It seemed that there was nothing Gautam could do about going to the dance on Saturday. Already he was thinking of the trousers he would wear. Last year his mother had had two pairs of polyester trousers made for him by Woodrow and Bayne, his father’s tailors, but they were too formal. For a long time he had searched for trousers that would fit him tightly around the thighs; he had heard that hippies who had come to India in search of enlightenment sometimes sold their Levi Strausses and Wranglers outside the Stiffles Hotel; they were the real thing, with faded furry patches shining against the inky blue like velvet. But his mother, always one to criticise new ideas and bent on doing everything according to her own, rather limited, understanding, had said the jeans might not be safe because the hippies often had diseases. His mother, ever since he could remember, saw germs, uncleanliness, and infection everywhere, in the most innocent of things, in the rims of glasses, in wet plates, in fingers, especially dark brown ones, and had taken it upon herself to battle her way through a country whose citizens possessed immune systems that were always on their toes. And then someone had told him that a shop in Kemp’s Corner was making blue jeans, the first in India. He had gone there one hopeful morning with his mother, and, after trying out a pair, had said, “Will it fade?” Yes, he had been assured, the colour would run. They were altered again by another tailor to hug his thighs, and now he wore no other trousers at all, and one could see him in them when he went out with his parents for drives, or with Anil for walks down Breach Candy, or to pick his father up from office. It was not that his mother did not throw tantrums about the other two trousers, or try to part Gautam from these, she and Jamuna smuggling them away and both maintaining they were being dry-cleaned at the laundry, until Gautam became suspicious. But now, for the first time, he would wear them to school. Everyone would come wearing clothes he had never seen them in before, in T-shirts, real Levi Strauss jeans, and Charmayne in a backless halter.
The Man from Khurda District
BISHU HAD LIVED in Calcutta for eight years but still couldn’t speak proper Bengali. “I does my work,” or “I am tell him not to do that,” he would say. Even so, he courted his wife in precisely this language and then married her. With his child he spoke in either Oriya or his version of Bengali, and the child, now a year and a half old, did not seem to mind.
He was twenty-seven years old. His elder brother, Mejda—“Middle Elder Brother”—a cook’s helper in the Bengal Club, had arranged this job for him as a sweeper and cleaner in a house in Ballygunge. Mr. Banerjee, owner of the large two-storeyed house, had divided it equally into four flats, in one of which he lived with his wife, giving the other three out for rent. Thus, this house, a long white rectangular structure with a huge lawn recumbent before it, had still not been sold or torn down, as so many mansions of the once privileged classes in this area had, giving way to multi-storeyed buildings, ITC-owned flats, Marwari-built houses that were a grotesque mishmash of ancient European and futuristic architectural styles. Instead, it had recently been repainted. The house just next to it, a lovely yellow mansion with a drooping banyan tree in the courtyard, was supposed to have belonged to a descendant of the Tagore family and had lately been turned into a UNESCO office — but, thankfully, not destroyed. Bishu and his family lived in a room on the first floor of the servants’ outhouse near the white mansion.
One day Mr. Banerjee called for Bishu and said to him:
“Bishu, I’m looking for a man to look after the compound and to help the mali — a good man. Can you look out for one?”
Bishu listened carefully, shyly, and said:
“I tries, dadababu. I sees if I finds someone.”
Then he went back to his work and, thinking about it, realised that what dadababu wanted was a replacement for Ratan, the errand boy who had left suddenly three months ago.
That Sunday, he left Uma, his wife, and his child at home in the outhouse and went to Esplanade to meet his elder brother.
“Why can’t Mejda come here?” asked Uma irritatedly. She was holding the child in her arms. It was quite large for its age, and was quiet and dark-skinned and pretty, and had immense eyes that were now looking out at something through the window over Uma’s shoulder.
“In club Mejda has work every day — how will he come?” Bishu said. He had to be a little extra assertive, or else he knew that Uma, who was older than he was, wouldn’t let him go.
“Then you come back by four, or I’ll be gone to Meeradi’s house,” she challenged. She seemed certain of her decision.
“You go,” he said, and left.
The tram to Esplanade was fairly empty, and as it rattled along slowly, Bishu sat on a seat on the left and looked out of the window. People kept coming in and getting out. When the tram came to Esplanade, he got off and saw his Mejda standing in front of a shop with its shutters down.
“Ei, Mejda!” he called, and went up to him.
“Ei, Bishu!” said Mejda, and put an arm around him. “Tell me — what work brings you here?”
Bishu loved talking to Mejda because it was Mejda who had taken the first step out of the village in Orissa — they belonged to the sweeper caste — and had come to Calcutta. He now had a “permanent” job in the Bengal Club, and was a kind of guardian to Bishu. They walked together away from the Esplanade area and K. C. Das, going down the road that led to the All India Radio building and the Governor’s house.
“What about the Money Order?” asked Mejda. “Borda wrote to me and said he had got no M.O. from you last month.”
“That’s right,” said Bishu. “Priti was sick, and there was a lot of expenditure. I had to take her to a doctor. But this month I’ve sent a hundred.” The usual amount he sent his eldest brother and mother was seventy-five rupees.
“Crops weren’t good this year,” said Mejda, as if explaining why Borda had sent him the letter.
“Everywhere there are problems,” said Bishu. “In the village there are problems, in the city there are problems.”
As they walked on side by side, Mejda a little taller, his pace more leisurely, Bishu quick-stepped, they discussed their youngest brother, Amal, a reckless boy who was in serious trouble in the village. Some people were saying that he or another boy had made a girl pregnant, though he was apparently less directly involved than the friend; nevertheless, he had fled to another village.