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.
* * *
TWO 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.
‘How many rooms?’ asked Nayana Neogi, following Mallika Sengupta down the small, shadowy corridor between two bedrooms, a glass of gin in one hand.
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.
‘It’s not that Mallika doesn’t have ambition, you know,’ said Nayana Neogi with quiet certainty, undoing the clips from her hair one night.
‘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 conversa
tion 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.
At night, the lights came on in the Marine Drive, a great witch-like celebration of neon and fluorescence, and Mrs Sengupta cheerfully told her son Nirmalya, as he looked out over the stone bannister, that the row of lights glowing individually around the drive was called the ‘Queen’s Necklace’.
It was to this flat that Shyamji came one day. Mallika Sengupta had been looking for a new teacher. A series of teachers had come to the Cumballa Hill apartment, starting with Chandrashekhar, who used to arrive on a scooter three times a week, a nice man, not hugely accomplished, who worked in an office and gave tuitions in singing. He’d been teaching her as he taught everyone else, with cheerful, encouraging insincerity, till one day he actually listened to her and fell silent in consternation. ‘Your voice is truly lovely,’ he said at last; the voice was still ringing in his ear – but this lapse from teacherly propriety never occurred again.
Motilalji, in spite of his gifts, she ‘got rid of ’ after he twice came drunk to her lesson. Then there was the famous classical ustad Ghulam Mohammed, who was recommended to her for his immense knowledge; a thin man who wore steel spectacles, he reminded her for some reason of a master tailor – it wasn’t difficult to imagine him with a tape-measure around his neck. He taught her nothing, or no songs, at least, but kept giving her vocal exercises; intricate exercises that didn’t add up to anything, but which he named, with satisfaction, ‘designs’. ‘Look at this design,’ he said; this contributed further to his calm, focussed, tailor-like air. Then, at last, he gave her a song, a geet; ‘This is a new tuin,’ he said, and though he taught her the same song for two months, she both liked and was exasperated by his quaint version of the word ‘tune’ and his blithe, dilatory use of it – ‘Yeh mushkil tuin hai’, ‘It’s a difficult tuin’ etc. Learning from him was to be in the middle of an unending chapter.
There were others. Jairam, who was past his heyday, and was convinced his daughter would be another Lata; Inderjit, a small flamboyant man, whom, mistakenly, she’d called by name once, instead of ‘Inderjitji’, thus scaring him off possibly with ideas about her romantic interest in him – all these teachers had come and gone from her house. The last teacher who’d come to this new apartment was Dheeraj, a dark man with a pleasant singing voice, a crooner’s voice. He began to teach her new geets. He got her to sing a rather ‘filmi’, sentimental song on the radio, not really suited to her style and voice (love songs seldom were), but she sang it with seriousness, too much seriousness, almost: ‘My many-coloured dreams have all shattered/ Like a mirror.’ He had a problem with his marriage, though; it was breaking apart. One day he stopped coming. They heard he’d had a stroke. She waited to hear from him; he was untraceable; a month went by. Then, when she’d almost forgotten him, she saw him from her car on the road, looking absent, a stick in one hand.
‘Haven’t I seen you before?’ asked Mallika Sengupta. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen you before.’ Shyamji had been waiting for her, looking beyond the sunken balcony at the sea.
‘Didi,’ he said very courteously, ‘I once came with my wife’s brother, Motilalji. You were in a different flat, then.’
‘Of course,’ she said – the day returned to her – and she added, ‘I remember – he said something like, “She thinks no end of herself,” and you looked as if you wished you were somewhere else.’ And she was oddly stirred by the memory of his discomfiture.
That discomfiture fitted with his personality: he was one of the most soft-spoken and pointedly courteous teachers she’d had. Later, she’d hear that people called him ‘smooth’, even ‘slippery’. But her doubts were subsumed by the compassion she’d felt for him right from the beginning; ever since he’d called her, without really knowing her, ‘didi’ and made her an elder sister.
It was seven years since she’d seen him last – and not quite forgotten him. But by this time he was no longer the man who had hovered in the background behind Motilalji. He was becoming, according to unofficial information, one of Bombay’s most highly paid teachers; the well-to-do he charged eighty-five rupees per sitting; a huge sum. But they wanted him – among them corporate wives; devout traders and tax defaulters whose anxieties were oddly consoled by music; not to speak of young, ordinary middle-class students who lived in the suburbs and learnt from him in groups of five or six – they wanted him for his melodious voice and his virtuosity. Like the god after whom he’d been named, whose flute was a wand that drew the female cowherds to him, Shyamji’s uninsisting, mellifluous singing had drawn one student after another to him in South Bombay.
The boy was now fifteen years old. He’d just finished his school finals; he’d passed with a decent, but not brilliant, first class.
The older he got, and the higher his father rose in the company, the greater the friction that came to exist between him and the life to which he’d been raised
. With an adolescent puritanism, he’d almost made it a point to boycott his parents’ parties, or to appear in them with a premeditated nonchalance, in a dishevelled state.
It was at this time that the boy ran into Shyamji, as he was flitting from the main door to his bedroom. Shyamji guessed he must be Mrs Sengupta’s son, but couldn’t be sure. The boy looked rather intense, bespectacled, a tender goatee – more like down – around his chin. Later, he asked Mrs Sengupta:
‘Didi, is that your son?’
Shyamji was genuinely interested. Because he believed the flat and the way of life inside it to be an inheritance, and he wanted to know who would inherit it. What he’d seen, in the person of this boy, he thought privately, was a bit odd.
‘Yes, that is my son,’ said Mrs Sengupta, brightening visibly, as if merely to become conscious of the fact again was to experience some form of satisfaction.
‘You have no other children, didi?’ he asked, softly, as if he were respectful of the ways of the well-to-do, but also very slightly concerned. He couldn’t comprehend the impulse to bring only one child into the world, but there were many things about people like Mrs Sengupta he couldn’t quite comprehend.
‘No,’ she said, and called, ‘Nirmalya, come here!’ But the boy was in his room and there was no response. ‘John,’ she said, ‘ask baba to come here.’
‘Nirmalya’: ‘an offering to the gods’ – they’d named him thus because he’d narrowly missed being a stillborn child; he’d been in a stupor in his mother’s womb – another two hours and he wouldn’t have lived. Even before his inception into the world, it seemed he was delegated a destiny.
The Immortals Page 4