Real Time by Amit Chaudhuri

Author:Amit Chaudhuri
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250086556
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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.

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