkerchiefs spread, playing cards. Near the gates, in the blue shadow not of the building but of a wall behind, there were two ramshackle structures: a tea stall, which catered, with thick slices of bread and biscuits, to the drivers, and a dhobi’s shop, where clothes from the building were ironed.

When Jayojit couldn’t sleep the first few nights, he’d reread the morning’s Statesman , the headlines become strange at the end of the day, when the appositeness that news had in the morning — calamities and predictions — had already passed into its daily afterlife.

There was one he’d been fooled by, an advertisement pretending to be a report, with the headline “Miraculous Antidote to Hair Loss Announced,” which he began to read with the same unquestioning acceptance with which he read the rest of the newspaper, before he came to its end and realized what it was. It began: “It was announced today that finally. .” and had just the right mixture of breathlessness and objectivity. Very clever, thought Jayojit. After this, he folded the paper, switched off the lamp, and tried to sleep.

Waking at home, in his house in Claremont, used to be difficult, with Bonny gone, withheld from him like a promise, and Amala, his wife, gone. Some of the pictures she had bought — prints; pichwais with serene trains of elephants, the cowherd-god, dallying with the gopis, identified by the peacock-plume above the forehead — were still on the walls. Mornings were quiet in Claremont; it was as if they waited till radio alarm clocks began to play and people got up. He lay still before he rose in his house in Claremont, feeling quite separate from the man who’d written a book about economic development, who drove a Ford, who’d secured tenure.

THE LUCHIS continued to appear. If his mother had lived in the nineteenth century, she, in spite of her pale complexion and occasional fatigued look, would have been happiest and busiest in the kitchen; alone and happy, not involved in the changes disturbing history and coming over others”, anonymous lives.

“Ma, this has got to stop!”

“Joy, you will not get luchis over there.”

His mother had fixed ideas about what his life “over there” was like. She had never been abroad; it was an imaginary place for her, a territory that intersected with her life without ever actually touching it, and which had, for her, its own recognizable characteristics. Two years ago, she might have gone there for the first time, if they hadn’t had to abandon their trip quite abruptly. Now her bangles shook as she put two luchis on Jayojit’s plate. Bonny, sitting next to Jayojit, was having milk and cornflakes. His father was having, as he did from whenever it was Jayojit’s memory could stretch back to, a soft-boiled egg and dry toast. That toast had been subject to vicissitude, once it was lightly buttered, and sometimes covered with a skin of Kissan marmalade, freckled with orange rind; this had been the taste of breakfast, in war and in peace.