The Immortals (37 page)

‘Lo!’ she said with a gruff laugh, drawing back in wonder as the old visitor gaped open-mouthed. ‘
You
are the one who does not want to take phone calls, and now
you
are the one to change your mind without telling anyone else. Tell me, is that right?’ she asked, smiling, shifting her benign, blessed squint towards the old man. She was careful, while rebutting her husband, to use ‘aap’, investing it at once with respect and a mischievous reproachfulness.

‘I said you’d let him know tomorrow,’ she added, as she vanished into the bedroom.

He was silent for a short while, neither saying anything after her or to the old relative, taking determined refuge, instead, in one of his ever-returning reveries.

The idea of travelling to Dongri quickened him; three fingers forming a chord, D sharp, on the harmonium, he crooned a ghazal – what did people listen to these days but ghazals? He decided to tell Banwari the next day: a tiny bit of good news that he deliberately delayed passing on.

In the morning, though, he had an irregular heartbeat, and, coming out of the bathroom, fresh from the effort of evacuation, he felt dizzy. The cardiologist who was now seeing him (arranged for by a student, one of the many who comprised the inexhaustible drove of new learners), Dr Readymoney, paid him a visit (three hundred rupees he’d charge him at the end, Shyamji knew; there was no way out) and, with a fastidious, metronomic gaze, took his pulse. ‘Telephone hai?’ he asked, in that richly musical Parsi Hindi, which had Sumati swooning over him in haste and anxious nodding compliance. He made a terse, polite call to have the music teacher admitted into a private nursing home in Versova.

Shyamji wasn’t overly worried. There was every chance he’d be better in a month’s time for Dongri and the Collector’s daughter and the wedding audience; he could smell that house; no need to refuse the Collector – if that’s what he was – this very moment. ‘Tell him I’m on a trip when he calls,’ he instructed his wife, sombre and moral, thinking it was the least consequential and most effective lie possible in the circumstances. Two middle-class disciples had been marshalled along with Dr Readymoney; they hovered by the doorway and ran up and down the stairs, quite oblivious of the lift; he – his family – was in his students’ hands; he was safe. Sumati, too, was unworried by the truant heartbeats; the sight of Shyamji’s students was a source of great pride and comfort, of almost a lulling rightness. She was smiling, as ever, at the way the different pieces were coming together. ‘Remember to take the pills!’ she cried out as an afterthought.

As he was being moved out of the ambulance in the cornice-and-lawn-bordered compound of the nursing home, his mind, not taking in the birdcall at all, was working at a terrific speed; he was comparing the costs of the treatment with his earnings and what he could expect from his students, and he was on the brink of arriving at a figure, like a musician, goose-fleshed, coming to the end of the allocations in a cycle of laya. Then he felt tired and closed his eyes, murmuring, ‘He´ bhagwan’ – almost a pleasurable blankness, as he entrusted his volition to the men around him, and was suddenly carried forward.

The flat in Sagar Apartments was in morningtime disarray. The forgiving pre-luncheon fragrance of worship, sandalwood incense, had spread from Mataji’s secretive, jealously-attended shrine in the bedroom to the sitting room. The maidservant was bent, a wet and dripping sheaf of spinach bunched in one fist. When Nisha, the youngest daughter, powdering her dark, acned cheeks, heard, she cried in terror – ‘Papa!’ – as she used to when she’d see bandicoots scurrying into the chawl in King’s Circle, and fainted. Sumati, her daughter’s head on her lap, sprinkled water on her face, intent, proper, ceremonial; she revived, dazed by her mother’s face, by the closeness of the ceiling, by the daylight, the cawing. ‘Hai Ram, hai Ram,’ Sumati said. ‘Kuchh samaj me nahi aa raha hai!’ She was lost. Of all the children in the family, Nisha was the least musical; she was learning, with an elemental buoyancy, to be a hairstylist. She was supposed to leave in half an hour for her training, curling her fingers, in a cramped and artificially nocturnal interior, around people’s hair.

Mataji, in her white widow’s sari, sat on the divan, silent, worship peremptorily abandoned, as if every part of her had been cut out of stone.

It was Banwari who called Mallika Sengupta; eyes bloodshot, nervous, he’d been making phonecall after phonecall, like a businessman desperate to trace a product on the market, his pale fingernail curving round the dial of the phone. She’d just been instructing a maidservant, one of Jumna’s many temporary, and inadequate, replacements in the last two months, to fold a sari she’d taken off before going to sleep. The young woman stood behind her, with childlike simplicity pinning down one end of this striking sari with her chin. Mallika Sengupta and her husband had gone to a party last night on the other side of the city, and returned late, exhausted, to the nighttime idyll of Bandra.

‘See what has happened to your brother, didi!’ said Banwari, his voice, as ever, hoarse, but passionate with bewilderment and injustice.

She had not heard from Shyamji for two weeks – an unusual neglect, to do with Nirmalya’s absence, of the steadfast, placatory role the music lesson played in her day. Instead, she’d been going to the Neogis’, not altogether happy to be there, watching Nayana Neogi, large in her smock, reigning in her inert way over the bed, she herself in the wicker chair, never, even now, completely sans the aura of the successful executive’s wife, surrounded by lackadaisically incumbent dogs, and one self-assured feline who appeared and faded at will. Sometimes, when Nayana (both of them having run out of chit-chat) lay worryingly silent – was she napping? – Mallika, in the remote presence of her old friend, took out a brand-new aerogramme from her handbag, and began to fill its paper-aeroplane-like folds with her large, impatient English handwriting: ‘Our shona Nirmalya . . .’ This was what retired life should be like; but Mallika Sengupta could never accept her life as a superannuated one, and soon wanted to get back home; but wondered, too, at how everything at the Neogis’ had been reassembled after the disaster of the rains, when water had flooded this ground-floor flat, as it did every monsoon, making Prashanta Neogi walk about ankle-deep in the sitting room, rescuing the avant-garde ashtrays, gathering up an armful of old spotted copies of
Imprint
(for which he once worked), Nayana, a dog cradled in her own arms, warning him: ‘Arrey baba, be careful of the electric wires!’ ‘We’ll have to vacate this flat,’ she confessed to Mallika, comfortably retrospective now, and semi-horizontal on the bed. ‘The water’s become too much of a nuisance; it’s not safe here any more’: but where would they go? Property prices were incredible; and what savings did a retired commercial artist have? ‘The only safe place to go is upstairs,’ she concluded, metaphorical but subversive at the end of her worldly tenancy; she was loosening her ties in a way that Mrs Sengupta could not. But the rhythm of these social exchanges had become, for Mallika Sengupta, a substitute for the music. She’d once again begun thinking of Shyamji, lately, with a mixture of puzzlement and suspicion: he’d made use of her as he’d used his other students, but, in return, had failed to back her in the way he should have. The disciple wants nothing of the guru but knowledge; but Shyamji was not a teacher in the mythological sense. He lived in a world of transactions. He expected his students to promote him; his students expected him to promote them; it was a relationship of interdependence at once less calculating, less final, and more human – with all the oscillations of judgement and misunderstandings that humans are prone to – than one might be led to believe.

Her husband was sealed in a meeting; trembling in the universe-illuminating mid-morning light, she changed into a sari and rushed out, hoping to catch up with the procession that Banwari had said, before disconnecting, was about to embark with the body toward a crematorium. ‘Which crematorium, Banwariji? How to get there?’: relieved, and the brunt of the news tempered, by the banalities of the quest. Once in the back of the Ambassador, she passed on, in her familiar summations so confusing to drivers (as if facts and destinations were beneath her), but noticeably emotional, the directions Banwari had given her with a peculiar, protective calmness. Half an hour passed as the hallowed, leaf-encircled, church-dotted streets of Bandra changed, and changed again, into the dusty edges of a metropolis of small retail outlets, large hoardings, cars tense and quiet at traffic lights. Then, past a dark, stifled PCO distributing the manna of long-distance calls to those who were hungry for the sound of the human voice, and the large, inviolate sanctum of a temple to Lakshmi, she saw a sizeable but straggly group, some of whom she knew, by sight or name or personally, joined together by their common, day-to-day pursuit of music, undertaken with varying degrees of intensity, or simply for its soothing, medicinal qualities, by, too, a currency of ghazals and bhajans that had been circulating among them, and, by choice, but as good as inadvertently, to the fate of a man who now occupied their thoughts and had left them temporarily baffled and disoriented. ‘He’s gone in,’ said Dr Kusum Deshpande sadly, a paediatrician who’d been a student of Ram Lal in another time, a ‘guru behan’ – a sister by virtue of having had the same guru – of the man who might as well have entered that doorway (such was the almost comic wistfulness of her words) to keep an appointment. She and Mallika Sengupta were the only women in the company, both educated, out of place, not women in the traditional sense (who were discouraged, as children might be, from being anywhere near the pyre, as if they might catch an infection); these two could not cry, but only have a conversation, and discuss – a look of utter disbelief on Mrs Sengupta’s face, a faint, wise smile on Dr Deshpande’s – the irrationality of what had occurred. She was six years older than Shyam; remembered him as a taciturn, precocious boy in and out of the room in which she used to sit and learn bandishes from the thin, idiosyncratic, but jubilant Ram Lal. ‘He was so talented,’ she said in English, shaking her head, struck by the memory of the boy, and the immediacy of his incursions into the room. ‘He would have been famous.’ The men around them were largely silent, mistaking physical discomfort for emotional dislocation, pushing back the collars of their shirts, not knowing what to do, waiting, again, to be needed or required.

A
LONG WITH
an invitation to join a discussion on the second coming of Christ by members of the New Church, a scribbled note on the back of a scrap of circular from Mr Dickinson, asking whether the time of the next tutorial could possibly be changed, a terse pamphlet, full of exclamation marks and a smudged picture of Winnie Mandela, exhorting the reader to become one of the many who no longer ate South African oranges, there was, in Nirmalya’s pigeonhole, an aerogramme, a silent traveller from India, its blue peering out from amidst the white and yellow. Surprisingly, it bore his father’s small, ornate handwriting. Despite directions provided to the recipient, the aerogramme always threatened to come apart in Nirmalya’s hands as he tore it open. Exhuming its contents like something that had been hidden in a magic box, he found a message written in a formal, somewhat stiff style, the style of a man who’d grown more used to officialese than to personal disclosure; but it masked deep emotion, the emotion of a father who’d successfully protected his son from the world, and wanted to continue to protect him. ‘Such things happen,’ he wrote. ‘Your Shyamji didn’t know where his best interests lay.’ He spoke of Shyamji as if he’d committed a minor transgression, something that could be forgiven and forgotten.

Shyamji was in a hurry, thought Nirmalya; as he read – ignored by students in the common room who hardly knew him, who were bending, congregating, spontaneously breaking away – he felt, for once, poised and centred in his aloneness, and his eyes filled with tears too fine and crystalline for anyone to have noticed, while, as ever, he sat in judgement upon his teacher. Taking a Tube from the Strand, numb, like everyone else on the train, but vivid with a secret grief that made him, in his own eyes, separate from the other commuters, and suddenly immune to the awkwardness of exile, he got off finally at Tottenham Court Road, and wandered, as he often did without rhyme or reason, among the crowds and theatres, but this time to clear his thoughts. He’d wanted too much too soon, he thought, as he upbraided his dead teacher for his impatient – even irresponsible – departure. What would Nirmalya, guruless, do now? And what was that ‘too much’? Certain of what it was, he didn’t – couldn’t – specify it to himself.

Three months later, he was in the lane off Pali Hill, relieved to be back home for the excess and heat of summer in this sloping, tapering neighbourhood. When Banwari and Pyarelal came to see him, he said, ‘The weather over there is so gloomy, I don’t feel like singing most of the time. I try to sing Purvi, and I think: what’s the point? Pyarelalji, the light isn’t right. Ekdum theek nahihai. Some days in London, evening doesn’t come, because it’s like evening from the morning onward.’ Pyarelal nodded vigorously, delighted, not because he understood exactly what Nirmalya meant, but because he expanded with pride while listening to him hold forth; Banwari seemed non-committal and suffused with responsibility, as if he were weighing, with exaggerated gravity, Nirmalya’s words.

Nirmalya was happy to see Banwari and Pyarelal, quickened as of old with a simple wonder at their reappearance. They were like friends; he’d never felt that tension with them that he had with Shyamji, where his feelings had been complicated, set on edge, by reverence and expectation. But he noticed that, despite their cheerfulness, they were oddly at a loss at their own juxtaposition, courteous elders of the bridegroom’s party where the bridegroom had gone missing, leaving them embarrassed and clearing their throats; Shyamji’s death had disoriented them – the intensely shy younger brother, and the garrulous, fidgety older man who’d married into the family and felt shackled to it ever since.