Bharati Mukherjee - The Middleman and Other Stories

“We’ve each had our several griefs,” the physicist says. “We’re each required to pay our karmic debts.”

“Where are we headed?”

“Mrs. Chatterji has made some Indian snacks. She is waiting to meet you because she is knowing your cousin-sister who studied in Scottish Church College. My home is okay, no?”

Fran would get a kick out of this. Maya has slept with married men, with nameless men, with men little more than boys, but never with an Indian man. Never.

The Chatterjis live in a small blue house on a gravelly street. There are at least five or six other houses on the street; the same size but in different colors and with different front yard treatments. More houses are going up. This is the cutting edge of suburbia.

Mrs. Chatterji stands in the driveway. She is throwing a large plastic ball to a child. The child looks about four, and is Korean or Cambodian. The child is not hers because she tells it, “Chung-Hee, ta-ta, bye-bye. Now I play with guest,” as Maya gets out of the car.

Maya hasn’t seen this part of town. The early September light softens the construction pits. In that light the houses too close together, the stout woman in a striped cotton sari, the child hugging a pink ball, the two plastic lawn chairs by a tender young tree, the sheets and saris on the clothesline in the back, all seem miraculously incandescent.

“Go home now, Chung-Hee. I am busy.” Mrs. Chatterji points the child homeward, then turns to Maya, who has folded her hands in traditional Bengali greeting. “It is an honor. We feel very privileged.” She leads Maya indoors to a front room that smells of moisture and paint.

In her new, deliquescent mood, Maya allows herself to be backed into the best armchair — a low-backed, boxy Goodwill item draped over with a Rajasthani bedspread — and asks after the cousin Mrs. Chatterji knows. She doesn’t want to let go of Mrs. Chatterji. She doesn’t want husband and wife to get into whispered conferences about their guest’s misadventures in America, as they make tea in the kitchen.

The coffee table is already laid with platters of mutton croquettes, fish chops, onion pakoras, ghugni with puris, samosas, chutneys. Mrs. Chatterji has gone to too much trouble. Maya counts four kinds of sweetmeats in Corning casseroles on an end table. She looks into a see-through lid; spongy, white dumplings float in rosewater syrup. Planets contained, mysteries made visible.

“What are you waiting for, Santana?” Dr. Chatterji becomes imperious, though not unaffectionate. He pulls a dining chair up close to the coffee table. “Make some tea.” He speaks in Bengali to his wife, in English to Maya. To Maya he says, grandly, “We are having real Indian Green Label Lipton. A nephew is bringing it just one month back.”

His wife ignores him. “The kettle’s already on,” she says. She wants to know about the Sanyal family. Is it true her greatgrandfather was a member of the Star Chamber in England?

Nothing in Calcutta is ever lost. Just as her story is known to Bengalis all over America, so are the scandals of her family, the grandfather hauled up for tax evasion, the aunt who left her husband to act in films. This woman brings up the Star Chamber, the glories of the Sanyal family, her father’s philanthropies, but it’s a way of saying, I know the dirt.

The bedrooms are upstairs. In one of those bedrooms an unseen, tormented presence — Maya pictures it as a clumsy ghost that strains to shake off the body’s shell — drops things on the floor. The things are heavy and they make the front room’s chandelier shake. Light bulbs, shaped like tiny candle flames, flicker. The Chatterjis have said nothing about children. There are no tricycles in the hallway, no small sandals behind the doors. Maya is too polite to ask about the noise, and the Chatterjis don’t explain. They talk just a little louder. They flip the embroidered cover off the stereo. What would Maya like to hear? Hemanta Kumar? Manna Dey? Oh, that young chap, Manna Dey! What sincerity, what tenderness he can convey!

Upstairs the ghost doesn’t hear the music of nostalgia. The ghost throws and thumps. The ghost makes its own vehement music. Maya hears in its voice madness, self-hate.

Finally the water in the kettle comes to a boil. The whistle cuts through all fantasy and pretense. Dr. Chatterji says, “I’ll see to it,” and rushes out of the room. But he doesn’t go to the kitchen. He shouts up the stairwell. “Poltoo, kindly stop this nonsense straightaway! We’re having a brilliant and cultured lady-guest and you’re creating earthquakes?” The kettle is hysterical.

Mrs. Chatterji wipes her face. The face that had seemed plump and cheery at the start of the evening now is flabby. “My sister’s boy,” the woman says.

So this is the nephew who has brought with him the cartons of Green Label tea, one of which will be given to Maya.

Mrs. Chatterji speaks to Maya in English as though only the alien language can keep emotions in check. “Such an intelligent boy! His father is government servant. Very highly placed.”

Maya is meant to visualize a smart, clean-cut young man from south Calcutta, but all she can see is a crazy, thwarted, lost graduate student. Intelligence, proper family guarantee nothing. Even Brahmins can do self-destructive things, feel unsavory urges. Maya herself had been an excellent student.

“He was First Class First in B. Sc. from Presidency College,” the woman says. “Now he’s getting Master’s in Ag. Science at Iowa State.”

The kitchen is silent. Dr. Chatterji comes back into the room with a tray. The teapot is under a tea cozy, a Kashmiri one embroidered with the usual chinar leaves, loops, and chains. “Her nephew,” he says. The dyed hair and dyed moustache are no longer signs of a man wishing to fight the odds. He is a vain man, anxious to cut losses. “Very unfortunate business.”

The nephew’s story comes out slowly, over fish chops and mutton croquettes. He is in love with a student from Ghana.

“Everything was A-Okay until the Christmas break. Grades, assistantship for next semester, everything.”

“I blame the college. The office for foreign students arranged a Christmas party. And now, baapre baap! Our poor Poltoo wants to marry a Negro Muslim.”

Maya is known for her nasty, ironic one-liners. It has taken her friends weeks to overlook her malicious, un-American pleasure in others’ misfortunes. Maya would like to finish Dr. Chatterji off quickly. He is pompous; he is reactionary; he wants to live and work in America but give back nothing except taxes. The confused world of the immigrant — the lostness that Maya and Poltoo feel — that’s what Dr. Chatterji wants to avoid. She hates him. But.

Dr. Chatterji’s horror is real. A good Brahmin boy in Iowa is in love with an African Muslim. It shouldn’t be a big deal. But the more she watches the physicist, the more she realizes that “Brahmin” isn’t a caste; it’s a metaphor. You break one small rule, and the constellation collapses. She thinks suddenly that John Cheever — she is teaching him as a “world writer” in her classes, cheek-by-jowl with Africans and West Indians — would have understood Dr. Chatter ji’s dread. Cheever had been on her mind, ever since the late afternoon light slanted over Mrs. Chatterji’s drying saris. She remembers now how full of a soft, Cheeverian light Durham had been the summer she had slept with John Hadwen; and how after that, her tidy graduate-student world became monstrous, lawless. All men became John Hadwen; John became all men. Outwardly, she retained her poise, her Brahminical breeding. She treated her crisis as a literary event; she lost her moral sense, her judgment, her power to distinguish. Her parents had behaved magnanimously. They had cabled from Calcutta: WHAT’S DONE IS DONE. WE ARE CONFIDENT YOU WILL HANDLE NEW SITUATIONS WELL. ALL LOVE. But she knows more than do her parents. Love is anarchy.