A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) (18 page)

Stepping out, he saw his mother asleep, her face in the pillow, her arm around Bonny. The sight, for no particular reason, made him smile, as if he’d accidentally beheld an odd and funny sight. He himself, surgically halving his growing up, as if it were a living thing which could somehow be distributed democratically, between Ooty and wherever his parents happened to be, hadn’t had much chance to experience closeness.

Going out into the hall, he noticed something glinting on the table. Bending, he saw it was part of the counterfoil for one of his father’s medicines—this one was for high blood pressure, Enapril; he’d heard the name on his mother’s tongue; she pronounced it “Annapril,” abstractedly and in passing, as if it were some Christian woman’s name. He picked it up and threw it into the dustbin.

Jayojit’s father was snoring. It wasn’t a comfortable sound; it was an irregular wheezing, as if the Admiral had carried over some complaint to the world of his sleep. Near the verandah, Jayojit became conscious, for the first time, that the wall of heat had gone; it was still hot, no doubt, but the powerful heat which attended the verandah was absent. He saw now that it was actually raining, a spray-like drizzle that whirled in the air before it fell.

Before the sun went down, Jayojit and Bonny were standing in the verandah when Jayojit saw a kite through the grille. It had perched on a dripping pipe, its brown feathers catching the remaining sunlight; the sun journeyed behind it, towards the cricket fields of the club. “It’s an eagle, an eagle! I saw it another day, too!”

“That’s a kite,” said Jayojit, glancing down at his son’s head.

“It’s an eagle,” said Bonny. “I’ve seen them in San Diego.”

“It’s a kite,” said Jayojit again. “Not the kind of kites people fly. It’s a bird called a kite.”

“What are you two talking about?” asked Jayojit’s mother, standing in the hall. “I could hear your voices.”

He’d gone downstairs, and he ran into Dr. Sen.

“Out for a walk?” he said, ambling towards him.

The doctor’s complexion looked a shade darker than usual. He ran a hand over his forehead, disturbed, in an uncharacteristic, nervous gesture, a few tracings of hair on his bald head.

“For a walk . . . heh—no, not at this time of the day,” he said, shaking his head and smiling. “Besides, you know, one can’t walk about in Calcutta these days. There are one or two places,” he waved around himself, as if delineating his set of choices, “not many.” He looked at Jayojit, smiled, beholding him with the eyes of one who, in the midst of change, can only offer a sort of continuity, and said, “No, I had come to see if I had any letters.” And he did have a few letters in his hand.

“Expecting anything?”

“Not really,” said Dr. Sen, deprecatingly. As if admitting to an embarrassing, simplistic fact: “Well, a nephew of mine sends me the Smithsonian. It’s a very good magazine—you must know it. The pictures, the
details!
Even the
paper
’s very good.” He shook his head, “The last issue had a
t-tremendous
chapter on ancient Egypt; lovely pictures of the mummies and the pyramids;
strange
things, pyramids, when you think about them; I hear they used to put the pharaohs” cats inside with the pharaohs—I don’t know how they found out about these things!”; the old Bengali romance for arcane, often useless bits of knowledge transformed his expression briefly. Then, becoming aware of the heat again, the emotion quickly spent, he complained: “But the new issue hasn’t come yet.”

Then, “Will you be here for much longer?” asked the doctor. In English, “You’re not thinking of settling here
permanently
?”

“Oh no. Bonny’s school begins next month, the university semester’s also about to start again. Summer’s ending over there.”

“Time flies,” said Dr. Sen, again in English. “We didn’t really get a chance to talk this time—” Suddenly he smiled. “All for the good though—I haven’t had to make a visit! Admiral Chatterjee’s and Mrs. Chatterjee’s health must be all right, touch wood, and you and your son seem to have got by somehow without falling ill.”

Dr. Sen’s visits were a form of socializing for Jayojit’s parents. Last time, when the doctor had come to check Jayojit’s father’s blood pressure, they’d digressed into a conversation about mortality. It had begun with a discussion about the price of vegetables these days, and fish and prawns—the latter were almost prohibitive—and the price of meat. “Tell me,” Dr. Sen had asked, looking Jayojit up and down, “do you eat a lot of meat?”

“I guess I grew up as more of a meat-eater than a fisheater,” Jayojit had said. “Though Bengalis claim that it’s eating fish that makes them so brainy,” he laughed, “it doesn’t seem to have done any other part of their bodies much good. Anyway, why not say it?—I have to confess I’ve become quite dependent on junk food. Gone back to a second adolescence.”

“You know one thing,” the doctor had said, “a lower middle-class Bengali’s meal is one of the best a doctor can recommend. Low cholesterol, with harmless fish protein. It’s cheap and it’s good for you; you know certain kinds of fish fat are good for the heart. Anyway, I was reading somewhere,” he said (these doctors, even in semi-retirement, kept up with the latest medical journals), “that Americans eat m-much less meat than they have ever before and have fewer heart attacks. On the other hand, heh,” he laughed, partly in embarrassment at his own amusement, “Bengalis go there and find a plethora of meat, and eat much more of it than they ever have, and consequently die like flies.”

“I’m only an occasional steak-eater myself,” Jayojit said. “I don’t much go for huge chunks of red meat.”

The Admiral had interjected by grumbling: “What’s the point of living forever? Especially on a pension that can’t keep up with inflation.”

This had met with great laughter, especially from the doctor, who’d responded to the Admiral’s death-wish with, “That’s a good one, Admiral Chatterjee, but you mustn’t deprive me of a job.”

That was then—an oasis of nervous banality in the midst of a time in which their lives took on another definition. Now Jayojit said:

“No, Bonny was all right. No sore throats or stomach infections. A slight allergy, but it was short-lived. I guess it was because we didn’t move much out of the house. But,” he said in a fit of belated candour, “I hope you’ll find time to visit my parents soon. I worry a bit about my father’s health—oh, I know,” he waved one arm and smiled without humour, agitated in his shorts and sandals, “that it’ll be all right as long as he takes care of himself—and God knows I have other things to worry about!” (“True,” murmured the doctor.) “But I think they also need to
talk
to someone— don’t we all! If you could just look after them while we’re away—look after isn’t the right word, of course,
look in
on them, rather, I’d be very grateful.” All this delivered in the serious public school accent in which he’d once addressed headmasters and countered competing debaters, and which he hadn’t forsaken, or, rather, which hadn’t forsaken him, and accompanied him through lecture rooms, domestic quarrels.

“Nischoi, nischoi!” said Dr. Sen. “I was anyway planning to visit them quite soon. And,” he lowered his voice to a confiding whisper, and looked around him once, “the Admiral’s health is all right, don’t worry. He got a bit excited at the Building Society meeting—I can understand why. He should avoid excitement,
mental
excitement,” he widened his eyes, “that’s all. Let him,” he said casually, “take an Alzolam to soothe him occasionally. No harm done.”

“He’s always been rather excitable,” said Jayojit, looking back, for a moment, at his father’s life. What he’d meant was that the Admiral had raw nerves; always in battle position.

“When will you come here again?” asked the doctor. “How soon can you manage your next visit?”

“Around the same time I—we—came this year, I hope. Early April, in this awful heat.”

“Oh, very good!” said Dr. Sen, and chuckled. “Just in time for the mango season.”

“I hope things will have returned to normal by then,” said Jayojit in a public manner, not knowing exactly what he meant—eavesdropping, as it were, on his own words. He patted his stomach. “Like my weight for instance.”

JAYOJIT’S MOTHER was in the kitchen. Tonight’s leftovers would be eaten for lunch the next day; she would be too tired to cook again tomorrow. And once Jayojit and Bonny had gone in the evening, they—Jayojit’s parents—would have a light meal of the daal and vegetables that Maya had cooked earlier. Time was being rearranged in their heads and their son’s, connecting part of their life to another. Yesterday Jayojit had said, unusually for one who was quite formal about making requests of his parents, “Oh for a fish that has no bones,” and so parshe had been brought; the fish lay on the pantry ledge, waiting to be fried.

“Better take this shirt down from here,” said Jayojit, getting up from the sofa; the shadow the electric light made of his body spread on the rug. A shirt was hanging from the clothesline. “It seems to be dry now,” he said, touching it. He unclipped and took it down, giving it a look of protective recognition. “Or else I’ll forget it and leave it behind,” he said in explanation. He added: “I’ll iron it myself, later.” This little monologue, which he might have been directing to himself, was actually addressed to his father, sitting on a sofa before the television.

He folded the shirt, and, on the way to his room, picked up a worn book from one of the shelves; he weighed it as if it were an artefact. He laughed incredulously.

“What’s this?” he said. “Jackie! Is this any good?” he asked, admiring Jacqueline Onassis’s face a second time.

The Admiral looked up.

“Oh, your mother borrowed that,” he said, “ages ago from the club.” There was a hint of accusation in his voice. “Must return it. We’ll have to pay the fine.” Just as the first touch of calm came to her from the early devotionals trickling in a small whine through the static on the transistor, these books on politicians’ wives, some, like Margaret Trudeau, quite remote from her, once used to be part of the dream-life of her spare hours, while she’d be undaunted by four hundred pages of close English print.

Returning from the room, Jayojit said:

“Well, we didn’t get to go to the club this time.”

“No,” said the Admiral. He seemed quieter than usual; he felt heavy and sluggish—as if in anticipation of the journey he would have to make in a couple of days, to the post office, to see why his pension cheque hadn’t arrived at the beginning of the month.

“Maybe next time,” said Jayojit, flitting from shelf to shelf, checking for items he might have missed, picking up one of Bonny’s prehistoric monsters: a pterodactyl.

He didn’t like the club. He wasn’t a member himself; and not being one, had to accompany his parents as a guest, a sort of overgrown child, allowed to sit with them but not to sign the bills or pay for the snacks and the drinks. Reluctant waiters would come to take their orders, and, intermittently, people would drift through elegant arches towards their table to speak to his parents, spotting them under fans that hung from long rods, as they were passing. When they found out that he was a “Non Resident Indian,” some would squint with curiosity, as once people might have regarded holy men or charlatans. Two years ago, he’d been bent over a sweet lime soda next to his father when he’d been asked the tiresome question (he supposed it was unavoidable) by a man holding a glass of Club Cola in his hand: “But, Mr. Chatterjee, do you know Amartya Sen?” He’d stopped bothering telling people he was “Dr. Chatterjee”; Sen, supposedly introduced as a conversation-opener was, for him, a conversation-stopper. Really, he and Sen had nothing in common (given the fact that they were both Bengali, and economists), except that, now, they had had the experience of a failed marriage as well. Sen, with chastening resilience, had married again, while Jayojit was still trying to grope for a balance in the second phase of his life, and the idea of marriage seemed to him to involve too much spiritual effort. “No,” he’d answered politely, perhaps a little abruptly, “I met him at a conference twice—he may or may not remember me.”

Children were allowed to sit in the outer lobby of the club (they weren’t allowed further inside) on a sofa, and here they played amongst themselves, not far away from portraits of the club’s presidents, climbing on to the weighing scales. There was a children’s room somewhere in the club, but Jayojit would never let Bonny sit there, while they ate and sipped fizzy drinks; this was another reason he hadn’t been to the club this time.

Before Bonny was born, when he and Amala had gone there together with his parents, Amala would spend time observing the women; for the saris they wore were old-fashioned, the blouses clumsily made. “Bengali women let go so easily,” she’d say. “They become so otherworldly.” A woman would pass by, and Amala would glance at her hairstyle, and a smile would come to her eyes.

The club had recruited younger members since then. It had even opened a rather quaint barber-shop which no person in his right senses patronized. And, actually, Amala knew quite a few people amongst its members, certainly more than he did; “Oh hi!” they’d say, “How’s mesho?” enquiring after her father.

The kitchen had been silent for the last five minutes; no more of the effervescence of the kodai; a smell of mustard-oil hung in the air.

“Bonny!” called Jayojit, craning his neck.

There was the customary silence before this cry registered itself.

“Yes, baba!”