Choice by Neel Mukherjee

Author:Neel Mukherjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

III

Data, n., pl. of datum, that which is given.

The truth is always concrete.

–­ V.I. Lenin (ish)

I

She is to arrive in a tempo on an early afternoon in spring, when the weather has already turned too hot, but it is still a good while from the sowing of aus paddy. Mira and Sahadeb have been sitting since dawn in a patch of shade that keeps moving with the sun –­ they know she is going to come in a tempo today, and they are more curious about the tempo because they have never seen a motor car in their short lives. There are no roads in Nonapani. There are no roads anywhere near Nonapani, you’d have to go nearly twenty miles east, near the border village of Dhopabari, to see a tar-­and-­crushed-­stone-­chips road. How the tempo is going to come to the children’s hut is a big question, but it doesn’t occur to them. It evidently doesn’t cross their mother Sabita’s mind either, for she comes out of the hut frequently and, under the guise of chivvying the children, lingers outside on each occasion and looks into the distance, the way she does when she is expecting the children’s father to return. In a way, she is looking for him, for he too is expected to arrive in the tempo. That’s what he had said when he had left yesterday: ‘We will return riding in a motor car, a big one, maybe a tempo, or even lorry, because a motor car would be too small.’ He knows all these things because he works in cities and towns. He is gone for months and months, then comes back for a few days, occasionally for a few weeks, when he is in between jobs, then ups and leaves again. The children call him Baba, of course, and are happy when he arrives, largely because of the presents he brings –­ lawjens wrapped in shiny cellophane or plastic; little painted tin boxes that once must have held something, they do not know what; shirts and short pants for Sahadeb, frocks for Mira, clothes for both children too loose and big on them (‘You’ll grow into them,’ he would say, ‘better to have something ready for the future than clothes you no longer fit into and will have to discard in a few months; what a waste of money’); plastic balls, and plastic dolls with pale pink-­orange skin and red-­painted lips; once even a wind-­up tin rooster that stopped working after one day. These things brought excitement and novelty to the children’s unvarying days, but they were formal and aloof with their father, shy, as they would be with a distant relative or a stranger. Their mother would have to say to them sometimes, ‘Go, sit with your baba’, or ‘Go talk to Baba, he’s here for only a few days, you won’t see him for a long time after he leaves.’ Mira and Sahadeb would try to get out of these directives, but when they couldn’t, a sense of stilted dutifulness marked their actions, not easy affection.

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