Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

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I THINK THE EARLY YEARSin Patna, though my memories of them are few, and often random and disconnected, must be the reason why I’ve never felt I belong here — to Bombay — although this is where I grew up. Yet I never think of myself as a person who “comes from Bombay”; it’s the place I’ve lived in much of my life. Where do I come from, then? I don’t have to go to Gujarat to visit my Gujarati relatives; many of them live here, on Peddar Road. My nani, my mother’s mother, died in a third-floor flat in a building at the turning of Peddar Road and Gamadia Road.

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YOU ASK MEif I feel more South Indian or Gujarati — I don’t know. I know a few Telegu words, but my father didn’t speak very much in Telegu at home. The language my parents spoke to each other was English. I grew up in a fifth-floor apartment on Nepean Sea Road, very near where the small flyover was built in the seventies. How many walks my friends, especially Kamini, who lived in the same building, and I took across that flyover!

Kamini and I, too, spoke to each other in English, although her parents were from the Andhra as well; but it never occurred to us to experiment with Telegu in our conversation. I don’t think we even had a clear idea that we were South Indians, I at least in part; the solidarity we felt had to do with the fact that we went to the same school. The English we spoke, I now realize, was garnished with Hindi words for effect; it all sounded very clever-clever: “Didn’t do too well in my chemistry paper. Chalta hai, yaar!” This was our Esperanto, and we never thought to think it anything but English; it wouldn’t have done to speak in any other kind of English. The girls who spoke in “perfect” English were slightly ridiculous and were supposed to be “goody-goody.”

That’s exactly the Esperanto that Shobha De (then Rajadhyaksha) and her colleagues began to write in Stardust in the seventies. There was something slightly impolite about that language, wasn’t there? — all right for schoolgirls to speak in, but to write in…?

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ALTHOUGH SO MANY PEOPLEwrite these days (so many, it’s difficult to imagine), you feel the world you know, the India you know, is still to be written about. Is this merely solipsistic? Shobha (I hope she won’t mind me using her first name) has scratched the tip of the iceberg, though; I now feel that her life is also in some way mine — I don’t mean the celebrity; though even celebrity emerges from that book, Selective Memory (what an apposite, an inevitable name!), as a kind of character, a desirable freak that some people got to know in Bombay at that time, rather than as destiny. Even the portfolio of photographs, the author now with Amitabh Bachchan, or Indira Gandhi, or Nari Hira, looks slightly doctored, as if all the photos of Shobha De had been taken on the same day, for she is the same — perpetually young, her carved face immutable — in all of them, while the others — Nari Hira, Amitabh Bachchan — are fraught with contingency, they look like trespassers. I’ve seen the tricks that are possible these days; that’s why John F. Kennedy looks like an intruder, alone and slightly nervous, when he’s made to shake hands in Forrest Gump with Tom Hanks without being certain he’s in the movie.

But that’s not what I mean when I say that Shobha De’s life is in some way mine. It’s not the celebrity; it’s the detritus that we all know but no one speaks of, the banal, briefly glittering sequence of events, where the heart beats underneath. That is what I’m concerned with; because that is when I feel myself in the silence, on the edge of the words, not yet a writer (just as she is not yet a writer) but listening to what we in the upper middle class in Bombay frivolously call “life.” Because, however much we insist, we will never be quite writers; literature is not where we start from. All those years, going to the matinee, borrowing books from the British Council, thinking you might be acquiring a boyfriend — literature was not what proscribed or described those episodes. Of course, we read books (I think Shobha did as well), and I even studied English literature; but that was studying other people’s lives, authors and characters. Where our hearts beat, that was secret, or disappointing, or satisfying, or trivial, too trivial for it to become words or a story. Really, our lives were glamorous and happy but too trivial. And it is there that I must begin, that is why all of us writers who have still not written a word are impatient to disturb the silence.

ALTHOUGH ONE OF THEMlived in Kensington and the other in Bayswater, they didn’t know each other. It was that evening, when he’d come out of the underground and walked down the road glittering with light and rain, and gone back home to speak to his parents on the telephone, that he’d first heard about her. A second marriage! What was marriage, after all? The back of his overcoat was velvety with moisture as it lay drying on the sofa, where it had been roughly put aside. Once, after a couple of meetings, it was agreed that the idea of a second marriage was congenial to both of them, they decided to put it to execution. They had no idea, really, what it was all about; members of both sides of the family became like coconspirators, and decided to keep the fact a secret till they had an inkling as to what the shape and features of a second marriage were. As far as they were concerned, it was still as formless as the rain on Kensington High Street. Last time, the rituals, like some vast fabric whose provenance they knew little about, had woven them into the marriage, without their having to enquire deeply into it; Arun remembered, from long ago, the car that had come to pick him up, his eyes smarting with the smoke from the fire, the web of flowers over everything, including the bed, the stage, even the car. The first marriage had been like a book into which everyone, including they, had been written, melding unconsciously and without resistance into the characters in it that everyone was always supposed to be.

They met at an old pub near Knightsbridge, and ordered two coffees. This time Prajapati, or Brahma, would not preside with wings unfurled from the sky or the dark over their marriage; nor would this wedding be in that ageless lineage that had begun when Shiva had importunately stormed in to marry Parvati. This time the gods would be no more than an invisible presence between their conversation. They sat there, two individuals, rather lonely, both carrying their broken marriages like the rumours of children.

“Sugar?” she said, with the air of one who was conversant with his habits. He was shyer than she was, as if he needed to prove something.

“Two,” he said, managing to sound bold and nervous at once.

They were like two film directors who had with them a script, a plan, but nothing else. There was both exhaustion and hope in their eyes and gestures, which the waitress, saying “Thank you!” cheerfully, hadn’t noticed.

“Two?” she said, noting that he was overweight. A gentle affection for him had preceded, in her, any permanent bond. It was as if it would almost not matter if they never saw each other again.

“Are you all right?” said the waitress, coming back after a while.

“Oh, we’re fine!” he said, his English accent impeccable. “Maybe you could bring me a few cookies.” The cookies were pale star-shaped squiggles, or chocolate-dark circles. They had brought a list of invitees with them.

“This is Bodo Jethu,” she said, pointing at the name, “A. Sarkar,” on the top of a piece of paper. “You’ll see him during the ashirbaad at Calcutta.” Withdrawing her finger and looking at a name, she said, “That’s my only mama.” He stared at the name she was looking at.