Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

“But, baba,” Bonny said very gravely, “you can have cornflakes if you don’t want lu-chis .”

From ten o’clock to eleven, for the first ten days or so, Jayojit lay down full-length upon the sofa, his legs arched slightly, his hands holding the newspaper over almost one half of his body. In front of Jayojit’s reclining figure, in the verandah, had appeared a new set of clothes drying on the clothesline— Bonny’s and his — almost crisp with the heat from the morning, hanging indecisively.

“But you must not take out the little boy”—“ bachcha chhele ” was how she referred to her grandson—“in the sun. How will he take it? And suddenly if he falls ill?” said Jayojit’s mother, agitated and having lapsed, without warning, into a worked-upness.

Jayojit dismissed this cursorily, his eyes still upon newsprint, eking out the fantasy of a holiday and saying casually to his mother:

“Oh, he’ll be okay, ma. Don’t fuss. He’s tough.”

Bonny overheard this with the air of a passer-by whose route had intersected, briefly, the conversation of strangers. He had gone, as usual, to the verandah, where his own blue drying shirt dangled over him indeterminately.

“Okay,” managed Jayojit after ten minutes, as if he’d drifted into a coma in the meanwhile. “Okay. You have a point. I’ll take care he doesn’t get too much exposure.”

Someone was not present, and part of the conversation, of the concern, was directed at that absent figure, or at least took her into account. She — Jayojit’s ex-wife; Bonny’s mother — was more and more real in her separate, everyday existence. Yet Bonny’s grandmother was too full of her own worry, her bosom working with affection, to think of this. She gazed at Bonny with the intensity of one who hadn’t seen him enough.

SOMETIMES, in the afternoon, Jayojit came out and stood in the corridor outside the flat, taking in the breeze. He wasn’t wholly comfortable; a door stared at him from the left-hand corner. Yet the flat was hotter than it should be, because it faced the west, while the corridor received the breeze coming from the south-east.

“That’s better,” said Jayojit. From here he got a partial view of the back of the building. Facing him were the many windows and verandahs at the rear of the flats, the dark, recurring backs of air-conditioners protruding outward; and, when he turned his head to the left, he could see part of a cricket field that belonged to a well-known club. He turned and, still standing there, faced their neighbour’s flat; the nameplate on the door simply said “Ghosh.” The man, whom Jayojit had seen no more than a couple of times, apparently ran some kind of small business in timber, and was often away in the hilly, presently strife-torn area of Assam (and yet how lovely and green and misty Assam had been when he’d gone visiting relatives with parents once as a boy); and his thin grey-haired wife, Jayojit’s mother had said, was called Pramila. Relations with the Chatterjees were cordial, if minimal. In all kinds of ways, these people were a million miles away from Jayojit’s parents and their world; their ambitions were different, their friends and referents were different, even the Bengali they spoke was different; they might have belonged to different countries. The lack of contact was also perhaps partly Jayojit’s family’s fault. For, since the divorce, the Admiral and his wife had withdrawn into themselves and gone into a sort of mourning; their flat had become a shell, and the neighbours’ flat, in their imagination, had moved further away. And yet, during that great leveller, the Durga Puja, Jayojit’s mother apparently met Mr. and Mrs. Ghosh downstairs at the festivities, became part of a crowd where all disparity and private, secluding grief were temporarily suspended, and were even delighted to “bump into” each other and exchange meaningless small talk during the three-day-long ceremonies. Each year it provided a brief but vivid illusion of life beginning again, to which everyone succumbed. What Jayojit could see now, as he stood here, was the back door to the Ghoshes’ kitchen, a door with criss-cross netting through which part of a crate and a bench were visible. It was true that they weren’t socially compatible, that before the Admiral’s retirement their chances of meeting would have been remote, the Admiral with his command belonging to a different world altogether; but this country had a way of, in the end, concealing disparity and banishing the past.

“Careful, don’t hit the door,” said Jayojit as Bonny began to play on that side of the corridor. His son looked up at him and continued to improvise his little game.

Jayojit could feel now, after two and a half weeks, that he was putting on weight. A suspicion found its way to his head which he’d never harboured before: had his father become so bulky because his mother had overfed him during his working life? He’d always assumed that his father, at some point in his life, had inadvertently eaten too much; but now he wondered if his mother had deliberately played a part. As for Bonny, he, with Jayojit’s approval, had moved, by the end of the first week, to the breakfasts he was used to having; cereal (a box of Champion Oats had been procured, when they’d been convinced these were no longer available, by the Admiral, with both perseverance and faith, from New Market), a glass of milk, fruit juice — the consoling and rare sweet lime, one of which yielded only a quarter glass of juice and for whose taste Bonny had no appreciation at all; though his grandmother kept trying to tempt him towards the luchis, cajoling and pleading with him.

“Don’t force him, ma,” said Jayojit with an indulgent sternness. “Don’t spoil him — he’s not used to oily meals of this kind in the mornings.”

She listened to him, abashed, as if he were her mother. In America he’d imbibed clear ideas, while having no idea that he had, of what to eat and what not to. Jayojit also wanted to spare her from preparing these breakfasts — she seemed to have a dogged capacity, even at this age, for working in the heat — but feeding her own son, really, seemed to give her pleasure at a time when hardly anything mattered to her. She would come out from the kitchen, her sari tightly wound around her, her face flushed. Although she appeared so submissive, there was a streak of obstinacy in her — both Jayojit and his father knew this. She would never make clear what conclusions she had reached emotionally, and, in everything, would cannily refer to the Admiral, either repeating what he said, or saying, “Ask him.”

By eight-thirty, when they had breakfast, the dining and sitting rooms would be hot; it was a miracle they could sit and eat here every day, registering no discomfort except a few loud exclamations about the heat. Dawn would end at half-past five, and the day had had ample time to become hot by eight-thirty.

Two weeks on, Jayojit explained to his mother, “From tomorrow, I’m going to have toast and tea — no more!” For he could feel the shape of his body changing; and he was afraid of triglycerides showing up in his bloodstream, as they had in some of his friends.

“O ma — what’s this!” she said in surprise. “But you don’t even eat much for lunch! You must at least have one proper meal a day.”

“Ma, I’ve been eating better than I have for months—” and he meant it.

For two weeks he’d done little but read newspapers, and desired, in secret, to finish a book, until he sat before his laptop in the afternoon, with the chiks in the balcony more than three-quarters of the way down to keep out the heat. The chiks moved lightly, as if someone had just pushed them.

The screen lighted up; he browsed slowly through old files, his mind elsewhere. Every time he’d tried to return to, during the last two months, the project he was supposed to be working on, he found himself trying to escape it like a boy in a classroom drawn to looking out of a window during a lesson.