A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) (11 page)

“Don’t disappear like that,” said Jayojit to the unsurprised boy. “Okay?”

Bonny assented by saying nothing and lifting his eyes to look at his father; then he rubbed one eye with the back of a hand.

“Dada—take a look at these shirts!”

Bonny was wearing sneakers; he must be hot—it might be an idea to buy him a pair of sandals. Where was Bata?

They went past vendors selling fruit on beds of straw. Mangoes had just come into season, piled pale green on baskets, but theirs was a peculiar family, because the Admiral couldn’t stand mangoes and the mess they made, and Jayojit had inherited his father’s fastidiousness; his mother, over the last few years, had become stoic; and the money she thus saved compensated somewhat for her yearning for the first langra and himsagar. Finally, Jayojit paused and went inside a store and asked for Dove soap. His mother had said “Dove” wistfully when he’d asked her which soap they used these days; it used to be Pears, he knew, but on this visit, like a new discovery, it was Dove; and since it was more expensive, a rare indulgence. As if by coincidence, he now saw an advertisement on one of the glass windows of the cabinets inside. The model, in the make-believe opulence of her bath, looked familiar, but she couldn’t be, she was too young; he’d stopped noticing models for years now; the last model he could remember—and he was surprised at the trivial information his mind retained—was called Anne Bredemeyer. “Dove,” he said, without knowing who would respond; there were three men behind the counter who themselves had the searching air of visitors.

“Give us a Dove soap!” said a man in kurta and pyjamas to someone at the back, then turned to Jayojit, “Anything else?”

Jayojit looked at the medicine racks behind the man, looking back at Bonny to see if he was on the steps, noted the fan overhead, and scanned the shelves for shampoo. But it was conditioner he wanted; his hair was greying; the grey had been seeping into the black. But he didn’t see any conditioner, unless it was disguised as something else; he saw bottles that said “frequent use” and “for greasy hair.” His hair, if anything, was too dry. About five or more seconds had passed since the thin man had said “Aar kichhu?”—and now Jayojit found himself saying, “Colgate toothpaste achhe?” almost ironically, then pondering on a suitable reply to “Chhoto na bado?”—“Small or large?”; and as an afterthought, adding “talcum powder.”

He’d seen a commercial on television the day before yesterday in which a busybody of a child was brushing his teeth with Colgate.

“Which powder?” asked the man behind the counter, who was shrunken but fastidious.

“Any will do,” confessed Jayojit. “Pond’s,” he said; the word had just come to him out of nowhere.

“Pond’s,” the man said. He turned. “Jodu,” he called, “Pond’s talcum powder de!”

Another man came out from behind a cupboard and looked at Jayojit with the interested equanimity of one looking at himself in a mirror.

“Pond’s?” he said, as if he was not sure if he’d heard correctly, and retreated again.

More fumblings.

“That’s seventy rupees,” said the man at last, writing numbers secretively on the back of an envelope.

On the way back they stopped at a bookshop that Jayojit noticed behind a photocopying and STD booth. The sky had darkened a few minutes before they entered. The man who ran the shop, dressed in a creased dhoti and kurta, regarded the rain without wonder or accusation as it began to fall in isolated drops.

“Baba, I wanna touch it,” cried Bonny, jumping in the doorway by the bookshelves.

“Go on then.”

The shopkeeper looked up once again—as if at a noise in the distance—and looked downward. The lane was subsumed in a gloom which made the colours of the unremarkable multi-storeyed building before them more visible. “But the rains aren’t supposed to start till two weeks later,” thought Jayojit, irritated, thinking of the weather fronts and insubstantial bands of high pressure building up over the South and the coasts of Kerala; grateful, too, for the breeze. Contemptuous, he turned his back to the drama of the rains. He looked, unseeing, at the rows of Penguin Indias, and registered, remotely, as one would the words of an exotic language, the Marquezes, Vargas Llosas; next to them, slim books of horoscopes; arranged for a reader who wasn’t very clear about what he was looking for.

He began to look for a book at random; noted the motto
“Everyman, I will be thy guide”
; stared, with some scepticism, at some of the books by Indian writers; “They not only look light, they
feel
lightweight as well,” he thought, weighing one in his hand; he picked up a new paperback of
A Suitable
Boy
with a theatrical air which there was no one to note. The last book he’d read was a volume treading, in the fog of post-structuralist theory, a tightrope between history and Keynesian economics; and he was going to give it a bad review for the university humanities journal. A colleague, an Italian American called Antonio who edited the journal, had sent it to him with a note: “Dear J, I know there are worse things in life than reading a deconstruction of classical economic theory (tell me about it!) but things aren’t half as bad as you think. Snap out of it, pal, and send me 1,500 words when you feel like it. Don’t leave it till the millennium. Best, Tony.” Antonio, settled with three children, married to a half-Vietnamese, half-French American, setting up the book for a bad review, knowing full well Jayojit’s distaste for airy-fairy “theory.” But Bonny was getting his t-shirt damp with the spray. Afraid of being reprimanded by his mother (he feared not so much his mother’s words as her silences), Jayojit said:

“Come in here, you!”

“Oh, baba!”

He hopped into the shop, throwing a glance at the books stacked everywhere. Jayojit brushed the moisture from the boy’s hair with his fingers. “Stand still!” Then: “Turn round”; the boy turning not so much obediently as displaying his swiftness; yet the tiniest bit afraid of his father’s brusqueness. “Okay.” He was thin now with burnt-up energy, but when he’d been born he’d been seven and a half pounds and his grandmother, his mother’s mother, had said, after the long night: “Ki bonny baby eta!” Yes, Bonny had been pink (“a little white mouse,” his mother had called him), with a hint of black hair which Amala repeatedly admired. They’d been in Claremont then, the nursing home had been on the outskirts, and the grandmother had come to be with her daughter. A week later, when it had come home, Jayojit had taken footage of the child, its first movements in the cot between the double bed and cupboard, and moments captured from its spells of sleep, on a camcorder, dipping into the baby’s life with the lens for two days, and then made videos for both sets of parents, who’d noted both the baby and the beauty of the house. The shopkeeper seemed not to notice the boy and the thirty-seven-year-old father’s exchange; keeping a vigil, he stared at Jayojit, his eyelids flickered respectfully, and, after opening his mouth to yawn, turned back to the books he was stacking on the table.

“How much is this?” asked Jayojit. He was holding a large hardcover in one hand; the picture of a cheetah, gold and black, jumped out of the cover. Its shadow leapt with the lightning.

The shopkeeper touched the book as if he intended, by some power of transformation, to make it seem like a saleable commodity. Wrapped in cellophane, its price was scribbled on the first page. “Five hundred and twenty rupees,” he said; some of his teeth were rust-brown with betel. His eyes held Jayojit’s. “Hm.” Jayojit turned the pages and consulted them heavy-handedly, superiorly. “Well, less than what I’d pay for it in New York,” he thought.

THE NEXT MORNING, the first day of the last week of May, he woke up feeling vulnerable and exposed. He hadn’t felt desire in a long time. Bonny’d been born, and at that time there had been a cutting off of sexual activity. Instead, when they had time, they would go to parks and sit on benches, admire the Fall’s redness that hung about the trees like an aura, talk about the new General Electric factory that was to come up in the outskirts and what it would do to jobs and to Claremont, and discuss moving to big cities in the East.

“When I was a kid, you know,” he told her when they were talking about the appeal of New York, and the fact that New York is attractive to every kind of Indian, from taxi drivers to dentists, “I used to think the Big Apple was the studio where the Beatles recorded their songs.”

She, in turn, warming to her memory of the Beatles, revealed to him how she’d liked Paul the best of the four, and how her friends would count how old they’d be when he was thirty-five. “
I’m
twenty-nine now,” she said, watching two children play with a frisbee. “He must be . . . forty-five.”

“You’ll still be quite young when he’s sixty-four,” said Jayojit.

She turned to him in mock disdain. “Poor joke, Mr. Chatterjee,” she said.

“I’m a Lennon fan myself,” he’d said, remembering the sixties in which both he and Amala had grown up, she in Calcutta and he in so many different places.

He lay there, thinking of what he’d dreamed of, and couldn’t return to it. Had he had indigestion? A crow perched on the silent air-conditioner was crying out repeatedly. He gave himself to recalling, for a couple of minutes, what it was that accounted for this pressure of longing; as if it were someone else’s body, he discovered he had an erection beneath his shorts. He was bare-chested—he’d taken off his shirt during a power-cut in the morning—and his body-hair was ink-black spread against the fair skin.

He got up to urinate; washed his face; glanced at the watch; nine forty-five. It had rained when they were sleeping, a stealthy downpour; the water from the tap was cool. They might have had another child. Two to five minutes, that’s all it took. In retrospect, thank God they didn’t.

He didn’t dry his face immediately, but draped the towel around his neck, his forehead moist.

His mother was standing near the dining table.

“Once the rains come”—to her, evidently, the incontrovertible fact of rainfall wasn’t enough; the rains would only “come” when it was time for them to, the 10th of June—“I’ll have to dry these in the bathroom,” she said, looking at the clothes in the verandah.

“Why don’t you buy a washing machine?”

His mother looked up. “Joy, they have new ones in that shop in Gariahat—‘Pleasant’—I’ve seen them; they wring the clothes so dry that it takes only half a day to dry them.”

“I know,” said Jayojit, with the air of speaking of a celebrated personality with whom he was already on first-name terms. “Who makes them?” he asked.

“There’s that one,” she said vaguely, “BPL . . . No— IBF or IFB . . .” She sounded tired and unconvinced.

There was a difference between his parents with regard to appliances; his father distrusted them as he would a rival; his mother had no confidence in using them, but none the less desired them. There was no doubt that a washing machine would help; probably it was too expensive for them. Jayojit wondered if he could offer to buy them one.

“But what use will it be?” said the Admiral, dismissing the idea with a wave of one hand.

Mrs. Chatterjee would say nothing; she would not argue with her husband.

“They’ve been around in the U.S. for more than fifty years now,” said Jayojit, slightly impatient. “They don’t seem to have done too badly—so I presume they have
some
uses.”

“But we have
cheap labour
, Joy,” said Admiral Chatterjee, as if making an important point.

“Once, being married was to have cheap labour,” said Jayojit. A little coldly, he added, “That was a joke.”

“You know what I mean,” said his father, still pursuing his original line of thought. “You know what I’m saying. It’s easier—and cheaper—to have what’s-her-name do the washing than to buy a washing machine.” He said, “Even if they sold these things in the Fort William canteen”—referring to the place where the Armed Forces could buy certain things at a reduced price—“which I doubt they do, it would still be dear.”

The sharp conversation reminded Mrs. Chatterjee of her husband’s working days and of the time of her own relative youth. But she enjoyed the impassioned exchange between father and son, the language giving it an intimacy which they could only communicate to each other in words which not so much excluded her as turned her into a spectator.

“That’s not a worry. If buying it’s the worrisome bit, there’s nothing to worry. Because I’m thinking of buying it.”

The Admiral stared at him, absorbing this final bit of information, this decision that had been taken without him.

“This is your doing,” he said, turning to his wife. “Tumi ki bolechho oke?” The accusing Bengali words sounded as unconfrontational as flute-music. For the first time in what seemed a while, Mrs. Chatterjee allowed herself a smile.

“She hasn’t told me anything, baba! It’s my idea. The way you’re reacting is as if the washing machine was some suspect foreign gadget that arrived here yesterday. You know, it’s been around for more than ten years.”

The Admiral became glum, like a child always used to having his own way finding himself again in a situation where all is not going as he wishes it to.

“It’s out of the question. Besides, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Jayojit sighed. It was difficult to negotiate with his father when he was in this dogmatic mood.

“We’re living in a consumer society, baba,” said Jayojit. “We might as well make use of it.” So saying, he suddenly unbuttoned the top of his shirt and began to fan himself with an old magazine.