A New World

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HE HAD COME BACK in April, the aftermath of the lawsuit and court proceedings in two countries still fresh, the voices echoing behind him. But he felt robust.

“Here,” he said to the taxi driver that day in April — it was a Tuesday — when he arrived. His son was staring out of the window, as if a taxi were the most natural place to be in, apparently unaffected by its rusting window-edges and its noise. It was eleven o’clock in the morning; it should be ten o’clock now the previous night in America.

“Stop here,” said Jayojit to the taxi driver. “Kitna hua?” he asked.

Vikram — that was his son’s name, his maternal grandfather’s choice — said, “Are we here, baba?”

Though they spoke to each other in English, both Jayojit and his wife (ex-wife now? but she had still not married the man she was living with) had decided to retain, as far as their son was concerned, the Bengali appellations for mother and father: “ma” and “baba.” Ironical, thought Jayojit — he thought about these questions more and more these days; indeed, he could often hear himself thinking — that we did not think to teach him, at least in practice, the other things that surround those words in our culture. He himself had learnt those meanings from the lives of his parents. It was curious how often he returned to his childhood and growing up these days, involuntarily, to their apparently random and natural sequence.

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