Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

At this point, my mother opened her bedroom door and came out with a girl with lightish hair, almost brownish in colour. She was dressed in a denim jacket and knickerbockers, and could have passed for a Greek or an Italian.

“Oh, she’s been feeling at home,” said Romola, making a can’t-help-what-my-daughter-does face.

“Oh, she was very happy, but then just now she began asking for her mother,” said my mother. Ritu looked not all there, as if she’d done something wrong; but not overtly repentant. Really, there was nothing to indicate, in the way this family looked, that they’d been living in Tezpur, surrounded by troubles, for the last ten years — Ritu, indeed, had been born there; they could have been from anywhere else, a city suburb.

One thing Mohon remembered from the past was my mother’s cooking.

“There never was any comparison! Whenever we used to visit you in Bombay,” said Mohon, thinking of the verandah overlooking the sea, “we’d really look forward to mashi’s food. Especially the chicken.”

“Tell me, re,” I said suddenly, asking him what I’d been thinking of asking him for some time, “what about the weight? How did it happen?”

“This,” he said, as if it were self-evident what “this” was, “happened over the last two or three years, re. I slipped and fell and fractured my ankle, and the bone’s never healed properly.” He smiled and shook his head slightly. “I’ve had two operations. But no exercise since then. Otherwise,” he turned to Anjali, “I used to be almost as thin as this guy.”

Later, after about twenty minutes, when he said he wanted to go the toilet, I noticed he walked with a small limp. At one point I’d ask him, “Where did you fall?” thinking of the hilly slopes of Assam, but he’d surprise me by saying, “Bombay. When we went there in ’ninety-seven.” When he came back, and we talked until lunch, we avoided looking at each other, as if there was something that couldn’t be said between us. It was something very minor, elusive, but it wouldn’t go away. It could be the differences that had come about in our respective ways of life, our different degrees of success, that were now embarrassing both of us. Or it could be the two small incidents that had occurred those twenty years ago, when we’d spent two nights with each other, talking, when one thing led to another and culminated the way such things do, in a mixture of embarrassment and a cheery, practical resolve to brush it aside. At that time, we didn’t think our actions would have any consequences, and of course they didn’t. What remained was like the smell of smoke, nothing we could hang on to, but something that wouldn’t go away, no more of an impediment except to keep us from looking directly at each other. In the end, it had had nothing to do with our sexuality; it had been one of those nameless animal impulses common to boys, something between pity and terror; twenty years later, it left you with nothing to build on, but it was there.

He sat sipping his second Fanta until my mother shouted, “Lunch!” Mohon and I sat next to each other, my mother and father at the head of the table at opposite ends, and our wives sat facing us. Ritu and Priya, who’d already been fed, finally began to play with each other, Ritu, being older, obstreperous, and over-affectionate, now and then speaking to Priya in, of all languages, Hindi. Priya tolerated her new friend as long as she didn’t touch her too often, until Ritu was frankly puzzled by Priya’s changing moods towards her. I could see that Mohon hadn’t put on weight only because of his bad foot; he kept taking second and third helpings while protesting he mustn’t eat too much.

“It’s the same chicken, mashi! Amazing!” he said as we approached the end of the meal, as if the same preparation had been reincarnated today from all those years ago.

All at once Ritu fell asleep, as if she’d inhaled some vapour that causes drowsiness, in an alien house upon a strange bed. Priya, our daughter, kept awake, as she does sometimes late into the night, keeping us awake with her.

“How’s your mother, Mohon?” I asked. It had been years since I’d seen her. A small woman with dark eyes and wavy hair, simple, unimposing in her smallness, came back to me. For some reason, he didn’t look at me when he said with an odd conviction, “Oh both ma and baba are fine!” They’d both retired, I heard, to their ancestral house in Assam about fifteen years ago; they lived ten miles away from Tezpur. The reason for the return was simple: Mohon had got into “bad company” in his college in Delhi, into drugs, and the only route that lay before them was to remove him entirely from the influence of his friends, from the busyness of the metropolis, to the ancestral home in Assam. They’d seemed to doubt that he’d otherwise have the power to resist the influence on his own.

“Tell him to lose weight,” I said to Romola, leaning forward. “At this age it might seem okay, but his…” I gestured around the region of his heart.

“You tell him,” she whispered. Twenty years! The afternoon moved towards teatime with its shingaras, after which they would leave. All those changes; Assam, Calcutta; and yet we seemed happy in our marriages, with our small families. Our wives were very different from each other, perhaps even from us, but our lives had come to occupy fully the shapes they’d made for them. Whatever had happened between us all those years ago had become harmless, meaningless, at most an uncomfortable scab that, with the friction of history, would fall off at some time. Was that the fate of these small excitements, that they became mawkish and disownable in the future?

Yet I hoped that his purpose was served. If there was going to be an opening, I’m sure my father would remember Mohon, and that he was ready to be transferred to Calcutta. I forgot to obey Romola’s instructions, and didn’t say anything to Mohon except “Try to cut down on the beer.” He looked at me, the old look of friendship, and sighed, “Yeah, that’s the one thing I must do.”

When he got up to go, heavy, his figure bigger than I could remember, I looked at his limp and expected it to disappear any minute, because it seemed to come from a callus under his foot that was destined to fade.

THE DINNER HAD BEENappointed for, first, Friday, then Saturday night, and already, by the middle of the week, the preparations had begun. They — the small nuclear family of father, mother, and the son who was equal to an army of a hundred — were going to move from this rather equanimous accommodation to a larger flat in another locality in a couple of weeks, so this would probably be the last party Mrs. Sinha-Roy would be hosting in some time. Not that the flat was a small one; in fact, it had spaces they didn’t know what do with. But with Mr. Sinha-Roy’s ascension to head of finance a few months ago, there was the technicality that the flat had only two bedrooms, just a technicality, since the bedrooms were huge, but yet a two-bedroom flat was not quite commensurate with the position of a head of finance and, more practically, his “entertainment” requirements. From now on, he would be expected to throw larger parties.

The young son, Amal, no more than eight years old, lorded it over the servants — the cook, the bearer, the maidservant — as the preparations made progress, now entering the disorderly activity of the kitchen, now rushing past or circling the sari-clad, abstracted figure of Mrs. Sinha-Roy as if she were some kind of portal. There was an enigmatic aura about him that couldn’t be quite pinpointed; as if he weren’t just the head of finance’s son, but as if there resided in him, in some indirect but undeniable way, the hopes and aspirations of the company Mr. Sinha-Roy worked for; as if he were in some way its secret and unacknowledged symbol. It wasn’t enough that the franchise of happiness the company offered lay in the furniture and the flat and the other “perquisites”; and that Mr. Sinha-Roy would, as head of finance, have to negotiate large losses and gains. The boy, too, was part of that loss and gain in a way he didn’t quite understand.