A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) (2 page)

“Still, it’s always good to check when you’re back!” said Jayojit, and drank the water urgently. “You know one could get dehydrated sitting on a plane for so long!” he said, putting down the glass. “These old glasses,” he murmured, looking at the glass quizzically.

Vikram drank some of the water slowly and then stopped as if he could drink no more, and his grandmother said, “Enough, shona?” The boy nodded seriously and gave her the glass, which she accepted as if it were a gift, with a smile.

“But tell me, Joy,” said his father, visibly irked and hot, “what made you take Bangladesh Biman of all airlines? Surely there are other, better airlines coming from America? I can’t believe that the best option is coming with all those Bangladeshis all the way from New York!”

“Baba,” said Jayojit, “the truth is there are a lot of airlines coming to Calcutta, all of them from third-rate East European countries—Rumanian, Yugoslav, Aeroflot of the defunct Soviet Union. KLM, Thai—I couldn’t get seats. Air India—if I
have
to tolerate rudeness, I’d rather it wasn’t from air hostesses who’ve got their jobs because of some reservation quota. At least in Bangladesh Biman, which doesn’t follow a
single
international regulation and isn’t even a member of the IATA, you have all these placid East Bengalis all around you, speaking to each other in dialect. Baba, I realized, sitting on that plane, why Bangladesh is the way it is: they’re all
happy,
and their marriages are working! Look at what happened to the Hindus who left.” His own parents were of East Bengali origin, the father coming from a land-owning family in Chittagong, the mother from Mymensingh. Apparently a few distant relatives had stayed on in the ancestral houses; a small businessman, a teacher—they were rarely in touch with them. “Besides, baba,” chuckled Jayojit, “the tickets are less expensive.”

“They’re certainly less expensive from here!” agreed the father, looking very concerned behind the beard, but in a way that suggested he was enjoying himself. “Every week tens of middle-class Bengalis who’ve been saving up all their lives queue up in the airport to travel by Bangladesh Biman—to visit their son or daughter in England, or to travel: you know the Bengali weakness for ‘bhraman’? Last week your Ranjit mesho and Dolly mashi, you remember them”—he looked reflective—“took a Biman flight to London.” The light glinted on his spectacles.

Jayojit pictured the couple in the check-in section of Calcutta airport, with its minuscule international air traffic and the rude officials behind the counters, Ranjit mesho and Dolly mashi, confused but not unhappy, with their suitcases, he looking like what he was, an executive whose career had begun well but not taken off, but who still believed in the system, happy to be going abroad, no matter that it was by Bangladesh Biman, and Dolly mashi, always in a printed sari, saving her good saris for who knows which day, accompanied by the same two suitcases they must always use when travelling.

“And the tickets are affordable—21,000 rupees,” said the Admiral in a strangely hurt way. “If you can tolerate Dhaka!” No reference was made to the fact that they had planned themselves to travel by Biman to America before the divorce had taken place; the unspoken reference to that possibility hung in the air like something that did not need to be said.

“How are their children, that reminds me?” asked Jayojit, pursuing a normal conversation. “Indra and what’s her name?”

“Oh, they’re all right,” said his father, a little disgusted, as if they couldn’t possibly be anything but “all right.” “One in England and one in America . . . Indra is a scientist.”

“Always thought he would be.”

Vikram was in the balcony, looking at the potted plants which were placed half in sunlight and half in shadow; geometric shadows from the grille fell on the wall and the floor, giving a kind of visual relief; in his hand he held a small unfinished carton of pure orange juice he had taken out of his rucksack, whose dregs he sipped contentedly through a bent plastic straw whenever he stood still.

“But Bonny liked the Bangladesh Biman chicken curry!” said Jayojit. “Didn’t you, Bonny?”

The boy turned to look back, in surprise. Then, as if the words had reached him an instant late, he nodded.

Now Jayojit’s mother emerged again and said to Vikram:

“Come on, we are going to have nice Bengali fish for lunch. So let us have bath now.”

“All right, tamma,” said the boy, stepping out of the shade of the verandah into the drawing room.

He was her elder son’s only child—her only grandchild, born seven years ago. Last year he had written her a letter beginning, “Dear tamma . . .,” and it should have been occasion for great pleasure, and it was, but that night she had lain thinking of what was happening, and the reasons why, and she had cried.

His blue t-shirt, which looked soiled and tired, and darkened at the sides, he took off and laid on the bed; divested of it, he looked surprisingly fresh, his upper body pale, he erect and ready for the bath as his grandmother took him into the bathroom. Barefoot now, he seemed to be enjoying walking on the cool floor of the flat, his toes curled a little at the thrill of the coolness.

“Come—I will bathe you,” said his grandmother, tying the aanchal of her sari around herself.

“No!” said the boy, in a voice that was small but clear. Shyly, he added, “Just show me how to work the shower.”

Although she felt a great urge to wash him, she restrained herself, for she sensed around him a wall of privacy he had grown up with—no fault of his, he was not even aware of it—which Jayojit did not have.

“Last time I bathed you—you remember?” she said. “We had so much fun!”

She advanced a few steps to the lever on the wall with the hot and cold water knobs on either side, which to the boy probably looked antiquated, and she said:

“I turn it like—
this
—and then I turn on the water like— this!” She was standing to the right, her left arm straining as she turned the knobs, and her two bangles, her iron wedding-bangle and a gold one, clashed against each other.

“Wooo!” said the boy as it rained on him, and he burst out laughing, a long series of delighted giggles. His grandmother, standing just outside the shower area, looked at him and smiled. His eyes and face were shut tightly. His arm reached out for the crevice in the wall where the soap was placed, and his hand closed around a new, waxy bar of Lux.

“I have kept clean towel for you, Bonny,” called out his grandmother, as if he were further away than he really was. He nodded vigorously, spitting out water, his hair plastered to his skull, his eyes still closed. “I’m going now,” she called again, and this time he did not respond. He had begun to play, quite independently, with the hot and cold water taps, adjusting them with his small hands. He hardly required any hot water; in April, the tanks became so hot that warm water flowed out of the cold water taps.

Later, as Bonny was drying himself, and investigating a scab on his elbow which had begun to itch, Jayojit came into the room; the conversation—the “adda”—outside between father and son had temporarily come to an end; both had had to tear themselves away; how Jayojit thirsted, without knowing it, for the pleasures of adda when he was in America! “I’ll be back to continue this conversation from where we left off,” he warned his father as he rose from his chair; now he sat on the bed, untying his shoelaces with a look of great satisfaction, as if it were the climax to his journey, ready to go in for a bath himself.

“Had a shower, Bonny?” he said.

“Uh-huh,” said the boy. “Baba, I don’t have any clothes,” he added, the towel covering his head like a hood.

“All right,” said Jayojit, with the air of one who is familiar with and used to such situations, “we’ll take your clothes out right now,” and he bent down on his knees to unlock the suitcase, and retrieved a new t-shirt from an apparently prodigious store of folded t-shirts, and a pair of shorts, and laid them carefully on the bed. The boy stared interestedly at his clothes.

In the kitchen, Jayojit’s mother was setting pieces of rui fish afloat in burning oil.

His mother was not the best possible cook, and these days she had a helper who did some of the cooking in the morning; this helper was not a very good cook either. But Jayojit was not too fussy about food and nor was the Admiral; for the latter, especially, home food was just a routine, and had to be healthy and cooked in a small amount of oil; excesses in connection with food were to be indulged in at the club Christmas or New Year’s Eve parties, where strangely shaped gâteaux were served, and people queued up for their portion of barbecued steak and sautéed vegetables.

Home food was safe and insipid, and had a tranquillity about it; today there was a watery lentil daal in a chinaware bowl, fried rui, a dalna which was a combination of sweet gourd and cabbage leaves among other things, and a preparation of pabdaa fish in mustard. It was an honest, even joyful, effort by his mother, though it had not quite worked; but it was not wholly tasteless either.

“The pabdaa is very fresh,” said Jayojit appreciatively. He was eating with his fingers.

His father, bent and serious, now and then dabbing his white beard with a napkin, was eating silently. He was old-fashioned; he rarely praised his wife’s cooking, but kept his ears pricked, like a child’s, for others’ praises. More and more his wife had become to him like a mother and a nurse, giving him his medicine with a glass of water, serving his food, to which he submitted with a helpless, sour-faced, child-like decorum, and overlooking, with good humour, his constant need to exercise his inconsequential tyrannical hold over this household, in which usually only he and his wife lived, with part-time servants coming and going each day. He ate with a fork and a spoon as he always did, laboriously, as if haunted by the expectation or memory of some pain—perhaps the mild stroke he had had seven years ago, which any day might recur. Above them, the fan with its three blades turned swiftly, generously, but invisibly, distributing air. Bonny sat next to his grandfather, perky after the bath; he had had nothing but daal and rice and a piece of the fried rui.

“The daal’s good,” he said, holding up his spoon.

“Have the other fish, shona,” said his grandmother. “Try the vegetables.”

“Let him have the daal, ma,” said Jayojit. “Just thank your stars he’s eating something!”

The boy stopped eating, the food still in his mouth, and looked around guiltily, but also pleased at this exchange about him, and at this description of himself as someone difficult and intractable; he was interested in his father’s portrait of himself.

Now the Admiral, having deftly divested the fish of its flesh with his fork and spoon, leaving only the bones, picked up the pabdaa head with his spoon, intending to chew it; the sound of his breathing surrounded him.

“Is dadu going to eat the head of that fish, baba?” asked the boy in concern.

“Dadu likes fish-head,” said Jayojit loudly, as if everything he said were important.

“Can I have a look at it?”

“Certainly,” said his grandfather. “Have a good look at it.”

So the boy stood up and peered at his grandfather’s plate, at the long pabdaa bone, and the fish-head with its eyes lying on the spoon.

“All right?” said the grandfather.

The boy nodded seriously and sat down again, and began to finish what was left of his daal and rice.

In the afternoon, when the meal was over, Jayojit’s father sat on a chair for some time; he was not supposed to lie down immediately after eating. His wife brought him pills which he swallowed noisily with a glass of water.

Now, in the afternoon heat before siesta, they seemed to feel the incompleteness of their family, and that it would not be now complete. Someone was missing. Both mother and father were too hurt to speak of it. In a strange way, they felt abandoned.

“Won’t you rest?” asked the Admiral after a while. “I think I’ll go and lie down,” he said.

“You do that, baba,” said Jayojit, getting up himself. Vikram was playing with two toy dinosaurs in the corridor; his father passed him on the way to the room.

Inside the room, Jayojit began to unpack the suitcase. He did not want to sleep; if he slept now, he would be asleep till midnight. So he began to hang up his shirts and trousers in the cupboard, and put handkerchiefs, vests, and underwear in the drawers; Bonny’s things went into the drawers as well. He was not as familiar with the house as he should be; his parents had moved here eight years ago, and he had visited only three times since then. His own feelings towards the flat were thus partially ones of familiarity and trust, and partially a complex of other feelings—of amusement and amazement at the mass-produced design, of both pity and avuncular affection for its bathrooms, tiles, furniture, verandah, and a basic admiration for, and acceptance of, its reliability. He realized that neither his mother nor father could see any of these things, and thus he too could not see them separately from the flat they had made their own.

One by one, he hung his shirts from the hanger, where they took on, inside the cupboard, a fleeting resemblance to his proportions. A sense of potential being, simple but true, now inhabited the cupboard. Some of the shelves were covered with newspaper; peering at them while arranging the clothes, Jayojit furrowed his eyebrows and snorted humorously. Something about Marxism and liberalization: the paper couldn’t be very old. The hard-core Marxists and trade unions wanted to know how the Chief Minister would reconcile liberalization with Marxist beliefs; Basu had offered China as an example. Then the paper was covered with clothes.