A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) (10 page)

“Is that so . . . is that so . . .” The doctor shook his head. Then he brightened and said, “Yes, that
is
so, isn’t it? They didn’t give it to Gandhi but they gave it to Kissinger!” he said, indignant, as if he’d been in the midst of those events. “I used to know him, you know, not very well, of course, when I was a student.” Jayojit was perplexed. “Where does he teach now (I’ve heard his marriages haven’t lasted)?” and he realized it was Amartya Sen he was talking about. “We’re about the same age, you know . . .”

“Harvard, I think. Though he seems to be everywhere at once . . . In Oxford, in Cambridge, tomorrow at Jadavpur.”

They pondered briefly on how human beings at times seemed no more substantial than rumours. Suddenly, in an aside: “America’s one country I’ve never been to.”

“I don’t know if you’ve missed much. You must have seen Americans here—they go everywhere! Well, if you’ve seen one—” Interrupting himself, Jayojit thought back and said, “It’s warm there now: some places are even hotter than here.”

“I have some nieces and nephews there,” said Dr. Sen. “One in New York, another in a place called Mon—Montana.”

Jayojit narrowed his eyes, wondering if he might possibly know the people the doctor had mentioned. “Mm,” he said. “Big Sky country,” he concluded emphatically. “Montana—they have a bright blue sky out there. Emptiness.”

“My nephew’s a general surgeon there,” the doctor continued, incurious about what Jayojit thought of the vistas of the American interior. He glanced swiftly at his wristwatch and said: “A-are you about to go down—going out, maybe?”

“I was thinking of it,” said Jayojit. “It’s a bit hot, isn’t it?”

Dr. Sen smiled sadly and shook his head, as if at a regrettable piece of news which had only just been revealed to him. “It’s terribly hot!” They began to go down the stairs.

JAYOJIT AND AMALA had married eleven years ago; eleven years and seven months precisely. That was when that evening pleasantness had set in, the month of Hemanta on the Bengali calendar. They had been divorced at the end of the year before last in a bright, clean Midwestern summer. It hadn’t been an easy or even a civilized event; the court had ruled that Amala, who’d taken the child with her, would have full custody. His first reaction was that all was lost. Then he’d decided he must fight; not just his studied determination but his natural belligerence had guided him. He employed a new lawyer; “I’m sorry, Gary, but I have to think of other eventualities,” he’d said to the old one on the phone.

Hundreds of miles away, the Admiral quickly grasped the legal niceties. Examining the loopholes and details helped to lift him from the depression that he felt at almost all times during that period.

“But can it be done, though?” the Admiral had asked over the telephone at well past midnight—meaning moving the case to the Indian courts.

“Why not?” Jayojit had asked, out of breath with agitation. Their child was gone; six miles away, but further away than India. “If it hasn’t been done it will be now.” Pause; the roar of the long-distance line that swallowed voices and sometimes sent them back. “I’m an Indian citizen, aren’t I?”

Another deliberate pause; because if you interrupted the speaker the words cancelled each other out. You had to be sure the other person had finished. Sometimes there was an echo.

“But Bonny’s not,” the Admiral offered. “He’s not, is he?”

“He’s too small to be any kind of citizen,” Jayojit had said. “Anyway, we’re not talking about the son here, but the father. The father’s prerogative.”

It was at that time, the Admiral remembered, that the question of what it was to be an “Indian” had had to be addressed. It was not something that either Jayojit or Admiral Chatterjee had bothered about, except during moments of political crisis or significance, like a border conflict or elections, or some moment of mass celebration, when it seemed all right to mock “Indianness,” if only to differentiate oneself from a throng of people; but this was a legal matter.

“We’re going to go to Gariahat,” he said to Bonny. The boy was in the toilet; he ran out, attempting determinedly to fit a button into his shorts’ buttonhole. It was their third trip to that place; each time Jayojit found an appropriate reason.

Last year he’d savoured, in the humidity of the late and vanishing monsoons, some of the smoking foods on the pavements. The reason he’d been experimental was because the food was fried; and it had settled lightly in his stomach and left him unscathed; and left no imprint on the surface of his mind.

Jayojit’s mother was worried.

“How will you go?” she asked; her face recorded her unhappiness. This, despite the fact that he’d been there six days ago on a private misadventure.

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll find a way,” said Jayojit, tying his shoelaces.

“Don’t take the bus, baba,” said his mother; as if she were advising against needless self-endangerment. “Whatever you do.”

“No chance of that—don’t worry.”

The Admiral, as if he’d overheard, came out of the bedroom and said:

“I can give you the keys to the car.” This was uttered as if it were a startling, slightly embarrassing, confession. “It’s a bit old, but the Fiat’s an excellent car—doesn’t have the Ambassador’s reputation for sturdiness, but it’s actually much sturdier. I’m not sure if it’s got enough petrol though.” The Fiat had been acquired cheap before retirement; and its engine had vibrated mildly until it had arrived at its state of voluntary repose, when its windows were cleaned twice a week from the outside.

Last time Jayojit had just walked; now his father stood before him, undecided.

“Ha!” he said, waving one hand, declaiming to the balcony. “No thank you! No, I don’t think I’m quite ready to take on the Calcutta traffic . . .”

Something in his father’s tone caught Bonny’s attention; he stopped to watch him with large eyes.

“It’s much better there, isn’t it?” said the Admiral.

Only one place was referred to as
there
these days; but at one time it used to be the Admiral’s in-laws’ home.

“In general,” said Jayojit, his voice louder than usual. But his old cynicism about America soon got the better of him, and he felt unable to commend any of its virtues without causing discomfort to a part of himself; he added, “If you don’t get run into from behind by some schizophrenic motorist.”

In the lane, Bonny ran a little way ahead (“Careful!” said his father). A watchman said: “Kahaa jate ho, baba?”; he knew Bonny now, but received no acknowledgement in return except an increase in speed. Raat-ki-rani and nameless but characteristic creepers, a colony whose presence was taken for granted, flourished by the gate. He didn’t always obey everything his father said; it was Amala who used to be the symbol of authority at home, and the one who would invariably dispense it. Nothing that had happened yet had changed the way that he viewed his parents; he saw the present arrangement as an experiment. He couldn’t clearly distinguish between fifteen minutes and half an hour, let alone knowing what a longer period of time was.

“That’s a pretty big house,” said Bonny after his father had caught up with him, standing suddenly to look at a two-storeyed mansion, probably built in the twenties or thirties, repainted yellow. A banyan stood alone in the courtyard, and its shadow sat meditating beneath it. “Is the guy who owns it quite rich?”

There was an outbreak of shrill chattering in the branches. The slatted windows of the mansion looked back blankly at the boy.

“Might have been at one time,” said Jayojit. “Probably gone mad by now, all alone in that huge place.”

There was no sound; the birds were quiet again.

“Yeah; right,” said the boy.

Yet something had made him pause before the old house, not just because of its largeness, but its silence in the midst of all the small sounds.

“There’s a taxi,” said Jayojit, pointing to a shadow.

Abruptly, as if he’d become aware of the sunlight between the trees, Bonny narrowed his eyes. Then he looked at the taxi; last time they’d walked to Gariahat.

Jayojit’s mother had once told him, “Joy, there’s always a taxi at the corner of the lane”; now her words came back to him.

Two men, in their late twenties or early thirties, were sitting on the front seat, a geometry of detachment. The heat was like a presence in the taxi; one could sense it from outside. Jayojit knocked twice on the door at the back.

“Will you go?” he asked, bending forward.

The driver turned to look at him.

“Kahaa?” he asked, avoiding his eye.

“Gariahat.”

A pause; then the driver shook his head, and his companion shifted slightly.

“Bloody fool,” thought Jayojit, his silent but vehement voice surprising himself, and then gently steered Bonny towards the main road.

Some of the trees were still heavy with gulmohur blossoms. At intervals in the lane, they recurred, the ones in the distance a blurred mass of deep orange. They found a taxi on the main road going in the other direction.

“Gariahat?” said Jayojit, uncharacteristically tentative now; more tense than tentative. He’d lost the knack of talking to these people and it often made him rude. Light shimmered upon the doors of the taxi. The driver, older than him or approximately his age, gestured to the back, and leaned forward to swing down the meter; Bonny, entering, sat at the edge and rested his chin disconsolately on the shiny plastic of the front seat.

“The market,” Jayojit said in Bengali, loudly, as if he were speaking in a foreign language.

The taxi moved slowly; Bonny’s head vibrating gently with the motion.

On the way they passed, at intervals, two ice-cream carts pushed by men in blue uniforms who almost immediately became reflections in the driver’s mirror.

“What’s Kwality?” asked Bonny.

Meanwhile, the driver, all of a sudden animated, blew his horn at a slow-moving private car, driven by an old man before him.

“What’s Kwality?”

After a couple of repetitions, Jayojit said: “Oh, “quality!” Let’s see . . . that’s the value of a thing. How good or bad a thing is.”

“Oh,” said Bonny. As Jayojit began thinking to himself about the way everyday speech had entered the language of economics and vice versa—for instance, the word “value”— Bonny said, “Why’s it painted on those vans?”

“What is?”

“Kwality,” came the reply.

A moment later, illumination came. “Oh that’s the name of an
ice-cream
,” he said. He realized that he had become something of a pedant with his son, always doing his best to rescue him from spelling mistakes and misinformation; unrepentant, he said, “That’s not a real word! The word I was talking about is”—and he spelt “quality.”

“Ice-cream?” said Bonny, lifting his chin from the seat, as if, like doughnuts, ice-cream was too outrageous to mention here.

“You can have some later,” promised Jayojit. This was a commitment to be honoured at some unspecified moment.

“Can I have some now, baba?” asked Bonny, tilting his face into the shadow, towards his father.

“Not
now
, Bonny, sorry,” said Jayojit, slapping a housefly off his trousers, and then busily smoothing them again. “See, the ice-cream van’s
gone
”—his voice shook as the taxi tried to swerve unsuccessfully around a pothole—“and . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, as if he’d already conveyed what he wanted to say. As an afterthought, he said, “
Gariahat
might have ice-cream.”

Just outside, the sun lay like fire on the pavement; two peasants sat on their haunches upon a kerb.

There were children everywhere, scattered and released from school; a pavement stall selling newspapers.

They were approaching the market; the tramlines here met and gleamed.

“Turn left and stop there,” said Jayojit, pointing to the opposite side of the road.

They waited for a tram to pass, the taxi already tensed to compete with a neighbouring car to make the first movement. When the taxi jerked forward, Bonny clutched the seat with his fingers, puzzled, but the impulse to race was spent almost as soon as it was surrendered to, and they were no more in motion.

“How much?” Jayojit asked, opening the door and stepping out. “Careful, Bonny, don’t get out on that side”; afraid because of the buses like juggernauts.

The meter said nine rupees.

“Tero taka,” said the driver. Thirteen rupees; lucky number. Jayojit took out the notes from his wallet and handed them to the driver—they were from the second wad of cash he’d got across the counter after coming here, and the perforations from where the staples had been violently prised open still showed—who counted them, and fished in his pocket for change. There seemed to be confusion about whether, indeed, the driver had the change or not.

“Fourteen, fifteen,” he said finally, as if muttering a charm to the counting of a rupee and two fifty paisa coins, and completed the transaction by dropping them into Jayojit’s palm.

He turned and found that Bonny wasn’t there. Where in the world is he? He went through the narrow passage between two stalls, and saw a boy in a t-shirt standing before a shop: Bonny.

“Ei khokababu,” said a voice, “ei khokababu!”