On their return from Rishikesh, Sujoy dropped Ronen Uncle home and declined the offer of a cup of tea before continuing onward to his place. He had had enough.
‘No, Ronen Uncle, I don’t want to get stuck in rush hour traffic. But I will come by and see you again soon.’
‘You are right. Well, I certainly hope to see you soon. Call me if you find time. And Sujoy, am so glad both of you could come for the immersion of Mala’s ashes. Her soul will rest in peace.’
‘I hope so.’
Ronen Uncle thought he detected a trace of irony in Sujoy’s voice as he waved and drove off.
Ronen Uncle watched the car move away and sighed. Sujoy had always carried an air of suppressed anger and resentment about him that had only become worse with time. His relationship with Mala had been fraught and over the last few years, broken down completely.
It was Ronojoy whom they had all had greater anxieties about, even worrying that he would need extensive counselling to cope with all he had witnessed. But curiously it was Sujoy who had turned out to be the more difficult child. His time at boarding school was littered with incidents of wayward behaviour. It was his family history that protected him from sterner disciplinary action. The saving grace was that he was academically bright and, prodded by his brother’s timely interventions, managed to excel at key school and college examinations. Yet, his college days had been even wilder. Alcohol, a brush with substance abuse, even a stint at rehab, a long line of troubled relationships with women – Ronojoy had had his hands full.
And then something happened; Sujoy failed an entrance examination for business school. This revealed another side to him. Overnight, Sujoy cleaned up his act. He virtually locked himself away from his circle of friends, cleared the management test and went on to finish near the top of his MBA class. On passing out, he was snapped up by a global investment bank at an eye-popping starting salary and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. Except Ronojoy, who knew his kid brother better than anyone else in the world.
It took Sujoy another hour in Delhi traffic to get home. By the time he got off the main Ring Road, he was feeling pissed off. The long drive, the pointlessness of it and Ronen Uncle’s patronizing tone through the drive back –
‘Chhotku, I know there is a lot of stuff bottled up inside you. It’s not healthy. Let go of the past. Now, even Mala is gone. Don’t hurt yourself.’ And, ‘Mala loved you dearly; after the tragedy with Subir she was just never herself. I fear you misunderstood her.’
And on and on.
Sujoy, out of respect for the old man, had not answered back but it had been an effort.
He needed a drink, badly. As he turned the key in his apartment door and pushed it open, he heard his son – ‘Papa is back!’ Jeet stood by the sofa looking at him expectantly, his leg poised over a football. He kicked it towards him.
Sujoy let the ball pass. ‘I am very tired, Jeet. And how many times have I told you to stop playing inside the house with that ball?’
Anu was sitting on the sofa watching television. She switched it off and said, ‘Jeet, go to your room. Leave Papa alone now.’
‘How did it go?’ she asked Sujoy, as Jeet made a face and left the room with his iPad.
‘A bloody waste of time. Anyway, it’s done. I’ll go and have a quick shower.’ He walked into their bedroom. The bar cabinet was by his wardrobe. Sujoy picked up a bottle of whisky and poured three fingers of it into a tumbler. He took a gulp, then another.
Showered, Sujoy came back to the living room with a drink in hand. Anu eyed the glass.
‘Did Dada seem okay?’
‘He will be fine.’ Sujoy took out his phone and dialled Ronojoy’s number. He waited for a bit before setting the phone aside. A crease appeared on his brow. ‘He didn’t answer.’
‘He’s probably still driving; those mountain roads aren’t easy.’
A silence followed. The drink was beginning to seep in but Sujoy did not feel relaxed. He had felt distinctly edgy and restive over the last few days, almost as if he was losing his grip on things. His drinking was becoming an issue; it had been so for a while now, even before the news about Ma.
The lunch at his boss’s place last month hadn’t gone off very well. Sujoy had had four martinis and over a perfectly amicable lunch-table discussion, raised his voice more than he should have. Nothing much had happened – just an ensuing hush and a few glances. Later, his boss had tapped him discreetly on the arm with, ‘Sujoy, watch the juice a bit. A good servant but a bad master, you know.’ He had left it at that.
On the drive back, there was an argument in the car with Anu. ‘How bloody embarrassing. That is the last office party I will ever attend with you. It’s only a matter of time before people start avoiding you, the way you are going,’ Anu had hissed. It was only the presence of Manoj, their driver, that had prevented it from becoming uglier.
Sujoy was thinking about all this. Ronen Uncle’s, ‘You have a lot of things bottled up inside you’ came back to him. He observed Anu from the corner of his eye. She was leafing disinterestedly through a glossy magazine – more to avoid conversation, Sujoy thought. They had been married for nine years now. Not so long, as marriages go, yet staleness, like rust, had begun creeping in.
Anu had been this desirable girl in charge of public relations at his bank whom all the young executives wanted to date. It was Sujoy’s brashness and ambition that had attracted her and they had married after a very brief romance. They were all right for a while but soon their son had been born and things began to change. Jeet became the centre of Anu’s world. Sujoy got busier and busier at office as he kept climbing the corporate ladder. Youngest Vice President, youngest President, whispers of being groomed to join the board – he was on a breathless ascent. At home, conversations inevitably revolved around Jeet, never each other, almost as if they carefully tiptoed around the fault-lines. Anu had put on weight and obsessed about it without being able to shed any. She was always on some fad diet or other and that meant a drastic cut-down in the elaborate Bengali meals that Sujoy so craved on weekends.
These were only small things but appeared bigger and rankled more with the passage of time.
These days, Sujoy just felt tired of everything. There was little he looked forward to. His office was a snake-pit of competitive hustlers he loathed in most part. Yet he had himself, not so long ago, been fuelled by the same cocktail of ambition, aggression, achievement. It seemed increasingly pointless to him, though it paid for the comforts.
He loved his son but Jeet’s constant hankering for his attention exasperated him. His carefully curated bubble of domesticity now stifled him. The thought of this being his life for years and years ahead filled him with dread. Family life felt like an invisible fist that was closing around his throat, tighter with every passing day.
Anu had begun laying out dinner. Sujoy should have been famished but today he had no appetite. He walked to the bedroom to fetch another drink. As he turned from the cabinet his gaze fell on the small framed photograph on the bedside table: Ronojoy and he playing with a furry black dog in the garden of their hill house. He was five in the picture, so Dada would have been about eleven. Sujoy noted, as he had often before, that they hardly had any physical resemblance – though siblings often did not. Ronojoy was fair, thin, tall for his age. He looked like Baba. Sujoy was darker and had a slightly East Asian appearance, his eyes crinkling into narrow slits as he smiled in the picture.
Sujoy lifted the frame and peered into it. He tried to remember the mountain house in Mukteshwar.
Dada had often asked him to visit but he never had.
Now he tried to imagine Baba standing on the patio taking the picture. His memories of his father revolved around things they had done together or places they had visited. Over the years, the image of his face had almost faded from memory. Sometimes he felt the same about much of his adult life – an exercise in obliterating all memory of childhood.
Abruptly a flash of anger crept up his neck. He had misunderstood Ma, Ronen Uncle had said. Really?
What mother packs her little children off to a distant boarding school just months after their father’s suicide? What mother checks out of her sons’ lives after such trauma, leaving them in the care of their grandmother?
He realized he was seething and looked up to see Jeet at the door, staring at his crimson, bloodshot face. He appeared frightened.