The Immortals (36 page)

‘You know, he said to me on the phone day before yesterday, “Tell Shyamji to be careful. He isn’t looking too well.” ’

Shyamji sipped his tea, smiled ruefully: ‘He is my biggest critic. He keeps a stern eye on me.’

It was true; had been true in the last four years, with those recurrent queries made in the glassy whirl of life in Cuffe Parade. Nirmalya’s frequent, awkward questions to Shyamji – ‘Why don’t you sing more classical?’ – his high-minded disenchantment, from the transcendent vantage-point of Thacker Towers, with the music scene – ‘Why are bhajans and ghazals sung in this cheap way these days?’ – had earned him a nickname, ‘the critic’. It was a bit of leg-pulling; Nirmalya enjoyed it. ‘Baba is a big critic,’ Shyamji would say, pretending to be very thoughtful. And yet Nirmalya, in this incarnation, had managed to make him slightly uneasy. A couple of years ago, late one morning in Thacker Towers, the boy, with obviously no real anxieties to plague him, had asked, genuinely exercised, ‘Why don’t you sing classical more often?’ and Shyamji had tried explaining, with a patience he reserved for the pure-hearted but naive, ‘Baba, you cannot practise art on an empty stomach. Let me make enough money from these lighter forms; and then I’ll be able to devote myself entirely to classical.’ A perfectly workable blueprint. But, to Shyamji’s discomfort, ‘the critic’ had not replied, but looked at him beady-eyed, as if to say, with a seventeen-year-old’s moral simplicity and fierce dogmatic conviction: ‘That moment will never come. The moment to give yourself to your art is now.’

J
UMNA
–
THIS WOMAN
who’d come to their house seventeen years ago as a cleaner of bathrooms, elegant, measured, twenty-six, whom Mrs Sengupta, in the first flush of company life, had pronounced a ‘cultured woman, more cultured than the women I meet at parties’ – this Jumna, already tired and resigned before she’d touched the jhadu, sat down on her haunches on the sitting-room carpet. One small eye sparkled with moisture. She’d been coming late every day for a month, the ends of her sari trailing behind her as she swept guiltily in like a phantom at eleven o’clock; Mrs Sengupta was not happy with her.

‘Memsaab,’ said Jumna, trying to reason with this familiar person shaking her head who was part employer, part perhaps comrade, ‘it’s too long a distance from Mahalaxmi to this part of the city. Bahut vanda hota hai – too much hassle. Why cause all this gichir-michir and gussa? Let me retire now, memsaab.’

Her hair was all grey, the metal strands falling on both sides of the parting and gathered at the back – this woman to whom Mallika Sengupta often used to turn, in the sea-facing heaven of La Terrasse, for solace, of whom she used to think, ‘Well, in some ways she’s luckier than I am.’

She sat before her on her haunches, patient in her campaign.

‘What are you saying, Jumna,’ said Mrs Sengupta, hardly listening. ‘How can you give up a good job in this way? Do you think they’re to be plucked from trees? And you’re much younger than I am.’

She said this complacent in the knowledge that she looked so much younger than Jumna; time hadn’t hurt her substantially since the flash had gone off in the studio in 1971 and illuminated that face with two surreptitious pearl-like crooked teeth and the fashionable dangling earrings falling from the earlobes; and Jumna (who’d circled that photograph and dusted it many times) knew it was only appropriate that this should be so, knew, without envy, that Mrs Sengupta had been blessed by the powers that governed lives (it was enough, for her, to have come into contact with such a being), and she now indulged, as she always did, Mrs Sengupta’s blitheness. As a rule, the poor age more quickly than the affluent; time, and life, move, for them, at another pace, ‘like a relapse after a long illness’. In fact, Jumna’s eldest son, after joining Jaslok Hospital as a sweeper two years ago – temporary employment, but imminently to be made permanent (‘You must educate your children,’ the ten-year-old Nirmalya, who quailed at the thought of school, once preached to Jumna; but her son had, in a doomed, helpless way, dropped out of his municipal school in the seventh standard) – this son had contracted jaundice and died a year ago. The awful husband – ‘Your sufferings in this birth will probably make your next birth a happy one,’ Nirmalya had instructed her when he was seven – that lame bewda who’d knocked out her teeth and drenched her with kerosene, intent to set fire to her one night: he too had died, hunted down by cirrhosis, two years ago. Now Jumna had had enough of making that tedious journey from Mahalaxmi; her left eyelid closed upon moisture; she wanted to go to the free optician for a pair of long-awaited spectacles.

‘I’ll find employment in the city,’ she reassured her unconvinced employer, and then, like a charm against refusal, reiterated a by-now ancient, barely-respected excuse. ‘The train to Bandra takes long, and sometimes I miss the train.’

H
E KEPT GOING
to the window of the little room, almost habituated now to its odd smell of carpet and fittings and the faint hovering ghost of a cigarette smoker; it was a concourse of people he wanted to see, but each time found other windows reflecting the modest light, and a courtyard on which it rained often. From the beginning, he was struck by the excess of silence; and he began to realise that his famous love of solitude was not real, that he loved company and noise much more than his own thoughts. He ate badly; half-eaten green apples, bitten into without pleasure, were thrown into the waste-paper basket; he went into the kitchen like a mouse at three o’clock in the afternoon, when there was no one else there, and put a Ginsters’ Cornish pasty into the oven. It smelled awful; but it was an absurdly, almost cheeringly, simple solution, and the rank but appetising smell made him impatient with hunger; the first bite always burnt his lips. Later, dead with solitariness, he switched on the kettle to make himself a cup of tea, its rumble growing like an approaching storm and chastising him and making him nervous, until the entire room filled with its roar. He needn’t have worried; it became silent, like everything else, including the plumbing behind the walls – where, as a matter of fact, the real pulsations of the place seemed to be hidden. The steam emerging from the spout pleased him; as any signal of life, even from things not really alive, had begun to please him.

Disturbingly free, for a student, of a plan of action or an impending deadline, he poured the water into a mug and watched the colour swim away unhurriedly from a tea bag.

He was unhappy – and undecided for the first ten days about practising. ‘At least I’m alone in this room,’ he thought, granting himself the luxury of asking for the one hundredth time, ‘What on earth possessed me to come to this country?’ He’d always envied Goopy and Bagha, the two buffoons, for their magic nagra shoes, which could transport them in an instant from one kingdom to another; London made him ache with such impossible longings. And just when he’d grown used to listening to the silence and its thin, unvarying pitch, he heard, one grey afternoon, his neighbour in the next room, coughing. Nirmalya was trapped; he froze at his table; his heart plummeted suddenly. The cocoon-like fabric of rumination and subterfuge he’d spun around himself in the first week was unravelled by this bodiless presence, whom he couldn’t see, but who became, in his or her ordinariness, a focus of Nirmalya’s suspicions and speculations. For an interminable fifteen minutes after hearing the solitary, but astonishingly candid, cough, Nirmalya kept very quiet, newly aware of every sound. The changing light from morning to afternoon, as he sat petrified in his room, took on a despondent significance.

Then he ran into his neighbour in the corridor at midday, and saw he’d been imagining a monster. A large, chunky, brown-haired man stuffed unevenly into a sweater like a pillow in a pillowcase, he’d clearly just woken up, and was on his way to do something necessary in the toilet. ‘Hello,’ he nodded to Nirmalya, his hair ravaged and made untidy with sleep, his freckled face full of a simple, childlike trust as he made his way through the corridor.

Tentatively, Nirmalya began to sing; hitting the sa, but no more than murmuring the note, feeling foolish too, afraid, almost, of being thought mad. Like many other singers, he too, in an unthinking ritual, took off his wristwatch and placed it beside himself before he began, as if he were about to dive into water, or embark on a journey for which there must be some form of material evidence and record; the white dial, he noticed, sighing deeply from the pressure of some unspecified responsibility, said five past ten. He began with the Asavari composition Shyamji had sung for him once, which then, quickly bringing out the two-in-one, he’d taped, then run over in secret with the maternally nurturing Pyarelal, a sweet, melancholy piece. Outside his window, the sun was waning; a very different sun from the one he was used to. What sense, he asked himself, does it make to sing Asavari here? Yet he steeled himself, his voice much louder, magnified, in the deceptive late-morning hall-of-residence silence.

His tutor, a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket, grey-black hair combed back to announce a thinker’s forehead (his name was Dickinson, an elegant interlocutor who seemed, on principle, not to have produced anything of note), wanted to cure Nirmalya of his philosophical hunger. He responded to his intensity with a cup of tea and a tin of biscuits, never forgetting to round this off with the question that effectively stemmed the questions his student might have asked: ‘Sugar?’ He approached Nirmalya’s unspoken sense of civilisational crisis as a doctor might a hypochondriac’s ailment, wryly, warily, not wishing in any way to offend. ‘Existence is not the chief problem of philosophy,’ he said, tolerant, good-humoured, as if he were breaking news that had long gone stale, ‘language is. But of that, more later.’

E
XPLORING THE
epicentre of London, with its cinemas, Anne Summers lingerie shops, ghostly doner kebab outlets and overcrowded sandwich-purveying delicatessens, its windows displaying the slashed prices of electrical goods or silent constellations of wristwatches, its private sex shops with indigo-blue doors, he entered a narrow sunlit avenue called Charlotte Street. Here, utterly despondent, walking past grim buildings, he found himself face to face with a barber’s shop in a corner. ‘A haircut is long overdue,’ he thought; but hesitated, desolate, conscience-stricken, on the pavement. His hair, straight on the whole, a glimmering black, in which mysterious waves appeared as it descended the tide-mark of the collar, was precious to him. Yet, resolved to tackle the unpleasant but necessary ceremony head-on, he entered the shop, hung his deep-sea-fisherman’s anorak from a hook, and sat down upon a sofa beside two other obedient victims who were pretending to read. He was beckoned, finally, with a forefinger; and as the Italian smashed the white cloth against the air like a child’s magician, he, before removing his spectacles, checked his reflection sadly in the mirror. ‘Just a trim, please,’ he said, diffident, for a moment, that he must make this deeply felt plea in a language he had no proprietorial right to – and because he, and his whole being, were now in the barber’s hands. The barber paid no attention; unsmiling, as detached as a blind man, he flashed his scissors and ran the comb through Nirmalya’s hair as if stroking a musical instrument. Then, like one who knew exactly what he was doing, he chopped off a great deal of the hair, as its young owner sat helplessly still. The hair which Nirmalya had started growing after school, this emanation, no less peculiar than a halo, which he allowed to be touched by complicit hands only once in two and a half months, lay irrevocably on a dark floor in Charlotte Street.

Two weeks later, as if in penitence, and in a moment’s hurtling recklessness, he shaved his moustache and his goatee; the face he saw above the basin was completely ‘normal’, surprisingly pleasant-looking, almost certainly respectable. He felt a great relief, and an irrepressible desire to laugh – delighted to return to the human race, to all the ambitions and desires it decreed were valid, and which he, too, surreptitiously shared. His razed but gleaming cheeks protested at the slap and sting of Tabac.

‘T
HERE’S AN INVITATION
, ji – from outside Bombay,’ said Sumati, adjusting the curve of her aanchal as she replaced the handset in its cradle. Shyamji was on the divan, his head propped on the palm of one hand, talking animatedly to a relative, an old man in white who sat on the carpet in a way that made it seem he could see all the way to the horizon. ‘From Dongri. Some bada officer posted there lagta hai – I think “Collector”-hi was what he said – his daughter is getting married. He said he’ll pay twenty thousand rupees and, arrey wa, first-class fare for you and Banwari and Pyareji. For you to sing, saheb, the night after the wedding for a small group of friends.’

Shyamji frowned more and more at Sumati’s unflagging cheer. Dongri was a nowhere place; but twenty thousand rupees!

‘He says he heard you sing in Khemkar saab’s house and is mad about your singing,’ she continued softly, caught in the vision of a time when she used to sit hunched in the background, face partially concealed by the aanchal, listening, her husband singing to a hall packed with government servants and businessmen, when Khemkar was no longer Chief Minister, but still a person of influence. She was very proud of her husband. Her indulgent, teasing adoration used to irritate the other relatives.

‘What did you tell him?’ he asked, half-listening to what she’d said. He used the familiar ‘tu’: married for more than twenty years, they were like a sister and a brother who’d almost approached an understanding about living with each other; half the time, they didn’t notice one another, except in fleeting glances of recognition, or with mild distaste and weariness. ‘Arrey, Suman, why didn’t you give
me
the phone?’ He only excavated her pet name to address her when he was close to exasperation.