With a start Mr justice Chatterji realized that he himself did not think very often of his wife. They had met at one of those – what were they called, those special festivals for young people held by the Brahmo Samaj, where teenagers and so on could get to meet? – Jubok Juboti Dibosh. His father had approved of her, and they had got married. They got on well; the house ran well; the children, eccentric though they were, were not bad as children went. He spent the earlier part of his evenings at the club. She very rarely complained about this; in fact, he suspected that she did not mind having the early evening to herself and the children.
She was there in his life, and had been there for thirty years. He would doubtless miss her if she wasn’t. But he spent more time thinking about his children – especially Amit and Kakoli, both of whom worried him – than about her. And this was probably true of her as well. Their conversations, including the recent one that had resulted in his ultimatum to Amit and Dipankar, were largely child-bound: ‘Kuku’s on the phone the whole time, and I never know who she’s speaking with. And now she’s taken to going out at odd hours, and evading my questions.’ – ‘Oh, let her be. She knows what she’s doing.’ – ‘Well, you know what happened to the Lahiri girl.’ And so it would start. His wife was on the committee of a school for the poor and was involved in other social causes dear to women, but most of her aspirations centred on her children’s welfare. That they should be married and well settled was what, above all, she desired.
She had been greatly upset at first by Meenakshi’s marriage to Arun Mehra. Predictably enough, once Aparna was born she had come around. But Mr Justice Chatterji himself, though he had behaved with grace and decency in the matter, had felt increasingly rather than decreasingly uneasy about the marriage. For a start, there was Arun’s mother, who was, in his mind, a peculiar woman – overly sentimental and liable to make much of nothing. (He had thought that she was not a worrier, but Meenakshi had filled him in with her version of the matter of the medals.) And there was Meenakshi, who sometimes displayed glints of a cold selfishness that even as a father he could not completely blind himself to; he missed her, but their breakfast parliaments, when she lived at home, had been more seriously acrimonious than they now were.
Finally, there was Arun himself. Mr Justice Chatterji respected his drive and his intelligence, but not much else. He seemed to him to be a needlessly aggressive man and a rank snob. They met at the Calcutta Club from time to time, but never found anything much to say. Each moved in his separate cluster at the club, clusters suited to their difference of age and profession. Arun’s crowd struck him as gratuitously boisterous, slightly unbefitting the palms and the panelling. But perhaps this was just the intolerance of age, thought Mr Justice Chatterji. The times were changing beneath him, and he was reacting exactly as everyone – king, princess, maidservant – had reacted to the same situation.
But who would have thought that things would have changed as much and as swiftly as they had. Less than ten years ago Hitler had England by the throat, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbour, Gandhi was fasting in jail while Churchill was inquiring impatiently why he was not yet dead, and Tagore had just died. Amit was involved in student politics and in danger of being jailed by the British. Tapan was three and had almost died of nephritis. But in the High Court things were going well. His work as a barrister became increasingly interesting as he grappled with cases based on the War Profits Act and the Excess Income Act. His acuity was undiminished and Biswas Babu’s excellent filing system kept his absent-mindedness in check.
In the first year after Independence he had been offered judge-ship, something that had delighted his father and his clerk even more than himself. Though Biswas Babu knew that he himself would have to find a new position, his pride in the family and his sense of the lineal fitness of things had made him relish the fact that his employer would now be followed around, as his father before him had been, by a turbaned servitor in red, white and gold livery. What he had regretted was that Amit Babu was not immediately ready to step into his father’s practice; but surely, he had thought, that would not be more than a couple of years away.
7.37
THE bench that Mr justice Chatterji had joined, however, was very different from the one he had imagined – even a few years earlier – that he might be appointed to. He got up from his large mahogany desk and went to the shelf that held the more recent volumes of the All India Reporter in their bindings of buff, red, black and gold. He took down two volumes – Calcutta 1947 and Calcutta 1948 – and began comparing the first pages of each. As he compared them he felt a great sadness for what had happened to the country he had known since childhood, and indeed to his own circle of friends, especially those who were English and those who were Muslim.