The Immortals (21 page)

‘Why, Nirmalya? What can you possibly lack? You have everything.’

Later, he joined them for lunch and dourly polished off Arthur’s fruit trifle.

D
ESPITE THE URGE
to go to the Himalayas, he also went with his parents to the Taj, and ate chilli cheese toast with them in the Sea Lounge. With a mixture of firmness and practised intimacy, Mr Sengupta, as he entered, placed an arm on the waiter’s shoulder and asked to be led only towards the left to the large sea-facing windows. There they sat at the tables meant for two – for couples or business accomplices; indeed, his parents came here every Saturday, for one unadulterated hour of silent nibbling and tea-stirring punctuated by conversation – and when Nirmalya came with them, he descended oddly on the third, awkward chair that was placed before the table by someone, and waited for the rectangular strips of toast with their swollen topping of cheese flecked with warning red spots.

Never entirely removed from where his parents were, or the areas in which he’d grown up or studied, he could still be spotted – even in the Taj on a Saturday – at different places almost simultaneously, as if these different incarnations of him – in the bookshop, at one end of the lobby, then at another end – all had a mysterious purpose or mission. Once, floating unmindfully, almost contentedly, down the glassy surface of the corridor that connected the old Taj to the new, he saw, and was seen by, a small figure, motionless among elegant passers-by. Pyarelal!

‘Pyarelal, what are you doing
here
?’ asked the boy, delighted, confused.

Pyarelal grinned as if he had a secret. His pale yellow kurta shone. Then, as Apurva and Mallika Sengupta approached, he dipped low and did a namaskar.

‘I have a programme here at six,’ he explained – he hadn’t shaved properly; there was still a bit of grey stubble on the chin. ‘My student Jayashree Nath performs before tourists. Please come whenever you have the time, baba.’ Behind him was the church-heavy door of the Tanjore restaurant. It was ajar; through a small gap, Nirmalya peered in to see a waiter in a dark suit, a shadowy, noticeably handsome figure – the restaurant was empty of diners at this time of the day – and a group of what looked like American men and women.

And, indeed, next week, Nirmalya did drop in to Tanjore; he pushed open the door, and was let in by the waiter in the black suit without a word. There were about fifteen tourists in the semi-dark of the restaurant; red-faced women in dresses or trousers, as if congregated in some suburb for a dashing evangelist, or to debate the environmental policies of an industrial house; and large men who were unaccountably shy. When Pyarelal appeared in a businesslike manner, he glanced at the audience, as a great artist resurrected from the dead might regard the living, without surprise, but with restrained curiosity; and then he spotted Nirmalya. He was pleased, and sent him a knowing smile. Bowing, but gazing above the audience’s heads, he did an elaborate namaskar, almost as much part of the performance as the dance itself. The tourists stirred vaguely, respectfully, as at the beginning of a speech; they didn’t know what the correct response to this was. He sat down before the harmonium with great solemnity; the dignity was expected of him; he’d cast aside the other Pyarelal, the one who was married to Tara, with three children, Puaji to the nephews and nieces, old Puaji, who would never go away, and who lost his temper at night. There was a sound of bells, again, again, and then Jayashree Nath, the bells round her ankles vibrating with every step, appeared on the platform with a young tabla player who ducked his head and glanced goofily at the visitors. She, however, had a far more worldly, assured air, like a tourist guide, cheerful, mechanical, underneath her apsara’s appearance; and, in a tourist guide’s English, she related the story she was about to perform, the perennially winsome one about Radha going with her friends to the banks of the Yamuna and there being harried by Krishna.

When she began to dance, and Pyarelal, clearing his throat daintily, to croon the words in raga Khamaj into the microphone, the explanation gradually became superfluous. The suburban women’s blue eyes sparkled like chips of aquamarine, as if extra interpretation were unnecessary. Repeatedly, surreptitiously, but in a strangely public way, like a lover who wants to make his excitement plain to anyone who cares to notice, Pyarelal glanced at Nirmalya; today’s performance was for him. The tourists were never not appreciative; even on bad days, when they danced and sang with less involvement, going through the motions in a way only they were aware of, the tourists’ applause was always spontaneous and automatic. This left Pyarelal content but secretly disconnected; he knew he’d been transformed into a fresco, a gilded element in a larger ‘Indian’ experience. Today, Nirmalya’s presence gave the performance a hidden competitiveness; they were no longer ‘Indian’ artistes, they felt they needed to show him that they were
good
artistes. So, although the tourists were innocent of this, Pyarelal and even Jayashree Nath and the tabla player were engaged in a give-and-take of concealed pleasure, of revelations and gestures, with the intruder.

Once, he took Pyarelal upstairs, to the veranda outside the Sea Lounge, where his parents, a couple of splendid potted plants their neighbours, sat on cane chairs having tea. ‘Pyarelalji, do sit down!’ said Mallika Sengupta, as he lowered himself cautiously into the forbidding oasis. ‘Will you have some tea?’ asked Apurva Sengupta, and Pyarelal made one of his exaggerated gestures, humble and overwrought, which could have meant anything. Tea arrived, and Pyarelal watched fastidiously as the waiter poured the weak brew into a china cup; ‘Bas, bas,’ he interjected with dignity as the man added milk. He began to relax; thoughtful, but every nerve sensitive, he stirred the tea with a spoon.

T
WO MONTHS AGO
, Nirmalya and Mallika Sengupta had gone for the first time to Shyamji’s house.

‘It is very far, didi,’ Shyamji had warned her, as if she’d suddenly threatened, unreasonably, to journey to a wilderness. ‘A very small place – we don’t have much to show . . .’

‘What nonsense!’ said Mrs Sengupta, in total control, as usual, of her decision, distracted by the heat, a neglected spot of powder on the tip of her nose.

Shyamji had recovered instantly and smoothed his hair back as he went out of the apartment; he’d said very sincerely, his pride recollected:

‘Please do come, didi. We’d be very happy if you did.’

When they arrived finally after an hour and a half in the summer evening, moving from familiar terrain into unfamiliar Matunga, through dust, oil-slicks and traffic past the slums of Dharavi, they found Shyamji in spotless white kurta and pyjamas, and Sumati, smiling, her pallu covering her head, waiting for them.

‘Aiye, aiye, didi,’ said Sumati. ‘Oh, I’m so glad baba came too.
Vel-come
,’ she said to him in English. ‘Kyun, did I say it right?’ and laughed loudly.

Shyamji and Sumati vacated their places on the divan for Mrs Sengupta and Nirmalya, and sat on an old sofa opposite. Hurriedly, Sumati went inside to make tea; the small sitting room was divided from the kitchen and the bedroom inside by a curtain and a wall. She came out briefly again with a tray with two glasses of water for the visitors and stood before them; they didn’t know, for a moment, what to do. Caste was not, of course, the problem; for what can keep you from accepting food and drink in a brahmin’s house? No, caste, anyway, was an irrelevance for the Senguptas – but other questions preoccupied them. Shyamji was watching patiently; but the Senguptas didn’t drink water that wasn’t boiled; they’d agreed amongst themselves to ban all water offered to them outside home, unless, of course, it came from a completely trusted source. Still Sumati, in her innocence, hovered like a spirit of solicitude, a half-smile on her lips; Mrs Sengupta, hot in her sari, hesitated, then picked up the glass and, as if this were the logical thing to do, placed it on the table in front of her. Nirmalya, faced with the tumbler, retreated almost visibly into his own awkwardness: ‘No, I’m all right,’ he said, and Sumati protested in disbelief, ‘Kya, baba, you don’t want water?’ and the tumbler returned to the kitchen behind the curtain from where it had come. Behind the divan, on the wall, was Pandit Ram Lal’s portrait, utterly still. And, from a distance, you could hear kirtans from the gurdwara’s loudspeaker.

And yet how wonderful it was to be in his guru’s house, the electric bulbs making the room bright, a room in which visitors were welcomed, but in which the divan where they sat, lightly covered with a sheet, obviously became someone’s bed at night. Mrs Sengupta did most of the talking; Nirmalya was largely silent, as he used to be when he accompanied his mother to the houses of acquaintances as a child; he held Shyamji in too high a regard to ever have a comfortable conversation with him. Besides, what would they talk about? They couldn’t discuss music, because it was not discussable; it was a set of rules and commands that had to be passed on and picked up almost unthinkingly. In fact, it wasn’t certain Shyamji ever
thought
about the kind of things that Nirmalya considered the province of
thought
; it seemed that his immediate future and that of his children, and, in that context, the business of proper conduct and what was admissible were what exercised Shyamji in his daily life. Nirmalya didn’t consider this ‘thinking’; his own daily life involved an agonising – punctuated by blank phases of stupefaction – over the history that, from the beginning of time, had gone into forming the moment that he now, in 1981, found himself uneasily in. Shyamji would, in all probability, have met these ruminations with incomprehension. The question, then, of having a conversation with Shyamji didn’t arise – where would it lead? Nirmalya was happy to be there, to sit and listen, as he often did when his mother talked, while two smoking cups of tea, brown with milk, were placed before them, and he, from time to time, as he sat there, became lost in the difficult, tenuous weave of his own speculations.

The second time Mrs Sengupta went to Shyamji’s house, she found a self-conscious, dark woman, somewhat younger than her, sitting on the divan.

‘Didi, this is Ashaji,’ said Shyamji, with an added carefulness and civility. ‘She is singing two songs in the film: we are very lucky.’

Mrs Sengupta looked at her again, this woman whose songs were played every day on the radio, and who, with her elder sister, reigned in a dual tyranny over the Hindi film music world. The face was benign, but mask-like; she seemed slightly ill at ease.

‘My son is very fond of your singing,’ said Mrs Sengupta as she sat down. Asha’s face brightened imperceptibly, but the mask-like composure didn’t change.

‘You should listen to didi some day,’ said Shyamji, assured, mellifluous. ‘She has a very beautiful voice.’

‘Oh I can tell,’ said Asha, smiling faintly. ‘Her speaking voice itself is musical to the ear.’
Her
speaking voice was a degree louder than a hoarse whisper; the words were spoken with the slow deliberateness of a child.

These words came back to Mallika Sengupta the next day; yes, she was pleased with them, but she dismissed them; it was beneath her to accept such crumbs of appreciation from this woman, who’d appeared to her in the incarnation of an ordinary working person in a plain printed sari. There was no getting round it; she lived in a world wholly separate from Asha’s, married happily to a successful man, moving about in sparkling, if occasionally vacuous, circles. But she wondered whether it was accident or destiny or her own hidden desire that had made her what she was. She’d never wanted to be Asha; yet what was it about her own talent that made it meaningless without the happiness she had, and also always made the happiness incomplete?

S
HYAMJI
’
S STOCK
had gone up steadily in the last three years: he decided to leave this small rented flat in which he’d lived for decades. Besides, families were growing larger; in neighbouring flats in the row of chawls, Banwari and Pyarelal lived with their wives and children. ‘Beta, Shyam,’ said his mother, small but zealous in her widow’s white sari, ‘you must do something, the children are growing up, there is no room any more.’

So they left King’s Circle; it was almost a wrench, to leave the noise of the gurdwara and the congestion. The task of acquiring the new properties in which the families would now be located, of dividing the money they’d get from their old landlord on vacating their flats in the chawl and using it for this purpose, of applying for loans – all this was left to Shyamji. Pyarelal, barely literate, kept himself in the background (even his withdrawals were dramatic and meant to draw attention), restricting himself to nodding or shaking his head like a deaf-mute when a response was required. On the whole, Shyamji ignored him; his eyes glazed over whenever Pyarelal drifted into the vicinity; but he went about his business stoically, of providing his brother-in-law and his family, besides himself and his brother, with a place to live. Banwari was no help either; he lacked confidence in himself. He continued, silent, decorous, with his old routine, of playing the tabla at various people’s houses, practising, quite deliberately, an abnegation of his own from his brother’s search, as if there were no change in his life.