The Immortals (24 page)

The time of departure was 3 a.m. ‘There’s no point in sleeping,’ said Shyamji with weary reasonableness to his family. ‘Haa, Shyam, you sleep on the plane or when you get there. We’ll sleep when you’ve gone,’ said his mother, even-voiced, hiding some complex apprehension, looking at no one in particular through her thick glasses.

He was leaving on a Saturday; so they rented a VCR from a man on Friday, and two video cassettes,
Dharam Karam
and
Namak Halal
, from one of the stifling video libraries that had sprung up irrepressibly in the interstices of the new buildings, and had brief and bright lives, like fireflies. By eight o’clock the packing was done, various white kurtas and pyjamas and handkerchiefs put in, the puja finished and a red tilak embossed on Shyamji’s forehead; they all, Banwari’s and Pyarelal’s families included, huddled in front of the television set, adults and children spilling on to one another, and began to watch a bad copy of
Dharam Karam
. The volume was high; they seemed unaware of this, and laughed and shouted to each other above the dialogue and violins, talking much of the time, because they’d seen it before; the film wasn’t meant primarily to be watched; it was a participant in this gathering as much as they were. Food arrived in the midst of all this, rotis that had swelled in Neeta’s deft hands, and vegetables, and, once more, the remnants of the yoghurt that had been set overnight in a bowl made of stainless steel. By the time
Dharam Karam
was over, their eyes ached with the trembling pictures and Banwari felt a bit ill; Shyamji’s son Sanjay took out the cassette and lifted the flap and shook his head at the faint line running through the tape; yet they persisted with
Namak Halal
, pushing it into the VCR and watching, agog, as it disappeared into the slot. Sumati laughed with recognition as the titles came on; Shyamji, sitting on an armchair, was now watching the film, and was now elsewhere; his mind travelled far away, then came back to the ear-splitting dialogue (the volume was turned up so they could hear it over their own exchanges), to the room, with everyone in it, abruptly. He was already in a state of departure, but sleep, which he’d dismissed from the occasion, was returning to him like an old habit; he yawned twice, and no one in the loud room noticed. When the film was only halfway through, becoming festive and precipitous a little after midnight, Banwari softly reminded him, ‘Bhaisaab, we should leave.’

M
RS
L
AKHANI
’
S
home was a two-storeyed house with a garden at the back. She manoeuvred the car dexterously into an expectant space in the front; there seemed to be no garage. Then they – she and a curious but slowly acclimatising Shyamji – both got out into the sunlight and shut the doors. A passage on the right, a small half-lit sliver, disappeared somewhere – to the garden, Shyamji found out later. Light came in from that garden into the sitting room. Shyamji had never encountered such silence before, so much composure; so many things everywhere, and not one that looked out of place – the cushions on the sofa, the beer mugs, the plates with pictures of places on them, the orderly crowd of framed photos of ancestors and the Sai Baba and children and grandchildren, a copy of the
Radio Times
, a large upside-down face emblazoned on its cover, upon the table before the sofa. The air had a curious, still smell that was faintly familiar to him and confused him: cumin and asofoetida.

He liked the silence immediately; it didn’t oppress him. The next morning he opened his eyes early, and stared at the wall opposite him with a mixture of surprise and panic, but after that, once he heard Mrs Lakhani call out, ingenuously, ‘Guruji?’ from the kitchen, he quickly, obligingly, exorcised his disorientation and grew used to the weather, the duration of the day. He was happy, in a way carefully contained but spontaneously childlike, to be free of the cacophony he’d left behind. Here, in this weather, he had a momentary but strong premonition of being able to give his music a home, a sanctuary.

She brought him to the harmonium on the upper storey that two years ago she’d ordered and had shipped from India. It too had made a journey, but it had merged into its home and internalised the hardly-broken stillness in the little children’s room, empty now. Shyamji ran his fingers over the keys almost blithely; and, finding them alien and hard, furrowed his brow and attacked them with a bit more aggressiveness. Then the instrument and he had made their peace, and he was ready to give his first lesson, and, the next day, to receive Mrs Lakhani’s adoring friends.

He made no attempt to discover London (which he’d, long ago, thought was interchangeable with England) all at once; he was fairly content to walk about Frognall Lane. Dressed in ash-grey trousers, a shirt and new shoes whose tightness he ignored, he walked down the slopes beneath the trees, staring patiently and affectionately at the children – they pretended not to notice him.

‘Don’t go too far, guruji,’ warned Mrs Lakhani.

From the sitting room, he’d look out through the French window into the garden when Mrs Lakhani had gone to work, leaving him with her daily, good-natured farewell, and he had nothing to do but reign absolutely over a house that was not his own; his complete possession of a place that in no way acknowledged him made him fleetingly nostalgic. ‘The pigeons
are
fatter here,’ he thought, watching the traffic of busy birds strutting on the grass. ‘And so are the sparrows.’ He’d presumed, previously, that the sparrows at home were universal in size and dimension. He now scrutinised these birds in the garden silently. It was his deceptive, inconclusive way of thinking, before Mrs Lakhani turned the key in the lock and opened the door, of where he’d come from.

He emerged, two months later, from the arrivals area at Sahar International airport, blinking in surprise at the sunlight, steering sadly, this man who could neither drive nor cycle, a worn, stuffed burgundy bag with buckles upon a trolley. In the midst of the large crowd, standing in the sun behind flimsy railings and watching the spectacle of passengers coming out one by one and walking down the catwalk before the arrivals exit – in the midst of all this his family was waiting, and broke rank imperceptibly on seeing him; he touched mataji’s feet, she blessed him with a detached, immovable satisfaction at something having come full circle, others came forward awkwardly to lightly touch the returning man’s toes. The first thing his sister Tara asked, with a sardonic lopsided grin, was:

‘What did you bring for me, bhaiyya?’

For some reason, he was disgusted by the question. His eyes, which had had little sleep, stared back at the bright sunlight of the city. Was it being married to Pyarelal that had turned Tara into – a beggar? It wasn’t unusual, he thought (walking, like one already beginning to reluctantly embrace the old habitat, towards the line of quarrelling black and yellow Fiats), for wives to take on the characteristics of their husbands. She was no longer little Tara, his sister and Ram Lal’s daughter; she was Pyarelal’s partner and comrade. But, at a glance, it was true of all of them waiting there for him – they weren’t waiting to receive him, they’d been preparing these months to swallow him up; wanting things from him, wanting things, wanting things. It was hot, but he froze inside; he had nothing of himself to give.

His health had improved noticeably after the two summer months in London; he’d lost weight, and felt younger and the better for it. He still hadn’t abandoned his new clothes; he came to visit the Senguptas wearing shirt, trousers, and strapped sandals. It was like meeting a man who’d returned from the past, with a new alias and a new future. Beneath the clothes, of course, he was the same man; Nirmalya thought of the quaint English phrase, ‘in the pink of health’, and thought how apposite it was to Shyamji at this moment, incongrous though it was to his complexion.

‘It is a good country,’ said Shyamji moodily. ‘I would be happy living there. I was thinking, maybe I should move there.’

Mallika Sengupta smiled, a little alarmed, although she perfectly understood the sentiment – the sense of possibility, which had come a bit belatedly to him, which suddenly makes things plain; she dismissed the possibility herself, because Shyamji emigrating would leave her without a teacher. But the words disconcerted Nirmalya; all his ideas that were derived from reading books on philosophy and English poetry told him the artist must belong to and practise his art in his milieu. How could Shyamji think of giving up his country so easily? Besides, being a Hindustani classical musician, Shyamji’s art was intimately connected to these seasons,
this
light, an intimacy that Nirmalya had not too long ago discovered for himself. After this discovery, which to him had the force almost of a moral revelation, he couldn’t understand Shyamji’s new-found rootlessness, or the mildly challenging look on his face as he said those words.

B
UT
S
HYAMJI
didn’t leave the country – at least, not permanently. In the following year, he made two more trips to England; his life, and his lifestyle, improved, as if one of those tiny, mute goddesses, whose vermilion-smeared pictures he bowed his head before, had impulsively decided to shower him with bric-a-brac and useful things. So he acquired a second-hand Fiat and employed a young driver to make that long journey from Borivli to various parts of the city.

‘Whatever Hari wishes,’ he’d say, glancing heavenward at the clouds from which the second-hand car had descended.

He arrived at Thacker Towers in it; it saved him the travail of trains and taxis. He was still not a ‘bada saab’; he couldn’t afford an upmarket ‘vehicle’; but he was proud of the turn in his fate that had brought him his own ‘vehicle’.

Very apologetically, he raised his tuition fees; ‘What can I do, didi?’ he said, with a pained but firm expression, fairly comfortable that what most of them gave him was a fraction of what they spent every day on a decoration, a painting, or a sari.

After his third trip abroad, he had cleared most of his outstanding debts. And he had enough money left over to sell his own flat in Borivli, and, with that money and some of what he’d recently earned singing for enthusiastic, cushion-propped, sprawling drawing-room audiences in Frognall Lane (how noisy and drink-and-peanut infested that quiet house became during soirees!) and performing in other places in London, he bought a two-bedroom apartment in Versova, facing the sea. This building complex, ventilated and its windows shaken from time to time by sea breezes, was appropriately called Sagar Apartments; it had been built for traders who’d acquired social pretensions and a bit of extra, unaccounted-for money and wanted not to be left out of the property boom; living for years, even generations, next to shops and godowns in humid rooms, they’d developed a longing for the sea. The porch and the corridors leading to the lift were laid with marble, the one stone that, in the city, had the ability to confer prestige indiscriminately upon a habitation. When Shyamji moved here, the building was brand new, and the white surface was still smudged by the footprints of labourers; but his eyes were temporarily, pleasantly, engulfed by that whiteness. With him moved to that smart two-bedroom flat mataji, the mother, and his wife, and his two unmarried daughters and son.

‘Hm? Who said?’ asked Shyamji, tugged against his will from the wideness of a reverie into the constricted space of this non sequitur. He was full of these absent moments, when he seemed to be thinking neither of his family nor his students.

‘Kailash,’ repeated his son determinedly.

‘Bewkoof hai,’ said Shyamji swiftly, serenely. ‘He’s an idiot.’

But Sumati, Shyamji’s wife, who was within earshot, smilingly and defiantly took up cudgels on this Kailash’s and her son’s behalf: ‘After all, learning the keyboard now will mean that our Sanjay will be able to become a music arranger by the time he’s eighteen, God willing’ – she’d had a vision of that moment in the future, it was an image that had a certain power over her – ‘and’ – here her prescience was lit by tenderness – ‘see how beautifully he already plays the guitar.’

All these Western instruments . . . They were glamorous because they’d arrived, intact, after a long journey; once here, they could merge intrepidly into the texture of almost any musical background – it was not as if Shyamji wasn’t won over by their virtues and innate youthful qualities himself. A man who could play a Western instrument would always have a livelihood in today’s world: so it seemed to the old music families. The tanpura, with its four strings, hadn’t lost its magic, but it became more and more difficult to make time for it; still, its sound shocked you every time you heard it – like a god humming to himself, its vibrations difficult to describe or report on, the solipsism of the heavens.

A slim white synthesiser with an apparently interminable row of white and black keys arrived in that room; Sanjay began to toy with it at once – the tinselly cascades of sound introduced a new and slightly embarrassing atmosphere to the small apartment,
filmi
, but upbeat and busy with possibility.

For two days, a series of chords, seemingly arbitrary, but executed in a variety of keys in quick succession, took over life in the little drawing room. People began, eventually, to ignore the boy; from time to time an awareness registered on Shyamji’s face in a faint smile, as if his son were a child again, and kept encroaching obstreperously, in his single-mindedness, upon his own concerns – for this is what it had been like when Sanjay could neither walk nor talk, but possessed, in his play, the same glassy-eyed, silent, dogmatic zeal.