Amit Chaudhuri - A New World

Before him, on the wall, there was a batik print of Ganesh that served the dual, not incompatible, purpose of being a decoration and bringing good fortune to the house. Beneath it, there was a table covered with a Rajasthani cloth with mirrorwork upon it. Each circle of glass reflected some bit of the room, no longer recognizable, independent of whatever it was it represented. These things had been bought on an impulse long ago — but the print was fairly recent— and had not so much to do with serious thought or judgement as trespassing into emporia and feeling heartless about leaving empty-handed. Then there was a Kashmiri shikara, slightly removed from its place, which is how Maya sometimes left things after she’d dusted them.

On the table there were photographs: one of Jayojit at the age of nineteen, become thin and tall (he had been pudgy as a boy), wearing thick black-framed spectacles, which were fashionable in those days; he was then at the Hindu College. Another of Jayojit and his brother Ranajit when they were thirteen and ten respectively, taken on a holiday in Madhya Pradesh, both the boys, in their long pants and keds, looking like colonizers on that ancient terrain; a wedding photo, bright with colour, of Ranajit and his wife. There were other smaller photographs, of cousins and relatives, and a series of pictures, in a large frame, of Bonny at different stages of his life; as a baby, as a child of two, when his hair, mysteriously, had been curlier than it was now, a boy of four in trousers with braces. The wedding pictures had disappeared, or become oddly improper. The pictures of Bonny were sans parents, as if he’d been conceived in a future when parents were not only no longer necessary, but were no more possible.

The only other picture of a couple among those photographs was one of Jayojit’s parents. It had been taken on their twenty-fifth marriage anniversary. The Admiral was noticeably less heavy in the photograph than now, his hair and beard a little less long. She was smiling faintly, almost shyly. Then there was a picture of the Admiral in uniform, taken some time in the eighties, a few years before Jayojit got married. There were also, separately, pictures of the Admiral’s parents; one of his mother and another of his father. Faded and obscure, and to all purposes forgotten, they still didn’t seem insignificant; they lived not in some afterlife, but some moment in history as difficult to imagine now as this moment would have been to imagine then. In its own and different way, that time must have been as shadowy and uncertain as any now, struggling, as well, to arrive at its brief being and truth; everything about that world must have been disequilibrious and dark to Jayojit’s grandfather. Jayojit knew that his grandfather had once run away from home to seek spiritual truth, and later, for some reason, returned to his parents. Then, not content to inherit land and his father’s estates, he’d gone to Dhaka and then to Calcutta and become a successful journalist. Thus, Jayojit’s father had been born in Calcutta, somewhere in the north, where it was impossible to go now because of the traffic. Jayojit himself had never seen his father’s mother; his father’s father had died when he was three.

His mother’s parents he could remember well. For years they used to live in a small mining town in Bihar. Sometimes he’d go to them with both his parents, sometimes with his mother. He’d notice, then, how fragile and unthinking his mother’s relationship seemed to be with his grandparents, how forgetful she became when she was with them, and then longed to go back after a month had passed, as if she had grown tired because she’d never completely be a girl again.

Once, when typing, he thought there was someone else in the room; looking up, he realized it was one of his mother’s saris, washed but not pressed, left in a bundle on the sofa; it had become a form on the edge of his vision. He looked up from the screen and gazed at the chik that was three-quarters of the way down to keep out the heat. Again and again, but with no obvious regularity in the intervals, the chik stirred, creaked, with the sigh of a south-easterly breeze; and beyond, the guttural murmurs of idle drivers, the punctilious beating of metal, hovered with an air of expectancy.

THAT AFTERNOON, he went out for a walk again; restless, with nothing to do, wondering how long the two months (of which thirteen days had gone already) would last. As he was setting out, he saw a group of schoolchildren returning in blue and white uniforms. They loitered in the hall before walking toward the lift; they seemed to be without a sense of urgency.

He walked past them, and he might have been invisible in his off-white trousers and check shirt. As he came into the sun, he narrowed his eyes instinctively.

He recalled that, as a child, he’d never known the meaning of this daily homecoming from school; instead, he’d wait till summer, say goodbye to his friends in Ooty (Aniruddha Sen, his constant companion in the Ninth Standard, came to mind undiminished with his long nose; apparently he was now a financial consultant in Birmingham), or postpone saying goodbye indefinitely, as the case might be (because promotions and the perpetual upward journey through new classes hurt almost physically when he was a boy, like a pang of birth), and then take a train to wherever his father happened to be posted. And then his mother would dote on him, almost consolingly, for two months, making not luchis as she did now single-handedly, but the cook preparing exotic rubbish: sweetcorn on toast; or versions of the roadside junk-food that was otherwise taboo to him.

This had been the subject of jocular ribbing in the early days with Amala.

“There’s a limit to carefulness, baba,” she’d said, rolling her eyes, for she herself had grown up in a family that allowed her to try out everything once; indeed, apparently she and her mother ventured out together in search of golgappas, getting out of their Ambassador near the vendors at Deshapriya Park.

He came to the main road now, confronted a tram, and turned right. This city irritated him; it was like an obstacle; yet he’d decided that it would give him the space for recoupment that he thought was necessary now. Nothing had changed from a year ago; only the pavement here seemed more dusty than he’d remembered and was like a path that ran parallel to the road. He walked on, until he saw three familiar shops in the distance, on the left, on the other side; a provisions store, a fast-food outlet, and a drugstore. He felt not so much a sense of déjà vu as one of ironic, qualified continuity. Then, further off, he saw a hoarding above a busy and troubled junction, where a stream of cars was divided into two or more directions, the conjunctive but disparate existences of Ballygunge Circular and Hazra roads, and saw that it had an advertisement, the same as last time, aimed at which set of eyes and personalities he didn’t know, for the ATM. The Hong Kong Bank copywriters had interpreted the ATM as Any Time Money, and it was the same advertisement except that it was a fresh slogan. It hovered in mid-air above a razed and derelict island.

He remembered his father saying to him during a telephone conversation, sounding as if the whole truth hadn’t sunk in: “Joy, are you sure I shouldn’t call her parents? Mr. Chakraborty could talk some sense into her. .”

“Baba, there’s nothing to salvage,” he’d said, patiently waiting for the line to clear. “It’s finished.” He had to say this to remind himself it was so. “What worries me now,” he’d continued calmly, “is that she has Bonny with her.” To reassure his father at the other end, he’d said, “Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow to tell you what I’m doing about that.”