A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) (19 page)

“Come here!”

The boy ran out into the hall, still holding a pencil in one hand, suggesting he’d been interrupted in mid-performance.

“Want to go down and have a game of ping-pong?” Jayojit asked.

He’d bought a couple of racquets from a shop on Rash Behari Avenue.

“I don’t know, baba.” He’d put one end of the pencil in his mouth.

Jayojit shrugged his large shoulders dramatically:

“Well, if you don’t want to . . .”

The boy’s face fell.

“Oh, go on,” said the Admiral.

But, downstairs, they found that one half of the table-tennis table had disappeared; the other half, with its pale green borders, remained, forlorn, truncated, a useless relic by itself.

“Oh no!” cried Bonny. “Where’s it gone?”

Jayojit looked around him, unable to conjure up the other half of the table. The table had been removed during the meeting, but he was pretty sure it had been returned to its place later. So absorbed had father and son been with their problem that they hadn’t noticed the couple at the other end of the hall, who were walking a child. They had come closer now, an elderly couple in their sixties, led by a toddler of about two.

Following the child, the grandfather, a slight bespectacled clerical man wearing a brown shirt, his face averted but conscious of Jayojit’s questioning gaze, walked leaning forward, but confident that his grandson could manage on his own, and that even if he fell, providence would keep him from serious hurt. Jayojit kept a half-smile of acknowledgement on his face, in case the man turned to look at him. “Slowly, dadu,” said the man to the grandson. Jayojit didn’t remember seeing them before.

Behind her husband, the grandmother walked more irregularly, a mass of confusions, now turning to look behind her, slipping her foot more firmly into her sandal, resuming her walk.

In the other room, his parents had gone to bed. He turned on the air-conditioner; it made a sound, like a throat-clearing, as machines sometimes do. Bonny was lying on his back, interlocking the fingers of both hands together, and, with a look of great concentration, prising them slowly apart.

“Better turn off the light,” said Jayojit, vacillating by the bedside. “There’s lots to do tomorrow.”

When he switched off the light, for a moment he could see nothing—the room disappeared. It never became so dark in the room in Claremont; some light, inquisitive and worldly, always entered through the curtains. The steady sound of the air-conditioner held him in his place; he began to make his way towards the bed, trying to imagine, from his memory, its location.

JAYOJIT OVERSLEPT for some reason. Bonny strode into the room and admonished him in a dream: “Oh, get up, baba, you’re lazy.” He couldn’t remember having had a dream— his sleep had been a blank; it had taken him to no other worlds. Rising swiftly, he turned off the air-conditioner; it went off, with a sigh, like an afterthought. Inside the bathroom, he encountered a heat that had accumulated overnight and which the air-conditioning hadn’t penetrated. Car horns could be heard until he turned on the tap; even then, over the water, a crow’s cry reached his ears. Wiping his face with the towel, he raised his face and inhaled the dampness in the bathroom.

He emerged after brushing his teeth, and said to his mother in his lecturer’s vernacular:

“And what’s been happening in the interregnum?”

She didn’t reply.

When Jayojit had just begun to read the headlines, Bonny said:

“Baba, tooth’s shaking.”

It was the second time that this had occurred; as soon as he’d said the words, he opened his mouth, flashing his milk teeth, revealing the cavity that led to the source of his voice; with his eyebrows knitted, and a look slightly inebriated, he nudged the tooth with his tongue. It was a lower canine.

“I see it. Let it alone,” said Jayojit, seeing the sensation of the loose tooth could become a narcotic. “You’re becoming an old man,” he added, and sipped his coffee.

“Tamma, look,” Bonny said to his grandmother; she’d been hovering over a plant in the verandah, standing between it and the sunlight.

“O-o-oh,” she sighed dramatically, straightening and looking down at him. Yet her inside was pulled by a pain that was quite unlike that of the tooth, that had begun more than two years ago and would be with her now.

“You want to leave the tooth for tamma?” called Jayojit from behind the paper.

“Tamma,” asked Bonny, “are all dadu’s teeth
real
?”

“All are not real,” said his grandmother, watering the hushed flat-leafed plant, “but some of them are real.”

“Like, he doesn’t put them in a
glass
?”

“No, shona,” said his grandmother.

Maya came at about half-past ten and covered the bed in Jayojit’s room with a Gujarati bedspread.

“Maya,” Jayojit said, turning to her, “I’m leaving this evening. I’ve left your bakshish with ma.”

“When will you come back again?” she asked, with such innocence, as if he were going on a pleasure trip and she were as ignorant of this family’s recent history as they were of hers.

“Ei—next year,” he said, looking back into the suitcase. He didn’t want a conversation now; he’d withdrawn into his private sphere where he meditated on a future that he didn’t expect, or hadn’t wanted, to confront. Turning his face towards her again, he instructed her, “Work properly when we’re away, and look after ma.”

His mother had complained to him again that every few days Maya pleaded absence from work, either because of some obscure excuse to do with the weather or the children’s health, or because one of the innumerable local gods that presided over the poor—kitchen god, fertility god—had a Puja imminent and must be appeased. Given that his mother was exaggerating, he
had
noticed, in a dream-like way, Maya’s impenetrable absences, and sensed that the laws governing her life were other than those that pertained to what he called “ordinary” life.

Unmoved, Maya declared:

“Chhoto babu will be taller when he comes next time. He won’t remember me.”

And I’ll have a larger paunch, and you may not be in this job any more, thought Jayojit.

For lunch, they ate the parshe they’d had the previous night. Jayojit’s mother had had Maya buy a packet of sandesh from a sweet shop. “I know you like these,” she said. “Take them with you. You or Bonny might want to eat one at the airport,” she added. “For God’s sake,” said the Admiral in English, “don’t bother him with trivial things at this moment!”

“No, ma’s quite right,” said Jayojit. “I do like sandesh. But there are customs officials at JFK who always keep an eye open for foreign-looking food, even fruit—you know, mangoes, custard-apples.”

“But these are harmless, Joy,” said his mother. “They’re unadulterated and good for you. Doctors prescribe them to their patients.”

“True,” said the Admiral, speaking from somewhere else.

“What will I do with these then?” she asked.

“Why—you and baba eat them! Have them with tea!” he said. “I’ll eat one now,” he said, and bit into a sandesh himself.

The Admiral abnegated the world and stole an hour-long nap, Jayojit’s frequent conversations with his mother failing to wake him. By three o’clock, Bonny was dressed, and his pale feet, which had often padded about naked inside the flat, were hidden away inside socks and sneakers.

“I’m not gonna sleep tonight on the plane,” he warned his father. “I’ll watch the movie.”

“Of course you will,” said Jayojit; he was still in his shorts and sandals, as if he, at the last moment, had decided to stay back, or he were travelling to Barbados, and all he needed was a camera. “Have you picked up your dinosaurs?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Your cars?” What about your books?”

“I dumped them in the suitcase,” he said. “But I want to take one with me, baba.”

“Okay. I’ll put it in my bag,” said Jayojit. “All right?”

There was a groan from the bedroom; the Admiral had got up and realized what time it was. He slipped his large feet into his sandals and stumbled to the bathroom to wash his face. Meanwhile, Jayojit let the cover of the suitcase flop shut; and once more stood face to face with the tartan design against the blue background. He zipped it shut.

He whistled in the bath—he had obdurate dry hair, which didn’t require frequent washing, hair peppered with a grey that seemed to be increasing almost daily. This metallic grey had come over him imperceptibly, and much fascinated his son, and pained his mother. Coming out of the bathroom, he said, buttoning his shirt, “Fine: we’re ready to leave. Where’s Bonny?” Then, seeing the ragged heap of his old clothes—shirt, underwear, vest—he said “Damn!’ and had to bend down to open the suitcase again. Pressing them into a small bundle, he pushed them to one side, next to a much-perused copy of his book,
Ethical Parameters in Development
. The clothes passed like a cloud over the title. His laptop rested against his shoulder bag.

The Admiral had changed into another of his white shirts; hair carefully combed, he lumbered into the sitting room; he sat there as if he were a guest; coughed a couple of times, and glanced at his grandson in the verandah. Jayojit’s mother had worn a starched tangail, and fastened her hair with a large clip. Jayojit dragged out the suitcase to the front door; it seemed to possess suddenly, after months of invisibility, a stubbornness and independence. “Oof! It feels heavier than when we came here,” said Jayojit. To Bonny, he called, “We’re leaving!” Bonny took his eyes away from the bit of the lane he was watching and walked towards them.

Once they were downstairs, they were noted, without much interest, by a few schoolchildren returning home, in blue and white uniform, and probably commented upon.

“Right,” said Jayojit, “I’m off to look for a taxi—only hope I can find one that isn’t falling apart!” He strode towards the lane, followed purposefully by Bonny; his parents waited on the steps, the Admiral squinting through his bifocals.

They returned a few minutes later in a taxi; “There’s always one, thank God,” Jayojit said, getting out. A dog had begun to bark upstairs; not Mrs. Gupta’s pomeranian, but the Alsatian who lived on the first floor. The driver, a clean-shaven man in his early thirties, had looked after his vehicle well; the upholstery inside was clean, reflecting the sunlight, and the taxi’s black and yellow shone brightly; he lifted the suitcase with a sullen respect. There was a companion sitting in the front—a boy in his teens, who watched with sleepy interest as the driver hauled the suitcase to the rear. The back of the Ambassador seemed to expand to accommodate the dour-looking grandfather, the grandmother, Jayojit, who, for some reason, was talking constantly, and Bonny, who stood between his father’s legs, and when tired of doing so, sat down upon one of them.

As they turned into the main road and the building vanished from sight, the Admiral rolled down his window a little to allow a breeze that had reached the main road to run through his hair. He leaned back slightly.

“All right, baba?” asked Jayojit.

His father nodded. But they were caught in a traffic jam in front of Modern High School, the massed cars still as a catacomb. Bonny turned to his father and whispered:

“Baba, who’s that?”

A small cut-out of Hanuman, pasted to the bottom of the windshield, had caught his eye. Hanuman, above the two motionless wipers, was in mid-flight, holding a mountain above him: the Gandhamadan parbat.

“That’s Hanuman, the monkey god,” said Jayojit, balancing the laptop on one knee.

“You mean, like, he’s the god of the monkeys?”

“Well, yes, but let’s say that he’s a god who also happens to be a monkey,” said Jayojit.

“He must be
real
strong,” said Bonny, curling his lip and smiling knowingly.

A little later, as the traffic broke up and they turned into Park Circus, he asked his grandfather:

“Dadu, do you feel hot in that beard?”

The old man smiled and shook his head.

“I’m used to it,” he said. “Like a dog is used to its coat.”

Then Bonny was largely silent, staring at the fleeting two-storeyed houses in by-lanes, the shops in Park Circus, the occasional outbreaks of shanty settlements, the thatched huts along the bypass; he was unmoved by the smell when they passed the rubbish dump, though his grandmother quickly pressed a handkerchief to her face.

By the time they reached the airport, the Admiral had been asleep for about twenty minutes; he woke up startled and bleary-eyed. Bonny was gone as soon as the taxi stopped, and returned brandishing a trolley, his chin above the handlebars.

“Okay, I’ll take hold of the trolley, Bonny,” said Jayojit, after paying the driver. He checked to see if they’d left anything inside. “No, that’s fine,” he reassured no one in particular. Then, to Bonny, “You can hold it at one end.” So, partitioning the responsibility of the trolley between themselves, they pushed their way inside.

Families were drifting around the hall, come to see off somebody. When the two, driving the wayward trolley, had finally reached the Bangladesh Biman counter at the extreme end of the check-in area, it was clear that there weren’t many passengers, probably because of the time of the year. Jayojit joined a disjointed queue of three people; and there was another queue of the same number. Nothing else; all the other check-in desks unattended and closed. Visitors weren’t allowed here; and, bereft of ordinary human society, the Biman passengers, who stood waiting with suitcases more imposing than themselves, had only their smiles and their passports (of two or three different colours, in their hands) to vouch for who they were. There was also something shabby about the walls and the small self-conscious trickle of international traffic, more like a leakage than a departure; yet almost each one of these people had lives they were going back to from the country they were visiting. The woman standing in front—an expatriate from the composition of her appearance; she was wearing blue jeans and vermilion in the parting of her hair, and a bindi on her forehead—turned her head and smiled at Jayojit. “Going to Heathrow?” she asked, in a warm mixture of a Bengali and a London accent. “No; New York,” he said. “And you?” “Oh I’m going to London,” she said, and laughed; she had slight buck teeth and striking long hair. The vermilion led Jayojit to briefly speculate about her husband, their children (if they had any), and their cold house and garden in the suburbs. “A much shorter journey than mine, then,” he said. She shrugged politely, not knowing with what words to respond to his jovial but superior manner. After a while, he said “Wait here” to Bonny, a picture of introspective ambivalence on the baggage trolley, and went off to pay the airport tax.