I looked at him once or twice, and yet we made no eye contact. It was as if all our talk was a prevarication, a hedging about issues. It appeared the unspoken conversations of the last twenty years must now necessarily remain unspoken. He went on to tell me, absently lifting his glass of Fanta, how it would be difficult for him, with the particular background he had, the sort of job he’d been doing for the last ten years, and was now quite comfortable doing, to actually find an opening in Calcutta. The door to my room opened, and Anjali came out with our daughter Priya, whose hair was combed neatly above her forehead, yet untouched in this endangered interval of calm in the day.
Romola straightened a little and smoothed her pale blue salwaar kameez with her fingers.
“She just finished her bath,” said Anjali (who was wearing a light brown salwaar kameez herself), cheerfully announcing, in medias res, the progress of an episode that concerned us all. “Say hello to Mohon jethu and Romola mashi. Is it jethu or kaku?” she asked, looking at me, distracted. She looked pretty after the bath she herself had had, and the brown salwaar kameez was rather lovely. I looked at her and gave her a smile of recognition you sometimes give someone with whom you spend almost every hour of the day.
“Kaku,” said Mohon, ironically but gently; this was the first word he spoke to Anjali. “I narrowly missed being a jethu. He,” he tilted his head towards me, “was born just a month before me.” Said sardonically but kindly, as if he’d forgiven me for this.
Priya, though, was not at the social hello-saying stage, though she sometimes ingeniously mimicked the sound of that word when she had a telephone in her hands; she just stared and stared at the two of them, as if there was something a little out of the ordinary or embarrassing about them.
“Say something,” said Anjali. “Or will will you start talking only when they leave, like you did the other day?” Mohon laughed and shook his head. He was used to the way children are, how perverse and self-willed they can be; his daughter was three years old.
“You know,” said Romola, sitting up and looking at Anjali with the intentness of one looking at a photograph, “you look very familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen you before.” I looked again at my wife, to see if there might be anything about her face that might be mistaken for someone else’s, to see if she reminded me of someone else, and said, “Yes, that’s what Romola’s been telling me.” The two women began to talk about which school they’d been to, but the fact that Romola had been born in Patna and not travelled much out of it seemed to take something of the fire out of the search for where they might have met before.
Left to ourselves, Mohon and I, with our wives’ conversation as a background, didn’t have a great deal to talk about, but nevertheless kept moving from subject to subject, reminiscing about our childhood as if it were a book we’d both recently read. Among the things mentioned were the pop songs we once liked and were surprised to find we still listened to. “Neil Young, ‘Heart of Gold’; that’s class stuff, yaar!” Mohon smiled and looked blindly at the wall unit opposite; what rooted him to his armchair, in his over-large half-sleeved shirt and trousers, was not so much weight as some sort of absence, something that had not taken shape and probably never would; possibly the future he’d come looking for in Calcutta. I didn’t know how I could help him, though I knew he needed help; the kinds of things we did were so different.
At this point, my mother opened her bedroom door and came out with a girl with lightish hair, almost brownish in colour. She was dressed in a denim jacket and knickerbockers, and could have passed for a Greek or an Italian.
“Oh, she’s been feeling at home,” said Romola, making a can’t-help-what-my-daughter-does face.
“Oh, she was very happy, but then just now she began asking for her mother,” said my mother. Ritu looked not all there, as if she’d done something wrong; but not overtly repentant. Really, there was nothing to indicate, in the way this family looked, that they’d been living in Tezpur, surrounded by troubles, for the last ten years — Ritu, indeed, had been born there; they could have been from anywhere else, a city suburb.
One thing Mohon remembered from the past was my mother’s cooking.
“There never was any comparison! Whenever we used to visit you in Bombay,” said Mohon, thinking of the verandah overlooking the sea, “we’d really look forward to mashi’s food. Especially the chicken.”
“Tell me, re,” I said suddenly, asking him what I’d been thinking of asking him for some time, “what about the weight? How did it happen?”
“This,” he said, as if it were self-evident what “this” was, “happened over the last two or three years, re. I slipped and fell and fractured my ankle, and the bone’s never healed properly.” He smiled and shook his head slightly. “I’ve had two operations. But no exercise since then. Otherwise,” he turned to Anjali, “I used to be almost as thin as this guy.”
Later, after about twenty minutes, when he said he wanted to go the toilet, I noticed he walked with a small limp. At one point I’d ask him, “Where did you fall?” thinking of the hilly slopes of Assam, but he’d surprise me by saying, “Bombay. When we went there in ’ninety-seven.” When he came back, and we talked until lunch, we avoided looking at each other, as if there was something that couldn’t be said between us. It was something very minor, elusive, but it wouldn’t go away. It could be the differences that had come about in our respective ways of life, our different degrees of success, that were now embarrassing both of us. Or it could be the two small incidents that had occurred those twenty years ago, when we’d spent two nights with each other, talking, when one thing led to another and culminated the way such things do, in a mixture of embarrassment and a cheery, practical resolve to brush it aside. At that time, we didn’t think our actions would have any consequences, and of course they didn’t. What remained was like the smell of smoke, nothing we could hang on to, but something that wouldn’t go away, no more of an impediment except to keep us from looking directly at each other. In the end, it had had nothing to do with our sexuality; it had been one of those nameless animal impulses common to boys, something between pity and terror; twenty years later, it left you with nothing to build on, but it was there.
He sat sipping his second Fanta until my mother shouted, “Lunch!” Mohon and I sat next to each other, my mother and father at the head of the table at opposite ends, and our wives sat facing us. Ritu and Priya, who’d already been fed, finally began to play with each other, Ritu, being older, obstreperous, and over-affectionate, now and then speaking to Priya in, of all languages, Hindi. Priya tolerated her new friend as long as she didn’t touch her too often, until Ritu was frankly puzzled by Priya’s changing moods towards her. I could see that Mohon hadn’t put on weight only because of his bad foot; he kept taking second and third helpings while protesting he mustn’t eat too much.
“It’s the same chicken, mashi! Amazing!” he said as we approached the end of the meal, as if the same preparation had been reincarnated today from all those years ago.
All at once Ritu fell asleep, as if she’d inhaled some vapour that causes drowsiness, in an alien house upon a strange bed. Priya, our daughter, kept awake, as she does sometimes late into the night, keeping us awake with her.
“How’s your mother, Mohon?” I asked. It had been years since I’d seen her. A small woman with dark eyes and wavy hair, simple, unimposing in her smallness, came back to me. For some reason, he didn’t look at me when he said with an odd conviction, “Oh both ma and baba are fine!” They’d both retired, I heard, to their ancestral house in Assam about fifteen years ago; they lived ten miles away from Tezpur. The reason for the return was simple: Mohon had got into “bad company” in his college in Delhi, into drugs, and the only route that lay before them was to remove him entirely from the influence of his friends, from the busyness of the metropolis, to the ancestral home in Assam. They’d seemed to doubt that he’d otherwise have the power to resist the influence on his own.