“Tell him to lose weight,” I said to Romola, leaning forward. “At this age it might seem okay, but his…” I gestured around the region of his heart.
“You tell him,” she whispered. Twenty years! The afternoon moved towards teatime with its shingaras, after which they would leave. All those changes; Assam, Calcutta; and yet we seemed happy in our marriages, with our small families. Our wives were very different from each other, perhaps even from us, but our lives had come to occupy fully the shapes they’d made for them. Whatever had happened between us all those years ago had become harmless, meaningless, at most an uncomfortable scab that, with the friction of history, would fall off at some time. Was that the fate of these small excitements, that they became mawkish and disownable in the future?
Yet I hoped that his purpose was served. If there was going to be an opening, I’m sure my father would remember Mohon, and that he was ready to be transferred to Calcutta. I forgot to obey Romola’s instructions, and didn’t say anything to Mohon except “Try to cut down on the beer.” He looked at me, the old look of friendship, and sighed, “Yeah, that’s the one thing I must do.”
When he got up to go, heavy, his figure bigger than I could remember, I looked at his limp and expected it to disappear any minute, because it seemed to come from a callus under his foot that was destined to fade.
The Party
THE DINNER HAD BEEN appointed for, first, Friday, then Saturday night, and already, by the middle of the week, the preparations had begun. They — the small nuclear family of father, mother, and the son who was equal to an army of a hundred — were going to move from this rather equanimous accommodation to a larger flat in another locality in a couple of weeks, so this would probably be the last party Mrs. Sinha-Roy would be hosting in some time. Not that the flat was a small one; in fact, it had spaces they didn’t know what do with. But with Mr. Sinha-Roy’s ascension to head of finance a few months ago, there was the technicality that the flat had only two bedrooms, just a technicality, since the bedrooms were huge, but yet a two-bedroom flat was not quite commensurate with the position of a head of finance and, more practically, his “entertainment” requirements. From now on, he would be expected to throw larger parties.
The young son, Amal, no more than eight years old, lorded it over the servants — the cook, the bearer, the maidservant — as the preparations made progress, now entering the disorderly activity of the kitchen, now rushing past or circling the sari-clad, abstracted figure of Mrs. Sinha-Roy as if she were some kind of portal. There was an enigmatic aura about him that couldn’t be quite pinpointed; as if he weren’t just the head of finance’s son, but as if there resided in him, in some indirect but undeniable way, the hopes and aspirations of the company Mr. Sinha-Roy worked for; as if he were in some way its secret and unacknowledged symbol. It wasn’t enough that the franchise of happiness the company offered lay in the furniture and the flat and the other “perquisites”; and that Mr. Sinha-Roy would, as head of finance, have to negotiate large losses and gains. The boy, too, was part of that loss and gain in a way he didn’t quite understand.
“What time’s Sinha-Roy’s dinner?” asked Mr. Gupta, glassyeyed, scratching his stubble as he cruised that morning down Marine Drive. In the office, he referred to Sinha-Roy as “sir” or “Mr. Sinha-Roy,” but in private he derived a careless, imperious pleasure from dropping the awed monosyllabic whisper of the first word or the ingratiating, lisping two syllables of the “Mr.” This was one of the small freedoms of “company life”: that, however it may have ingrained itself into you as a religion, you did not have to practise it at home. Driving down Marine Drive, Mr. Gupta was a free man; though only in a sense, because the car on whose steering wheel his hands rested was an accessory of the company’s, both a free-moving object that gave him the illusion of ownership and control, and an accomplice to employment.
“Seven-thirty,” said Mrs. Arati Gupta, brushing aside the filigree of hair that had blown across her face with the breeze. She was the less sharp but the more pragmatic, even the wiser, of the two. In a sense, she was the one behind the wheel, always had been, always would be, while he made the protestations and clamour of the engine. “But eight o’clock would be all right, don’t you think?” always seeking his agreement, if not permission, at the end of a suggestion.
The palm trees of Marine Drive rushed in the opposite direction, like a crowd that was running to meet someone. Only recently, Mrs. Gandhi had waved a wand — or was it a cane? — and nationalised all the banks, and substantially reduced foreign shareholdings in “private sector” companies. This was true of the private sector company, which manufactured paint, where Mr. Gupta worked, which recently had been made more “Indian” or true-blooded but whose status derived from the fact that it had once, not long ago, had the word “British” in its name (the word had now, with dignity, been dispensed with). The private sector found itself uneasily on the cusp of a world that had been left behind and which Mrs. Gandhi, reportedly, had set about changing.
“Yes, eight o’clock; I don’t want to go too early,” he said, taking a bend. Mrs. Gupta said, as if the thought had just come to her: “Should we take something for them?” There were, of course, no rules on this matter, of visiting your superior’s house on what was after all a social and civilised visit, no rules except when you realised that every form of interaction was permeated by company law, not the sort of company law that Mr. Gupta had studied laboriously what seemed not many years ago, but the kind that Arati Gupta had become an avid student of.
“I don’t know,” said her husband gruffly. “It’s not done. People will talk.” “People”; “them”: simple, collective pronouns and nouns that had, however, complex but exclusive gradations in the life they’d made their own. “People” was not only managers, heads of sections, and directors, but their wives, too. “Them” had the ability to take on different, often contesting, resonances: right now it conveyed, at once, both Mr. and Mrs. Sinha-Roy and the difference between them as individuals.
“What about the son, what about Amal,” said Mrs. Gupta tranquilly. “We should take him a little something.”
It was as if she were testing him; she liked teasing him at times.
“What about Amal!” he said, mimicking her. “He doesn’t need anything. Don’t be silly!” His face had a special vehemence of emotion that came into being when he knew he’d be called upon to display a fatherliness that he did not possess. Somehow, the boy — the idea of him, not even the boy himself — exhausted him more than anything else.
In the Sinha-Roys’ flat, the cook, a dark septuagenarian, woke up from a brief nap to finish frying the little patties he’d set aside for the afternoon. The driver rang the bell and came in holding a bouquet of flowers; and Mrs. Sinha-Roy, like a somnambulist in her housecoat, moved from dining table to living room and back again in the heat of the afternoon, distributing flowers from one vase to another.