The Immortals (40 page)

Nirmalya saw the bandaged leg later, as he stood next to the bed along with his mother and Tara, as she drew the screen to blot out the incumbent on a neighbouring chair, a man with well-combed hair with shirt buttons open up to just above the stomach, keeping vigil next to a puzzlingly well-looking woman.

‘Give them space,’ Pyarelal ordered Tara; she, suddenly yielding and obedient, stepped backward to make way for the visitors.

The lower leg beneath the pyjama was supported by a metal splint that had been screwed, it appeared to Nirmalya, on to the bone of the shin and ankle; an intimate streak of blood, like betel juice, had dribbled on to the dressing.

‘Well, you won’t be able to play the tabla with me next week,’ said Nirmalya, pressing his arm with the urgency of their early conversations, an urgency that returned in deceptive waves whenever they were together. Hidden in that clasp were all sorts of things; the first onrush of love, faded misunderstandings, mutual suspicion, and the memory of the transformation, the sense of possibility, that music brings. They’d once held that knowledge like a secret. ‘I was thinking of sitting for some practice. Maybe I can ask your son to play.’ Pyarelal’s son had learnt the tabla; it was going to be his profession too, the gharana deepening, continuing, then losing itself in the mundane.

Pyarelal at once looked apologetic, a bit confused – probably because he was no one’s guru. He’d taught people a few things, yes, but he had no official status. He’d taught Nirmalya many things, but Nirmalya’s guru was Shyamji; he didn’t dispute that. In private, he said to Tara: ‘Arrey, what did Shyam teach him?
I
taught him much more!’ And then the two of them, the small, darting man who could be full of pestilential fury, the large smouldering wife, became silent and heavy for a minute, probably for very different reasons.

L
ATER, AT THE
close of the year, as the gentle month of December approached, bright and polished, the sweatiness of October gone, the sun descending marginally early on Marine Drive, Banwari, Shyamji’s younger brother, and Shyamji’s son Sanjay went about half-heartedly trying to set up the Gandharva Sammelan. They would soon be here from California, Zakir Hussain and Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar, the proscenium was being erected in the St Xavier’s quadrangle, you’d have to plan the evenings accordingly with the thin, bangled girls in their shawls and blue jeans. It was a matter of prestige, in the midst of all this, to try to keep the Gandharva Sammelan going. But the irony of having to place Shyamji’s portrait next to Ram Lal’s! For Sumati, that framed picture, taken in London, in Wembley, by a student, the face in it patient, not absolutely convinced by the moment, waiting for the click of the shutter – that picture, in these last months, had become for the newly lost and unmindful Sumati a mute companion.

Banwari, brushing his hair back, his absent gaze riveted to the mirror before he opened the door, and Sanjay, his head bowed, set out to scout for advertisements and donations; they went to the homes of former students, did their inaugural namaskars, descended upon drawing-room sofas, shook their heads and gazed heavenwards while accepting condolences. But most of the students didn’t want to sing. The sammelan, even with its crowded, inbred glamour, in which every singer was like a blessed and exceptional son or daughter in a single remarkable family, had lost its impetus. ‘Not this year,’ said Mallika Sengupta, while Mr Sengupta sat some distance away on the same sofa, not unsympathetic, in fact, perfectly democratic in his sympathies, understanding at once the dead man’s brother’s and son’s requirements as well as his wife’s reservations. The whole burden of opening the hardback songbook again – its spine had begun to break like an old, tattered hive – was too much for her. These bhajans hadn’t gone forever, no; Meera’s agonies over her phantom god, Tulsi chanting and chanting the name of Ram; she was confident they’d return to her. But she didn’t want to have anything to do with them just yet. ‘And, Banwariji,’ she added, glancing at her husband in a way that suggested he couldn’t speak for himself, ‘please don’t ask Sengupta saab for an advertisement. You know he’s not with the company any more.’

Pandit Rasraj, the one eminent singer who performed regularly at the sammelan, and was distantly related to the family (their forefathers had, fifty years ago, stirred out of the scoured desert landscape of Rajasthan and set out for this brittle, teeming metropolis), said: ‘I cannot sing before Shyam’s picture. No, I can’t do that. He was very dear to me. No, I cannot sing before his picture.’ He shook his head from side to side, as he sometimes did when he sang. He sounded bitter – almost as if he envied Shyamji. Rasraj was now almost an icon. The classical musician has a short creative shelf life; that is, there’s a relatively brief period in which his creative powers and his visibility coincide. Pandit Rasraj was now in his second phase, of canonisation, and it promised to be long. He was losing his spontaneity and mastery in music; but, otherwise, he had every reason to be content. But he was strangely impatient. ‘No, no, I can’t sing before Shyam’s picture,’ he said.

‘K
ARKHANIS
has failed,’ wrote Mrs Sengupta in a letter in her large-hearted scrawl. ‘What kind of doctor is he? Pyarelal keeps having to go back to the nursing home.’

It was March now. Despite reading Frege and Wittgenstein, Nirmalya was still not cured of metaphysics; the world, for him, hadn’t been demystified. Which was why he continued to rail against it secretly and blame it as if it were an errant and immoral object. Cross and lonely, he went out. The leaves had barely begun to come back to the parks in London, to Regent’s and Hyde Park, to the neat green but shorn barricades near Buckingham Palace. But it was still cold. He did not see the leaves returning; he looked straight through the frail physical outline of things into their essence as if he had X-ray vision; and he went about everywhere, in rain and shine, in the hooded, grey, featureless anorak.

Ah, the embrace of poverty! It was much less attractive here than it was at home; you felt the fight was going unnoticed, somehow. Yet he kept at it, glowering in the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the metallic beat of the music in his ear as he retired, anonymous, to a corner and emptied a sachet of sugar into the styrofoam cup.

News of Pyarelal’s bad health kept penetrating the ennui of exile. ‘What kind of nursing homes are these?’ wrote his mother, and her outrage was audible to his inner ear. ‘They are running a business, that is all.’ That nursing homes were businesses like any other was clearly a revelation to her. The wound in the leg had lingered; Pyarelal had been admitted to hospital again; there had been a complication, and he’d contracted jaundice.

Nirmalya sighed as he refolded the aerogramme. He sat and looked straight in front of him. Where did this sudden melancholy come from? Was it Pyarelal, or the light outside, or the way in which Shyamji had gone abruptly? Or was it something without history, a dull, buzzing ache which had first announced itself to him during his transformation from a child into a young man, and which had no present and immediate cause?

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to a few people.

Firstly, Peter Straus,

for belief and friendship when it mattered.

At Picador, Andrew Kidd and Sam Humphreys,
for the continuance of old and important ties, and for warmth and attentiveness.

Sunetra Gupta,
for her unstinting support and friendship during the writing of this novel.

Aamer Hussein and Rohit Manchanda,
old friends and respected practitioners, whose kind words mean a great deal.

I would like to thank Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Damayanti Basu Singh, and OUP Delhi for giving me permission to use Buddhadeva Basu’s ‘Transformation’ as an epigraph.

Finally, my family:
my parents, who made these explorations possible in more ways than one;
my daughter, for her obliviousness;
and my wife, companion through the work’s various stages and phases, for creating a space, and providing perspective and composure.