‘How’s he going to cope when he has to go to a normal school back in India, in a real solid classroom six hours a day, when he’s barely learnt to sit still for five minutes? The sooner he gets used to it, the less of a shock it will be. If we wait until we’re finished here, he could be … what? Eleven, twelve years old? He’ll be uncontrollable!’ Prabir could tell that his father had been speaking for a while. He always began arguments dispassionately, as if he was indifferent to the subject under discussion. It took several minutes for this level of exasperation to creep into his voice.
His mother laughed her who’s-talking laugh. ‘You were eleven the first time you sat in a classroom!’
‘Yes, and that was hard enough. And at least I’d been exposed to other human beings. You think he’s being socialised properly through a satellite link?’
There was such a long silence that Prabir began to wonder if his mother was replying too softly for him to hear. Then she said plaintively, ‘Where, though? Calcutta’s too far away, Rajendra. We’d never see him.’
‘It’s a three-hour flight.’
‘From Jakarta!’
His father responded, quite reasonably, ‘How else should I measure it? If you add in the time it takes to travel from here, anywhere on Earth will sound too far away!’
Prabir felt a disorientating mixture of homesickness and fear. Calcutta. Fifty Ambons’ worth of people and traffic, squeezed into five times as much land. Even if he could grow used to the crowds again, the prospect of being ‘home’ without his parents and Madhusree seemed worse than being abandoned almost anywhere else — as surreal and disturbing as waking up one morning to find that they’d all simply vanished.