The Immortals (32 page)

They arrived, pennant-heralded, at the dun-coloured driveway to the hotel, and got out at the immense porch. A distant gust of chill air greeted them. The hotel, with its line of palm trees, had risen out of nowhere like something in a European fairy tale; it was surrounded largely by waste land. Mr Sengupta had a lost but cheerfully inquisitive air, like someone who’d been forced to take a long diversion and had stopped accidentally; and the doormen willingly cooperated in this little piece of theatre, and received him accordingly, calming him with smiles and bows as he entered. When they’d walked past the catafalque-like lobby, ignoring the small, glassy-looking men and women behind the reception, and settled into the understated but resplendent chairs in the coffee shop, burrowing finally into the heavy menus before them, running their eyes over varieties of Darjeeling tea and cake named and described in sloping letters, Nirmalya, who was looking out through the large sunlit glass windows into the brown tract of land outside, where, in the distance, a boy was squinting and squatting on the edge of a metal cylinder, said: ‘Baba, I don’t want to eat here.’

Apurva Sengupta looked again at his son in surprise, even wonder, as if he were reminded that the boy represented a puzzling, unforeseeable turn in their lives; he couldn’t help but laugh, almost with pleasure, as he used to when Nirmalya, as a baby, had first begun to exuberantly and insistently utter nonsense, and it had seemed so momentous to his parents. Then, too, he’d felt that fear mingled with joy, as if he’d never confronted anything comparable before.

‘Why, what’s the matter?’ he asked his son, without anger or condescension – just as he’d reasoned with him at different points in their lives, while cajoling him to go to school, for instance, or when leaning forward to the small unappeasable boy before he got on to a flight.

‘I can’t eat here,’ Nirmalya said, shaking his head slowly, the boyish face, little more than a child’s in spite of the moustache, full of an inexplicable hurt, the eyes almost tearful. ‘I can’t eat here till Shyamji is able to eat here,’ he said, eyebrows knitted, still shaking the head ominously.

What was this sudden onrush of love for his teacher – a love he seldom displayed openly? What had happened to this boy, for whom all it took to be happy once was to come home from school? Apurva Sengupta felt a twinge of concern, as he struggled to work his way towards a sense of how his son perceived the world. But they – the parents – didn’t argue or admonish; simply tried patiently to understand the truth of this outburst. Returning the ivory-coloured napkin to the table, Mallika Sengupta said: ‘No, I don’t like this hotel either. It has no soul,’ she concluded determinedly; and the father, still strikingly handsome and kind-looking, fundamentally an optimist and a person of faith, faith in the future, nevertheless wondered at the spectacle of his son, and nodded tentatively in agreement. They pushed the chairs back and rose; Nirmalya had already reached the open doorway of the coffee shop.

Smiling, but with a conviction that they were doing the only logical and admissible thing, the Senguptas followed their son out, leaving the waiters puzzled, Mrs Sengupta glancing tolerantly, without emotion, at the tray of cakes. They crossed the lobby, forfeiting the usual unconscious abandon and easy familiarity they felt when visiting beautiful, welcoming places in Bombay. The boy, in his faded pink kurta and jeans, was already outside in the heat, distant, self-enclosed, the wind tunnelling through the driveway blowing into his hair, as he stood oddly adjacent to a gigantic Sikh doorman. ‘Nirmalya!’ said his mother, coming out of the air conditioning and wiping her nose instinctively with a hanky, the merciless semi-developed expanses of Versova trembling in the heat; the Sikh doorman, an anachronistic but unignorable ornament, half-turned in her direction with an astonishing jerk of recognition and reassurance and smiled.

S
HYAMJI WASN’T WELL
; he’d developed a cough. It interrupted him again and again like a hiccup that wouldn’t go away.

‘Shyamji, what is this?’ asked Mrs Sengupta suspiciously, looking up from the songbook; her antennae were always tuned to illnesses.

‘I don’t know, didi,’ said Shyamji, peeved but distant, as if he were in no way responsible for the tiresome interruption. ‘I don’t have a sore throat.’

‘You should have it looked at.’

Meanwhile, it had begun to rain. June had changed to July without much rainfall, with only, on most days, an expectant, oppressive heat which made the shadows the trees cast in Bandra seem so timeless and seductive; and now, it was suddenly raining in bursts, agitating and disorienting the birds on the balconies, dissolving into a false calm later in which one leaf dripped patiently on to another.

In the midst of this late-arriving, swirling pool of shadow and cloud and wind, Shyamji became, temporarily, a migrant, moving from one suburban location to another, staying with students in Khar or Juhu who wanted to give him space and respite from duties and family while they looked after his needs, while enriching, of course, their own store of songs and even their lives by being near him. Sometimes, Nirmalya and Mrs Sengupta visited him at these places, getting out of the car after it had been parked on the side of a narrow lane in Khar, the road still moist and muddy with the print of tyre tracks after a brief shower, opening the gate, going in carefully, the scab-rough walls of the old house pale gold with the indecisive, intermittent sun, the small, mali-tended garden outside still wet, the flat leaves shivering with tiny rivulets of water, the bark of the tree seemingly dry and hard; as they approached the door, they could hear Shyamji singing with his students. A young Bengali family – two brothers and a sister – who had musical ambitions and had moved from Calcutta to Bombay for this reason, had rented this apartment.

‘Aashun, aashun,’ cried the older brother when he saw Nirmalya and his mother hesitating at the doorway; because he was well aware they were Shyamji’s students, and he knew them slightly.

The harmonium sighed as Shyamji hooked the bellows. ‘Aiye didi, aiye baba,’ he said. ‘Sit down here,’ he said softly, patting the white sheet that covered the bed. Although he wasn’t in the best of health, he was intent on being hospitable; and though he was in a house his students had rented, it was as much his house – perhaps more his – as theirs.

He looked tired, but undemonstratively happy. The fragrance and breath of the rains was always a gift that delighted human beings, and Shyamji was no exception.

In two weeks, in spite of the niggling cough, he was back to accepting invitations and giving in to demands. He said:

‘Didi, some people have been asking me to sing in a new Sindhi temple. Will you and baba also sing a song each? I don’t want to sing all the songs myself with this cough. Besides, more people should listen to you, didi.’

Mrs Sengupta’s role, in her married life, had usually been to sing a song or two on small occasions, after which someone, good-natured and anonymous, would lean towards her and murmur gravely, ‘I haven’t heard a voice like that since Juthika Roy!’; praise that would leave her, each time, happy as a tender seventeen-year-old, but then, as the sense of her body and spirit in time returned to her, essentially unfulfilled. Yet she could never resist adding another nameless venue to the ones her singing-life in Bombay had been dotted with; she agreed now, feeling, in spite of herself, the transient little-girlish excitement and nervousness she always experienced at these moments.

‘I must then prepare the song I have to sing,’ she said, to him but really to herself, very seriously. ‘Where is the temple?’

‘Not far away, somewhere in Versova,’ he said. ‘But we will need a car.’ He’d recently sold the second-hand Fiat. ‘Will your car be free, didi?’ he enquired very quickly, almost a random question. ‘If we could use it . . .’

Mrs Sengupta felt a flash of impatience. Did Shyamji really want her to sing, or did he just want to use the car?

‘Of course the car will be available,’ she said, like a fairy godmother speaking of what’s most predictable and cursory among her enchantments; and Shyamji looked visibly gratified.

On the afternoon, they set out for the outer reaches of Versova. The macadam road cut deep into a landscape on which nothing much yet had come up, although, here and there, in the dark mud of the monsoons, they noticed the beginnings of construction; on and on they went, in the broad afternoon glare, the tall extinguished lampposts standing in the sun. Finally, the Ambassador, with its cargo of Shyamji, his brother Banwari, Mallika Sengupta, Nirmalya, and the harmonium and tablas secure on their straw rings in the boot, came to the Sindhi temple, which was made of marble; it came to a stop in the dust with a sudden reminiscent whiff of gasoline, the engine over-heated with the air conditioning. A tall, fair man in steel-rimmed spectacles and white kurta and Aligarhi pyjamas ran down the steps to welcome Shyamji, and swooped down on the car door like a melancholy bird: ‘Aiye, aiye Panditji.’ He was all humility; and he emphasised it by stooping and lowering his head slightly, drawing attention to his plangent bird-like poise. Everything about him and his clothes seemed fresh and laundered; Shyamji introduced Mrs Sengupta to him as ‘my own didi’, the wife of the burra sahib of a well-known company (‘But you must listen to her sing,’ he said), and spoke softly of Nirmalya – with a hint of mischief, slyly mocking the obstreperous high-seriousness that the boy carried with him everywhere – as his ‘true disciple’, ‘asli chela’. The tall man nodded in amazement in the approaching dusk, and led them up the steps to where a group of people had been waiting for them, sitting patiently before a raised platform on which there was no human being yet, only an arrangement of microphones. They sat down; tablas and harmonium were brought and placed before them. Almost everyone was dressed in white; they ended up looking, these benign-seeming people, a bit like phantoms (they didn’t mean to, of course), inhabiting, as the sun set, a place somewhere between mercantile activity and the afterlife. The new temple itself suggested a similar ambiguity; the white stone it was built from was meant to calm doubts about the everyday world, to suggest abnegation, purity, but to remind you, too, of the benediction of money, that the gods of the affluent demand to be housed expensively. There were no doors in this main area of congregation; and the absence of doorways gave what would otherwise have looked like a hotel lobby the spaciousness of worship. There were no doors, but there were large pillars; in the midst of all this, Mrs Sengupta’s voice, coming from the speaker (she had begun to sing), sounded almost like a child’s; a child who had still not seen the world, who was still innocent, who still believed in simple rewards and just dispensations. The sweetness of the voice, and its lack of knowingness, surprised the listeners; the old women, hardened by material expectation, began to sing along softly, as if they’d been won over. Then, when she stopped, they smiled and murmured among themselves, letting her return to being who she was: they didn’t want to know her name, as they would if she’d been a professional singer, but glanced sideways at her, at her sari and mascara and bangles, curious, but with no desire to interfere. Now, the boy, long-haired and uneasy, began to sing – an old Surdas bhajan, ‘He´ Govind, he´ Gopal’, at which everyone stirred with recognition. He sang quite sweetly, but they found it difficult to relax; he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height. After he’d finished, Shyamji seemed to speak a word of encouragement – a ‘shabaash’ – into his ear. The sky outside had reddened. As Shyamji began to sing to the soft background of his harmonium, Mallika Sengupta thought of where she was now, how far away from home, wherever home might be; how
this
was where home had been in the last thirty years, wherever her husband was, or her son, in Malabar Hill, in Cuffe Parade, in Pali Hill, in Versova, wherever she happened to be at that moment, how the old idea and sense of home had faded, and she’d allowed it to fade. Sitting inside the temple, she realised that no place was really alien any more. With part of her attention, she listened to Shyamji; these were the songs she sang away from home, these Hindi bhajans she’d been learning for the last thirty years. If she’d stayed at home, she might probably have sung other songs. Shyamji, now in his second bhajan, coughed twice; the cough irritated him, and he ignored it as he’d ignore a heckler. He cleared his throat, but the cough didn’t seem to have anything to do with it; it came back intermittently. The audience didn’t mind; Shyamji’s music was, to them, anyway, less an aesthetic than a devotional experience; and the flame of their devotion wasn’t so easily put out. Nirmalya noticed that the tall man, who looked about forty, who’d brought them in, was shaking his head and weeping copiously as Shyamji sang. It wasn’t so much a public display as an outpouring of emotion among people whom he knew too well to feel embarrassed in front of. When Shyamji finally stopped after the fourth song, pointing sketchily to his throat and pleading with a smile to be let off because of his cough, the man swiftly returned to what he’d been like when he’d received Shyamji emerging from the car, normal, cheerful, even official, as if his sorrow had mysteriously faded, or as if he could manage to inhabit two planes of existence, on one of which he could surrender to mourning the pain of life, the other on which he polished his glasses, wore his ironed clothes, and cheerfully carried out all its duties. As the audience dispersed without urgency, he took these visitors, his characteristic graciousness restored, on a small, impromptu tour of the temple, to where the holy book (written, surprisingly, in the Arabic script) was kept, reminding Nirmalya, in a way that had never occurred to him, that the Sindhis were a people without a homeland. Finally, he led them to where boxes of sweets had been kept for them; and, no doubt, out of the sight of others, in a private, invisible moment that nevertheless must have elapsed, paid Shyamji discreetly. But Nirmalya was convinced this man did something terrible every day and that his guilt came back to him in moments like the one that Nirmalya, against his will, had just witnessed. Shyamji looked pleased the session had gone well, and that he’d had use of Mrs Sengupta’s car; though Nirmalya, glancing at the tranquil, slightly out of sorts expression on the face of the sick man, always found it difficult to guess at what his teacher was thinking, what it was he wanted.