The Immortals (18 page)

‘This is Sengupta saab’s son, Sengupta saab, you know, the MD of . . .’ When Shyamji introduced him to some of the people going in and out of the green room, they looked twice at Nirmalya, as if, in spite of his guilty, caught-in-transit appearance, he possessed certain qualities: he was Sengupta saab’s son – the famous company was oddly embodied in him, a mark of distinction he wasn’t personally responsible for; they didn’t need to know his name.

They sat in the third row, Apurva Sengupta, in a dark blue suit, his necktie compressed into a perfect knot, and the untidy, intent son next to him, spectacles gleaming, unremarkable except for his quiet air of exercising judgement.

There, on the stage, was Mrs Sengupta, cheeks white in the stage lights, turning the pages of the songbook absent-mindedly, as if she’d never find the page; and, next to her, Shyamji, playing the harmonium as he had with all his students, not looking so much tired as far away and vaguely dutiful. A faint hum emanated from the instrument at his fingers.

This was an important moment, both in and out of her social life, this spotlit pause when she was most alone, when she began to sing the first lines to an audience that was never quite listening. The sari she was wearing was a beautiful purple Benarasi, embossed with silver thread-work. In comparison to the other singers and their hurried ambition and swift attunement to the dark of the auditorium, their smiling, convivial namaskars at the end of their two songs, she was like a slightly forgetful royal personage, half-aware of her listeners, in exile, someone from another age. The audience accepted her entry and her brief, incongruous incumbency good-humouredly. But when she sang, Nirmalya couldn’t stand it; he felt her voice, amplified and made subtly different, a voice from the past and not her own voice, was sounding too sharp, she was not in practice, she was accompanying her husband to too many parties, from which she’d bring back stories of the Tatas and the Singhanias. He could never listen to his mother calmly during a performance. It was only months, sometimes years, later, when he’d overhear something she’d taped for her own purposes, that he’d be struck by the beauty of her voice, effortlessly fresh and immediate, and wonder why he could never hear it in the present moment.

When she came out into the auditorium, hot, but calm, she whispered, ‘Mrs Makhija said to me – You have a wonderful voice!’ Nirmalya’s father smiled, pleased as much at her spontaneous happiness, at the end of the outing, as at the compliment: ‘Very good. Very good.’ She turned to search her son’s face for some indication or sign. He didn’t smile, only nodded curtly. Later, he was filled with pain for not having been kinder.

By ten o’clock, it seemed like midnight; the singers had finished – only their teacher remained, Shyamji, singing bhajans to an almost empty hall. His family sat in a cluster – and Apurva and Mallika Sengupta, and Nirmalya, because they so loved listening to Shyamji. Most of the others had gone; they had buses to catch.

In the front row, unmissable because of his largeness, a bearded man, dressed entirely in white, sat shaking his head in appreciation.

‘Who’s that?’ whispered Nirmalya to his father, studying the figure in amusement.

‘Hanuman Rao,’ said his father in a low voice. ‘Some Congress leader, apparently.’

H
ANUMAN
P
RASAD
R
AO
came from a landowning family from a village on the border between Maharashtra and Karnataka; and this was the manner he carried with him – not of a man of the people, but a protector of the people. Dressed always in white, the slightest spot threatened to besmirch not only his clothes, but his reputation. He had huge hands; he could easily have strangled someone with them. An air of foreboding accompanied him; as if, when he’d be struck down, he’d be struck down simply, by a stroke, or a flash of lightning. But, as of now, he looked quietly, assuredly, invincible.

One day he’d discovered Shyamji, and, in his expansive way, become a sort of devotee. ‘You are the best singer in the country,’ he said, placing an ample hand upon Shyamji’s shoulder, ‘and some day everyone will know it.’ Here, too, he had the grandiose, proprietorial air, not unlike that of an explorer who reaches a continent and begins to believe he owns it. His admiration for Shyamji was an extension of his egotism, and possessed the charge, the enchantment, of self-love; Shyamji knew he could withdraw it whenever he wished. He might get bored; or he might take offence for some reason, as people did when they thought they were in love. So Shyamji kept Hanuman Rao happy.

Hanuman Rao was obsessed with films; he loved Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor, their youth full of simple rustic joy and unfathomable magic, their openness to the risk of romance and the uncertainty of the changed world; and Hema Malini and Waheeda Rehman, companions in the changed world – he felt beholden to them, these figures of solace and desire. He was moved by the great films, their deep understanding of the importance of sacrifice; his large frame would go still during the great scenes; he would weep.

He also saw that politics was a form of cinema – except that it was real. ‘They are not the real heroes,’ he told his wife in private, slapping his chest. ‘
We
are.’

He now had what seemed to him a fantastic idea: he wanted to produce a film and – this seemed like the logical thing to do, given his personality and appearance – to act in it. It didn’t matter that he was fifty-one; the movie industry needed a mature protagonist. The film would have the sort of socialist content expected from a Congressman; it would be about a peasant uprising, the overthrowing of a landlord, and he, Hanuman Rao, would play the peasant leader, exiled from his village and then returning to it by subterfuge and bringing about an awakening among the villagers.

‘Shyam,’ he said, for he addressed the singer by his first name, as if he were Shyamji’s older brother, ‘you will be the music director. It’s your tunes I hear when I think of the film. It has a wonderful title: “Naya Rasta Nayi Asha”.’ A new road, new hope.

I
T WAS
S
HYMJI’S
good fortune that, although he was an accomplished classical singer, a master, he had a pliable and beautiful voice. This meant it could take advantage of the musical currency of the day, of the songs with which a middle class of faithful, hardworking husbands and vivacious housewives expressed its dreams. It lent itself to ghazals, to their gorgeous banalities about drunken love, about heartbreak and desire, which inordinately moved husbands who seemed generally impervious to passion, and made them sigh; it lent itself also to the pieties of the bhajan, to the worshipful mood, the genuflections to Ram and Krishna that were part of the household created by mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Shyamji was at the centre of this solemn self-expression. But the beauty of the voice carried with it a seductiveness – in the old days, the masters were right to be wary of mere beauty. It made Shyamji believe he could do, and sing, all things; that he could return to the other needs of his calling later.

‘Shyam, you will sing in the film,’ Hanuman Rao said, the large hand resting on Shyamji’s shoulder. ‘It’s my one condition for making you music director. There’ll be a special song in the scene in which I rouse the villagers. I want you to sing that song.’ Hanuman Rao’s voice made a rasping sound as the vision formed. There was no discrepancy at all, as far as he was concerned, that, on screen, he’d burst into song in the ether of Shyamji’s voice. He was too grand and determined a man to be bothered by detail.

‘Didi!’ Shyamji called, as he entered the flat. ‘Didi – it is ready! I’ve brought it with me.’

He had with him something at once ordinary and charged with unusual significance because of the way he held it – a long-playing record with a bright yellow sleeve. Its back was white, with the names of the songs and details about the film, the music director, the producer, the singers printed neatly, darkly, in English. A third of the yellow side, which was the cover, was enveloped by a looming picture of Hanuman Rao, dressed in white, as he usually was in real life, with what looked like a staff in one hand; behind him, incidental but not negligible, were two smaller figures before a hut – a young woman and a man. Shyamji was dazzled by both the vinyl within and the epic compressed upon the cover; Nirmalya handled the sleeve with diffidence.

‘Baba, put it on the record player,’ Shyamji said, the childlike wonder and impatience barely disguised by the softness of the request – he must have already heard the record twenty times.

A jangly orchestral music filled the room. Shyamji sat with a frown on his face, now and then surrendering to his emotions, staring at the carpet, sighing at the sudden shift of register in the tunes. Mrs Sengupta and Nirmalya too listened to the record with one ear; but, really, they were more intent upon watching, with a mixture of respect and protectiveness, the spectacle of their teacher listening again to his own music.

‘When is the film coming to the theatres, Shyamji? Can we go and see it?’ asked Mrs Sengupta brightly at the end of song number two. She had not the slightest intention of seeing it; the effort it took to be mendacious translated, in her tone, into a sparkling enthusiasm. She hardly ever watched Hindi films; although, like others among her contemporaries and peers, she amused herself sometimes by buying
Filmfare
and reading episodes from the lives of the stars during vacant afternoons – these stories, frivolous and instantly forgettable, were more diverting and less boring than the films themselves.

‘It’ll be out soon, didi,’ said Shyamji, humouring Mrs Sengupta, not daring to distrust either Hanuman Rao or fate. He suspected that, on some strangely moral level, Mrs Sengupta didn’t really care, and didn’t want him to care either. ‘The film is ready.’

‘Badhai, didi, badhai!’ said Sumati, her eyes (she had a squint, but it was the auspicious ‘Lakshmi’ squint, in which one eye tilted slightly in a different direction) bright, her head covered by the end of her chiffon sari. ‘Congratulations! Your brother is going to be a famous music director!’

What a silly woman, thought Mallika Sengupta (for she herself, having benefited from it, was superstitious about providential benediction – like a dalal on the stock market who watches from below the index fall and rise nervously); the word that described Shyamji’s wife – she stored it away to relay it to her husband later – was ‘fun-loving’. Sumati’s gaiety seemed to Mrs Sengupta to be almost an affront. Good fortune, whatever the ebullience you felt within, couldn’t for a moment be greeted with levity; it must be welcomed poker-faced, dignified, and serious. To Mallika Sengupta, nervous, too, always about Nirmalya, about any imminent danger to his health, the taking for granted of something that had still not happened was an example of culpable thoughtlessness; her suppression of immediate outward delight at the announcement of good news was, for her, a kind of penance. In Sumati, immediate delight took the form of a sort of innocence. Mrs Sengupta, her soul inured to holding back, secretly wished Sumati would be sombre and quiet until she had cause for celebration.

Nirmalya’s music lessons were always something Shyamji was doing between things, in a hurry. In the old movies, in the gloom of fake temples or caves made of papier maˆche´ or cardboard, the guru and his disciple spent long hours of struggle, often next to a gigantic graven likeness of Shiva, also made of papier maˆche´, the god silent and aloof from the trials of human ambition, the guru exacting, sometimes capriciously, both devotion and labour from his young disciple, as a great cobweb grew and grew in one corner, till he finally began to sing in the perfect tone of a famous playback singer. In Thacker Towers, it wasn’t like this: nothing in the end can cocoon you from the effort it takes to master something, from the fact that the returns are wrung reluctantly from the energy invested – but neither can you protect yourself from the banal and the everyday that comprise your life and make it safe and familiar for you. The world that Apurva and Mallika Sengupta had made theirs so completely, the proximity of lunch or tea, the servants coming in or going out, qualified the music lesson.

The tape recorder made the process of teaching and learning less messy, more compressed and expeditious, for both the time-pressed guru and his undecided disciple, shackled to the modern life that had formed him, eager to learn, but within the secret, exploratory rhythms of his day. For each day was part purgatory for Nirmalya, where he constantly came close to the sinking spirits of damnation; as well as a time for discovering randomly, with impatient, almost dismissive, exhilaration, the cultures of the world and of history. He had lots to do: read philosophy, and novels in which men suddenly discovered in pubs that existence was
contingent
and
absurd
, that it had occurred almost for no discernible reason, and poems by women who flirtatiously confessed to being besotted with suicide; flick quickly through pornographic books from European social democracies which had pictures taken from dizzying angles accompanied by crowded, shameless texts in German and probably Danish as well as a sort of English, each a short frenetic paragraph, the German full of militantly erect capital letters. In the midst of all this, Shyamji arrived. Nirmalya sat meekly next to him, tape recorder by his side. It doubled as both student and teacher; when Shyamji sang, half carelessly but magically, into the microphone of the Panasonic, as if he were singing into the ear of the immemorial past, it seemed to listen raptly. And then, later, it became a guru; when Nirmalya played back the tape, Shyamji sang through the Panasonic, it became an extension of Shyamji, and yet it could never
be
Shyamji, it was at once less clever than him, and more pliant and amenable than he was. But at least it was always there. In a way, it seemed to occupy its own space, its own domain from which it governed; and it made both guru and disciple independent of – and slightly redundant to – each other.