Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

HE GLANCEDat his watch and made an attempt to finish the tea in his cup; he was waiting for a call, and it was his second cup of tea. Five minutes later, the phone began to ring.

“Pramathesh?” said the voice at the other end; and he could tell, from its slight note of insouciance and boredom, that it was Ranjit.

“I was waiting for your call, old man,” he said, trying to muffle his irritation with his usual show of joviality. “You were supposed to call half an hour ago.” He didn’t know why he even bothered to mention this, since Ranjit, who was never known to acknowledge he was late, would take this to be an unnecessarily pedantic remark, a remark that pointed to the actual, if generally concealed, gulf that distinguished their temperaments.

“Trying to send the boy off to school … didn’t want to go this morning,” Ranjit muttered. “That boy’ll cost me my job one of these days.”

“Come, come, don’t blame it on poor Mithu. He has enough troubles being an innocent bystander in your life. Are we ready?”

“Of course I’m ready! Should we say ten minutes?” As an afterthought, a change of register: “Sorry I didn’t call earlier.” You can’t choose your colleagues in the office; he hadn’t grasped the significance of this until a few months ago. And to pretend you were friends — that, too, was a fiction you couldn’t bring yourself to wholly believe in, but couldn’t entirely dispense with either; you did “things” together, sometimes outside office hours, you visited each other’s houses — he’d been to Ranjit’s place in New Alipore only day before yesterday — got to know each other’s wives and children, the kind of food the wife, affectionately referred to as the “grihini,” cooked, and, yet, you made a pact to keep all that was true and most important about yourself from the colleague; in case the desirable boundary between private life and secret nightmare and employment ceased to exist. Meanwhile, your real friends, those mythological beings, who by now had embarked on lives and careers of their own, fell obligingly by the wayside; they became things you put inside a closet and meant to recover, someday, in the future. In other words, you were alone, with your family, and your destiny.

Pramathesh Majumdar had joined the company three years ago, soon after coming back from England in 1964 as a chartered accountant. A brief honeymoon period with office life and work in Calcutta ensued, which also saw this makeshift arrangement, this friendship, with Ranjit Biswas come into being. Ranjit had never been abroad; he’d been born and brought up in Calcutta. He had the ease and the unquestioning expectancy of routine repeating itself, and of things continuing to fit, that belong to one who has never been removed from his original habitat. Pramathesh belonged nowhere; he came, originally, from East Bengal; his sights were probably set somewhere higher. Although Ranjit Biswas was still, strictly speaking, a colleague, both knew, though this wasn’t articulated, that Pramathesh, in his unassuming way, was preparing himself for the race people called “professional life,” while Ranjit, with his impatience at keeping appointments, was perhaps going to stay in the same place for some time, feeling, now and then, bitter, without being unduly bothered to do anything about it. It was the strength of Pramathesh’s British degree that gave him a head start, of course, but it was also something else, a meticulousness that might be called foresight. In fact, Pramathesh had been transferred to the Delhi office in June this year, and since the Delhi office was now the head office, this move had been interpreted as a promotion.

Today’s mission was the outcome of a chance remark made day before yesterday. He’d been sitting at Ranjit’s place after dinner, contemplating returning to the guest house; he said, stretching his arms, “Well, I’m returning to Delhi next week. Have to get down to some shopping.” “Like what, Pramathesh da?” asked Ranjit’s wife, Malini, as she was putting away the dishes. “The usual things, I suppose,” said Pramathesh, who looked younger than his thirty-nine years. “Go to Gariahat, buy a few saris; decorations; take some gandharaj lime — my son loves those…” In his heart of hearts, he missed Calcutta; Delhi seemed small and transitory and provincial in comparison. “How did the project with the boss go this time?” asked Ranjit, lighting a cigarette (his wife called him a “chain-smoker”) and leaning against the wicker chair in the verandah. There was curiosity in his voice, and a hint of competitiveness. “Oh, all right,” said Pramathesh, sounding noncommittal, but actually engrossed in the mental picture of Lahiri as it hovered before him, a quiet, balding man with fair, tissue-paper-like skin who wore glasses with thick lenses and looked as if nothing had changed noticeably since the years before Independence. He could hear his voice and his cough. “You know, generous and friendly when he’s in a good mood, and slightly unfathomable when he’s not.” Ranjit nodded and took a fresh puff on his cigarette. “Are you thinking of taking back a two-kilogram rui from the fish market?” said Malini from the semi-lit dining room, her voice holding back laughter. “I saw you eating today and thought, ‘He doesn’t get fish there.’” “Yes, that’s right,” said Pramathesh, “I’ll just give it to the air hostess and tell her to hang on to it until we land.” “A lot of people take back mishti doi,” said Ranjit. He began to laugh in his unobtrusively nasty, dry manner, which meant that he was going to reveal something that had given him pleasure at someone else’s expense. “I saw a man standing in line for security at the airport with a huge bhaad of doi, and the next time I saw him the bhaad had fallen to ground and shattered, the yoghurt lay on the floor in a tragic mess: the poor man, he looked lost and heartbroken! I don’t think we’ll see him in Calcutta in a hurry!” After a few moments, Pramathesh said quietly, “I was thinking of taking back a picture … something nice — to hang up in the new flat.” “A picture?”

There were still hardly any art galleries in Calcutta. And the idea of buying a painting — and not a print — was still an unusual one. But recently, at a cocktail party in a superior’s bungalow in Delhi, Pramathesh’s wife had noticed an original Nandalal Bose. Not that she’d known it was an original; but someone told her it was. Returning to their flat, she’d said it might be a good idea to buy a decent painting for their drawing room; it would be their first stab at creating a status that would be in accordance with Pramathesh’s professional life. Now, Ranjit racked his brains and said, “Well, I know where Gopal Ghosh lives; we could go there.” Of course, owning a Gopal Ghosh may not be owning a Picasso; but his paintings were held in high regard. Just as Pramathesh’s career as a chartered accountant and an employee was at the fledgling stage, so was the Indian art world, with its ambivalences and lack of self-belief. Paradoxically, it was those who might be accused of not understanding art who would nourish it, unknowingly, through this delicate moment, setting up a concomitance between its life and theirs. It was as if their lives were destined, in some sense, to be connected and to grow together, though this must not be seen to be so.

So the two men decided to meet in front of the office itself in Chowringhee, at a quarter past ten on Saturday, before the seven-storeyed building. An old, moustached watchman who had nothing much to occupy him hovered in the background while Pramathesh waited for Ranjit to arrive. When he did, Pramathesh instructed his driver to remain parked where he was. From there, they went in Ranjit’s white Ambassador, the driver in front wordless, down a main artery, which was fairly deserted on a Saturday, towards one of the by-lanes in an area quite far from both New Alipore and the company guest house; Pramathesh, in fact, didn’t know what it was called. Here, they came to a ground-floor flat in an old two-storeyed house in a narrow lane facing, and flanked by, other houses not unlike itself. They were not sure if they should just walk in, but when they did, finding the door open, they saw no one inside; only the ceiling fan hung immobile above them. The painter, emerging into the living room a few minutes later to discover them, didn’t seem to mind their intrusion. He was wearing a dhoti and a shabby jacket himself, and looked abstracted; he glanced at the two men in their pressed shirtsleeves, trousers, and sandals, and appeared to make a shrewd appraisal of why they were here and who they might be. “Was it you who just came up in the car?” he asked, to which Pramathesh said, a little hesitantly, “Yes.” He finally sold Pramathesh two of his paintings very matter-of-factly, bringing them from a room inside, one showing a pale, white forest, in which the trees were crested with white blossoms, with probably a peasant woman walking in it, and the other of a group of figures, possibly pilgrims, walking dimly past a mountainside. One might have missed their appeal; indeed, Pramathesh had to summon up something forgotten inside him, something from his early youth, in order to respond to them. It was not a faculty he had to use often, or of late; and he wasn’t altogether sure of his judgement. At any rate, without quite knowing why, he bought the two paintings for one hundred and fifty rupees each.