Avenue of Kings by Sudeep Chakravarti

Author:Sudeep Chakravarti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

I met Suman for lunch after my meeting with a junior minister with the Marxist government, who assured me that Bengal was a great place to do business. I showed him government statistics that proved otherwise. He called my paper capitalist and comprador, and me, bourgeois. He abruptly ended the interview, saying whatever I wrote would anyway be lies, so I might as well make it up. It was a great quote, and I had every intention of using it.

Suman and I went to How Hua, a hole in the wall on Free School Street, a sliver of tawdry road off Park Street, which housed prostitutes in run-down buildings and the offices of one of the companies the brothers had earlier raped.

We ordered crab soup. To speed the journey to heaven, we added a few drops of dark soy sauce from the local Sing Cheung Sauce Factory.

Suman wiped the area around the soup bowl with a paper napkin. She had done it several times before the soup was served. It wasn’t really her kind of place; she was more comfortable in the places from our childhood that hadn’t fallen on hard times. There were few. We were lucky there was electricity; this part of Cal, among the swankiest, had blackouts for half the day. Anyway, the food was great, I told Suman. She nodded absently; she seemed to be on edge. The stewed pork arrived, along with some Chinese cabbage and sprouts.

‘I’m planning to get married, Dada,’ Suman announced then, snapping at the cabbage with chopsticks. With the arch of her neck and her hair held back in a retro-chic bouffant that seemed to be sweeping Cal, she looked like a warrior.

‘Fantastic.’ I tried to dazzle her with a smile. She looked suspicious.

I decided to reassure her. ‘Because I’m having trouble with my marriage doesn’t mean I don’t wish yours well.’

‘How’s Suya?’

‘Must be fine. She’s travelling somewhere in Rajasthan.’ Her parents are fine, I added before she could ask. And her sister, her sister’s boyfriend and Miriam the cook.

I talked to Mrs J whenever I could, usually on the phone. Our conversations didn’t last long. After a minutes’ chirpiness, she would sigh and break into sobs. I would politely end the conversation because I didn’t want to sigh and break into sobs too.

‘When will you come home?’

I won’t, I wanted to tell Suman. I cannot. It reminded me of death. There were too many photographs of the dead on the walls—Ma, my grandparents, images of the family in togetherness during some holiday. There were too many reminders of a past I no longer had the energy to comprehend. It was different in a museum, where you paid money to see people dead outside your circumstance, and someone else’s history.

‘Staying in this side of town is easier for my work,’ I said instead.

‘Papa keeps saying he wishes you would stay at home. He talks to everyone about your work. He keeps clippings of what you write.’

‘He gets the paper? He never told me.

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