The Immortals (39 page)

The tuning went off without event or injury; only the lint that had accumulated on the strings flew out in small, lazy particles as he began to play. The sound filled his ear, the four strings combining to create not only a single vibration, but a world. It was a world without time, and Nirmalya was alone in it; he forgot, for the moment, the confusion and distress he’d felt when he’d heard Shyamji had died. And then, as he kept playing, his predicament returned to him, the real world intruded into the world of sound the strings had created: he was without a teacher – he didn’t know where to go from here. ‘What should I sing?’ he wondered; because his tanpura-playing was a preamble, a doorway into the world of the raga, but he was content to sit, dazed and speechless, at that doorway, to wait in that world of sound, to be undecided about what to practise. A minute passed; a surprisingly soothing breeze reminded him that it had rained last night, clattering on the back of the air conditioner, making him think for a second, as he lay in bed, of the tin roofs of houses he used to stay in when visiting relatives in small towns as a child. ‘Malhar – it has to be a Malhar, of course,’ he thought. He allowed the tanpura, aloof sentinel, to embrace and envelop him.

Ram Lal’s widow – that sturdy and unstoppable woman in the white sari. Mallika Sengupta was momentarily overcome; the pain of a mother at her son’s death – she’d lived it many times in her imagination; and now to see it so plainly before her!

‘How did you hear about it?’ he asked, drawn again and again to the same story, the story of that day; and she recited it, tremulous and obedient.

‘And upon reaching there I found Kusum Deshpande – you know her, the doctor,’ said Mrs Sengupta. ‘She was very kind,’ she observed, as if it was she who had somehow been the victim of a misunderstanding. Then, speaking to him in the old, quietening, timeless voice with which she used to tell him stories as the evening ended and he was already, mentally, in exile, at his desk in the classroom, ‘None of the women of the family were there’ – she meant the crematorium – ‘the women don’t go there, Nirmalya.’

In his mind, Rajasthan, from where the family had originally come, was mixed up with spectacular tales of sacrifice from abandoned textbooks, of newly widowed women leaping or being pushed on to a funeral fire. Would Sumati, two hundred years ago, have become a woman of pure soul, and burned while Banwari and Pyarelal watched in terror and humility and adoration? The fantasy, in which he couldn’t quite picture the protagonists, only the pure white sari and the flames, ran away with him.

No, here, in Bombay, things had to take their tried and tested course; the small, forthcoming celebrations of which life was constituted. Sumati went to a jeweller’s to look at dainty gold bangles for newborn children, frozen, glimmering but shrunken, resting on the red velvet; for her eldest daughter, who lived in Delhi, was eight months pregnant.

A
FTER
S
HYAMJI’S
death, Pyarelal received a new lease of life. After the first dawning of doubt and anxiety – for he’d been shamelessly dependent on Shyamji – he’d emerged into a teeming world where he was no longer under Shyamji’s protective umbrella.

It was around this time that he’d acquired Madhu, the one-film-old star, who’d stepped down from her brief tenancy in the firmament, and had come to him to refine her skills in kathak. She was like a being from a fairy-tale kingdom, but what Pyarelal saw before him was a talented dancer and an average, middle-class suburban woman, alight with ambition. And she could dance; she was already accomplished in kathak when she discovered Pyarelal, had conquered, with her mother standing guard shadowily behind her, the competition circuit. Something about the man’s gestures, the subtlety of his style in abhinaya, which could lift him from his hyper-tense, beedi-smoking, traffic-negotiating, itinerant state into becoming Radha herself, and the compositions in his store, all these drew Madhu to him; so he became her ‘guru’ – unofficially, of course, as he for the most part seemed destined to be: never quite acknowledged, but constantly turned to. There was another Pyarelal somewhere in the city, a well-known dance teacher from Banaras who got mentioned occasionally in the
Times of India
; Pyarelal would dismiss him peremptorily with a flick of the hand when people rang him up to congratulate him.

‘Woh doosra hai,’ he’d say. ‘He’s not me.’

And he’d be incensed when people thought that Madhu’s teacher was this other obtrusive and recurring Pyarelal.

‘I will present Madhu in a performance,’ he promised Nirmalya, as they stood together on the balcony of the flat in Bandra, his beedi lit and shrinking, nature rustling about them. ‘You will miss it, baba, because you’re going back to London’ – by which he meant not the city, but a distant place, more distant than Russia (which he’d visited in the fifties as part of a government-sponsored entourage, bringing back with him pictures of himself in a warm black sherwani, standing, slight as a snowflake, next to Sitara Devi). ‘I wish you could have been here – it’ll be wonderful!’

‘What about Ashaji?’ Nirmalya asked Pyarelal, ingenuous as ever, always flummoxed by human behaviour. They were discussing the troubled financial circumstances, the fresh uncertainty, this family had fallen into after Shyamji’s death. But what of Ashaji – the great playback singer who still crooned into people’s dreams, the one who’d sung for the eternally shelved film
Naya Rasta Nayi Asha
? With such admirers, legends themselves, after all, surely there wasn’t cause for worry?

‘She cried a lot,’ said Pyarelal, grave, histrionic in his ponderousness, as if her tears were a form of capital which few people ordinarily saw her part with. ‘She called bhabhi on the phone and cried.’

But Pyarelal, Nirmalya discovered, was clear-eyed and undeceived about Madhu. For, on this visit back home, he’d been seeing billboards displaying giant-sized versions of her, as the car went into Haji Ali toward the sea and the mosquito-frail worshippers weaving their way in the rain through the wave-lashed path to the mosque. There she was at the corner of Haji Ali, newborn and windswept like Venus, the gods and mortals agog around her, about to spring her second film on the world, exposing a bit of midriff – and when he’d asked Pyarelal how seriously she took her dance in comparison to the movies (for surely to be an ‘artist’, if you had the talent, was superior to being a ‘star’), Pyarelal, taking a drag on the leaf-stub of his beedi, had said:

‘Baba, Madhu knows exactly what she wants. She wants to be recognised by people when she walks down the street. She has the talent, but I don’t know how long she’ll keep dancing.’

And he took another hungry drag; while Nirmalya puzzled over this logic and on the apparently calculated, short-lived movement of Madhu’s small ghungru-wearing feet.

It was during these vacations that the song in the new movie, with the infectious words ‘Tin tin na tin, yeh ratein rangeen’ to which she’d danced a pert athletic number, became a big hit and was on everyone’s lips, or at the very least invaded everybody’s ears, even in Bandra – its tinny, electric chorus flowing in waves from a radio in the evening, across the chirruping of bats – confirming her fame and charm.

P
YARELAL WAS
returning to his small flat in Borivli after the Wednesday presentation at Tanjore in the Taj, where Jayashree Nath danced before the American tourists under his hawk eye and to his ever-dependable singing and tabla playing. By the time he was near home, walking punctiliously in his nagra shoes past the peeling, frayed poster of
Gini and Jony
on a much-urinated-upon wall, the many-hued paper exfoliating around Mehmood’s mournful face, heading towards the dark, inhabited avenue, all of whose lamp posts were lightless except two, it was after ten; the sweat and press of the local train and the lurching of the bus were gradually leaving him. He’d smoothed his long yellow kurta after getting off on the platform. As he was crossing the road to the compound that led to his building, avoiding, with jaw set, the potholes the rain had thrown before him, it seemed a bat flew out of the darkness and swooped down upon him; he was knocked to the ground.

He couldn’t understand at first what had happened; he was at a loss; he only heard the snarl in his ear, withdrawing, fading. He sat there for a while, mulling the incident over and over; and then two or three people, he realised, had picked him up – he wasn’t really too heavy – and taken him to the flat, portable and voluble in his wet clothes. With every movement, worryingly, there was pain; his pyjamas, he saw to his disapproval when he was in the flat, were soaked with blood.

There was excited chatter, the sort of chorus you heard during weddings and departures, when everyone wanted to drown everyone else out, neighbours looked in, serious-faced phonecalls were made; he listened to some of it, still and bent with the ennui of inevitability. No, not a bat; it was obvious an auto rickshaw had borne down on him in the badly lit lane, knocked him down, driven away.

‘The suburbs have too many autos,’ said a neighbour, a clerical officer, a kind man, thin as a reed, but an unbending one. ‘All kinds of miscreants are driving them.’

Pyarelal, in his mind’s eye, saw the bat’s face, human in its internecine suddenness, appearing, and vanishing forever.

‘It’s a government hospital,’ said Mr Sengupta, as, without urgency, he buttoned a bush shirt with a floral print (the sort of fabric Nirmalya would never permit within inches of his skin) that his wife had bought him. (Her taste, even now, after her husband’s retirement, was unapologetically youthful.) ‘There’s no reason why you should have heard of it.’

A government hospital! Free care – but poor facilities. For Nirmalya, a government hospital was preceded by its reputation, by a premonition of its municipal, functional interior of transits and departures. Nirmalya wrinkled his nose, as if he could smell the phenyled corridors in the distance.

Once they had reached this awful but equably accommodating place – the government hospital was a handsome colonial building, and still had a residue of that air of stern justice that the Raj must have once appeared to have – they went to the first floor to the general ward. A large room on the left surprised them, with about ten beds, each quite near the other. Pyarelal – his bed wasn’t too far from the corridor – seemed to be taking a nap on this narrow, high, iron contraption; his eyes were shut. When the nurse told him he had visitors – ‘Dekho kaun aya’ – he opened them immediately. He’d been shaved in the morning; there was no shadow on the cheeks. They murmured their questions, Mallika Sengupta more probing and reproachful than the other two, as if the accident were somehow a result of a lapse in Pyarelal’s judgement, Nirmalya standing close to where the man’s legs were swathed in a green sheet, feeling that unexplainable child-like inner ease he experienced whenever he was close to him. Pyarelal answered in a sprightly way, admitting to his guilt with good humour; it was a bad fracture. Nirmalya kept glancing at the next bed, where a man, pretending to be deaf, was eating diligently from a metal tray carved into tinny crevasses that contained peas, subzi, roti, and daal that was drying into cold scabs at the edges. There was a smell of onions. To be so focussed on the hospital food, bent forward in that buttonless white shirt and loose pyjamas everybody here had to inhabit, seemed terribly lonely to Nirmalya, one man joined to the other by the camaraderie of exile; it was like having to deny, for that moment, what had nurtured and made you.

‘And food?’ asked Mrs Sengupta, frowning, challenging him.

Pyarelal smiled, the smile of a man who knew he was free. He gestured to a humble tiffin-carrier on the floor tucked next to his bed.

‘Food comes from home, didi,’ he said, deprecating but content.

A week later, Pyarelal was relocated in the tinctured safety of Dr Karkhanis’s nursing home, a cramped room with three beds that could be partitioned at will by frayed green curtains, a Voltas air conditioner shuddering in one wall, no windows anywhere so that visitors and convalescents were shielded from the contamination of daylight, connections behind the bedhead for monitors if they were needed, a little bedside table for a glass of water, Marie biscuits, and a banana: a chilly, nocturnal, crowded haven. The name of this orthopaedic surgeon sounded too perfectly apposite to Nirmalya not to be made up – ‘Karkhanis’ from ‘karkhana’ or ‘factory’: it was as if, improbably, the man and his very lineage specialised in spare parts for the body.

‘He’s fine,’ said the shambolic doctor when he had a moment to speak, with the succinctness of a harried but polite young man. ‘The wound is taking time to heal though. It’s a common problem with chronic smokers.’ And then, having imparted an implicit sense of understanding in the perspiring overcrowded corridor next to the lift, he, with a deft, not impolite, movement had shaken off the possibility of the next question, and was gone.