A short story republished from A Strange and Sublime Address (1991). The book, which is a novel and nine short stories, completes 25 years in 2016.
by Amit Chaudhuri
I n the morning, after eating breakfast and reading the newspaper, the boy went to the bathroom and opened the hot water and cold water taps — small, stylish, silver-coloured knobs with indentations — and extended his hands beneath the faucet. The knobs however began to vibrate, and water trickled from their sides. He screwed them shut and opened them again. Water poured from the faucet, but the silver-coloured knobs hummed contentedly in a deep baritone; then, getting a little louder, they began to broadcast curious orchestral sounds.
Disgusted, the boy kept the taps running and went to the kitchen. Jadav, the servant, a thin young man in pyjamas, was sitting on a stool in front of the fridge, picking his teeth with a matchstick.
‘How many times have you been told,’ said the boy, ‘to wear a shirt in the house. Is this a village?’
Jadav sheepishly got up from the stool. He swung one arm shyly. The bright tea-coloured skin was stretched upon the bones of his shoulders and his chest as lightly as a perfectly-fitting fabric; there was not an inch of extra flesh on him.
‘Well?’ asked the boy.
‘This is not a village,’ said Jadav.
‘Then wear your shirt!’
Jadav disappeared into his tiny room. He emerged two minutes later buttoning a shirt with red checks.
‘The other shirt has gone for wash and this one just got dry, so I thought …’
The boy turned to go, beckoning him with one hand to follow.
Dutifully, Jadav walked behind him with a slight stoop which he did not usually have, muttering:
‘… so I thought if memsaab would buy me a nice cotton shirt I would not have the problem of washing one and waiting for — ‘
The boy stopped abruptly in the hall and turned round.
‘How many months have you been working here?’
Jadav closed his parted mouth. A hunted expression came to his face. His eyes became innocent.
‘Dada?’ he asked.
‘How many months have you been working here?’ asked the boy, relentless.
‘How many months?’ asked Jadav.
‘Yes, how many months,’ said the boy.
‘Working here?’ asked Jadav.
‘Here,’ said the boy. ‘Here.’
Jadav smiled suddenly, as if everything had been solved.
‘Three months, dada,’ he said. ‘February, March, April. February 15th I joined, and today is — ‘
‘And haven’t you been told,’ said the boy, ‘that you get your uniform when you complete six months?’
‘O yes,’ nodded Jadav happily. ‘Memsaab told me — When you complete six months, you get your uniform.’
‘Then why do you go on and on about the shirt?’ asked the boy sadly. ‘Why, when we have already given you pyjamas?’
‘That’s right,’ admitted Jadav. ‘You have given me pyjamas.’
He glanced down at them in puzzlement and wonder.
‘I bought them myself,’ said the boy, ‘from Gariahat. There are four prices — eighteen rupees, twenty-one rupees, twenty-six rupees, and twenty-eight rupees. And I bought,’ said the boy sadly, ‘the pair that cost twenty-eight rupees. Best-quality cloth, the same as I buy for myself.’ At this point, the boy glanced at his own pyjamas, and then at Jadav’s. They were both equally white.
‘Yes,’ Jadav agreed, touching and teasing his pyjamas with the tips of his fingers. ‘This cloth — no question about it. You can’t get better cloth than this in Calcutta. So soft, like cream.’
‘Then say no more about shirts,’ said the boy, turning again and beginning to walk towards his room. ‘We have work to do. The taps are in a mess.’
At eleven o’clock the boy was reading a book in his room when he heard a strange sound in the hall, like the crackle of electricity. Then it was gone, but no there it was again. He closed the book and rose from the bed and opened the door and looked out. He saw a man standing on one of the dining-chairs with emerald-green covers that had oriental patterns sewn on them; he was stretching out one hand towards a light shaded with crystals that was hanging from the ceiling; the light was on, and glowed from the sides of his hand; he had laid a newspaper on the emerald-green cover of the chair, and this newspaper crackled mildly each time he moved his feet. Jadav was standing by the chair, looking up past the man’s head at the light.
At this point, the boy’s father opened the door of his bedroom and came out. He said:
‘Ah there you are at last! What are you doing?’
‘Just checking the light, sir,’ said the man on the chair, looking down and yet trying to reproduce, by a great imaginative feat, the effect that he was looking up at the boy’s father. ‘Giving everything a thorough check-up.’
‘Good, good,’ said the father. Then he said with a genuinely concerned expression of his face: ‘But I can’t understand the fans at all.’
‘What’s the matter with them?’ asked the man.
‘None of the regulators seem to work!’ he said, apparently astounded. ‘When you want the fans to turn fast, they turn slow; when you want them to turn slow, they stop turning altogether!’
The boy, who had been listening silently so far, now said decisively:
‘And sometimes they go from slow to fast or fast to slow for no reason… Sometimes they won’t even start!’
‘Quite right,’ said his father. ‘Quite right.’
‘I’ll have a look at them, sir,’ said the man on the chair. ‘You needn’t worry.’
‘Ha-ha — worry? The way you people talk! I’ve been chasing you for three days,’ said the boy’s father. ‘My man Jadav went looking for you — ‘
‘In the afternoon sun,’ said Jadav.
‘In the afternoon sun — three days. You come one day, disappear the next without completing your work. Once you disappear no one can get hold of you. It’s astonishing! Tell me,’ he asked, ‘are you people ghosts, or people? No one can catch hold of you. Electricians, plumbers, all the same. Are you ghosts or what?’
‘Whatever you wish sir,’ said the man on the chair. ‘We are whatever you wish.’
‘I wish you would fix the fans,’ said the boy’s father. ‘But I think you are ghosts.’
At three o’clock in the afternoon, when the boy was lying on the sofa in his room, reading, two men knocked at the door.
‘Yes?’ said the boy.
One of them poked his head in. For some time the boy gazed at the head, apex of God’s handiwork, each head as different from another as a thumbprint, in this case simply and uncomplicatedly floating without the body.
‘Yes?’ said the boy.
‘Plumber,’ said the man.
‘Oh plumber,’ said the boy. ‘Come in, come in.’ He waved towards the bathroom door. ‘The taps,’ he said.
The two men came in. The first man was of medium height, around forty years old, bald, stout, with short arms. In one hand he held a cloth bag which contained tough and tensile implements. His hands and part of his forearms were white, as if he had been dipping them in talcum powder, till suddenly the white died and the brown and human river of his skin began again. The second man was younger and taller; his hands were white as well. He glanced around the room at the painting and the cupboards and the beds and the sofa, probably comparing it with other rooms he had entered that day. Shyly, like a policeman, the older man turned the brass knob on the bathroom door and opened it.
They both gazed at the basin. They whispered to each other, not so much from a desire not to disturb the boy, but, it seemed, from a wish not to break the pure crystalline calm of the bath. Sunlight fell on the pale green tiles, turning into an edible pistachio. They approached the basin silently, with bottomless love and suspicion. The older man opened the taps. Instantly the taps began to sing — gara gara gara ga ga gara — sublime as a Russian choir. He closed the taps and plucked out one of the silver-coloured knobs like a flower; then he bent down to gaze at where its ugly stem descended to its roots and then disappeared endlessly into the water-pipes of the building. At this point the younger man closed the door softly.
The boy tried to read, but could not. The faint but clear clinking of metal came now from the bathroom. One note rang out, echoing itself at a fixed and invariable pitch like a bird’s mating call. Then another clanking sound followed, lower on the musical scale, like another bird replying from another tree. It went on in this way, making the boy think of a forest in springtime.
He laid the book aside and walked to the bathroom and opened the door. He found the older man crouched and squatting on his haunches in the shadow of the basin, surrounded by a circle of chipped concrete. He seemed quite happy there, in his cave. The other man had opened the window on the right and was ruthlessly scaring away pigeons who had made their homes among the junctions of the water-pipes outside. The pigeons were making stricken, protesting noises, protesting not at the man but at fate, which had made them pigeons, and the boy could hear the furious flapping of their wings diminishing to a single agitated wingbeat.
‘How long will you take?’ he asked.
The older man looked up from under the basin.
‘Not long,’ he said. ‘Say — another fifteen minutes?’
‘All right,’ said the boy. ‘Will you clean up before you leave?’ he asked, gesturing towards the rubble.
The man gazed at it affectionately, as if it were his lunch.
‘O this,’ he said. ‘No need to worry dada, everything will be cleaned up by me and my man and left as it was before.’
The boy nodded and closed the door. He went out into the hall where everything was silent. He found the chair on which the electrician had stood in the morning to catch the light positioned at an angle from the others, the newspaper still covering it. He straightened the chair and folded the paper, last Friday’s. Then he went to the panel of neat switches on the wall and turned on the fan tentatively. It began to spin slowly, and as he gazed at its three blades it gathered speed, and the blades disappeared into a thousand radiating tendrils — till he switched it off and it slowed down and the three blades emerged again as if after a flood. Looking down, he found that the newspaper he had put on the table had flown away quietly to a corner of the hall.
‘Jadav,’ he called. ‘Jadav.’
There was no answer. He said loudly this time:
‘Jaa — ‘and he broke off ‘– dav.’
No one. He went to the kitchen and then to the man’s tiny room and found it empty, with one light burning. He switched it off. Then he opened a connecting door and went into the passage leading to the front door and found Jadav standing in the doorway in pyjamas and a white vest, smoking a beedi and talking to the janitor who was swabbing the floor outside the flat with a wet rag. In the grey sunlight that filled the rectangle of the doorway, both were figures in a framed picture.
‘What’s the matter, Jadav,’ asked the boy, coming from behind, ‘can’t you hear me?’
Jadav turned and hid the beedi, holding it behind his back.
‘Did you call, dada?’ he asked. ‘I couldn’t hear you at all!’
‘How could you,’ said the boy, ‘when you are standing here talking to this man?’
The guilty janitor made off without looking up with his bucket and wet rag. He left behind a floor which was burnished and echoed the sunlight and smelled sourly of disinfectant.
‘Besides,’ said the boy, ‘you left the light on in your room. Have you any idea that it costs money?’
Jadav looked penitent. The telltale smoke from the beedi began to rise in pale wisps behind his back, where he had kept his right hand.
‘Is your hand on fire?’ asked the boy.
‘Fire, dada?’ asked Jadav. The smoke continued to rise in a fragile ladder behind his head.
‘Yes,’ said the boy. ‘Your hand — is it on fire?’
‘O no,’ said Jadav. ‘It’s only — ‘
The boy shook his head from side to side and smiled. Jadav also smiled when he saw this. Jadav smiled at the boy and the boy smiled at his own thoughts. Jadav misunderstood and thought there would be a reconciliation now, it was all right. Then the boy stopped smiling and Jadav dropped his gaze uneasily.
‘Now I’ve forgotten,’ said the boy, ‘why I was calling you.’
The boy fell asleep on a sofa in the living-room. He had a dream. In the dream he and his parents had gone out. Jadav was swaggering around the house bare-bodied. He was wearing the boy’s pyjamas. The two plumbers and the electrician were standing in the doorway talking to Jadav, who was however in the hall. All the lights in the hall were burning. There were no fans in the house, and the boy was telling this to Jadav although he was not at home but out with his parents.
He woke up. His throat was dry. He got up and walked to his room; he found the bathroom door closed. He opened it and saw it was empty inside. The bits of chipped concrete lay scattered on the floor as before, but everything else looked untouched. He opened the taps and once more the despondent fugue began. He closed the taps and cursed. No, they can never do anything properly, they never complete their work, who’ll clean this up, the man had promised, they’ve left it all unfinished, where are they, thought the boy, going out into the hall and then to the living room and then from the kitchen to Jadav’s room and then from the guest-room to the room in which his parents were peacefully sleeping. Neither Jadav nor the plumbers were in the house. They’re ghosts, thought the boy. Ja-dav, Ja-dav, he shouted, but not aloud, just again and again silently inside his head, so that no one heard.
Due to formatting restrictions on Medium we could not reproduce the story in its original format, but you can read it here.
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Amit Chaudhuri is an award-winning novelist, critic, and musician. His latest novel is Odysseus Abroad. Among the prizes he has won are the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Los Angeles Times Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Prize, and the Infosys Prize for outstanding contribution to literary studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia.
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