The Immortals (9 page)

The Senguptas made the move, and he – Apurva – became the new Managing Director. It was around this time that Nirmalya entered into a phase – it was an odd change of mood, a prickliness, that had begun after his school exams – of being ostentatiously ill at ease with the world his father inhabited. Without saying as much, he sat in judgement upon it. He hated the new flat in Cuffe Parade. The first evening, when his parents were busy supervising the packers, he arrived late, and sat in the large drawing room among the semi-finished furniture, asking, ‘Why did we have to come here?’

He had grown his hair long. It came to his shoulders. He hardly appeared to smile, and never shaved the straggly goatee.

When his parents threw their first party in the new flat, and just before the first guests began to arrive, congratulating the Senguptas, he went out for a walk. ‘Where’s Nirmalya?’ his father asked, exasperated. No one knew.

When he returned, no one asked him where he’d been. His father spotted him and escorted him to the non-executive chairman of the board who’d flown in the previous day from Delhi. Apurva Sengupta had an unnecessarily triumphant air, as if he’d caught a bird of marvellous plumage, and not the untidy boy he had next to him.

‘Here he is at last – managed to find him!’ he smiled, as if at a hugely funny joke.

The chairman, a tall, fair septuagenarian with bushy eyebrows called Thakore, wasn’t impressed. He was a figurehead in the company, but a coveted emblem; and he knew it. His smile was a mixture of politeness and disdain.

‘We don’t get to see you these days!’

Thakore was slightly threatened by the boy; he sensed a resistance. He wasn’t sure if he was getting the respect due to him. His remark was an exaggeration; he’d met the Senguptas’ son only once before.

Nirmalya smiled, and, as ever at such moments, said nothing. The silence was infuriating to the chairman.

‘So what are you doing these days, young man? In college?’ Thakore looked at Nirmalya’s hair.

‘Junior college,’ murmured Nirmalya. He was in that zone in which he could pretend he was an undergraduate and no longer a schoolboy, in which he could study in college classrooms and ‘hang out’ in college corridors, without actually beginning his BA until two years later. As far as he was concerned, the important thing was he was not a schoolboy.

‘Let me get you a refill, JB,’ said Mr Sengupta, and put an arm around Thakore. The bushy-eyebrowed chairman was glad to be led away. Apurva Sengupta took him to the little bar on the far side of the drawing room. Before heading off to the bar, the chairman said (for he liked having the last word):

‘We must see more of you, my boy! We haven’t got to know each other.’

Nirmalya went onto the balcony; the small crowd of two women and a man didn’t notice him, or pretended not to notice him, and made no effort to be nice to him, as people did because he was Mr Sengupta’s son. He looked out. It was the sea, of course, the same sea he’d seen for five years from La Terrasse; but he was looking at it from the other side, and it seemed different. In fact, he could see the faint phantom outline of La Terrasse among the different-sized buildings on that side. Darkness had translated the sea into near-invisibility. Ten days after the move, it was as if he were indifferently looking at a relic from his past.

Before moving out of La Terrasse into Thacker Towers (that was the name of this sternly clone-like cluster of buildings) they’d gone scouting around the south side of the city for an appropriate flat for the new managing director: the two of them – Mr and Mrs Sengupta, accompanied by a guide delegated by the company, and sometimes Nirmalya.

Dyer was not going to vacate his duplex flat in La Terrasse for Apurva Sengupta; he was going to sell it on behalf of the company – and probably pocket a cut; a parting present to himself before leaving. ‘Yes, that’s why he’s selling it,’ said Mrs Sengupta. This was a disappointment; they’d been looking forward to moving into the apartment on the seventeenth floor with the goldfish darting in the grey water; where, once the main door opened and you were inside, the staircase swiftly escaped upwards. ‘No matter, we’ll find a better place,’ said Apurva Sengupta, his face grim but reconciled to the sleight-of-hand by which the duplex flat had vanished. He began to search obdurately for a lavish apartment as a sort of rebuff to the departed Englishman.

But Nirmalya felt bitter and unhappy at the idea of moving house, and wandered sullenly about the flat in La Terrasse as if he were looking for a hiding-place in which to secrete himself, in the hope that he wouldn’t be missed.

Looking back (and he was already in a retrospective mood), it seemed – although there was no reason to support this – that he was leaving behind a simpler time in his life, of pure white walls and spacious rooms, where even wealth was less ambivalent. It was as if – and his heart sensed this, not his mind – he was now to be caught up, if not as player then as bystander, in a story of ambition; he wasn’t sure whose – perhaps his own, but if not his entirely, then his parents’, or other people’s, or could it be even the city’s itself? The spell of La Terrasse was broken.

Had it only been his imagination? No, even the pigeons who alighted on the sloping concrete bannister of the balcony had succumbed to it; they were conscious of the evident hospitality of the drawing room. Sometimes one of the Senguptas would find one standing there, next to the sofa or on the edge of the carpet; or even seeming to investigate the immense catacomb-like wall-unit on the left, with its various compartments that held, among other things, the record player and speakers that blasted out, at certain times during those years, Nirmalya’s burgeoning pop and then rock collection. Innocently it stood there, as if listening for the music that was no longer coming; almost solicitious, but wary if you stopped to look at it, escaping, even before you clapped your hands to shoo it away, with a loud flap of wings, a sound that, long after, would be audible and present to Nirmalya’s ear.

Earlier, when Nirmalya was smaller, and the relationship between the Senguptas and the Dyers was still in its golden period, Mr Sengupta would cajole his son – sometimes command him – into visiting the Dyers, especially when their son Matthew came ‘home’ from England.

‘Matthew’s back,’ Dyer would say cheerily on the phone after a long conversation about more official things. ‘It would be absolutely lovely for him – and Tina of course – to see Nirmalya again.’

Matthew was a nice boy, full of crass jokes and good-natured energy: but a disappointment to his parents. And his parents, especially Philip Dyer, didn’t hide their disappointment from him. Dyer treated his son like a semi-literate. ‘Matthew’s spelling’s quite atrocious,’ he’d confided in Apurva Sengupta once, at the end of a discourse of gloomy opinions about Indira Gandhi’s nationalising fervour and trade union unrest.

And once, Nirmalya was with the older boy in the study, ensconced by books no one read, a stack of thick faintly shining magazines that Nirmalya wouldn’t ordinarily see anywhere else,
Fortune
,
Life
, and
Penthouse
, too, placed neatly on the glass table, signifying other universes that were always just round the corner for the Dyers, the room separated from the sitting room by its absence of natural light and a tinted glass door; Matthew was in the study, wolfing down ice cream from a plate, when his mother had said to him, ‘I don’t think the Murrays would be amused if they saw you eating that way!’ The Murrays; a couple in some suburb made mythic by power and distance – Paul Murray was a director in the ‘parent’ company in England, its headquarters in Surrey. Nirmalya, seeing Matthew peer up in hurt surprise from his plate, wondered why his own parents had never issued similar instructions to him. What made the Murrays so important to Matthew’s life?

But Matthew took parental chiding on the chin; he saw them as a source equally of meaningless strictures and endless pocket money; and he’d made a shrewd appraisal of their own shortcomings, and the sort of life, a life created for public consumption, they were leading in India. He himself had a vague longing for the ocean and the deep, to explore the humanless but crowded world underwater; it was only a germ of an idea, but it had already planted itself in his head.

He was only three years older than Nirmalya, but behaved as if he were much older. Part of his independence from people who were much cleverer than he, or who represented success and otherwise dominated him, like his parents, came from his sexual knowledge. He had many girlfriends, and the moral ambiguity of this fact gave him a sort of secret strength. ‘No girl over sixteen in Britain,’ he’d told Nirmalya one afternoon, like one who, after discussing several exciting possibilities, returns reluctantly to the sheer ordinariness of things, ‘is a virgin.’ This was in response to a stupid question; Nirmalya had asked him, ‘Do you sleep with your girlfriends?’ – for Matthew said he had two, one for weekdays and one for weekends. The reply, an incredible revelation, at first astonished Nirmalya into dumbness; but it also disturbed and excited him physically. Something extraordinary and unmentionable happened to girls in England when they reached sixteen; and the myopic Matthew, in every other way unremarkable, had been inured to it into a state of forgetfulness.

He was the first English boy Nirmalya properly knew. And, because he was English, he was somewhat exotic, as English books were – exotic not in an antique fairy-tale way, but with toffee and jam, mud and physical effluences. Matthew made Nirmalya blink with nervousness. When he was smaller, he’d been loud and unstoppable, like some volatile foreign toy that has a life of its own. Then Nirmalya grew used to the jack-in-the-box energy and wildness, and realised it was essentially harmless. On the whole, it had to be said that Matthew was the friendlier and more simple of the two.

At an early age, Nirmalya had entered Matthew’s room on the upper storey and discovered the treasures Philip Dyer had given his son despite being an exacting and sometimes unforgiving father. Among these was a small gramophone, of dimensions that made it look more like a projection of a fantasy than a real object – yet it was not a toy, but played, with precise functionality, Matthew’s limited but munificent record collection. Among these was a song, ‘Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud’, which Matthew put on the record-changer repeatedly, and which seemed to emerge from some hitherto unknown bog of English identity, and which Matthew sang along to in an insistent way, with a personal abandonment that made Nirmalya feel uneasy. But there were other wonders that filled him with longing during his brief sojourns in Matthew Dyer’s small room; films of the Tramp and Tarzan in bright square packages to be seen at some point on a projector; and thumb-sized toys you could lift in your palm, from which Nirmalya realised that England had the same red postboxes that Bombay had, and the same kind of red double-decker buses.

Matthew had friends in Bombay, rather shady and stupid-looking, but confident from being ‘experienced’; the sons of some of Philip Dyer’s business contacts who escorted Matthew to, and made him pay for, sunless bars and restaurants and discotheques – the Bombay that lay far beyond Nirmalya’s purview. He’d developed a taste for Hindi films in their company, for their embarrassing exuberance and their helpless bursting into song, their tearful but happy families and prodigious villains; for two and a half hours they gave Matthew something he found nowhere else. Now he nurtured an ambition his parents knew nothing about. ‘I’m going to produce and act in a Hindi film one day.’ Matthew said this with a smile to Nirmalya, but he was quite serious.

Tina, his sister, went to school in Bombay and was much younger than Nirmalya; eight years old, a child. But the feminine desires and demands that would shape her life had already woken in her, and, almost accidentally, their object was Nirmalya. ‘I want to marry Nirmalya,’ she’d said to her mother. To which Julia Dyer replied coldly: ‘Nirmalya only likes black girls.’ Candid and inquisitive about the mysterious remark, Tina had passed on the statement to Nirmalya: ‘Do you only like black girls, Nirmalya – my mother says you do?’ and Nirmalya was made speechless by the long passage of history newly written, and condensed into an observation that confused him, and barely managed to mumble something. Tina’s desires were genuine and intense, if still out of place at eight. To show her affection, she once lifted her dress in front of Nirmalya and pulled down her panties. Her sudden straightforward insights into Nirmalya sometimes exceeded others’, including his own. ‘I know why you come here,’ she’d said knowingly. ‘You want to see my mother’s mammas.’

When Nirmalya reported the panty episode to his mother, as if he were relating the charming antics with which all eight-year-olds win over the world, she smiled, but was secretly furious. ‘Is this what working in a company means?’ she said to her husband that night. ‘Is your career so important that our son has to go to that house?’

From the Dyers the Senguptas ‘inherited’ a cook who made continental dishes, a tiny saintly man, a Malyali called Arthur. Arthur was not his real name. His real name was Thambi. He made chocolate cakes, pancakes, steak and kidney pie, stuffed peppers, fruit trifle, macaroni, Christmas pudding. He’d passed through a procession of European households where he’d minted and reproduced this food with an almost unknowing fidelity. Brought into the world in a village in Kerala, he seemed, oddly, to be born for this task. And, yet again, with this latest departure, he was momentarily marooned, momentarily unsure of who’d value his outlandish gift, but was appropriated immediately by the Senguptas before he had time to make up his mind – and the Senguptas would become the first Indian family to benefit from the skills he claimed to have acquired from those slightly exasperated English memsahibs.