The Immortals (10 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY,
after the party, when John, and Jumna, his assistant, were still putting away, with stately, valedictory meticulousness, the piles of washed dishes, Nirmalya sneaked out for a walk around Thacker Towers. This part of Cuffe Parade had been ocean not very long ago; it was land that had been fairly recently reclaimed. Upon it had appeared Thacker Towers and its sister skyscrapers: a whole family of tall siblings that didn’t seem to know one another. And Snowman’s Ice Cream Parlour, where different-coloured flavours were frozen inside troughs, a shopping arcade, and the President Hotel with pennants fluttering.

Walking, he was aware of its newness, as if it were the edge of a young planet. It was a strip of land that had encroached on water. And, because of the encroachment, the water had become flat and grey, like macadam; there was hardly a wave in it. Mornings and evenings, it was, for a while, lacquered by light from a sun that rose and set without comment on this part of the universe. One or two gulls hovered in a puzzled way over the water, as if it were a road stretching to infinity, or at least to the other side of Bombay, where you could see La Terrasse among the buildings.

If you walked back down the reclaimed land, you came to the fringes of the old Colaba, with its palm trees and its walls on which sea breezes had left shadows, like bruises that had appeared not overnight, but over years. That was another world, where the sea had once ended; where they’d moved to was only a ten-minute walk away. He was intrigued by the the dead calm of the sea around Thacker Towers. This was not the sea he knew, whose waves had the habit of rising twenty or thirty feet during the monsoons and drenching the cars and buses on Marine Drive. Sometimes, as he stood at its edge, like a traveller newly arrived on a planet, it seemed to be an enormous shadow.

The door was half ajar when Shyamji first arrived at the apartment; so he didn’t have to ring the bell to enter. ‘Didi!’ he cried in his sweet high-pitched voice, and looked blankly at the long corridor on his right. ‘Mallika didi!’ He checked his reflection, when he saw it, in the large mirror above the telephone; he ran his fingers through his hair. Then he saw Nirmalya, in a khadi kurta and jeans, his goatee a shadow beneath the chin.

‘Baba,’ he said, ‘look at this apartment – it is wonderful!’

Mrs Sengupta, who was just coming down the corridor, said, with a playful approximation of a look of concern:

‘He doesn’t like it. He tells me he doesn’t want to live here.’

Shyamji appeared mildly scandalised. He looked closely at Nirmalya.

‘But why – why not?’

‘I think he liked the old flat – the one in La Terrasse: he liked that better; usko wohi pasand thha.’

Nirmalya looked uncomfortable and shy, as if everything his mother had said was a joke, and strangely despondent. But Shyamji nodded seriously, like one who was considering the virtues of a dead relative.

‘That flat was nice, certainly. But this one . . .’ He was impressed with the little he’d seen of it; it was like a mahal – he’d encountered nothing on this scale before.

There were flies in the flat. This discovery – of a constant buzzing, a microscopic movement, involved in its own journeys, but coming in your way, challenging and distracting you without even knowing it – this unlooked-for companionship was exasperating. The flies buzzed against windowpanes and flew around your face. You spent a lot of time waving them away. Among other things, they qualified the grand rebuff to Dyer the flat had represented.

Mrs Sengupta, Nirmalya, even, occasionally, Apurva Sengupta – all attacked them briskly with fly swatters. But it was a losing battle. The flies bred and multiplied in Thacker Towers. And sometimes they sat on surfaces that couldn’t be attacked, like a figurine of the Buddha.

They put wire gauzes against the windows, delicate and dun-coloured. They did it on the advice of their friend Prashanta Neogi, who’d done the same to keep out mosquitoes from infesting his ground-floor flat in Khar; for that area was home to tanks of stagnant water. ‘It’s the only way to deal with it,’ Prashanta had said grimly, drink in hand. Gauze after gauze was put in wooden frames behind the windows in the Managing Director’s new flat.

‘It’s that machhimar nagar,’ said Nirmalya, gesturing one morning, prophet-like, toward the sea. The promontory – the fisherman’s colony – that featureless strip of sand. Nirmalya had passed it several times on his louche and aimless walks. Bombay, as everyone had learnt in school, had once been seven fishing islands that had been presented by the Portuguese to the British as a part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry; ‘There was no-
thing
here then,’ the geography teacher had said, standing before the blackboard, enthralled and relieved for an instant by the sheer recentness of what sometimes seemed eternal: the exercise books, children’s voices, chalk dust. ‘Only these fishermen.’ Walking down Cuffe Parade on his solitary explorations, Nirmalya saw the hull of an upturned boat on the sand. He saw the nets drying against the sun. He smelled the air.

It was from here that the flies had moved into Thacker Towers.

Now, paintings were hung in the drawing room. Two Jamini Roys, bought eleven years ago for almost nothing, and the B. Prabha – a terracotta village girl with elongated arms – had adorned the walls of the previous flat and were hung again here. The B. Prabha was newly emerging as a status symbol; a curious example of a painter whose stock wasn’t high among her peers, but whose work was looked upon with increasing tenderness by the affluent. The Senguptas, too, led to her pictures of smoky huts and indecisive village maidens by a gallery owner, viewed them with simple wonder; the painter herself was present, a gentle soul in a white sari with a green border, unsure of whether to maternally cherish or to broker her brood – the family of images – that surrounded her. When Mrs Sengupta praised a picture, she murmured, ‘Thank you,’ and when they asked her the price, she mentioned it – ‘Six thousand’ or ‘This one is five thousand’ – uninsistingly, with dignity, as if she was telling them its name. The Senguptas were as charmed by the artist as they were by the paintings.

Other pictures were purchased after they moved to this flat – and the cost put down to the ‘soft furnishings’ account. ‘Soft furnishings’ and ‘entertainment allowance’ – these were the two ways in which the company made up for what it couldn’t give its directors through the heavily taxed income, cocooning them from the brunt of the non-company world, making it, somehow, less urgent and real. Yet ‘soft’ – as if the fixtures, in a state of semi-fluidity, resisted the solidity of the Midas touch.

His mother went to the Cottage Industries, wandering aimlessly and liberally on its three levels amidst handicrafts and handlooms, children’s playthings made in remote regions of the nation scattered here and there like debris, the dolls limp with concealed life, the horses fished out of some imaginary battlefield and left stranded; she noticed some Moghul miniatures – figures on a white surface.

‘Madam, this is ivory,’ said the saleswoman apologetically.

Ivory! But wasn’t ivory illegal – Mrs Sengupta hardly saw it these days; it was like going down the tunnel of time and glimpsing something decadent and vanished. No, not illegal; but rare. Mrs Sengupta stared for a couple of moments at the figures: the woman in the brocaded top, the man in an ornate cap, the ageing man holding a rose, the small meeting inside a durbar.

The four miniatures were put down to ‘soft furnishings’.

The miniatures were hung up on one of the walls of the drawing room, not far from a wooden cabinet that housed the music system with its frozen turntable and the muscular wires at the back. Nirmalya guessed that one was Jehangir, the other figure Noor Jehan. The middle-aged person, his whole figure, from top to bottom, in profile, was clearly the Emperor Akbar; or so Nirmalya presumed from the man’s appearance. He seemed content, standing in the void of a clearing, pausing for a moment in what looked to Nirmalya like wintry daylight.

Standing alone in the half-empty flat, Nirmalya wondered if the nearest one could come to that kingly world was to be someone like his father – a Managing Director. He saw before him, in his mind’s eye, his father in his black suit, going out to the office. Did he feel some of Akbar’s poised contentment? Because Akbar, in that painting, standing indecisively, seemed not only to be looking, but listening to something. Did his father, too, secretly, listen to the world?

A woman called Shalini Mathur came to tinker with and reorganise the flowers in the vases twice every week. She was an expert flower arranger – she had a diploma in flower arrangement – and the company had hired her to do something pretty and slightly different with the flowers every few days in the Chief Executive’s flat; to involve these inert, fragrant objects in a delicately changing composition. Shalini came in at about ten thirty in the morning, and began to work; she smiled sweetly at no one in particular, and hardly said anything. She sheared the stalks, trimmed leaves; the vases were always surrounded, while she bent over them, by an autumnal precipitation of disposable plant-life. Pleasant but unremarkable to look at, with thin hair and the efficient but somewhat provisional air of a working woman, always in light chiffon saris that fell upon her like a rag, and rather unexpectedly large-breasted. When she spoke, she spoke to Nirmalya’s mother, briefly, and almost out of earshot. Nirmalya couldn’t remember having heard her voice.

She leaned forward to place the vases according to some tangible geometry of space, tangible only to her, like a web. The effect was a sort of Japanese calm. When she leaned, the dwarfed aanchal of her sari fell from place; her breasts were full and large.

Jumna, revealing her mauve gums, said, ‘She has very big “ball”. Look, look at Arthur – dekho isko, baba. He keeps leaving the kitchen and going into the drawing room.’ It was true. Arthur would shuffle out into the drawing room, look blankly about him for a few seconds, while Shalini, in the distance, a mixture of professional seriousness and divine obliviousness, hovered behind the flowers, and go back to the kitchen. ‘“Baap re, what big ball, what big ball!” he keeps saying,’ reported Jumna. And, having heard this report, Nirmalya too found himself gravitating towards the drawing room once or twice, casual and anonymous in kurta and pyjamas, with an air of high-minded absentness that recently-turned voyeurs have. Shalini neither acknowledged nor ignored him; her eyes remained downcast but weren’t steely or unfriendly. She didn’t bristle; she just stiffened slightly, almost imperceptibly as a plant might – partly out of respect for the fact that the ghostly passer-by lurking past was the Managing Director’s son; and partly . . . it was something else that was never quite brought to light.

Arthur, with quick small hands (he was a tiny man, well below five feet), made food common in storybooks – cottage pie, pancakes, honey roast ham. But, because the Senguptas didn’t eat this kind of food regularly, he found himself with nothing to do. So he became a savant in the kitchen, and browbeat the other servants. ‘Don’t throw them away!’ he ordered Jumna, after the flowers Shalini had arranged had shrivelled up, and were gathered funereally from the vases. He fried the petals diligently in masala and oil, and sometimes the servants had no other lunch. ‘Do you know what he gave us to eat today?’ complained Jumna to Mrs Sengupta one afternoon. ‘Flowers. Phool. I can’t eat them,’ she said glumly, and stuck out a bit of pink tongue. ‘They’re bitter.’ ‘Flowers?’ asked Mrs Sengupta, astonished. ‘Why?’ ‘He says they’re good for you.’ ‘But you can’t give them flowers, Arthur,’ said Mrs Sengupta gently; the old man nodded, his graven, bespectacled face, whose features were quite perfect, expressionless. It was true he was remarkably agile at seventy-four. He believed in the virtues of flower and root.

He knew some English; this made him comic and grand in everyone’s eyes, and almost incredible, like a member of the British royalty. One day, when Nirmalya had gone to the Dyers’, Matthew had told him, ‘Arthur’s made a chocolate cake for Tina’s birthday.’ ‘Really?’ said Nirmalya. ‘Yes, I’ll show it to you.’ He took the boy to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and showed Nirmalya a large cake on the second rack, spotlit briefly by the fridge’s light, chilled and sealed by its weather. In white, stylish icing, it had inscribed upon it ‘Happy Birthday Dina’. ‘But . . .’ said Nirmalya. His mouth opened in an o. Matthew put a finger to his lips; he closed the fridge judiciously. Arthur called Dyer’s daughter ‘Dina’, and that was who she would be, for all purposes, this birthday.

Shyamji had no real interest in objets d’art; pictures of saints or gods or film stars he might take a second look at, but of art for its own sake he didn’t have a strong conception. But he was staring at the small durbar scene with interest: not necessarily because it was beautiful, but as if he recognised the people in it.

‘Did didi get this?’ he asked. ‘It is new, na?’

Nirmalya nodded.

‘Didi really has an eye for things,’ said Shyamji, looking about him, seeming to take in all the decorations in a glance. Then he became absent-minded, as if he were considering some distant object, something that wasn’t in the room. He waited for Mrs Sengupta to come out into the hall.

Nirmalya had become interested in this man: Shyamji. He still couldn’t quite make him out: he’d been observing him from a distance – and listening to him sing, of course. He came almost every other day to the flat; a man who was obviously a master of his craft, and who knew he was one. But not ill-at-ease among the furniture, the mirrors, the accessories to luxury; quite in his element, almost unconscious of his surroundings. Nirmalya was moved by his singing: it was like a spray of rainwater. The phrases were delicate and transient, and almost never, he noticed, sung in the same way twice. Shyamji’s ability to spin these beautiful musical phrases out of nothing, thoughtlessly – even, at times, callously, glancing quickly at his wristwatch – was, to Nirmalya, at once wonderful and perplexing.