The Immortals (6 page)

At night, the lights came on in the Marine Drive, a great witch-like celebration of neon and fluorescence, and Mrs Sengupta cheerfully told her son Nirmalya, as he looked out over the stone bannister, that the row of lights glowing individually around the drive was called the ‘Queen’s Necklace’.

It was to this flat that Shyamji came one day. Mallika Sengupta had been looking for a new teacher. A series of teachers had come to the Cumballa Hill apartment, starting with Chandrashekhar, who used to arrive on a scooter three times a week, a nice man, not hugely accomplished, who worked in an office and gave tuitions in singing. He’d been teaching her as he taught everyone else, with cheerful, encouraging insincerity, till one day he actually listened to her and fell silent in consternation. ‘Your voice is truly lovely,’ he said at last; the voice was still ringing in his ear – but this lapse from teacherly propriety never occurred again.

Motilalji, in spite of his gifts, she ‘got rid of ’ after he twice came drunk to her lesson. Then there was the famous classical ustad Ghulam Mohammed, who was recommended to her for his immense knowledge; a thin man who wore steel spectacles, he reminded her for some reason of a master tailor – it wasn’t difficult to imagine him with a tape-measure around his neck. He taught her nothing, or no songs, at least, but kept giving her vocal exercises; intricate exercises that didn’t add up to anything, but which he named, with satisfaction, ‘designs’. ‘Look at this design,’ he said; this contributed further to his calm, focussed, tailor-like air. Then, at last, he gave her a song, a geet; ‘This is a new tuin,’ he said, and though he taught her the same song for two months, she both liked and was exasperated by his quaint version of the word ‘tune’ and his blithe, dilatory use of it – ‘Yeh mushkil tuin hai’, ‘It’s a difficult tuin’ etc. Learning from him was to be in the middle of an unending chapter.

There were others. Jairam, who was past his heyday, and was convinced his daughter would be another Lata; Inderjit, a small flamboyant man, whom, mistakenly, she’d called by name once, instead of ‘Inderjitji’, thus scaring him off possibly with ideas about her romantic interest in him – all these teachers had come and gone from her house. The last teacher who’d come to this new apartment was Dheeraj, a dark man with a pleasant singing voice, a crooner’s voice. He began to teach her new geets. He got her to sing a rather ‘filmi’, sentimental song on the radio, not really suited to her style and voice (love songs seldom were), but she sang it with seriousness, too much seriousness, almost: ‘My many-coloured dreams have all shattered/ Like a mirror.’ He had a problem with his marriage, though; it was breaking apart. One day he stopped coming. They heard he’d had a stroke. She waited to hear from him; he was untraceable; a month went by. Then, when she’d almost forgotten him, she saw him from her car on the road, looking absent, a stick in one hand.

‘Didi,’ he said very courteously, ‘I once came with my wife’s brother, Motilalji. You were in a different flat, then.’

‘Of course,’ she said – the day returned to her – and she added, ‘I remember – he said something like, “She thinks no end of herself,” and you looked as if you wished you were somewhere else.’ And she was oddly stirred by the memory of his discomfiture.

That discomfiture fitted with his personality: he was one of the most soft-spoken and pointedly courteous teachers she’d had. Later, she’d hear that people called him ‘smooth’, even ‘slippery’. But her doubts were subsumed by the compassion she’d felt for him right from the beginning; ever since he’d called her, without really knowing her, ‘didi’ and made her an elder sister.

It was seven years since she’d seen him last – and not quite forgotten him. But by this time he was no longer the man who had hovered in the background behind Motilalji. He was becoming, according to unofficial information, one of Bombay’s most highly paid teachers; the well-to-do he charged eighty-five rupees per sitting; a huge sum. But they wanted him – among them corporate wives; devout traders and tax defaulters whose anxieties were oddly consoled by music; not to speak of young, ordinary middle-class students who lived in the suburbs and learnt from him in groups of five or six – they wanted him for his melodious voice and his virtuosity. Like the god after whom he’d been named, whose flute was a wand that drew the female cowherds to him, Shyamji’s uninsisting, mellifluous singing had drawn one student after another to him in South Bombay.

The boy was now fifteen years old. He’d just finished his school finals; he’d passed with a decent, but not brilliant, first class.

The older he got, and the higher his father rose in the company, the greater the friction that came to exist between him and the life to which he’d been raised. With an adolescent puritanism, he’d almost made it a point to boycott his parents’ parties, or to appear in them with a premeditated nonchalance, in a dishevelled state.

It was at this time that the boy ran into Shyamji, as he was flitting from the main door to his bedroom. Shyamji guessed he must be Mrs Sengupta’s son, but couldn’t be sure. The boy looked rather intense, bespectacled, a tender goatee – more like down – around his chin. Later, he asked Mrs Sengupta:

‘Didi, is that your son?’

Shyamji was genuinely interested. Because he believed the flat and the way of life inside it to be an inheritance, and he wanted to know who would inherit it. What he’d seen, in the person of this boy, he thought privately, was a bit odd.

‘Yes, that is my son,’ said Mrs Sengupta, brightening visibly, as if merely to become conscious of the fact again was to experience some form of satisfaction.

‘You have no other children, didi?’ he asked, softly, as if he were respectful of the ways of the well-to-do, but also very slightly concerned. He couldn’t comprehend the impulse to bring only one child into the world, but there were many things about people like Mrs Sengupta he couldn’t quite comprehend.

‘No,’ she said, and called, ‘Nirmalya, come here!’ But the boy was in his room and there was no response. ‘John,’ she said, ‘ask baba to come here.’

‘Nirmalya’: ‘an offering to the gods’ – they’d named him thus because he’d narrowly missed being a stillborn child; he’d been in a stupor in his mother’s womb – another two hours and he wouldn’t have lived. Even before his inception into the world, it seemed he was delegated a destiny.

He’d come armed with a disability as well; but an invisible one. When he was three and a half years old, a stethoscope had paused, padded around the sternum, then returned to the top-left corner of the chest. The doctor’s face had darkened. ‘There is a murmur,’ he said, puzzled; it wasn’t the kind of sound he’d expected to hear. He’d glanced nervously at the mother, as if expecting to be castigated for speaking out of turn. He was a mere GP after all. Confronted with a happy family, an upwardly mobile family, his first diagnosis was that the fault was in himself, in his instrument. But the murmur wouldn’t go away.

At first there was disbelief, then mourning – the preamble to the journey to a heart specialist in a tottering building. Nameplate stacked untidily upon nameplate indicated that at least half the building was occupied by doctors. Once you got out of the giant hencoop of the lift, after the brief journey up a shaft in which only the cords and pulleys were constantly alive and never at rest, you walked down an unpromisingly dark corridor and came to a glass-doored chamber with a small sitting area that was fluorescent-lit and air-conditioned. It was like a world that the building didn’t seem to know existed within it.

His father would be dressed in a suit for work. The heart specialist too would be in a suit. As they sat across the table from one another, they’d have the manner of colleagues in tune with each other, the father still with his post-breakfast, corporate, I-know-what-I’m-doing air about him. That air was actually a great comfort to the mother in her printed silk sari, which she’d put on hastily before the appointment; it was however her – with her implacably nervous air, who looked like a child that had been startled by a thunderclap – that the doctor repeatedly addressed, as if it were she who were the patient, and he a family elder who had to persuade her to go to a doctor. Any little thing might make her cry; and the doctor didn’t want that to happen in the tranquillity of the chamber.

When Nirmalya was slightly older, and had had further experience of doctors, he asked his father: ‘Baba, why do these doctors always have their chambers in awful buildings?’ He’d always wondered if it was humility or otherworldliness, because the doctors he knew seemed absent-minded, and invariably had bad handwriting. ‘It’s cheap for them,’ said his father. ‘They pay very little rent.’

And at last the logic of these successful doctors seeing him in tottering buildings became clear to him.

As the mother and father waited, he in his dark suit, she in her printed sari, as if they were about to embark on a trip, Nirmalya lay recumbent for twenty minutes on the narrow high bed, while the moist-lipped nozzle connected to the various nodes of the electrocardiogram kissed his skin and ribs wetly. A kindly lady in a white sari moved the nozzle from one point to another on his chest; the little space behind the curtain was ice-cold from the air conditioning. By the time he’d wiped the stuff from himself with a tissue and put on his shirt, he’d grown used to the cold.

These buildings were dark, and the various doctors’ chambers were little bigger than large cupboards. But the cupboards were all bright and air-conditioned. After they were finished, the three of them got into the lift and descended into daylight again.

After that, his parents felt temporarily free and lightened. And, since Nirmalya had anyway missed the morning’s school, they stopped at a small new cafe on Marine Lines. Mr Sengupta, dressed for a business appointment, sitting with wife and child at a table in a cafe; but it was as if simply emerging from the doctors’ building had bequeathed upon him another day. They had chicken sandwiches.

Often, Mrs Sengupta would think back to that day in January in Calcutta, when Nirmalya was one and a half years old, and she, in Calcutta for two months, had been invited to judge a competition at a music school, where the children would be singing Tagore songs. Her co-judges were two distinguished singers, Sumita Mullick and Banani Ray, and, in a way, it was quite an honour to sit at the same panel as them.

But they – Apurva and Mrs Sengupta – didn’t know what to do with the child; they decided, after a long discussion, to leave him in the car with the ayah. The competition continued longer than expected; it went on and on; one girl after another approached the microphone and sang Rabindranath’s lyrics with the utmost solemnity; and Mrs Sengupta sat ill-at-ease and restless with her co-judges. When they returned to the car, they found that, despite the windows being rolled up, there were mosquitoes inside. The child was howling and angry; he had been bitten. As if he were some sort of deity before which she must be contrite, Mrs Sengupta bent forward and picked him up from the ayah’s lap. ‘E Ram! E Ram!’ she said. A few days later, the child had a fever – it turned out to be the dengue, of which there was an epidemic in Calcutta at the time.

Years later, she would return to that day in Calcutta; the competition, which had now receded into the background; her own neglect, as she saw it; and the dengue, which she could hardly believe had happened to her own child. She’d read that both dengue and rheumatic fever could damage the heart; and she wondered if she were responsible for her son’s condition. She could not bear to think it, but she couldn’t help thinking it. ‘No,’ said the specialist. ‘This is congenital; the defect was there from birth.’ Yet she couldn’t help thinking of the day of the competition.

Jumna – who lived in a slum in Mahalaxmi – said: ‘Why do you think so much, memsaab? Don’t you see how well our baba is?’ Mallika Sengupta nodded tearfully. She envied Jumna, almost. She envied her her four healthy children. Vipul, Ramesh. Shankar, Asha. Four children who went to a municipal school. Would she, Mallika Sengupta, have changed places with Jumna? Perhaps not. But she would have liked to have had Jumna’s easy taking-for-granted, as Jumna bent low before the carpet, jhadu in hand, of her children. And she knew she couldn’t have it.

And so Jumna had to lay down the jhadu and sit beside the centre table. Mrs Sengupta was a small statue of pain; Jumna must console her. For a long time they’d just sit together in silence. ‘Nothing will happen,’ Jumna said, as if she’d casually dismissed the powers-that-be. ‘Arrey, what can happen?’ Then, slowly, after an interval of brooding and staring into the distance, she’d get back to work.

Jumna lived in the large sprawling slum in Mahalaxmi, not far from the Race Course. In spite of its size, it was invisible from the main road; it had to be arrived at by a couple of narrow by-lanes and gullies. The people at the Race Course and the members of the Willingdon Club probably didn’t know it was there. Once, Nirmalya and the driver had dropped her off on a road next to the Willingdon Club which had a large expanse of untended green on one side. She’d got out of the car, and Nirmalya didn’t know in exactly which direction she’d gone. The car had gone back up the road; and when Nirmalya turned back to look, Jumna was already gone, there was only the road and the expanse of overgrown green. But Nirmalya knew now that this – not the exact location, but somewhere here – was where Jumna returned in the afternoons.