Read Online A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) by Amit Chaudhuri - Free Book Online

really welcome them with open arms. The Chief Minister isn’t the problem. The trade unions and the party cadres are the problem! Do you think they’ll allow it? Not to speak of the hooligans in the Congress.” The Admiral had a sneaking, unconfessed admiration for the Chief Minister because he’d done his Bar-at-Law in England; he was a “gentleman.” Then, in Bengali, he said: “Meanwhile, look what’s happening to this city. You can’t walk on the pavement, can’t post a letter.” In English again, seriously, “I wouldn’t advise you to come back to it.”
    Jayojit’s mother returned to broodingly retrieve the last load of laundered articles; “She’s become a household machine,” thought Jayojit, a little unfairly, as her shadow passed by him, “maybe she’s happy this way.” He knew how often she used to go shopping at the JK Market with her friend Manju in Delhi.
    “I’m afraid there isn’t much chance of that in the near future,” said Jayojit to his father, and laughed, as if he had just remembered something.
    The Admiral’s thoughts had moved on; he was staring into the distance. “You remember Bijon,” he said suddenly.
    Jayojit started out of his own thoughts. Bijon used to work in an engineering firm in Delhi; his acquaintance with the Admiral was through some tenuous but palpable route; Jayojit’s mother’s late brother-in-law’s niece had a husband whose sister had married Bijon, who himself had no children; or some such laborious relationship. Somehow Bijon and the Admiral had become occasional drinking partners at the Services Club (the Admiral had now, that is, for the last six years, perforce, given up drinking).
    “Why?” As if some private, guarded realm had somehow been violated by the question. Then: “No, of course I remember him.”
    Bijon was supposed to have retired about two years ago and moved to Calcutta. He was not what one would call close to the Admiral; but over drinks they’d exchanged confidences that were self-revelatory in nature. You needed someone to exchange confidences with; even the Admiral.
    “He’s gone to Dubai,” said the Admiral.
    “Really?”
    That hadn’t been part of the plan; but things seldom were. It was as if the Admiral had somehow been betrayed. He spoke of him as if he were a desert mirage, something quite ordinary that had turned out to be odd only by being insubstantial, arising and then fading in a vaguely recognizable, uncategorizable foreign landscape.

 
    EARLY IN THE MORNING, when the Admiral and his wife woke up, they didn’t at first say a word to each other; it was as if they didn’t feel the need to. Above, the fan turned at full speed, giving the Admiral, for once, mild goose-flesh as he emerged from the night’s sheets. They had it planned between them; that Admiral Chatterjee would go in for his bath first, and then be the one to open the doors to the verandah in the sitting room. Two or three loud coughs administered his entry into the sitting room, refamiliarized him with its tidiness, its claim to be accessory to his present life; these coughs were physical but ritual in nature; in the other bedroom, neither Jayojit nor Bonny heard him over the internal hum of the air-conditioner. When they weren’t there, the coughs were directed at a nervous sense of absence, at the far-away. The Admiral then went in for a bath of cold water, water gathered in a bucket with which he then drenched himself from head to bottom, which he believed would keep him cool and sane for the rest of the morning; even his sacred thread, which he neglected to remove, became soggy. He didn’t like being disturbed in the midst of his quick ablutions, but this was more an idea than a reasonable suspicion, because there was no possibility that he would be. In the bedroom, Mrs. Chatterjee, very softly, as she often did these days, or ever since she had grown used to this negligible but returning loneliness, turned on the transistor radio to