The Immortals (31 page)

He went now, taking a half-empty two o’clock train from Bandra to Churchgate, to the Asiatic department store near the station, because it had the only passport-photo booth in Bombay. Edging past unflappable, prodigious housewives, he paid for a token at a counter and then, avoiding a mirror, climbed expectantly up the stairs. He was suspended momentarily between two levels on which toys, stainless-steel utensils, yards of cloth appeared and disappeared in an exchange of gazes, words, and consultations, the thin salespersons in white taking out and then once again silently returning the folded bales to their places. There, before him, on the first floor, was the booth, flanked by long counters busily selling things. A lone man in uniform advised him sombrely about what he was to do when he was inside: ‘Be careful not to shut your eyes when the flash goes off ’; ‘Drop the token and stare at the green light before you’; ‘Adjust the stool to the correct level’; all in a low, inhuman, deadpan voice. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Nirmalya, vaguely disturbed; he went in and pulled the curtain, feeling nervous, and also a guilty, solitary excitement, because there’s an unmistakable hint of sleaze about cubicles and drawn curtains. Much as he tried, in that narrow island in the milling hubbub of the shop, the flash, both times, went off a moment before he was prepared for it, leaving him feeling somehow chastised when he emerged from the booth. The man, who’d felt snubbed by Nirmalya’s ‘Yes, yes’ now had the inevitable tranquillity of the powerful; when the photographs fell with a buzz into the slot, he forbade him with an impersonal, imperious gesture to touch them until a few minutes had passed. Nirmalya dawdled there, distracted, as his image composed itself bit by bit upon the whiteness; when he finally picked up the photos, he saw the sense of being imprisoned inside the cubicle had robbed his face of its strangeness, had made it ordinary and disposable as the paper it appeared on. He felt no attachment to it whatsoever; given a choice, he’d have denied to the passport officer it was his picture.

They still felt the need, of course, to go to the city three or four times a week; the old life was a fix they suffered almost physically without – despite the prettiness of Bandra, despite their avowed contempt for that existence comprising parties and elaborate hairdos. They took a taxi usually, often with shrill Lata Mangeshkar songs playing from the speakers at the back; or, when Apurva Sengupta was picked up in the morning by a colleague, they followed distractedly in the fitfully cool Ambassador. But it cost money, the journey; hundreds of rupees every week at the Shah and Sanghi petrol station at the corner of Breach Candy and Kemp’s Corner. The taxi fare, each time, was almost a hundred rupees.

‘And cheap,’ added Nirmalya. It was not like him to be troubled about such things. Nevertheless, he was aware in a faraway, theological way that there was no company now to foot the bills, and he worried – this was a new and pleasurable anxiety – slightly for his father; and, of course, he quite enjoyed embracing whatever little poverty he could. Travelling by the local train was his way of briefly, innocently, taking on a disguise, of insinuating himself into the life of the multitude.

‘Really? Where does it go to?’ asked Mrs Sengupta, enthused mildly by the thought of saving the taxi fare; excited, too, to be in a new partnership in this foray with her son. Besides, the idea of saving money had always exercised the puritan in Mr and Mrs Sengupta; the actual practice bored them.

‘Churchgate Station,’ he said.

‘Let’s try it tomorrow,’ she replied, negotiating.

They took a taxi – not to the city this time, but to Bandra Station, and, while Mrs Sengupta hovered in the background, near the entrance, watching vendors, abstracted beggars with bandaged, amputated limbs, and auto rickshaws suddenly roaring back to Bandra, he bought two first-class tickets. This theoretical and implausible luxury gave him much pleasure; ordinary tickets were only two rupees; and, if you paid fifteen rupees more, you travelled first class, which was identical to second, except that the seats were slightly cleaner, and, instead of the raw, ubiquitous perspiration of vegetable vendors, errand boys, and people with part-time employment, you inhaled the odour, mingled with aftershave, of clerks and traders’ accountants, their monthly passes (naturally they didn’t buy tickets) in their shirt pockets. The compartment was less than half full because it was half past two; he – because she was so nervous about her feet and balance – had to help her up, clasping her hand tightly; once she was in, she looked about her with a mild, puzzled smile, like one who’d entered a somewhat makeshift drawing room at a suburban social gathering, and then allowed herself, elegantly, silently, to be led to her seat. People seemed to recognise her, and looked at her respectfully, as if they knew she was Mr Sengupta’s wife and what that meant; and then returned almost immediately to their own thoughts. She settled into the seat, without comment, trying to experience the strange magic in the compartment, unworried, for the moment, that the seat was hard and that she had a lingering backache. He glanced at her with a deep, uncategorisable love. Just as the train began to move, barefoot children and tiny, intrepid men with fan-like bouquets of pens jumped on board, displaying them briefly to one tolerant but uninterested person after another; the children took around small plastic packets of peanuts, saying, just a little too familiarly, ‘Timepass?’ Mrs Sengupta looked nonplussed and charmed. ‘Let’s have some peanuts,’ she said, with an air of someone consenting to behave much more rashly than they normally did. Then, surrendering to the breeze, which generally annoyed her when she was in a car because of what it did to her hair, making her quickly roll the window up, she sat munching peanuts with dignity and an impenetrable delight; until, carefully, entering a different phase in her consciousness of the journey, she put the packet into her leather handbag.

Nirmalya stood by the open doorway, holding, casually, the metal rod he’d lately got accustomed to. ‘Be careful,’ she cried. He nodded curtly and looked away, immersed in his own independence. It was a slow train; it gathered speed and immediately lost it; it stopped repeatedly. At every stop, Mrs Sengupta became dreamy and childlike, her meditation seemed uncomplicated and engrossing, and she was nudged physically out of her reverie only by the jolt the train gave when it started again. Surreptitiously, this experiment saddened her and dampened her spirits; no, she was who she was, she couldn’t, at this late stage in her life, become somebody else. She harboured a small panic within her.

‘No,’ she said, getting off, with her son’s help again, on to the wide platform at Churchgate Station, the long train motionless beside her, commuters alighting and vanishing unhurriedly towards the gates and exits by the time she’d found her bearings, ‘this is very nice, but not for me.’ She smoothed the expensive tangail she was wearing. ‘You know I’ve gone round in this city in nothing but a car for the last twenty years,’ she confessed to her son, as if he’d failed to notice. She smiled in apology, seeming to speak of a way of life she’d had no choice but to accept – that’s the way the company had cocooned them all – and how she’d begun to find everything outside it a tiny bit incredible.

She’d taken a change of sari with her for the cocktails that evening, and a jewellery box with a few bangles and small diamond earrings, all in a small plastic bag. She’d refused to give the bag to Nirmalya to carry, nervous that he, in one of his absent, visionary moods, might leave it lying on a seat upon the train.

As ever, like pigeons returning to roost, they got out of the taxi at the gothic archway of the club. Here, at twilight, they were reunited with Apurva Sengupta, in view of members seated on neighbouring sofas, not quite noticing them; and returned to afternoon papers and tea, and fresh lime soda. At the stroke of seven o’clock she went into the cavernous Victorian ladies’ dressing room in the club and began to transform herself.

Nirmalya went to see a movie on his own:
Omen II
. It was part of his deliberate cultivation of peculiarity; ‘What’s wrong with seeing a movie by myself ?’ he said, not so much to others as, defiantly, to himself. Then he stood in a queue and bought one ticket, and climbed up the steps to the hall, liberated by his anonymity, but also feeling the sad undertow of aimlessness that was constantly part of his life. He gradually lost himself in the terror of the film; his heart, his errant heart, beat wildly. And Mallika Sengupta transferred the old sari into the plastic packet, and then put it behind the rear seat of the Ambassador. She was telling her husband about the journey by the local train, laughing at how simple things, things without special distinction or interest, became, for Nirmalya, the son they’d brought up with more than a god-like attention, and put into the best school – how simple things had begun to become for him portentous adventures. ‘He’s excited by what others would find boring, and bored by what they’d find exciting,’ she said. ‘It’s the way you brought him up. He has no idea of the “real world”,’ the father said, not entirely without pride or admonition. ‘I worry for him.’ She’d begun to defend herself, but was interrupted by a child at the traffic lights at Marine Drive crying to her to buy a small garland of mogra flowers.

‘No, no,’ she said, which encouraged the child into assuming a low-pitched whining tone, little more than a whisper: ‘Take it memsaab, take it memsaab.’

She gave in, as she always had ever since she’d discovered the mogra in Bombay. And it was always at this junction that the girl would appear, so that the nocturnal perfume had become associated for her with the traffic lights and the Talk of the Town. She would emboss it on her bun, where, in the dark, it would fit perfectly, like letters of an ancient typeface.

T
HE CITY HAD
begun to glitter; even Pali Hill and Bandra, once cut off, a sanctuary for a different rhythm of life, places in which people lived who were half-hidden, small-scale, even Bandra and Pali Hill sparkled with money. Nirmalya’s rejection of the world of corporations he’d grown up in widened into a disgust with the booming city; weddings everywhere; cars in droves thronging at the entrance of some celebration; clusters of families with children shopping late into the evening.

A new shop called ‘Croissant’ had opened on Perry Road; and Nirmalya loved croissants. Walking past its gleaming door, blue and silver in the evening with light, he was tempted to go inside. But then he noticed a group of frenetic children – obviously the children of the labourers who were constructing a building behind the one he lived in: he’d seen the irrevocable, emergent skeleton of the building from the rear balcony of the flat, the labourers rhythmically at work in daytime. White dust rose habitually; he knew these were their children because of that dust, which they bore like signs on their hands and parts of their faces. They were in some excitement; one of them, an obdurate waif-like girl, had created a kind of hammock by lifting and holding the bottom of her dress in front of her, and this tiny hammock was crowded with breadcrust. Nirmalya had seen the children emerge from the shop; walk noisily down the steps; the others darted away from the girl but were reunited and ran around her in a chattering group, now and then scooping up bits of the crust. Nirmalya was amazed by their pleasure; he stood there, like an idiot, watching them, and taking in the radiance of Croissant from the corner of his eye. He watched as the children danced into the half-completed building off Perry Road, the girl still holding the end of her dress before her. Returning home, he wrote hurriedly in his notebook, shutting out a television that was within earshot, ‘When the children entered the building site, they became invisible, though I could hear them laughing. The building site, dark with the white dust the labourers had raised, was like the garden in “Burnt Norton”, where “the leaves were full of children,/ Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.” ’

‘Let’s go and have tea at the Leela Penta,’ said Mr Sengupta. Saturday morning, and strange parts of the city beckoned. The Leela was the new hotel, not only a new hotel but a new species of hotel, that had come up in the outskirts. Not like the Sun ’n’ Sand, with its respectable, palm-tree-infested charm, overlooking sunsets and quaint horseback rides on the beach, but an excuse, it seemed, for some people to pour money into a freshly built-up wilderness, where you’d least expect it. One morning, Shobha De had surprised them all by describing it as a paradise on the edge of civilisation in a full-page advertisement in the
Sunday Times
. This had made them suspicious; but also, naturally, curious.

‘What
is
this place? If Shobha De says it’s good, it must be rubbish,’ said Mrs Sengupta. And so they set out for tea at eleven thirty. Featureless, intimidating, promising Versova: wide avenues and thickets of tall buildings, even taller than Thacker Towers. This was the city’s newest suburb – and was this where, long ago, when Nirmalya was a boy and they used to visit the beach in Marve on certain weekends, was this where a connecting road used to run, with fields and marshes beyond, and with a low-roofed South Indian cafe doing surprisingly bustling business on the roadside, where Nirmalya, with his parents, on the long journey back towards home, had once eaten a dosa, agog with wonder at the black mustard-seed seasoning on the potatoes? So it seemed vaguely, as they went this way; that it had been somewhere here; though there was no evidence of it now.