The Immortals (2 page)

It was in this house, oddly, that he’d first seen Lata Mangeshkar. She, sitting on the little divan in her white sari, talking to the members of the household in her babylike voice. She had seemed tiny to Shyamji. He glanced at her; although her songs often floated about in his head, he was, at that moment, curious about what she looked like, sounded like. They brought her puris and potatoes on a plate – it seemed she’d asked for them specifically – and she ate them carefully and said: ‘I love eating anything Arati makes.’ Arati was married to Motilal, Shyamji’s wife’s brother: everyone knew she was a good cook. A small cordon of family members, of children and cousins intermittently talking to each other, had formed itself around Lata. He was introduced to her as Ram Lal’s son, and at this she showed a passing flicker of interest. When you are introduced to the great, you have a fleeting impression that they have taken in your features and your name, and that they’ll remember you the next time you meet. Shyamji was happy to pay his respects with a namaskar, then retreat into the background.

Later, when she was practising a song with Motilalji – without accompaniment, without harmonium – he was surprised that he could not hear her. He then went a little closer; the familiar voice became audible, small and sharp. So this is what a microphone could do!

Motilalji himself was a marvellous singer, astonishingly accomplished; but this was the pinnacle of his achievement – to have his talent mutedly applauded by Lata, to give her a few tunes for the bhajans she sang, to accompany her on the harmonium at the occasional public concert she gave, and to act as a filler during those concerts: that is, to sing a song or two when she wasn’t singing, and the audience was distracted, going out for coffee or to the toilet. At first, they’d all thought it was a miracle – a result of ‘bhagya’, fate – this conjunction with Lata Mangeshkar, and it was expected that, when the time came, she’d surely ‘do’ something for him. But she hadn’t ‘done’ anything for him; he had continued to be her filler, he hadn’t become a music director. What
could
she do? explained the family. But the relationship with Lata, to all outward purposes, was cordial; it could even be described as ‘particularly close’.

Part of Motilalji’s problem was drink; no use blaming others for a self-inflicted problem. Drink made him more solitary; late in the evening, he would sit alone, talking to himself. The rest of the day, if he was sober, he was abrasive; as if the world somehow displeased him. And his talent became a problematic responsibility he did not know what to do with; it was as if, having given so much to his gift – hard work, practice – he wanted something in return; and not having got that ‘something’, whatever it might be, he had decided to punish both himself and everyone around him.

Motilalji came into the room, looked around him, and appeared barely to notice his brother-in-law. But he had noticed him of course; ‘Bhaiyya, at this time of the morning?’ he said.

‘No, I had a moment,’ said Shyamji, ‘and I thought I’d stop for a glass of water.’

‘Well, did you get it?’

‘I did, and it gave much ananda,’ said Shyamji. Motilalji seemed to mull over this remark and dismiss it. He came to Shyamji and for the first time looked him in the eye.

‘Where are you going now?’ he asked; Shyamji smelled drink on his breath. Although the smell revolted Shyamji, he kept his expression amenable. He noticed that Motilalji’s teeth, bared briefly, had flecks of paan on them.

‘I was going to see a chela of mine at twelve o’clock, but I’m in no hurry – he’ll wait.’

Shyamji thought of this student of his, an enthusiastic young man whose voice kept going off-key, and put him out of his mind.

Motilalji patted his hair and smoothed his creased kurta. ‘Come with me then,’ he said, glancing at a mirror, and then at his watch.

It turned out that they were going to Cumballa Hill. This was not far away, and they might have walked it in half an hour. But Motilalji had lavish tastes; as they descended from the small hill on which the house stood, he hailed a taxi. They sat at the back, Shyamji wondering if they could have taken a bus. ‘Arrey, who will take a bus for such a short distance! And these buses tire me – I am not well.’ He looked distractedly before him.

Besides, no bus would have taken them straight to the building. Motilalji began to hum with a sour expression on his face, as if he was never on holiday from his talent and vocation, and resented the fact, as the taxi made the round from Peddar Road to Kemp’s Corner, and then turned right at the Allah Beli Cafe´ and continued down the straight lane. Shyamji, by contrast, was wide-eyed and curious, as if he was still not bored by this area. He was also silent. The small intermission of the journey seemed to have mixed up daydream and reality for him. He watched the sunlight fall on the different buildings; the old, deceptively homely but expensive shops on Kemp’s Corner; the multi-storeyed buildings in the lane in which mainly Gujaratis lived, with their sense of crowdedness; then the sense of spaciousness again as they turned into the hill, with its older buildings.

They came now to an old, large, three-storeyed house. ‘Arrey, dekho,’ said Motilalji, ‘I have only two rupees change in my pocket. These fellows will never have change for a hundred rupee note. Give him five rupees, will you, Shyam?’ and with that he got out of the taxi. Shyamji noticed, as he fished resignedly in his kurta pocket, that Motilalji’s dhoti was quite shabby. But he was not drunk; he was walking straight. They went up a single floor in an old lift, one that apparently never caught the sunlight. In a way that was both unworldly and dramatic, Motilalji rang the bell next to a large door with a brass nameplate.

The door was opened by an ageing bearer, a grey-haired Malyali, who’d grown inured to the incursion of people like Motilalji into the flat. Certain skills brought you into contact with the well-to-do, he’d decided; and in his thirty years as cleaner, boy, and bearer, he’d seen a range of skills. Besides, the lady of the house liked singing; the people he’d worked for had always had interesting hobbies, and he preferred the employers that had hobbies to the ones that didn’t have any. He was accomplished enough to feign a look of tolerance and respect toward Motilalji; he didn’t know the other man. Then, with an approximation of childlike enthusiasm, he padded off barefoot towards the bedroom to say, ‘Memsaab, music teacher has come!’

Motilalji sat on the sofa with a sort of half-smile on his face, while Shyamji turned his head momentarily to look at the flat; glancing back quickly over his shoulder, he saw the potted plants in the veranda. Motilalji leaned towards him to say something; but the lady was approaching them; he cleared his throat.

‘Mallika,’ he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind that I brought my dewar with me!’

The dewar, the brother-in-law, looked a bit startled; he felt, more than ever, that he was in someone else’s house, and that he’d been manipulated by Motilalji for a reason only he knew. He was also surprised, and mildly offended, that Motilalji referred to the lady by her name, rather than ‘Mallikaji’ or ‘didi’.

The lady smiled and nodded at Shyamji. John came out of the room with a harmonium, and placed it on the carpet.

‘She’s been learning from me for seven–eight months now,’ said Motilalji. ‘You should listen to her – she has a good voice. She’s very proud though.’

Shyamji quailed. He pretended he hadn’t heard.

‘My dewar’s name is Shyam – Shyam Lal,’ said Motilalji. ‘The late’, and he glanced at the heavens, ‘Pandit Ram Lal’s son. He’s quite a good singer, and a teacher too. He’s still young, though.’

The lady and Motilalji sat down to sing. First the parping sound of the harmonium, not very musical; then the lady began singing, while Motilalji sat there, feigning boredom. Her voice was full-throated, surprisingly melodious.

‘Wah, didi!’ said Shyamji after she’d finished; then Motilalji went through the motions – they could be called nothing else – of a lesson without bothering to raise his voice, but almost humming her a tune, which she followed assiduously, nodding appreciatively.

There was a break, and John brought them tea. Shyamji stirred his cup thoughtfully, and Motilalji declaimed,

‘You must practise this song, Mallika! And you have to get the pronunciation right!’

Mallika Sengupta had been trying to get the pronunciation right. In every way she liked being in Bombay; but as a singer she’d been temporarily unmoored, and had to find her bearings, and explore avenues she’d once never thought of exploring. These avenues mainly comprised bhajans and ghazals, so popular in Bombay. She’d had to take a deep breath to get round to them, of course. She’d never taken Hindi songs seriously when growing up; even though she’d heard the Hindi songs of Saigal and Kananbala, they were film songs, there was a prejudice against them in her family. Now, more than thirty years later, she found herself faced with these languages; the onus was on her, in the daytime loneliness of her flat, to get her tongue round Hindi and Urdu vowels and consonants.

Her metier was the Bengali song, the Tagore-song – naturally. Everything she said in Hindi, thus, sounded a bit like Bengali. But the Bengaliness of her voice – its rounded full-throatedness – is also what made her sound charming to her music teachers; they would prick up their ears and search for analogies: ‘You sing like Kanandevi,’ they’d say; or, ‘You sing like Geeta Dutt!’ Kanandevi had long turned to religion; Geeta Dutt had gone out of circulation prematurely; in the age of Lata, Mrs Sengupta’s voice was certainly different.

Mrs Sengupta’s voice evoked a ‘golden age’. When people heard it in this drawing room, when they closed their eyes they couldn’t believe it, they felt they’d been transported, somehow, to an earlier, to a better time. Secretly, one or two of them might think the voice ‘old fashioned’; but it wasn’t at all; it was simply out of place in the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist was Lata’s voice, thin, small, and, to Mrs Sengupta’s ears, shrill. This was the reigning definition of a female singing voice. Mallika Sengupta’s voice’s moment had passed, at least for now, though neither she nor anyone else could be conscious of this fact; passed, unless it was rediscovered in the distant, as-yet unimaginable future, unless a change of taste were brought about by a future generation and it cared to remember Mallika Sengupta.

Her beginnings were in a small town in North Bengal where her father had been an advocate. Her family had had social pretensions in the small town, but had swiftly fallen from grace after her father’s death when she was twelve. The family struggled; but the cultural pretensions survived, as did the talent and intelligence. Her own talent was least nurtured, because she was a girl. It was almost a lucky break that she met and married Apurva Sengupta.

At first she’d refused him; she laughed now when she thought of it. She laughed; but at the time it had been no laughing matter. She was not in love, she thought; and, even as the daughter in a large family run only partly successfully by a widowed mother, she had this impractical desire – not only to be loved, but also to love the person she would marry. Then there was the matter that he was her brother’s friend at college, and that was how she thought of him; and the fact that although her family looked up to him, both for being a ‘nice boy’ and for belonging to a wealthy zamindari family, their odd cultural snobbery made them look down on his family, as not being cultured enough. But the tumult of Partition and Independence had made these histories and their nuances, her brothers’ prejudices, absurd and dreamlike; the landscape changed permanently; she wisely accepted his offer, largely because she respected him, but also because she decided, shrewdly, that life with him would allow her to pursue her singing. Here she was in Bombay now, with her husband, as if they’d come from nowhere, freshly created from morning dew, the future a clean slate.

‘John!’ she said.

‘Memsaab!’ he responded urgently, emerging into the drawing room, a duster in one hand. Everything for him was a form of theatre.

‘Please remove the harmonium. Is baba’s food ready – the mutton stew?’ The smell of the stew had drifted into the hall. She was now waiting for her son to arrive.

‘Yes memsaab baba stew ready!’ exclaimed John in English; then stooped toward the harmonium.

Motilalji and his brother-in-law had left twenty minutes ago; her attention was focussed on the boy returning from school. She’d feel an inward restlessness, as if at a job left undone, until he’d come back and eaten.

The music was a constant trickle in her life, not allowed to disturb her routine; in fact, the routine went on, and now and then paused decorously to make time for the music, at which point it was consigned to someone else’s hands – John, or the cook; but it wasn’t allowed to stop. She never consented to losing her grip on it, to handing the reins to someone else, except temporarily.

Nirmalya came in busily at twenty to one. He was seven years old. Immediately, food was served on a trolley in the air-conditioned bedroom. It was what he liked best; daal and rice and fried fish.

Ten minutes after Motilalji had left, she’d had John shut the windows of the bedroom, in anticipation of her son’s arrival, and switch on the air conditioner. The temperature would be just right by the time he was here. Her mind kept going back to Motilalji’s little performance – you could call it nothing else – and the way his personality always exacerbated her. ‘She’s very proud,’ he’d said, or ‘she thinks very highly of herself,’ or words to that effect; and boasted the next moment, ‘Do you see how she holds that steady note? None of the others can do it!’ She was pleased by his praise, coming as it was from someone whose gift she respected; but she wasn’t certain how long she could cope with his personality.