The Immortals (29 page)

‘What?’ cried Mallika Sengupta, looking up and waiting for him to turn and to catch his eye. A strange melange of emotions invaded her; among them was the instinctive realisation that a person’s dying was such a simple solution to so many dilemmas and hesitancies, but a solution never seriously considered till it happened and surprised you with its straightforwardness. He’d been Head of the Light Music wing of HMV when he’d died, though he’d been less on her mind than even two years ago; some people never retire, and become fixed to their employment, like a mask. Very few find out, or even care to, what they were outside it.

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘Two days ago. Died of a stroke.’

An employee at HMV he’d run into that afternoon in the lobby of the Taj had paused a moment to break the news, as if Laxmi Ratan Shukla had to, in some form, briefly inhabit these bits of formal chit-chat between them. A couple of minutes of astonishment and slow questioning – ‘When?’ ‘How?’ – and nods and grim phrases, and that was it, they continued urgently in opposite directions. And it almost seemed to Mallika Sengupta that a burden had lifted, that she’d been delivered from waiting for the day this man would be persuaded just that little bit more – that final push – and produce her disc; and surely there must be many others, in whose thoughts Laxmi Ratan Shukla had become a dull and persistent discomfort, who’d been similarly delivered. That day – the day Shukla would pick up the phone and say to her husband, ‘Sengupta saab, we will do it now; there is a possibility . . .’ or rise from his table to say innocuously, with that discomfiting softness, ‘Sengupta saab, please sit down . . .’ and give the go-ahead – that day, it was safe to say, would never come, and she was glad she’d give up, now, whatever attachment she’d had to its arrival.

‘Shyamji,’ she said on the phone, wanting to disabuse him as quickly as possible of any notion he might have had of the man’s continuance in the world, ‘Laxmi Ratan Shukla is no more.’

He replied gravely, unfazed, ‘He never did anyone any good’; the seriousness with which he said this made her laugh later; for her, it became Shukla’s epitaph.

For Mr Sengupta, Shukla’s death was, in passing, a day on which to take stock, to understand what music – especially in its incarnation in his wife, his marriage – had meant to him; although there were several other things, to do with the consultancy he was providing the Germans, to preoccupy him in the evening. Had he been too soft, had he given Shukla too much time of day, as Mallika Sengupta seemed to think; would she have fared better if he’d not depended so heavily on this enigmatic man and acted, in his own eyes, with more recklessness? He laughed to himself, as he entered into an imaginary dialogue – composed of strong and inextricable feelings, not words – with his wife and son upon the subject (when he actually had to talk to them about it, he found himself unable to use any but the simplest generalities, which his son infuriated him by dismissing almost immediately); Mallika had wanted recognition, that pure, woebegone desire for a reward for her gift had accompanied her life from the start but never overwhelmed it; but she hadn’t wanted to dirty her hands in the music world; she’d wanted to preserve the prestige of being, at once, an artist and the wife of a successful executive.
She
knew, with an uncomplicated honesty, what her worth was; to what extent could she compromise or to which level stoop if others pretended not to? She kept her distance; remaining busy all the time, not a moment’s hiatus, busy with the music, busy with the household, busy with Nirmalya’s life and Mr Sengupta’s. That had left him with no choice but to pursue Shukla, who’d been more than happy, in his phlegmatic way – if ‘happy’ was a word you could use of him – to be pursued. Apurva Sengupta hadn’t
liked
pursuing Shukla; sometimes, he’d found it perplexing and pointless – as a human being, but also as a manager of people and departments. The pursuit had ended; the quarry – though it was Mallika Sengupta who felt more like a quarry herself – had suddenly removed itself, permanently.

NIRMALYA
– though he still hadn’t completed college – wanted to apply to study abroad. ‘There’s no philosophy degree here worth its name,’ he said, contemptuous and impatient after a day spent loitering intractably around the portals of the college at Kala Ghoda.

He found an ally in his mother, who, otherwise, couldn’t bear to let him out of her sight, but who became very serious and nodded at everything he said these days, as if it were of the utmost importance. His mother, who’d disciplined him as a boy when he would plot new and untested devices to ‘bunk’ school, had recently become a sort of acolyte. For thirty years her life had been designed by her husband and by the company; now, like a beacon representing some other order, her son, untidy, brooding, with an opinion about everything, appeared on the horizon.

‘He doesn’t want to be like
you
,’ she said, berating Apurva Sengupta, as if he and his kind were a species of obstreperous, careless dinosaur whose day had come.

Mr Sengupta smiled. He knew that, although his own days might be numbered, his type, the company type, ambitious, brisk, democratic, convinced in the sacred value of entrepreneurship, was bound to flourish – it made him a bit sad, knowing his son had decided not to be part of this proliferation – in a way that dinosaurs never had managed to. His type would populate the world in unforeseen mutations. Money was like a sea-breeze blowing inland; gentle now, but threatening to uproot everything. He, Mr Sengupta, had never really seen money except in its genteel aspects, had never seen its unbridled form; but he could smell its distant agitation. Nirmalya appeared immune to the smell, or determined to ignore it.

But, surprisingly, Apurva Sengupta felt affectionately about his son’s interest in philosophy; just as you might listen to a piece of music which numbs you to the present and makes your nerves tingle to the daydreams of who you were thirty or forty years ago, Mr Sengupta felt a momentary, youthful enchantment. Then the present returned to him all at once, physically and emotionally; you could not escape being who you were now; he was worried by Nirmalya’s intention to study philosophy and the mundane but unavoidable questions it raised. It seemed quite right, and wonderful, to Mr Sengupta that Nirmalya’s first follower was his mother; there was a small but revolutionary change taking place in his family before his very eyes; and who knows – given time, he too might be converted. What was parenthood, after all, but an apprenticeship (a belated apprenticeship in Mr Sengupta’s case) to the possible greatness of one’s children?

But to go off to England, as Nirmalya wanted to, soon, insatiable, suddenly, in his conviction that the real hunt for knowledge would begin once he’d transplanted himself there – that passage would require funding; where would the funds come from? Nirmalya was too unworldly, too insulated from the material capriciousness of human existence, to be bothered with these particulars. It was left to Apurva Sengupta, who’d once managed a company, to now manage his son and his unworldliness. Mr Sengupta would have to quickly review his savings (which, under Mrs Gandhi’s tax regime, had been small, most of it going every month into a strangely futile insurance premium) and apply for educational loans. It was expensive maintaining a saint, a mystic. Wasn’t it Sarojini Naidu who’d said – Apurva Sengupta’s mind went back to his shabby, peripatetic college days and to the freedom struggle – that it cost a lot of money to keep Gandhi travelling third class? Decades had passed since that remark, exquisite in its irony, had been made and those excitements burnt out into the straight-faced pursuit of well-being in present-day existence. Mr Sengupta smiled as the words – full of a tolerant, even affectionate, mockery he recognised while taking up the task in hand – came back to him.

‘Jane’, thin, hesitant, but large-heartedly helpful, was part of an entourage from the Commonwealth office in whose honour a cheerful and efficient business luncheon had been organised that day, in a conference room in the basement of a five-star hotel. The topics covered in the meaningless, happy hum between the suited Indians and the awkward English, some of them making jerky, shy movements of the head, others complacent and impenetrable, had included foreign investment (naturally), mergers, the annual growth rate, trade restrictions, and, between Jane and Apurva Sengupta, for about seven to ten minutes, philosophy departments.

And so Nirmalya became a correspondent, and entered, reluctantly, his first transcontinental communication, in which someone from the department, a Mrs Sandra Dixon, pleased and ruffled him by writing back to him and sending him, obligingly, an envelope thick with forms. He sat down heavily with them in the morning upon the bed, bending forward, placing them against the hard surface of an exercise book, filling them out laboriously, progressing slowly from rectangle to rectangle, sighing from the start like a sick person (he had a condition close to dyslexia when it came to completing forms; it filled him with a subdued panic and lostness). When it was done, he felt an indescribable sense of liberation, as if he’d never have to do it again; he went on to the veranda to get some air and to survey the unfolding of the everyday. Weekly, now, long white envelopes began to arrive, with postage stamps that had, upon them, a ghostly impression of the head of the Queen of England.

The letter they’d been waiting for but not expecting crept in beneath the door one afternoon with aerogrammes and statements of interest rates: acceptance.

When Nirmalya had ripped open the envelope and excavated the letter, he read, with the same swimming eyes of the unhappy form-filler, the message in the neat, punctilious, by-now-familiar type: ‘I am pleased to say that . . .’ He took it to his mother; she opened her mouth in astonishment and then read it out, in her naive, stumbling, insistent maternal accent, to her husband over the phone.

H
E WENT WALKING
around Pali Hill and the lanes of Bandra; in the afternoon, confronting dogs that lay curled up in self-contained, pilgrim-like repose in the middle of a road, or a tyre abandoned on one side without explanation; and in the evening, with the fruit bats hovering overhead. He was in a curious interim phase; unexpectedly leaving his childhood terrors and his adolescent anxieties behind, opening himself, for the first time, to the allure of the world – he was in a state of semi-retirement himself, secretive with his thoughts on books and music and this new locality, nothing to do for much of the time, as he waited to travel to King’s College. He had almost no friends – he’d gradually stopped seeing them, one by one – and he undertook his expeditions alone; his parents no longer questioned him about his irregular attendance at college. He was struck by everything here: the warm, loaf-like stones that made up the walls of the Christian schools; the pretty, tissue-paper-like bougainvillea (almost like something mass-produced by a greeting-card manufacturer) by the gates to the Goans’ bungalows causing him to stop, undecided, in confusion; at traffic junctions, as lines of cars negotiated transitions from Hill Road to Perry and other roads, sudden crosses rose up like sentinels behind the traffic lights; and churches sprang up between or in the corners of the interconnecting lanes. How different all this was from the Bombay he’d grown up in!

‘So you’re going to London,’ said Nayana Neogi, his parents’ friend, sitting in a large, loose smock in the small bright sitting room of the new flat. He felt more comfortable now, more at home, with his mother’s friends than with his own; he felt they could sense his transformation. ‘We’re so proud of you, Nirmalya.’ She leaned forward, this woman who was for years familiar to him, large, engrossed, looking for an ashtray.

Now that they were in this part of the city, his parents had begun to see the Neogis more regularly than before: they were a ten-minute drive away. Not only proximity, but the fact that retirement had restored a sort of parity, that to see Apurva Sengupta was to see an old friend, and not so much to visit a ‘big man’, had made things just a little easier; from the early days, when everyone and everything was full of promise, and Nayana’s husband a young gifted artist and Apurva a charming, beautiful ‘chhokra’ they were fond of, to the middle period, full of unresolved tensions and contradictions, when it seemed infinite opportunities opened up for the slightly less deserving and mysteriously closed for others, to now, when Nayana Neogi seemed more at peace in her oversized frame and with her superannuated bohemian days, happy with her various pets – so much time had been covered, and was represented, in this simple visit now that the friends lived within a few miles of each other: Khar and Bandra! It was in London, of course, they’d first met in the fifties, when Nayana’s husband, Prashanta, and Apurva Sengupta had been students, the former of commercial art, the latter beginning his articleship toward a degree in accountancy: there was that story of how Apurva had, by mistake, on the first night he’d spent at Prashanta’s ‘digs’, used – they had taken an instant liking to each other – the latter’s toothbrush. This outrageous act of presumption on young Apurva Sengupta’s part (for that was how it was seen by the doting Prashanta) had sealed their friendship for life; but the story of the toothbrush was just a little too old now, almost too pat and rounded, for Prashanta to use it to make a special claim on his friend; but he still recounted it; for him, it still had a kind of music. Over the years, they’d not so much grown apart as been divided by what constituted and defined success: the Senguptas suspected the Neogis secretly resented their ‘success’ only because they clung to one particular meaning of that word. The Neogis felt that Apurva Sengupta had sacrificed his freshness, his mischief, and become predictable in his life-devouring pursuit of conventional fulfilments. But now the Senguptas had moved to this part of the city, the subterranean debate about success had lost its urgency; and Mallika Sengupta had begun to visit, every other day, the rented ground-floor flat, two steps up to a wooden door on the left, where the Neogis continued to live, the black-and-white photograph of their dead, smiling son greeting you as you entered the bedroom, a menagerie of pets – a sleek, supercilious grey cat and, recently, a small family of Pekinese – moving constantly and confidently from kitchen to bedroom to hall, the coir chairs waiting to be occupied by visitors.