A New World: A Novel (Vintage International) by Amit Chaudhuri Page A

now; the last model he could remember—and he was surprised at the trivial information his mind retained—was called Anne Bredemeyer. “Dove,” he said, without knowing who would respond; there were three men behind the counter who themselves had the searching air of visitors.
    “Give us a Dove soap!” said a man in kurta and pyjamas to someone at the back, then turned to Jayojit, “Anything else?”
    Jayojit looked at the medicine racks behind the man, looking back at Bonny to see if he was on the steps, noted the fan overhead, and scanned the shelves for shampoo. But it was conditioner he wanted; his hair was greying; the grey had been seeping into the black. But he didn’t see any conditioner, unless it was disguised as something else; he saw bottles that said “frequent use” and “for greasy hair.” His hair, if anything, was too dry. About five or more seconds had passed since the thin man had said “Aar kichhu?”—and now Jayojit found himself saying, “Colgate toothpaste achhe?” almost ironically, then pondering on a suitable reply to “Chhoto na bado?”—“Small or large?”; and as an afterthought, adding “talcum powder.”
    He’d seen a commercial on television the day before yesterday in which a busybody of a child was brushing his teeth with Colgate.
    “Which powder?” asked the man behind the counter, who was shrunken but fastidious.
    “Any will do,” confessed Jayojit. “Pond’s,” he said; the word had just come to him out of nowhere.
    “Pond’s,” the man said. He turned. “Jodu,” he called, “Pond’s talcum powder de!”
    Another man came out from behind a cupboard and looked at Jayojit with the interested equanimity of one looking at himself in a mirror.
    “Pond’s?” he said, as if he was not sure if he’d heard correctly, and retreated again.
    More fumblings.
    “That’s seventy rupees,” said the man at last, writing numbers secretively on the back of an envelope.
    On the way back they stopped at a bookshop that Jayojit noticed behind a photocopying and STD booth. The sky had darkened a few minutes before they entered. The man who ran the shop, dressed in a creased dhoti and kurta, regarded the rain without wonder or accusation as it began to fall in isolated drops.
    “Baba, I wanna touch it,” cried Bonny, jumping in the doorway by the bookshelves.
    “Go on then.”
    The shopkeeper looked up once again—as if at a noise in the distance—and looked downward. The lane was subsumed in a gloom which made the colours of the unremarkable multi-storeyed building before them more visible. “But the rains aren’t supposed to start till two weeks later,” thought Jayojit, irritated, thinking of the weather fronts and insubstantial bands of high pressure building up over the South and the coasts of Kerala; grateful, too, for the breeze. Contemptuous, he turned his back to the drama of the rains. He looked, unseeing, at the rows of Penguin Indias, and registered, remotely, as one would the words of an exotic language, the Marquezes, Vargas Llosas; next to them, slim books of horoscopes; arranged for a reader who wasn’t very clear about what he was looking for.
    He began to look for a book at random; noted the motto “Everyman, I will be thy guide” ; stared, with some scepticism, at some of the books by Indian writers; “They not only look light, they feel lightweight as well,” he thought, weighing one in his hand; he picked up a new paperback of A Suitable Boy with a theatrical air which there was no one to note. The last book he’d read was a volume treading, in the fog of post-structuralist theory, a tightrope between history and Keynesian economics; and he was going to give it a bad review for the university humanities journal. A colleague, an Italian American called Antonio who edited the journal, had sent it to him with a note: “Dear J, I know there are worse things in life than reading a deconstruction of classical economic theory (tell me about