Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

“Ranga dadu, it’s good to see you looking so well! You’re positively pink!”

“It’s the rum that keeps him so healthy,” someone else said. After two weeks, she was looking at the photographs, and she said: “So many photos! I didn’t realise someone was sneaking around taking so many photos! Who was the photographer?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Proudly, he added, “I wasn’t there.” Naturally, he couldn’t be present at his wife-to-be’s ashirbaad ceremony.

They sat looking at the set of photographs. Everyone in them looked as if they had no desire to go anywhere, and there was a strange unhurriedness about the faces and postures. It was almost as if someone had somehow managed to take the pictures after the event.

TWENTY YEARS HAD PASSEDsince I last saw him, and when I came out of the room I didn’t recognise him at first, though I knew it must be him. Twenty years in books seems like a long time, but linear progression actually has no felt shape; in reality, you always live in the present. Mohon was three times the size he’d been then; and since you don’t grow from being medium-sized to huge overnight, he must have had to buy new sets of clothes more than just once.

“Ei Mohon,” I said, putting one arm round his shoulder. His bulk pressed against mine, and he smiled. Yet there was an awkwardness between us — where did that come from?

“How long are you here for?” I heard myself say. “When are you leaving Calcutta?”

“Hey, day after tomorrow,” said Mohon, smiling; and, turning to his wife, he said: “This guy hasn’t changed, yaar. He was more or less the same when I saw him last.” Romola, in a salwaar kameez, rather pretty, got up from the sofa.

“He’s told me so much about you all.” At this point the telephone rang shrilly, and I had to raise one palm to indicate I’d be with her directly.

“Hi, I think this must be the first time I’m meeting you,” I said, after I’d answered the inconsequential query and put the phone down. Now glasses of soft drink were distributed among us, though I refused mine from the boy who worked in our flat.

“What’s it like over there right now?” I meant Tezpur, where he’d been working and living, on an estate, for the last fifteen years. He seemed used to the question, but embarrassed. His wife answered for him.

“It’s boring! ” she said, and then giggled surreptitiously, as if she’d let the cat out of the bag. He answered more seriously, although trying not to sound too serious, “The troubles are always there. You just have to avoid them,” making them sound like bacteria you could keep from contracting by observing a careful diet. He said as an afterthought, “Of course you can’t always do that.”

“Where’s your daughter?” I asked suddenly. “Didn’t you bring her with you?”

“Ritu,” said Mohon, with a deprecating look. “She’s gone in with mashi. Mashi came out and took her inside.”

“Strange girl! Not in the least bit shy,” chimed Romola, shaking her head, as if she couldn’t believe the person she was speaking of was her daughter. “She just followed your mother inside.” And she broodingly took a sip of the pale drink.

So my mother had been out to see them already. She had been present at Mohon’s wedding; I’d been away, but of course she’d known Mohon since his birth, because we’d been born around the same time.

Twenty years — I settled back in my chair and said to Mohon:

“But I hear you want to leave that place now? Maybe move to Calcutta?” Mohon leaned forward and nodded his head thoughtfully. All that extra weight had magnified his mottled complexion, which had never been very clear, but there was a strange combination of the effects of aging and an almost untouched simplicity about him. In as polite a way as possible, he said:

“That’s right, re. It would be nice.” I knew, in fact, that that was why he’d come to Calcutta — not just for a holiday but to see if there might be an “opening,” any chance of leaving a landscape made intolerable by strife. But, of course, there was really no great possibility of there being one; opportunities were few.

I looked at him once or twice, and yet we made no eye contact. It was as if all our talk was a prevarication, a hedging about issues. It appeared the unspoken conversations of the last twenty years must now necessarily remain unspoken. He went on to tell me, absently lifting his glass of Fanta, how it would be difficult for him, with the particular background he had, the sort of job he’d been doing for the last ten years, and was now quite comfortable doing, to actually find an opening in Calcutta. The door to my room opened, and Anjali came out with our daughter Priya, whose hair was combed neatly above her forehead, yet untouched in this endangered interval of calm in the day.

Romola straightened a little and smoothed her pale blue salwaar kameez with her fingers.

“She just finished her bath,” said Anjali (who was wearing a light brown salwaar kameez herself), cheerfully announcing, in medias res, the progress of an episode that concerned us all. “Say hello to Mohon jethu and Romola mashi. Is it jethu or kaku?” she asked, looking at me, distracted. She looked pretty after the bath she herself had had, and the brown salwaar kameez was rather lovely. I looked at her and gave her a smile of recognition you sometimes give someone with whom you spend almost every hour of the day.

“Kaku,” said Mohon, ironically but gently; this was the first word he spoke to Anjali. “I narrowly missed being a jethu. He,” he tilted his head towards me, “was born just a month before me.” Said sardonically but kindly, as if he’d forgiven me for this.

Priya, though, was not at the social hello-saying stage, though she sometimes ingeniously mimicked the sound of that word when she had a telephone in her hands; she just stared and stared at the two of them, as if there was something a little out of the ordinary or embarrassing about them.

“Say something,” said Anjali. “Or will will you start talking only when they leave, like you did the other day?” Mohon laughed and shook his head. He was used to the way children are, how perverse and self-willed they can be; his daughter was three years old.

“You know,” said Romola, sitting up and looking at Anjali with the intentness of one looking at a photograph, “you look very familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen you before.” I looked again at my wife, to see if there might be anything about her face that might be mistaken for someone else’s, to see if she reminded me of someone else, and said, “Yes, that’s what Romola’s been telling me.” The two women began to talk about which school they’d been to, but the fact that Romola had been born in Patna and not travelled much out of it seemed to take something of the fire out of the search for where they might have met before.

Left to ourselves, Mohon and I, with our wives’ conversation as a background, didn’t have a great deal to talk about, but nevertheless kept moving from subject to subject, reminiscing about our childhood as if it were a book we’d both recently read. Among the things mentioned were the pop songs we once liked and were surprised to find we still listened to. “Neil Young, ‘Heart of Gold’; that’s class stuff, yaar!” Mohon smiled and looked blindly at the wall unit opposite; what rooted him to his armchair, in his over-large half-sleeved shirt and trousers, was not so much weight as some sort of absence, something that had not taken shape and probably never would; possibly the future he’d come looking for in Calcutta. I didn’t know how I could help him, though I knew he needed help; the kinds of things we did were so different.