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

might have worked. It wasn’t Bonny’s fault of course; it was just the way these things were. The Admiral was not orthodoxly religious—though he believed in the laws according to which providential happiness was given or withheld, and would sometimes return from a temple with a tilak beneath the mane of hair that had not long ago been hidden by a naval officer’s cap—and yet he’d hoped for an alliance with both the devotee’s humility and his serene expectation of disappointment; when the disappointment came, it took him by surprise. But that girl, Arundhati, had insisted that she found Bonny perfectly charming. “What d’you want to be when you grow up, Bonny?” she’d asked him, sitting forward on a sofa as he stood before her, plates of onion savouries on the table, a pale glass of lemon sharbat in her hand; and when he answered, at last, “I don’t know,” they’d laughed as if it were the most knowing, canny answer to the question.
    “If you don’t mind my asking, how long did it last?” Jayojit had asked during one of their conversations, although he already had a fair idea from the person who’d introduced them. The aura of that marriage had preceded her, the story with vague correspondences to his own; all this related by a nondescript go-between, a gentleman wearing bifocals who worked at the middle level of a tea company. She lived on the ground floor of a house with a terrace, somewhere near a park on a by-lane not far from Southern Avenue; here, on the verandah, facing the dark horizon of the park, they were left to themselves (Bonny would be at home with his grandparents), not far from the lit windows of a neighbouring house. She had, in an unostentatious way, attended to herself before his visit, put on lipstick, an outline of kohl, and something on her face that made it pale against the dark.
    There had been a pause; and then, dismissing the memory the question might have brought to her, she’d said:
    “One year.” She was pouring him tea.
    “That’s a bloody short time, if you don’t mind my saying,” said forcefully to convey his indignation not at her but her former husband.
    Then she’d told him how (still conveying to him something of her disbelief ), after going to London with her husband, who was studying medicine there, she’d be left alone in the house without any money. They were in a house on Golders Green; he commuted each morning to King’s College Hospital. She used to sit watching television, or go for long walks. “Actually,” smiling, “I went to Oxford Street only thrice. I didn’t see the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. I wanted to go to the Tower to see all the jewels the Brits took from us and put on their crowns and—what do they call them—sceptres.”
    The clattering of cutlery could be heard inside. After a polite search for a cue, he’d asked her, returning her, without warning, to the present:
    “What’s the park like?” He regarded it in the partial illumination; it seemed both sinister and peaceful. She seemed slightly flustered, as if he’d crossed a boundary and said something personal.
    “Oh, the park . . .” She didn’t know how to put it to him without sounding melodramatic. “It isn’t safe any more. I haven’t been to it for years . . . When I was a child, it was quite nice, though . . .”
    Later, they’d gone in and joined her parents inside; the mother dressed in a tangail sari, the father bespectacled, sipping tea nervously, their shadow on the wall, excited by innocent speculation, partaking of the new romance as if they were at the cinema. They had tea at their own table guiltily. A car passed by outside, lighting the lane and the trees with its headlights.
    She was a junior advertising executive; her parents nowhere near as well-to-do as Amala’s. Yet when he asked her what the job was like, she’d say no more than, “It’s quite nice,” as if her vocabulary had deserted her with the effort of readjusting to