The dewar, the brother-in-law, looked a bit startled; he felt, more than ever, that he was in someone else’s house, and that he’d been manipulated by Motilalji for a reason only he knew. He was also surprised, and mildly offended, that Motilalji referred to the lady by her name, rather than ‘Mallikaji’ or ‘didi’.
The lady smiled and nodded at Shyamji. John came out of the room with a harmonium, and placed it on the carpet.
‘She’s been learning from me for seven–eight months now,’ said Motilalji. ‘You should listen to her – she has a good voice. She’s very proud though.’
Shyamji quailed. He pretended he hadn’t heard.
‘My dewar’s name is Shyam – Shyam Lal,’ said Motilalji. ‘The late’, and he glanced at the heavens, ‘Pandit Ram Lal’s son. He’s quite a good singer, and a teacher too. He’s still young, though.’
The lady and Motilalji sat down to sing. First the parping sound of the harmonium, not very musical; then the lady began singing, while Motilalji sat there, feigning boredom. Her voice was full-throated, surprisingly melodious.
‘Wah, didi!’ said Shyamji after she’d finished; then Motilalji went through the motions – they could be called nothing else – of a lesson without bothering to raise his voice, but almost humming her a tune, which she followed assiduously, nodding appreciatively.
There was a break, and John brought them tea. Shyamji stirred his cup thoughtfully, and Motilalji declaimed,
‘You must practise this song, Mallika! And you have to get the pronunciation right!’
Mallika Sengupta had been trying to get the pronunciation right. In every way she liked being in Bombay; but as a singer she’d been temporarily unmoored, and had to find her bearings, and explore avenues she’d once never thought of exploring. These avenues mainly comprised bhajans and ghazals, so popular in Bombay. She’d had to take a deep breath to get round to them, of course. She’d never taken Hindi songs seriously when growing up; even though she’d heard the Hindi songs of Saigal and Kananbala, they were film songs, there was a prejudice against them in her family. Now, more than thirty years later, she found herself faced with these languages; the onus was on her, in the daytime loneliness of her flat, to get her tongue round Hindi and Urdu vowels and consonants.
Her metier was the Bengali song, the Tagore-song – naturally. Everything she said in Hindi, thus, sounded a bit like Bengali. But the Bengaliness of her voice – its rounded full-throatedness – is also what made her sound charming to her music teachers; they would prick up their ears and search for analogies: ‘You sing like Kanandevi,’ they’d say; or, ‘You sing like Geeta Dutt!’ Kanandevi had long turned to religion; Geeta Dutt had gone out of circulation prematurely; in the age of Lata, Mrs Sengupta’s voice was certainly different.
Mrs Sengupta’s voice evoked a ‘golden age’. When people heard it in this drawing room, when they closed their eyes they couldn’t believe it, they felt they’d been transported, somehow, to an earlier, to a better time. Secretly, one or two of them might think the voice ‘old fashioned’; but it wasn’t at all; it was simply out of place in the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist was Lata’s voice, thin, small, and, to Mrs Sengupta’s ears, shrill. This was the reigning definition of a female singing voice. Mallika Sengupta’s voice’s moment had passed, at least for now, though neither she nor anyone else could be conscious of this fact; passed, unless it was rediscovered in the distant, as-yet unimaginable future, unless a change of taste were brought about by a future generation and it cared to remember Mallika Sengupta.
Her beginnings were in a small town in North Bengal where her father had been an advocate. Her family had had social pretensions in the small town, but had swiftly fallen from grace after her father’s death when she was twelve. The family struggled; but the cultural pretensions survived, as did the talent and intelligence. Her own talent was least nurtured, because she was a girl. It was almost a lucky break that she met and married Apurva Sengupta.
At first she’d refused him; she laughed now when she thought of it. She laughed; but at the time it had been no laughing matter. She was not in love, she thought; and, even as the daughter in a large family run only partly successfully by a widowed mother, she had this impractical desire – not only to be loved, but also to love the person she would marry. Then there was the matter that he was her brother’s friend at college, and that was how she thought of him; and the fact that although her family looked up to him, both for being a ‘nice boy’ and for belonging to a wealthy zamindari family, their odd cultural snobbery made them look down on his family, as not being cultured enough. But the tumult of Partition and Independence had made these histories and their nuances, her brothers’ prejudices, absurd and dreamlike; the landscape changed permanently; she wisely accepted his offer, largely because she respected him, but also because she decided, shrewdly, that life with him would allow her to pursue her singing. Here she was in Bombay now, with her husband, as if they’d come from nowhere, freshly created from morning dew, the future a clean slate.
‘John!’ she said.
‘Memsaab!’ he responded urgently, emerging into the drawing room, a duster in one hand. Everything for him was a form of theatre.
‘Please remove the harmonium. Is baba’s food ready – the mutton stew?’ The smell of the stew had drifted into the hall. She was now waiting for her son to arrive.
‘Yes memsaab baba stew ready!’ exclaimed John in English; then stooped toward the harmonium.
Motilalji and his brother-in-law had left twenty minutes ago; her attention was focussed on the boy returning from school. She’d feel an inward restlessness, as if at a job left undone, until he’d come back and eaten.
The music was a constant trickle in her life, not allowed to disturb her routine; in fact, the routine went on, and now and then paused decorously to make time for the music, at which point it was consigned to someone else’s hands – John, or the cook; but it wasn’t allowed to stop. She never consented to losing her grip on it, to handing the reins to someone else, except temporarily.
Nirmalya came in busily at twenty to one. He was seven years old. Immediately, food was served on a trolley in the air-conditioned bedroom. It was what he liked best; daal and rice and fried fish.
Ten minutes after Motilalji had left, she’d had John shut the windows of the bedroom, in anticipation of her son’s arrival, and switch on the air conditioner. The temperature would be just right by the time he was here. Her mind kept going back to Motilalji’s little performance – you could call it nothing else – and the way his personality always exacerbated her. ‘She’s very proud,’ he’d said, or ‘she thinks very highly of herself,’ or words to that effect; and boasted the next moment, ‘Do you see how she holds that steady note? None of the others can do it!’ She was pleased by his praise, coming as it was from someone whose gift she respected; but she wasn’t certain how long she could cope with his personality.
Now, with Nirmalya before her, dangling his legs from the divan, eating from the trolley, a different set of pleasures and anxieties replaced the previous one.
‘Do you like the fish? How was your day?’
She always asked these or similar questions; but she also viewed him, always, with a mixture of excitement and foreboding. She felt he was special; more special than other children. If asked to explain herself, she probably couldn’t have done so; but, from the moment he was born, she’d held the belief with conviction. Nothing he’d done – at school or at home – had necessarily proved her right. In fact, the time he’d spent at school, until recently, had been miserable. This only strengthened her conviction – the teachers didn’t have the insight to understand him.
He scraped the white fish and its black skin off the bone. He was bright and sunny – thoughts racing in his head – as he always was when he came back home; as if the reluctant boy of the morning had gone to never return.
‘I want to go and fetch Baba today!’ he said.
‘Yes, yes.’
/> Mrs Sengupta saw this homecoming as an apogee of something; she didn’t quite know what. Next morning it would go bad again; there would be the usual waning of enthusiasm. She would have to cope with the transformation. It repeated itself on every weekday morning.
Once or twice a week, a maulvi saheb came to the flat, a man who looked exactly like a ‘maulvi saheb’ should. He was an extremely polite man with hidden reserves of personality, a thin man with a small skull cap on his head and a beard.
From the start, this had been a bad idea; but the maulvi saheb was such a patient man that he almost turned it into a good one. He taught her Urdu; slowly, patiently. She had no patience, but she was determined in the interests of her new life in Bombay; she must get her tongue around the words in the ghazals. ‘Not jim,’ he said. ‘Jeem.’
In her notebook, she wrote aliph, be, and te. She forgot them the next time he came. ‘Oh maulvi saheb,’ she said, embarrassed but not unduly concerned, ‘I’ve forgotten them.’ He was not so much stoic as calm; he was used to rich students paying him for the ritual of learning Urdu; though he wished he had more well-to-do students. Sometimes he wished he had more; sometimes, when he grew tired, he longed for serious students.
Their business was conducted at this centre table, in this small area in the drawing room, where, you could say, many of her daytime pursuits – call them work, or hobbies – were confined. Here, too, tea came and interrupted them. He always accepted tea tentatively, with the fastidiousness a Victorian Englishwoman might have had. He was clearly thrown off-balance by the prospect of having tea with Mrs Sengupta; he didn’t know what relationship he should have to this interregnum, this moment, and to her during it: was he her equal, her co-tea-drinker, or still the ‘maulvi saheb’? She made it slightly easier for him by ignoring him completely as she finished her tea.
Half her mind, of course, was on whether the furniture had been dusted, whether the decorations had been moved inadvertently from their shelves. Then she would find that her eyes were staring at ‘jeem’ and ‘che’.
‘Bas, maulvi saheb,’ she’d say, ‘enough today. I’ll see you again next week.’
A large sofa with floral upholstery; a patterned carpet with a rectangular centre table whose pug marks showed if it moved slightly out of place; the two dignified armchairs on either side; the shelves on the wall-unit which had been bare and became quickly populated with miniatures and objects – urns, brass lamps – released from their expected uses; the momentarily listless curtains; the dining table glimmering in the distance – this, at least for now, was her house.
Sometimes the boy, when he came home from school early, or on a holiday, would see the maulvi saheb and his mother, and approach them. He found the maulvi saheb uncommunicative. Yet he felt he might tell him something. He always felt that visitors from a clearly different background were his natural allies; that when they were pretending not to notice him, they were waiting for the right moment.
‘But why should I sing the ghazal?’ she asked herself one day. Would giving it up mean she had failed? But wasn’t her forte the bhajan, the devotional; isn’t that what they said? Then why was she struggling to sing these love songs? She’d never get them right, and, anyway, they were, in a sense, absolutely foreign to her; she’d never be able to enter their mood, their spirit. Once she realised this, it was as if a burden she’d carried without knowing it had gone. Overnight, the letters ‘aliph’ and ‘jeem’ began to disappear from her memory. She discontinued her lessons with ‘maulvi saheb’.
That evening, they went out for dinner – the company secretary was visiting from Calcutta. Mr Deb was in a room at the old Taj; although it was still not the old Taj – the idea for the new Taj had been floated, but it had still not been built. The old Taj was alone, and had an inviolability about it.
They went to the Crystal Room for dinner. It was good to see Mr Deb again; they ordered naan, palak chicken, daal. The boy was there too; he sometimes accompanied his parents on these occasions. They sat, talking about Calcutta, about the company, about Bombay. When food was served, the dim light almost concealed the colours on the plate; the yellow of the daal, the green of the palak. Yet, though they tore the naan with enthusiasm, they didn’t seem interested in the food. Only Mrs Sengupta said she liked the taste of the daal. Where Mr Deb was concerned, there was always, for them, a sense of waiting and watching. They were not conscious of this, though; but it was almost certain that once Mr Deb retired, Mr Sengupta would take his place. This, perhaps, gave these meetings an air of deferral, where a lot was said, but something couldn’t be.
‘Sir, the bill.’ The bill was settled by Mr Deb; easier for him, as he was staying at the hotel. But, outside this little ritual, it came to the same thing: the meal would be paid for by the company. They – Mr and Mrs Sengupta – had just begun to get used to, to take for granted, the freedom of gesture this represented.
Two months later, taking them by surprise, Mr Deb died. Death had nipped retirement in the bud by two years. He would now be fifty-six years old for eternity; he was quietly cremated in Calcutta. The company settled the dues. A chest pain, wrongly diagnosed by a family doctor as flatulence, had been followed by a heart attack. They could now talk about it – the mistaken diagnosis – forever. Mr Sengupta flew into Calcutta, on work, but also made his visit coincide with Mr Deb’s shraddh. Mr Deb was, in a small way, part of his private mythology; he’d been one of the people who interviewed Mr Sengupta. He felt, within the constraints of the circumstances, the context of flux in the company the departure of one person created, a sense of bereavement. Mrs Deb, in a white sari, gave a general impression of whiteness, as her hair was almost all white. She spoke to him as someone who was not quite a relative, someone she had got to know, but risked losing. ‘You must stay for dinner, Apurva,’ she said.
* * *
THE COMPANY OFFICE was on Tulsi Pipe Road. This was a curious address – not a very distinguished address – for a company of standing. They were framed by the old, declining industrial landscape, by a sense of grease and iron, and of funnels of smoke from chimneys in deathless mills. But now, for two years, the office had become the head office; the head office had moved from Calcutta. It was strange to see, in these surroundings, Mr Dyer emerge from the entrance, debonair, balding, not too long after his pretty secretary, Pamela, had left, and advance towards his car. Apurva Sengupta, too, could be seen coming out not too much later, his jacket on one arm.
Sometimes the boy would come to pick up his father (this was a momentous event in the week) and sit in the car watching the procession of company employees coming out of the incongruous art deco building, the secretaries in their long skirts, the junior executives in chattering groups, invisible as individuals, the directors getting into cars. One day, as they were going back home, a man in rags fell across the bonnet of the car as it paused at the turning; with one arm he banged the windshield, and turned to stare, for one protracted second, inside the car. The driver swore. Ignoring him, the man rose, and, as if he had more important things to do, swayed to the other side of the road. ‘He’s drunk too much,’ said the driver, starting the engine. ‘Bewda!’ Nirmalya didn’t know what it meant to have drunk too much; he didn’t know what had happened for the man to become like this, or what the strangely unseeing stare meant. He sat motionless; inwardly, he shrank with terror. Only when his father, who’d been smiling with astonishment, began to talk about the party in the evening did his sense of being at home – in the car, in the world – flow back to him; the moment receded, like a dream that no longer had the power to touch him.
Some people said that Mr Dyer had affairs with his secretaries; but most of them would have admitted there was more exaggeration in this than truth. But they chose to suspend belief and disbelief, and continued to inhabit a mental realm in which these affairs – plunged into at some hour of the day that lay outside the flow of time as they knew it; probably when he was dictating, behind the shut door, a long letter to e
ither Pamela or Doris – were possible.
He was a charming man. A great part of his charm lay in his physique and his manner: his height, the way he stooped forward slightly, his sideburns – that narrow, perfect-shaped fleece of gold; all things that made the fact that he was balding almost irrelevant.
He gave the impression of listening to you very carefully, his blue eyes fixed over your shoulders, his eyebrows slightly raised in interest and concern, the deep alluring lines creasing his tanned forehead. Behind this manner, he was a dictator who left final and important decisions to no one else, and carried the company, like a personal possession he didn’t want to misplace, in his pocket. But he had been specially charming with Mr Sengupta: he gave him exactly what he wanted – a chauffeur-driven car, a flat, servants, a decent salary – so as to preclude permanently the possibility of Apurva Sengupta one day moving elsewhere. Mr Sengupta didn’t think of his being here as necessarily permanent; but he was beginning to become happy in the company. He suppressed his instinct that his boss was a type of extraordinary and somewhat disrespectable English adventurer: everyone knew it was largely Dyer who’d made the company the success it now was.
‘Well, A.B.,’ he said one afternoon, leaning over his desk (he’d begun the practice of referring to his colleagues by their initials, perhaps to conceal the fact that he had trouble getting their names right; he himself was known to them by his first name – Philip), ‘you know that, with poor Deb gone, there’s a vacancy.’ He smiled; lines appeared round his eyes. An expression almost like kindness; a moment’s deference to the death, but also a sensitivity to the window it had opened up. ‘I’ve thought about it, and I don’t want to advertise. I’ve been looking at your work, and I think you’re the right man for the job, don’t you?’
At these moments, in the air-conditioned isolation of his office, Mr Dyer’s style was pressing: he was a seducer. He was Mephistophelean; but he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in being Mephistopheles to everybody; and the alternative (which induced nervousness in those who’d seen it) was a blankness in the blue eyes.
The Immortals Page 2