The Immortals (23 page)

S
HYAMJI FELL ILL
. He’d felt a sudden pressure on his chest, and rubbed it unhappily with one hand; he’d been taken to a nursing home. It was a mild heart attack.

‘However did it happen?’ asked Apurva Sengupta, phoning his wife in the middle of work. He sounded impatient, as if the knot in his tie felt tight, or his secretary had gestured to him about an appointment; it was three o’clock, a quiet but demanding hour, in which the chief executive, suddenly alone after lunch, has to collect the day around him. ‘Is he all right?’

Shyamji was only forty-three. He was slightly overweight – Nirmalya had seen him changing his kurta before a programme, the rounded, dark body beneath the vest, the tender, secretive folds of flesh, the brahmin’s thread tucked inside: his condition was aggravated by diabetes.

‘You must stop him eating sweets,’ Mallika Sengupta said to Sumati. That irresistible, and, to Mrs Sengupta, inexplicable urge that people from this particular world had towards jalebis and milk. ‘If he, a grown man, can’t control himself, you, as his wife, must control him.’

‘Didi, you know that our Shyamji is like the Shyam after whom he was named,’ said Sumati, with a smile that was lit at once by indulgence and ecstasy. ‘He’ll steal into the kitchen and eat what he pleases – no one can stop him.’

There was an idiotic poetry to Sumati’s words that infuriated Mallika Sengupta; she recalled, for an instant, the child Krishna stealing into his mother’s kitchen to satisfy his truant love of buttermilk. But that Shyam was a god, a diverting figment of someone’s imagination, she thought; your husband has just had a heart attack. Sumati was placated and insulated from anxiety by mythology – the mythology of her religion had entered into, and become inseparable from, the mythology of her husband: no real harm could come to him.

The rich of Bombay came to his bedside in the nursing home as he recovered, his head propped against two pillows, a flower vase, a tumbler, and a bottle of water on the table next to him. ‘Aiye, aiye,’ he said, as if he were welcoming guests to his abode, his gaze incredibly calm. He was fatigued; but it was reassuring, this arrival of the affluent. Outside, ‘sisters’, figments in white, circulated purposefully in the corridor, sending in, now and again, proprietorial glances through the doorway. At different times, the visitors: Priya Gill and her father, indomitable and inspiring in his Sikh’s turban; Raj Khemkar – his father was no longer a minister, but Raj still carried with him the ironical confidence of a minister’s son; Mrs Jaitley, whose husband had been recently promoted to General Manager of Air India – all these, and others like them, brought with them, unthinkingly, the assurance of the everyday and of continuity as they sat kindly by the bed, confirming the solace of the birds and the hopping and buzzing insects outside the window on Shyamji’s left.

And the famous; Asha, who said in a hoarse voice (you were always nonplussed, listening to that voice, that it had sung, full-throated, those melodies): ‘How is he?’ and, putting a bangled hand to his forehead: ‘You have no fever.’

One of the people missing from the bedside was the bearded Hanuman Rao, the Congressman who wore nothing but white. But no one mentioned Hanuman Rao. The film
Naya Rasta Nayi Asha
– a new road, new hope – had been made, but it suddenly seemed unlikely it would ever be released: that the new road would be taken, the hope materialise. Hanuman Rao had fallen out of favour with the powers-that-be in the Congress, puny men in scheming huddles who resented his largeness, metaphorical and physical; an old but niggling case, to do with his role in his constituency during the Emergency, had been brought back into daylight by a member of the Opposition; the Congress had neglected, carelessly, to bail him out – some said the return of the case was instigated by some malevolent force in the Congress itself. Hanuman Rao hadn’t been arrested; but his assets were frozen, and the film, alas, was one of those assets.
Naya Rasta Nayi Asha
, soundtrack and all, had been sucked forever into the tunnel of lost prospects; and with it had gone, also, the thousands of rupees that Shyamji had put into it, in the glory and unassailability of having turned, at last, into both ‘music director’ and ‘playback singer’.

‘Shyam, I could listen to your bhajans for hours,’ said Hanuman Rao. ‘Once the film is released, this voice I love so much will be heard by everyone.’ Shyamji had been seduced, not just by Hanuman Rao, but by the magic of the colours – perennial, abiding always in a sort of springtime – of celluloid; the loss of its promise, and, with it, his money, had created a vacancy to which he hadn’t been able to reconcile himself, and brought a pressure to his heart.

No one mentioned Hanuman Rao’s name in that room in the nursing home.

‘S
AAB
,
WE ARE
in need of some money.’ That’s how Shyamji would broach the subject every few months with Apurva Sengupta. Very softly and decorously, not as if he were begging or asking, but sharing a piece of information that had been troubling him. The advance was ‘adjusted’ with the number of ‘turns’ taken teaching Mrs Sengupta; these English words, with their expeditious, dry clarity, had become part of the parlance. ‘Adjust ho jayega,’ said Shyamji, displaying the calm he never deviated from. ‘It’ll get adjusted.’

But this calm wasn’t only a pose he put on for the benefit of his students or family; it had become a dharma, a philosophy of life. It was partly a strategy of self-defence; he’d begun to suspect (but still didn’t wholly believe) that the world he was in love with – Cuffe Parade, Malabar Hill, the mirrored drawing rooms of his older students (plunged by marriage into affluence and anxiety), even the glamour of the film studios – was not quite going to, despite its extravagant, seemingly sincere, gestures of reciprocity, return his love: it had too many other things to do. The thought hadn’t formed itself in his head; but the detachment, the calm, had deepened a little.

‘Saab, what was the need for this?’ he said softly.

This time, money hadn’t been asked for; it had been offered; five thousand rupees in a stapled bundle had been placed discreetly by Mr Sengupta one evening in Sumati’s hands.

‘We are not rich,’ Mrs Sengupta reminded her husband. ‘In fact, we’re poor.’ Nirmalya heard his mother make this statement with a look of preordained, unshakeable conviction. It might be that she was berating herself and her husband for not having saved enough over the years; or just that she was reminding herself that the job, with its army of attendants and comforts, wasn’t forever. The servants themselves seemed blissfully unaware of the fact; symbols of continuity and wealth, they, despite their little quarrels, had the fixity and absence of care that symbols have; Mrs Sengupta almost envied them their strange abandon.

No, the scandalous remark had a context; it wasn’t meant for public consumption, but was a private release, like a curse or a prayer; now, in the early eighties, directors and executives had the satisfaction (as once their English predecessors had) of leading lives that had all the marks of affluence, and a prestige that traders and businessmen lacked: but their salaries were heavily taxed. Most of what constituted the lifestyle belonged to the company; most of the salary belonged to the government of India; and what was theirs (the pay that reached their pockets) was a relatively modest residue. At least that’s how Mrs Sengupta saw it. So she went through the motions and performed the functions of a company housewife and of being the chief executive’s wife, and, at the same time, cultivated the detachment of a sanyasinni, an anchorite – even when she was buying a Baluchari or wearing her jewellery – from this way of life. Or so she thought.

Those who seem to be rich feel compelled to behave like the rich. The money they’d given Shyamji, for instance, was given from real concern; they didn’t expect it back. But their generosity was complicated by superstition; Nirmalya, in spite of his heart murmur, had developed no symptoms, and they never forgot this fact. Someone was watching over him, and them, and their lives in Thacker Towers in Cuffe Parade; in the shopping arcade in the Oberoi; in the office and on the numerous social occasions that threaded the week – watching others too, possibly, but certainly them. In the midst of everything, they – mainly because of Nirmalya – were sometimes aware of being watched. The lifestyle became partly an enactment; they never quite experienced the luxury, the longed-for benediction, of being able to think it was all there was.

G
RADUALLY
, S
HYAMJI
got better. He felt the need to go back to the world, to embrace it, to win it over, to enjoy it – the old desire and restlessness returned. But it was preempted by his family’s optimism and impatience; almost as soon as they sensed Shyamji was recovering, they began to make plans for the future. The discontinuity and disjunction Shyamji’s illness represented was already a thing of the past.

Some of his students were emigrants. Mainly women, they’d lived for years in England; every winter, sometimes earlier, they’d come back, vaguely doubtful about returning, and at the same time questing, eager with expectation, to Bombay, their husbands following them like mascots. And here, for a month, for two months, they’d fold their cardigans and put them aside in a drawer; they’d stop wearing socks beneath their saris. They should have had a sophisticated and superior air, but they didn’t; living in suburban London and its environs made them feel provincial in the whirl of Bombay. Tooting, Clapham, and Surrey were where they lived; one or two lived in Hampstead; in their dowdy saris, they bore no signs of Englishness except an apologetic tentativeness. Now family surrounded them in the crowded flats they were staying in; this didi, that chachi, small, infirm mothers who continued to exist frugally from day to day, nephews and nieces they might have glimpsed as newborns, or not at all.

Music, besides family, is what drew them back – long ago, in the twilight before they left for England, when they were, most of them, newly married and unburdened with children, they used to sing, learn from a teacher. They didn’t sing well, but they didn’t sing badly; emigration, the hurried departure, the half-hearted, disbelieving resumption of their old life in a new locality and new weather, their mutation into the women they had become, had infinitely deferred their flowering as singers. Decades later, their children and their neighbours’ children grown up and ‘settled’, they felt they could resume from where they’d been cut off; their husbands had saved enough money by now to make that yearly journey to the nephews and nieces and the infirm mother. And, unexpectedly, one of the people at the end of that reverse journey was Shyamji.

‘You’ve been unwell, guruji. I hope you’re getting the right treatment,’ said Mrs Lakhani. She was more affluent than the others – she lived in Frognall Lane. She was unexceptional but reassuring to look at, in spite of the tired eyes and drawn face; years of rearing children, of listening to the silence, of rainy days, of socialising with other Indians, had left her just enough time to satisfy her weakness for music without giving up her friendships. Now, back in this difficult but unforgettable country, she sat, head bowed, as Shyamji, slightly recovered, sat on the bed, having donned a white kurta, and taught her a composition in raga Hansdhwani:

It was afternoon; not the right time for Hansdhwani. Still, in England, there was no right time at all. Evening and afternoon and morning there were much the same.

‘You need a change of air, guruji,’ said Mrs Lakhani, once she’d finished singing the notes with him in her soft, unpractised voice, her uncertain tone and his, sweet but undemonstrative after the illness, in unison for a few minutes. ‘The air over there is very good. Not like here. Even pigeons are fatter there.’ She smiled at his restrained incredulity. ‘Come and stay with us. Come and stay with us over there. I will arrange some concerts, I will arrange everything. My friends are dying to listen to you.’

This seemed to both Shyamji and his family to be a windfall, a great opportunity. The lady, wan, but always in tasteful, expensive saris, the grey in her hair touching her with an added dignity, began to become more and more visible with Shyamji, with the special, concentrated manner that marks the visitor, a lady with some purpose – perhaps no more than to be in Shyamji’s proximity – listening to him, waiting during a recording, discussing something quickly, even, sometimes, self-effacingly going over a song she’d learnt from him. After seeing her in three different places, Nirmalya hummed to his mother: ‘Who is she?’ ‘I cannot remember her name,’ she confessed. ‘She is a student of Shyamji’s from England.’ Nirmalya had overheard her clear her throat and sing once, shyly. ‘Why does he waste his time with the likes of her?’ he asked, the stringent puritan in him provoked. England meant pounds, and pounds were a windfall; they had the power to heal, to renew. ‘Jao, jao, don’t think so much,’ said Shyamji’s mother. But he wasn’t thinking; he’d decided to take up the offer – in his courteous, patient way, he had the passport and visa done with Mrs Lakhani’s help. Secretly, he was pleased to be free of his family for the first time, of the gaggle with its needs and requirements and opinions – from his revered mother to that loiterer and dramabaaz Pyarelal. It would be like a rehearsal of sannyas, the last stage when the householder withdraws from worldly duties, except that he wasn’t retiring to the forest, he was off to Frognall Lane: the trip had some of the benefits of renunciation, and also made good business sense. He underwent a transformation; for the passport photo, he abandoned his loose pyjamas and kurta and wore a shirt and trousers. He looked more efficient in this incarnation. He
felt
more efficient, too.