The Immortals (35 page)

‘These fools!’ he complained to Nirmalya with the contempt of the clear-sighted. ‘They talk about movies and that minister’s son and this new hotel.’ Then, with a preoccupied, martyred look, he pushed at a bad tooth with his tongue.

After which, satisfied with his prodding, he added, his mood changing at once to exasperation and comedy:

‘He sings that song at the end of each programme. The boring Kabir bhajan: “At least see to it, lord,/ that when my life leaves my body,/ I have the name of Govind on my lips.” Do you know what Durgaji’ – referring to a relative, a fairly well-known singer of qawwalis – ‘calls it?’ He grinned; then was wracked immediately by a beedi-smoker’s cough; but he shook off the tremor that passed through his body in a businesslike way, as if it had happened to someone else, and resumed: ‘He calls it “Shyam’s national anthem”.’ He looked at Nirmalya, a look of irony and entreaty exchanged among partners with similar persuasions and agendas. ‘Arrey, tell him to stop singing it, baba’ – for he’d really had enough of the tearful paean.

Although, like everyone else, Pyarelal believed it was only a matter of time before his brother-in-law was better, he’d begun to feel a subterranean fear; was it an intuition of the end? It came to him in the middle of the tedious and demanding everyday, while scratching his stubble or nagging at a tooth, or boarding a BEST double-decker in the afternoon, standing at attention with a self-conscious jerk of the head if he didn’t get a seat, this unsettling intimation of the void. But it didn’t last long; Bombay said to him, as the bus lurched ahead: ‘Don’t be silly. Life goes on; it has always gone on.’ But then, when he’d finally found a seat, there might be a delay; the bus coming to a halt, the cars next to it frozen, their occupants’ elbows sticking resignedly out of the windows; impatient, grandiosely peremptory, always as if he were playing a part, he’d glance at his steel-banded wristwatch, shake his head; then – thank God! – the bus would begin to inch forward, and menacingly approach, then pass by, a roadside congregation of people, strangely, for the most part, focussed and silent; an accident, the windshield of the Fiat was smashed; this time, there was no intimation, no premonition, just the urge to return to, as soon as possible, the homeward-bound traffic, a quick averting of the eyes and the obligatory muttering of a prayer for no one – no one known, encountered, or imagined – another solitary, wondering shake of the head (again, as if an audience were looking), and the perspiration on the forehead drying as the bus picked up speed and a sea-breeze blustered in through the window. So Pyarelal, in his better moments humming a film tune that had been following him persistently all day, returned home.

T
HE SUITCASE
had been packed: the deep, folded layer of winter clothes, a dark suit that Nirmalya had vowed never to wear, small and diminished inside the suitcase, but possessing, nevertheless, a buttoned-up authority even without a body inside it, trousers – including a couple of frayed, disintegrating corduroys that his mother had at first slyly neglected to put in, and which he’d had to bargain for, with the steely persuasiveness of a counsel and, finally, the relentlessness of a madman. Into the smaller suitcase went
The Story of Philosophy
, with its psychedelic borders in yellow and orange and blue, the strip of black along the bottom of the jacket, and the comforting, pain-numbing mantra of names on the back, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Santayana; it was a book he’d outgrown since he’d picked it up from a shelf in a bookshop three years ago, but he still needed it as a pacifier. The cheap, commercial binding that held together these great lives and speculations was falling apart; page one hundred and seventeen, from the chapter on Francis Bacon, which he’d glanced at and skipped, had dislodged itself in protest. Yet, armed with Will Durant, although he felt – had always felt, really – somewhat superior to him, to his success, to his solemn trust in Western civilisation, to his somewhat gauche devotion to his wife, proclaimed on the second page – armed with Will Durant, he still hoped to make the journey into the unknown and into deliverance.

He hadn’t finished discovering Bandra. It was here, as he circled the roads with their cottages, the courtyards swept and empty and the gardens overgrown with weeds and flowers, or came up against a stone cross or the warm wall of a church, it was here that his fierce world-denying self began to understand the pleasures of the earthly. Strange that he should embrace the earthly amidst so many signs of transcendence: the cross, the church. But this is what Bandra meant to him.

His father too, and his mother – how different they were in this location! They were the same as ever, of course; but he felt they were more his own now. The grey that had slowly appeared in his mother’s hair in the last few years was only visible if you looked hard at it; otherwise, she was changeless. But she liked the quaintness of these environs; ‘It reminds me of the town in which I grew up,’ she said, not elaborating.

When it rained here, you were aware not only of the rain, but of the other houses, the lane itself, the trees: the disappearing, panicky birdcall, the creak of a gate, loitering schoolboys breaking into a run. And, after the shower, the gulmohur blossoms would have fallen from branches on certain parts of the road with a particular exactness and economy, precise carpets of bright red only in those sections of the lane where the gulmohur trees stood, then, an hour later, becoming pink, then, after another hour, a soiled pink fading into the tarmac’s perennial, unsentimental grey. Inside, of course, the household duties of cooking, cleaning, changing bedsheets, were always unobstreperously unfolding. He was going to leave his parents quite tranquil in these surroundings; they seemed, temporarily, like long-standing citizens of these lanes; they appeared to feel no loss for the Bombay they’d left behind, and would never return to now except for a previously decided and pondered-upon part of the day.

The building his father had bought the flat in had risen, naturally, where a cottage had stood once; so, in a sense, they were a part of the change that was now coming to this lane, as were the others who’d bought flats in the building. Most of the Senguptas’ neighbours were Sindhis – toughened by hard work and migration, but also boisterous and benign with new money. Mr and Mrs Sengupta were on cordial terms with them; but, the moment they entered their own flat, their neighbours hardly existed, and their world, instead of closing in and becoming a microcosm, expanded idiosyncratically through the windows and balcony, embracing the old houses opposite, the lanes that ran parallel to theirs, and the invisible horizon. Nirmalya didn’t really mind the families who lived opposite or on the other floors; he liked them for their openness; he liked them better than the polished, cocky corporate types he’d grown up among. But he wasn’t always sure whether to be amused or affronted by their taste and their sense of display.

A week was all that remained for his departure; and a friend, Mihir, who’d been with him in school and was studying for an engineering degree in Calcutta, had, unxpectedly, made enquiries about his address and come to visit. His childhood was splintering now; different elements of it were being blown towards directions and places that were unthinkable then; and it always surprised him when one of those splinters returned to him, and took the trouble to look him up.

‘You sort of dropped out of circulation, yaar,’ Mihir said, as they stood in patient, forbearing camaraderie on the balcony. ‘But I thought I’d find out what you’re doing these days.’ He chuckled, as if taken aback by an act of transgression from a person he’d always suspected was capable of anything. ‘I didn’t realise you were off to the UK.’

‘What are your own plans?’ asked Nirmalya – partly because they were at the stage of their lives when ‘plans’ were important, when everyone around him was working overtime on a sifting and sorting out of destinies; but also because he’d reached that age when he was curious whether old, rapidly anachronistic friendships could be turned into alliances, when he’d realised that allies had become more important to him than friends. Yet, for all his hints, he had few friends, and even fewer allies. ‘Joining an engineering firm – going abroad?’

‘Probably do management,’ said Mihir, embarrassed and aggressive at once, because they’d wanted to be poets and artists two years ago, adding, ‘Philosophy-tilosophy is not for me.’

‘I thought you were quite interested in it,’ Nirmalya reminded him, anxious that the undefined cause had lost, again, a possible recruit, but confirmed in his own singularity.

‘Oh, that’s OK to
patao
the chicks!’ laughed Mihir loudly, vastly amused that anyone could think it had another purpose; and Nirmalya laughed too, at the validity of the suggestion, slightly apologetic that he hadn’t pursued its ample possibilities.

They were startled from their lugubrious sharing of thoughts by firecrackers. ‘Gosh!’ said Mihir; for a simple bang had woken him up to where he was. People Nirmalya knew vaguely by sight were rushing out of the porch, laughing breathlessly, long, festive kurtas shimmering, setting alight coils of serpent-like firecrackers that then exploded, in a rapid series of white flashes and spent smoke, deafeningly and endlessly. When one coil had burnt itself out, or even before, a tall young man would light another and, giggling as if at an old man’s unintimidating scolding, jump away as it began to go off.

‘Shit,’ said Mihir, trying to ignore the noise suavely, like an officer in the middle of artillery, ‘that’s black money, you know.’

The fragrance of burning crackers filled their nostrils. A man in a radiant sherwani and turban – the younger son of a family that lived on the second floor, transformed without forewarning into a bridegroom – walked stiffly towards a nervous but obedient horse that had appeared in the lane, and mounted it. Nirmalya was about to speak, but a fresh burst of crackers took his breath away; pigeons, now almost accustomed to the general atmosphere of disturbance, took off again lazily from the neighbouring mango tree.

‘This is what the Jews must have been like,’ said Mihir, his youthful, good-natured face (he wasn’t handsome, but something about him drew you to him) expressionless with irony, leaning on the bannister as they watched the family dancing in the lane, ‘before the Nazis came along.’

Nirmalya, already silenced by the crackers, was made speechless by the observation. A great gust of history seemed to blow towards him, threatening to spoil the idyll, but passed him by without harming him. What exactly did Mihir have on his mind; and in his heart? The fanfare, in its own quite organised way, moved left, probably towards some hall where the wedding would take place; the bridegroom, his face now covered by the screen of flowers dangling from the turban, sat still and lifeless on the horse, while the revellers, snapping their fingers and dancing round him, kept drawing more and more family members, the ones staying aloof and dignified in the background, into the dance; and it took these initiates only a second or two to cast off their aloofness and dignity, and to be converted to the pleasure of being a public spectacle. How many times in their life would they be asked to dance, after all? The horse would have looked ancient and fairy-tale-like, had it not been conveying, in spite of itself, its very animal discomfiture and unsureness to the onlooker. It was a relief to finally see it go, and the euphoric humans as well, towards the wedding. ‘Beautiful place,’ said Mihir, when it was quiet again (only the two latecomers, plump fifteen-year-old girls in gleaming white silk dresses, ran out to the lane to search for the lost party). ‘Your parents are lucky to have a flat here.’ Glancing cannily at Nirmalya, he added: ‘So much nicer than Cuffe Parade – don’t like Cuffe Parade at all.’ They lingered on the balcony for ten minutes, letting the scene, the lane, the trees, melt into twilight. Nirmalya felt a strange pang: it was more time he wanted, he half-realised, without the desire really breaking to the surface; a little more time to be with Mihir, more time before going to England, more time for the day itself to last. He mourned the fact that the day could not be longer.

T
WO DAYS AFTER
he’d left, Shyamji came to the Senguptas’ flat. The curtains were parted to let in the hot, bright light of early October.

‘What, has baba gone?’ he asked, looking slowly around him, as if the boy just might materialise from behind the furniture.

Although he was so dark, his face was pale and scourged this morning, as if he’d powdered it; his feet, beneath his pyjamas, seemed to be swollen. He hobbled comically into the sitting room scattered with curios and pristine ashtrays.

‘Oh, he reached there day before yesterday,’ Mallika Sengupta said – it was almost an announcement; not just for Shyamji, but for the world, if it cared to listen. ‘We spoke for a short while on the telephone . . .’. She went into a momentary reverie. ‘The flat is so quiet now.’ Bleary-eyed, she asked – for her sleep had gone awry ever since she’d waited, in the airport, for Nirmalya to be airborne at three in the morning; she’d woken up yesterday and today at half past three, her mind on fire as she wondered where her son would be twenty years from now, eyes shut, determined not to notice the dawn stealthily coming to the windows – ‘Shyamji, will you have some tea before we start?’

Shyamji, who looked like he hadn’t been sleeping too well himself, his cheeks puffy, frowned as if he’d been challenged and said: ‘Why not, didi?’

So cups, trembling faintly, and the pot and strainer were brought to the sitting room on a wooden tray, and they sat, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the mother, sombre with reminiscence, and her teacher, drinking tea without any milk in it, each cup made wonderfully palatable with a sachet of Equal.