Free A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) by Amit Chaudhuri Page B

it presented to her, and suffered when it was in her control), she saw a face and heard a voice that was dimly familiar. The blonde, sturdy-jawed woman was someone she’d met before: it was Anastasia. She was filled with longing for a bygone simplicity.

 
    THE NEXT MORNING Jayojit woke up at eight, still sleepy.
    “Did they keep you awake?” he asked, scratching his stubble.
    “I fell asleep,” confessed the Admiral.
    The rest of the day was hot and surprisingly silent. Late last night the lane had echoed, even when the shehnai had died away, with the loudspeaker, imperative and muffled, announcing numbers. Jayojit had caught himself listening to them again in the bathroom as his head jangled to the sound of his own toothbrush. This morning he’d discovered the bathroom light on, its lustre wasted in daylight. He thought ephemerally of the Marwari bridegroom and his new wife, imagined what they might look like, of the wife’s comeliness, and her shyness inevitably wearing away the way the light in the bathroom had merged into the daylight’s ordinariness, and that the two might even be preparing to get on to a plane. He read the papers twice, bored the first time, with the writing and with life in India, and in a more interested way the second time round; then he read an article about how well Indians were doing “abroad”; naturally, by “abroad” the reporter meant not so much Kuwait or Bangladesh but principally America. He not so much disagreed with it as felt the report belonged to another era, another planet. How naive and innocent and ultimately patronizing and misleading everything in it was! After he’d finished, he suddenly missed the vigilant candour of The Times and the New Republic (though he’d taken issue with its recent pro-Clintonism), which he had once subscribed to, in one of those private moods of exuberance he’d had in America and of whose nature his then-wife had been unaware, in 1992. He had forgotten, last year, for some reason unconnected to his inward, slightly enervating, reappraisal of circumstances, to renew the subscription.
    “You can always go to the American Centre,” said his father. “I don’t know if they’ll have the—what did you say it was?—the New Republic , though.”
    Last time he’d been to the American Centre, sceptically, guarding his emigrant status like an undisclosed secret; he was seized not so much by nostalgia as by confusion, and even the Chowringhee outside the glass looked like a photograph. People were turning the pages of newspapers, browsing through videos; of course they didn’t have the New Republic. He’d gone to the toilet; and coming out, had encountered a strange picture comprising three colours, white, yellow, and green, which he hadn’t been able to understand. He grew impatient. His mind had been formed by his teachers at school and his father’s world, which in turn had been shaped by the late-colonial world (although his father had been against Empire, and was among the ratings who’d sympathized with the three accused of the INA and brought the Empire down by throwing down their arms). It was a mind that had little tolerance for ambiguity; each time it looked at things, it also looked into the mirror of certainties that had shaped it. Yet when the time had come for Jayojit to choose between Britain and America, he’d chosen the latter; though he never felt it was quite good enough for him. Even the other day, when he’d caught his parents returning from their walk early in the morning, he’d said: “How quaint of you two!” Explaining, he’d continued, “You know, in the States, no one walks any more. They drive; and once a week, when they want exercise, they go to the gym.”
    “What if they need—need some matches—or milk?” asked his mother, smiling in puzzlement.
    Worked up like the boy he once used to be, he said: “Oh, they phone! Home delivery! And then they go for a ‘workout’ and walk for hours on a