The Immortals (5 page)

Pyarelal played the harmonium; he played the tabla; he sang – he was a bits and pieces man: he seemed to do everything fairly well. But most of all he was a dancer: he used to teach kathak in Mussoorie.

One day, Ram Lal, as if he’d been mulling over a bright idea for a while, murmured, ‘Let us have him as our jamai. He is a good man.’ Shyamji and his younger brother Banwari were aghast; but Shyamji especially. Must his sister, the Tara he had loved since she was born, marry this vagabond? She was not beautiful; she was dark – did that mean she must be given to this itinerant? Even at the age of twenty-seven, his father still alive, Shyamji had realised that if Pyarelal entered the family he would end up becoming
his
responsibility, a millstone round
his
neck. But he couldn’t say as much to his father.

As they were eating, Motilalji said: ‘What did you think of her?’

Shyamji, putting a piece of roti in his mouth, said: ‘Of whom?’

‘That Bengali lady, bhai,’ said Motilalji, impatient. ‘Have you already forgotten her? Mallika.’

Shyamji flinched again at the familiar use of the first name. He didn’t like it. But it was, he knew, Motilalji’s way of dominating his pupil even in her absence; because she could replace him whenever she wished, and because he coveted her patronage as much as she needed him as a teacher, he must salvage his pride by dominating her – by using her first name, which she was too polite to object to – not only during the tuition, but also whenever she was mentioned in conversation; it was as if she had a power to hit back at him which had nothing to do with her, or her actual presence.

Equanimously, Shyamji said: ‘She seemed a good person.’

‘Yes, but these people want too much! After two lessons she says to me, “Motilalji, I have picked up this bhajan now, please give me another one.” I say to her – arrey, first learn to sing it properly!’

He had finished eating. He had very little appetite. In two long sips, he finished his glass of water. Although his wife’s cooking was renowned among friends and visitors, he’d become indifferent to it himself.

When Shyamji had first met Motilalji, he – Shyamji – was just eighteen years old. He was a bridegroom; he was getting married to Sumati, Motilalji’s sister. Sumati was just a few months younger than Shyamji. Sumati had a lovely face, and the same eyes as her elder brother, except that she had a squint; the squint was considered auspicious.

Directing the marriage, besides caste and community, was, of course, eugenics. Both the retired Ram Lal, with his piercing silence, and the doddering Kishan Prasad, Motilalji’s father, for whom death’s door was invitingly ajar, had realised that the meeting of the two families promised a gene pool that was full of potential for the musical lineage. In the exchanging of garlands between the bubbly, tomboyish girl and the accomplished young singer, in a way more feminine than his bride, lay the hope of creating a gene for the future.

Pandit Ram Lal’s marriage had been similarly arranged. By then he’d transformed from an irresponsible and slightly anxious sensation-seeker into a serious musician – or so it seemed. The dark, stocky woman whom he obediently married had a strong singing voice; a strong voice, period, which could be heard, when she was talking, from a distance. Her uncle on her mother’s side was the man – the famous music director – who had composed the tune for the film song ‘Chanda re ja re ja re’. ‘O go quickly, moon, take this message to my beloved,’ sang the young Lata. A simple imperishable tune; sometimes still played on the radio. The music director was now dead and all but forgotten.

T
WO YEARS AFTER
Apurva Sengupta’s company moved office to Nariman Point, the Senguptas themselves moved house. The building was a new one; overnight it strode on to the Malabar Hill skyline, overlooking the Kamala Nehru Park and the expanse of the Arabian Sea. Once there, it was difficult to imagine it hadn’t been there before.

Mallika and Apurva Sengupta went to see it one morning; the security guard’s cabin was in place already at the entrance, and then the car went up a slope before arriving at the plateau on which the building stood, with a neat strip of lawn on the left.

Heavily, they alighted from the car and encountered the marbled porch, and, in an opening in the wall on the left, a small, interior garden – soil, plants, leaves – whose changeless freedom from the vagaries of seasons would cease to surprise them in the coming years.

There was a double move. The Dyers moved to the seventeenth floor of Block A, a two-tier duplex apartment with an open aquarium on the lower level in which goldfish, orange flickers in the water, darted. The Senguptas moved to the tenth floor of Block D, a large three-bedroom flat. The building was called La Terrasse. It was not a Garden Apartments or a Sea Breeze, which it could have easily been. It was clearly meant to not only look, but to be different.

It was their flat – a childlike happiness gripped the Senguptas. And it wasn’t theirs; they saw it as a gift, a gift from life; they wandered, admiring, from room to room, Mrs Sengupta already imagining alterations – her imagination had
become
, briefly, the flat itself, and the imagination is always, compulsively, altering what it imagines, change and play are its subsistence. And so, for the next six or seven years, the flat – still, as they walked around it on the first night, a half-furnished husk, its walls silken with new paint – became, in a sense, her imagination; she could do with it as she pleased, and felt almost compelled to make pleasure a part of her relationship with it, a pleasure indivisible from constant change. So the narrow balcony at the back, which she only glanced at that night, was later brought into the flat and turned into a study, separated from the dining room by a screen of beads. Other changes were repeatedly made. The flat was theirs: never still, recognisable but not quite hardening into trademark features, never static or motionless.

A constant hubbub in the sitting room behind; a modest get-together had been arranged to celebrate the move, the arrival into the new home. Nayana Neogi, tall in a hand-woven cotton sari she’d worn in deliberate haste and clumsiness, had her air of bohemian sophistication intact, a refusal to be awed by this recent spectacle of luxury, but to view the property with friendly sincerity and politeness. She was indifferent to property; her world, and her husband’s, was a world of handlooms and recyclable items, of ashtrays made out of inadvertently discarded chunks of wood, of junk fashioned into useful everyday objects or bric-a-brac or even art, a world of small-scale creativity and experiment. She looked upon Mallika Sengupta’s back with affectionate superiority; not least because Mallika, a small-town girl, could never, whatever her husband achieved, attain her natural, careless sophistication. Nevertheless, she couldn’t suppress a twinge of curiosity.

‘Three bedrooms,’ said Mallika Sengupta with unthinking pride.

‘Oh you lucky thing, Mallika!’ said Nayana, looking into a bedroom on the left. ‘Three bedrooms in Malabar Hill! It’s beautiful.’

The last observation was made quietly, almost a reassurance – that she was partaking of her friend’s ascent into these surroundings. By ‘beautiful’ she didn’t mean what she meant when wandering about an art gallery, or assessing one of her husband’s graphic designs; as an adult sometimes pretends to use a word in a simple, clear, limited way for the benefit of a child, she used the word as the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie thoughtlessly used it, as an uncomplicated acknowledgement of well-being. At the same time, the observation was an afterthought she’d almost come to terms with, without too much ruefulness: about the impossibility of ever possessing anything like this lifestyle.

Later, she went into the drawing room and took up a conversation with her neighbour on the sofa in her lilting convent-taught English. She picked up one of the crisp aubergine fritters that were being served to accompany the drinks. This much she’d grant Mallika; that she had a gift for cooking. It was probably a small-town gift. Her dry chicken curries – her prawns in white gourd – even her daal – all marvellous! The aroma from the kitchen hung among the guests like another visitor; no one remarked on it; no one was unaware of it.

‘What kind of ambition?’ her husband asked, rather surly. He had a drink, the tumbler dewed over with moisture, on the table by the bedside. He was wearing one of the ‘ethnic’ plain tops he often wore: neither a kurta nor a shirt. He turned to look at her without intensity or interest. ‘You mean to do with Apurva?’

‘That, of course,’ said Nayana, as if the thought had occurred to her long ago. No, she had something else to offer. ‘No, it’s her singing.’ She placed the clips carefully on the small bedside table. She waited for the remark to sink in. ‘Bechari, she does have a nice voice,’ she said. She was more grudging about praising this gift of Mallika Sengupta’s than she was about unstintingly giving her her due for her daals and chickens. No response was forthcoming as yet from Prashanta. ‘But it is rather untrained.’

‘What’s the
point
of having this ambition?’ muttered Prashanta Neogi petulantly, after taking a moody sip from the glass. ‘Where will it get her?’ And he put down the glass and stared blankly in front of him. He scratched his arm. He was glowering and seemed to be thinking of something else.

It wasn’t clear what had made him say what he had – some grumbling desire to please his wife; contempt for Mallika Sengupta’s presumptuousness; a general acrid conviction about fate; or was he in some way being secretly self-referential – speaking of, and to, himself? But he didn’t dispute what Nayana had just said; he accepted it as if it were a simple, self-evident truth.

She had been a singer once herself – she had learned in Shantiniketan from Shailajaranjan Majumdar. She had glimpsed the Poet when she was fifteen years old; he was close to death, old, white-maned – she had heard him speak sonorous lines in his thin, clear voice. She had been part of a charmed circle.

Then, in her mid-twenties, she began to lose her voice. It began as a crack in the lower register; she’d clear her throat, gargle secretly at night – because Prashanta had the same bohemian indifference to this crisis that he had to everything else, and crises made him impatient – banned, with an ironical smile, normal conversation for a week, spoke to everyone in whispers, and (this she found most difficult) gave up smoking. The crack did not go away.

Then, gradually, she gave in. She told herself she wasn’t giving in, but just putting things in abeyance; but she began to enjoy the benefits of the abeyance, its spacious freedoms, the ambivalent relaxation from the tensions of ambition. At some point, her surrender took on some of Prashanta’s casual indifference to ‘important’ things. And she began to smoke again.

Now here was Apurva’s wife, disturbing her indifference just a little, a woman from a small town, thrown into the centre of things in Bombay, Mallika with her singing voice, her naivety, and, it seemed to Nayana, the ambition – an implicit backing of herself – which she was herself almost not conscious of.

This twin move, Dyer’s and Mr Sengupta’s, and the new proximity it brought between the Chairman and the Head of Finance (to which post Mr Sengupta had recently been appointed) was seen by many to be a blessing, Dyer’s personal blessing on Apurva Sengupta; but the proximity was actually a mixed blessing. It brought the Senguptas into closer contact with what was really a dysfunctional family, a fact they chose to make an effort to ignore since Dyer was at once boss and benefactor.

In private, they sometimes discussed the Dyers with a sort of scandalised wonder. ‘She was a dancer in Calcutta,’ he said. ‘I heard he met her there.’ ‘Where?’ Mallika Sengupta asked innocently. ‘In the restaurant on Park Street where she was dancing.’

It seemed difficult to connect the woman in the restaurant on Park Street, whom Nirmalya saw, in his mind’s eye, in a state of partial undress in a dimly lit dance hall surrounded by shadowy, eager men sitting at their tables, with Julia Dyer. And Nirmalya’s imagination furnished him with a younger Philip Dyer, slightly thinner, sitting enigmatically alone at one of the tables. There was the slightest hint of scandal, of speculation, in Apurva Sengupta’s voice, that she might be Eurasian. This was left hanging in the air, though, and hardly touched upon; it was just a fleeting, promising thought. Now here was this couple, transmuted, the burra sahib and memsahib, the last vestige of Britannia long after the Raj was over. Julia was small and beautiful; she had somewhat, but not entirely, lost her figure (her dancer’s backside – if dancer she had been – had become quite large); she dropped in and out of spells of near-alcoholism – sometimes, in the morning, when she and Mallika Sengupta were having their dutiful convivial chats on the phone, her speech was slurred. But she was never not sober when they met. And they tried not to sit in judgement upon her; Mrs Sengupta always admiring her for being as beautiful as her name, which she also found particularly beautiful.

From the balcony in front, you could see the sea, Chowpatty beach, the Marine Drive stretching and curving to the right: all that mattered in Bombay was before you; you didn’t need to know any more of the city – you took that fickle, flickering, glittering view to be the city itself. The cars were small, busy, and toy-like. The view from the Dyers’ flat was the same, but more breathtaking and varied; the cars looked tinier, more numerous, and the white yachts floating on the sea without ever touching it moved with an impulse of their own.