It seemed that there was nothing Gautam could do about going to the dance on Saturday. Already he was thinking of the trousers he would wear. Last year his mother had had two pairs of polyester trousers made for him by Woodrow and Bayne, his father’s tailors, but they were too formal. For a long time he had searched for trousers that would fit him tightly around the thighs; he had heard that hippies who had come to India in search of enlightenment sometimes sold their Levi Strausses and Wranglers outside the Stiffles Hotel; they were the real thing, with faded furry patches shining against the inky blue like velvet. But his mother, always one to criticise new ideas and bent on doing everything according to her own, rather limited, understanding, had said the jeans might not be safe because the hippies often had diseases. His mother, ever since he could remember, saw germs, uncleanliness, and infection everywhere, in the most innocent of things, in the rims of glasses, in wet plates, in fingers, especially dark brown ones, and had taken it upon herself to battle her way through a country whose citizens possessed immune systems that were always on their toes. And then someone had told him that a shop in Kemp’s Corner was making blue jeans, the first in India. He had gone there one hopeful morning with his mother, and, after trying out a pair, had said, “Will it fade?” Yes, he had been assured, the colour would run. They were altered again by another tailor to hug his thighs, and now he wore no other trousers at all, and one could see him in them when he went out with his parents for drives, or with Anil for walks down Breach Candy, or to pick his father up from office. It was not that his mother did not throw tantrums about the other two trousers, or try to part Gautam from these, she and Jamuna smuggling them away and both maintaining they were being dry-cleaned at the laundry, until Gautam became suspicious. But now, for the first time, he would wear them to school. Everyone would come wearing clothes he had never seen them in before, in T-shirts, real Levi Strauss jeans, and Charmayne in a backless halter.

The Man from Khurda District

The Man from Khurda District

BISHU HAD LIVED in Calcutta for eight years but still couldn’t speak proper Bengali. “I does my work,” or “I am tell him not to do that,” he would say. Even so, he courted his wife in precisely this language and then married her. With his child he spoke in either Oriya or his version of Bengali, and the child, now a year and a half old, did not seem to mind.