‘Ma, what does balidaan mean?’ asked Nirmalya a couple of days later. He was skulking behind her as she, after her bath, was dabbing her face and putting the finishing touches to herself before the dressing-table mirror.
She looked up absently.
‘Sacrifice,’ she said.
Nirmalya heard her sing the song again; and, for some reason, he was interested in finding out what the words meant. One or two of the words had caught his ear; he pieced the song together.
He wasn’t quite sure what to think of it. The tune was sugary; and its message so unequivocal that it couldn’t be taken quite seriously. And yet, although it was quite a crude song, its meaning startled him. It was as if – because it was only now that he’d put together what the words of the song meant – it was now that he felt himself capable of understanding what it was saying; he almost confused translation with communication; the song had suddenly given to him what it had withheld so far. It penetrated him not through its verbal distinction, but its rapid series of pictures.
Are the hands that pray more beautiful than hands that wear ornaments? Although he himself had never prayed, the question didn’t seem merely rhetorical. He saw arms before him, a woman’s arms; not disconnected from the body, but the body nevertheless invisible; one set of arms sparkling with three or four bangles; the other set of arms bare. For some reason, the sight – the mental picture – of the bare arms calmed him.
From the sunken balcony he could see Bombay repeatedly; or as much of Bombay as he wanted to see. And the water, which disturbed him without his knowing it, and which, although it was everywhere, he could only look at from the corner of his eye. The sea was a negation of the city’s human energies.
Once or twice, in the years he spent at La Terrasse, he dreamt of the sea: this tame accessory, this add-on, to luxury apartments and hotel rooms. It had risen all the way from Elephanta island, like a huge tidal wave swelling from Trombay, in one dream; and the flat he lived in was no longer the flat he knew. From the balcony, he saw the sea approaching with awe and a feeling of doom. But the balcony had become the front rows of a movie theatre, and the flat itself was like the inside of a cinema; a cinema that was elegant and in business, but strangely empty. From the window of the theatre (whose spacious lounge reminded him of the interiors of the Eros or of the Regal), he looked at the gigantic tumult; and then, as if he wasn’t alone, he communicated his sense of dread to someone inside with a smile.
Next morning, he woke with a sense of the other world he’d visited still upon him, of having gone and returned from an elsewhere that was familiar, banal, and yet, unexpectedly, magnificently on the brink of destruction: he knew no one survived that flood. When he came out into the drawing room, his eyes smarted with the light. There it was like a drab mercantile fact; the clusters of low and tall buildings from Nana Chowk to the Fort to further away; behind them, like the humps of idle animals, the islands of Elephanta and Trombay. The sea was dull and shining. It was as if the world had exhausted itself, and taken refuge in a surreptitious normalcy. But he was heavy with knowledge.
* * *
WHEN SUMIT SEN visited Bombay from Calcutta, Apurva Sengupta arranged a recital for him and Mallika Sengupta in a hall in North Bombay. The so-called ‘expatriate’ Bengalis sent out a welcoming party, of course; they wanted to get involved, as they did when any luminary made their way to Bombay from Calcutta. They went to receive him at the station – a gentle, ordinary-looking, bespectacled man who hadn’t lost his air of small means and limitations; and his low-key modesty was more a sense of surprised, genuine gratitude at what luck had given him. He emerged from the Gitanjali Express crumpled, but impeccably dressed in the manner of a singer of Tagore songs, in white dhuti and kurta. He folded his hands in a namaskar when the expectant ‘expatriate’ Bengalis approached; if not with garlands, then at least with pleased, vindicated expressions.
Mr Sengupta had just been made Head of Finance. He was steadying himself after the congratulations; he was weary of the felicitatory food he’d eaten at parties – he felt full all the time. He wanted to get back to work, to the responsibilities that Philip Dyer had quickly divided between Mr Sengupta and himself. But at the same time, he wanted this performance to go well, both for Sumit Sen and for his own wife; it distracted him.
‘Call the newspapers,’ he said to his personal assistant, the large Das, who was always composed and silently efficacious. ‘You know that Sumit Sen is well known in Calcutta.’
Mr Das nodded. ‘He is very well known,’ he agreed. And, leaving aside some of the day’s other work to do with letters and appointments and taxes, he began to make phone call after phone call.
The invitation cards went out. They were sent to the middle-class Bengalis – among them junior employees in Mr Sengupta’s company, who’d been watching his rise from a distance – who lived in Dadar, Khar, Prabhadevi, Mulund. Some of them would have come because Sumit Sen’s rendition of Tagore songs in the style of Hemanta was all the rage now in Calcutta; and ‘expatriate’ Bengalis liked to feel they were in touch with their homeland. For this reason they would flock to the Kala Kendra auditorium, and even tolerate Mrs Sengupta’s singing: because, privately, they concluded that the only reason she was singing on that day was because she was Apurva Sengupta’s wife. They resented having to make this journey through the traffic lights partly for Mallika Sengupta.
Mallika Sengupta didn’t care; she was somewhat contemptuous of the Bengalis who lived in Mulund and Khar. She knew what their ‘clubs’ and cultural programmes, their small-town ideas of recreation, were like. She was not one of them.
Sumit Sen had asked her to sing: so she would. Although she felt a distaste for his unfailingly populist choice of certain Tagore songs, and his sentimental version of Hemanta’s already sentimental style, and although he was quite unimpressive-looking, he was, astonishingly, a good man: that rarity. He had, somehow, spontaneously, after listening to her sing, realised what she was, in spite of being the wife of a Head of Finance: an artist. In this itself he was unusual.
Mrs Sengupta wore a green jamdani sari; she used to wear it sparingly, and saved it for such occasions. Nirmalya clenched a Panasonic tape recorder by the handle, and entered the hall, feeling rather indispensable and conspicuous, for he’d been entrusted with the mission of getting the performance on tape; not because he wanted to, but because he was so unthinkingly familiar with the ‘rewind’ and ‘record’ and ‘play’ buttons. He focussed fussily on the buttons.
Sumit Sen was in yet another white panjabi and dhuti, with his trademark air of simplicity. One could say that the show was a success: the suburban hall was almost three-quarters full.
For two days afterwards, the tape was played again and again. Out in the sitting room, near the balcony facing the Marine Drive and the indifferent glint of the sea, or inside the bedroom, the Panasonic lay propped against the sofa. Nirmalya’s parents listened intently. The muffled world of the auditorium returned, the applause in semi-lit aisles, the rather pedestrian, optimistic energy of Sumit Sen’s singing, Mrs Sengupta’s voice, as she sang Atul Prasad, hovering in the ether, all this absorbed and made cloudy by the small microphone.
‘Abhay Deshpande was there.’ Mr Das, taciturn personal assistant, conveyed this bit of information to Apurva Sengupta with characteristic restraint. ‘Abhay Deshpande?’ said Mr Sengupta, looking up. Deshpande was a leading music critic; he wrote for the Times of India and the Evening News. A small, short-sighted man, shaped like a bitter gourd. No one, except those who knew him, recognised him at music concerts.
‘But unfortunately,’ and Mr Das appeared crestfallen, ‘I don’t think he stayed on for the second half. I think he missed Mallikadi’s singing.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Mr Sengupta. Mr Das looked nervous. He nodded.
‘I saw him out, Mr Sengupta,’ he said. ‘He was in a hurry.’
For some reason, on the next two days, Mr Sengupta bought a copy of the Evening News fr
om a small boy at a traffic junction on Marine Drive. He pored over it carefully as the car stopped at intersections; then set it aside. There was nothing; why had he expected otherwise? The flash of excitement at the Kala Kendra auditorium died; Sumit Sen went back to Calcutta.
He was dictating a letter to his secretary, afternoon sun making the office window radiant, when Mr Das, purposeful and unstoppable as a weapon in a military arsenal, entered and said with suppressed agitation (because this would surely increase his importance in Mr Sengupta’s eyes): ‘Abhay Deshpande called.’ Mr Sengupta looked up: ‘Yes?’ With unexplained triumph, Das said: ‘He wants Mrs Sengupta’s bio-data.’ Mr Sengupta furrowed his brows; he opened a drawer – fortunately a recent biographical note was at hand.
Then, one day, Apurva Sengupta came back home with a paper in his hand. ‘Das gave me this,’ he said. ‘He’s very excited – Abhay Deshpande has written a review.’ He was beaming; he waved the Evening News. She smiled apprehensively; she went past the report on the Chief Minister’s transgressions on the first page, the light-eyed girl in the bathing suit on the third page, and kept turning the pages until she came to a headline hovering on the right-hand side, BENGALI SONGS CHARM BOMBAY. She didn’t know what to make of the small print, the first three paragraphs about Sumit Sen, beginning, ‘Sumit Sen is all the rage in Calcutta, and one can see why. He sang the songs of the Kaviguru, known to us here in Bombay only from the tunes stolen without any apologies by our music directors, with aplomb in his marvellous and mellifluous voice.’ The last two paragraphs concerned Mrs Sengupta: ‘She has a lovely, melodious voice, soaked in bhakti, and sang the songs of a lesser-known but no less talented composer, Atul Prosad, with command and ease. Many of the songs were set to bittersweet and emotive ragas like Desh and Kafi. Mallika ably brought out the pathos inherent in these ragas.’
She closed the paper; her eyes sparkled; she wanted to believe the things he’d said. But Abhay Deshpande’s figure receded and receded; she could not grasp it or imagine it. ‘I thought he left before I started to sing,’ she said. She tried again to think of him, but the man eluded her. ‘Mr Das might have been wrong,’ she said. She paused, as at a minor conundrum. ‘Of course, he might have been right . . . What does he look like?’ she asked her husband. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him,’ said Apurva Sengupta as he took off his jacket. They decided what to feel – to be happy with the review; to think no more of it.
* * *
PRASHANTA AND NAYANA Neogi still lived in the rented ground-floor flat with the dusty driveway in Khar. These, the Senguptas’ oldest friends in Bombay. But separated from them not only by distance – between the old world of Khar and the sea-facing tall buildings of Malabar Hill – but the different social worlds they now moved in. In fact, the Neogis didn’t ‘move’ at all; they stayed put, and people visited them – the same filmmakers and artists, both failed and successful.
And although Khar was far away, the Senguptas sometimes visited on Saturdays; sat in the bedroom, the air-conditioner on, the bamboo chiks keeping out light, as the Neogis’ dogs either strutted about, or rested immovably on the floor, tranquil, breathing heaps of bone and hair. Mallika Sengupta appeared to ignore them, but gathered the hem of her sari silently; although she didn’t think this in so many words, these animals in the bedroom represented to her the hidden wildness of the Neogis’ lives. The dogs, on the other hand, truly ignored everyone, unless a fit of awareness possessed them.
The Neogis had a son, Biswajit, six years older than Nirmalya; the other son, known now only by his pet name, ‘Tutu’, had died when he was seven years old of leukaemia. The Senguptas had never seen this boy; there was a picture of him in the bedroom, a vivid black-and-white close-up of his laughing face. The boy’s absence, and the presence of the photograph, haunted the casual cigarette-smoking skein of the Neogis’ lives, and always confronted the visitor. When Nirmalya first heard about Tutu from his mother – ‘They say he was a bright boy, very talented’ – he was seven years old himself, and he took a careful second look at the photograph for reasons of his own. He felt a moment of dread; could he die like that, suddenly? The boy in the picture was smiling into the distance; Nirmalya looked to his mother, busy talking to Nayana Neogi, a tea-tray before them, for reassurance. But they were in some other world, on the hallucinatory plane of repetitive, everyday existence. What was death – a sort of permanent blankness? He often wondered what would happen if he fell asleep and didn’t wake up again. He’d once had a dream in which he died, and woken up with a sense of foreboding, a deep sense of being metamorphosed. In the dream, he was playing with a friend, Puneet – this small, chuckling boy had since failed his exams and lost a year, and stayed back in the same class; they’d stopped being as close as they used to – Puneet and he were soldiers, possibly American Marines, and they were trying to capture what was either a ship or a submarine. In the gun battle on the green submarine, Nirmalya – and this happened not long before he awoke; the light was already in the curtains – was shot. Puneet couldn’t help him; and, at that moment, when Nirmalya was dying, he thought, ‘This is a dream’; he woke up. But that feeling of draining away, where dying had mingled with the dream’s fading into daylight – he found that difficult to shrug off as he put on his socks for school, while John the bearer loomed over him.
* * *
THE COMPANY Mr Sengupta worked in grew. So they decided to move office again. This time it was a stupendous, time-taking affair; moving from Nariman Point to a tall new upstart building on Cuffe Parade – one of a throng that had appeared where there had been nothing before. At the same time, the Senguptas moved to a huge five-bedroom apartment on the top storey of another one of the new buildings; and, in what seemed a logical but nevertheless breathtaking culmination of his career so far, he took over the company from Philip Dyer. A large laminated black-and-white picture on wood, of Dyer sitting at his chairman’s desk, his sideburns flamboyant and prominent, signed in a stylish black scrawl, ‘To Apurva and family, Philip’, as if a gift of some part of himself, even a replica, was to always preside benignly over their lives, was removed a few weeks later from the position it had occupied in the Senguptas’ bedroom for three years (where it used to be noted silently by Dyer during parties) and put inside a drawer. No comment was made, or necessary. The company was still partly foreign-owned; but it was, in effect, the end of the last vestiges of the British age.
There was some tension at this time with Dyer – Dyer, who loved Bombay, who loved ‘India’, that mythical composite of colour and smell and anonymous human beings and daylight, who loved being attended to by everyone from peons to businessmen, who, it was said, loved his brief flings with starlets and secretaries, who believed he had in some ways nurtured Apurva Sengupta. The last farewell parties were slightly awkward affairs, full of enforced shoulder-huggings and the sudden, unpredictable moist eye – because people found that emotion could surprise them when they least expected it. (The main bit of gossip at this time was the golden hair that had recently appeared, like a burst of energy, above Dyer’s forehead. ‘It’s not a toupee,’ whispered a director’s wife to Mallika Sengupta at a party. ‘Apparently he had a transplant.’ There was Dyer, not far from her, gesticulating and displaying the painfully acquired new hair.) Now he was displeased and melancholy at the idea of having to pack his bags after all these decades and leave for London, for ‘home’, with the semi-alcoholic Julia. His children, recently out of boarding school, were no longer in England; the son was somewhere near Dubai, working on an oil rig; the daughter was in her ancient residential boarding school. Philip Dyer, it seemed, had nothing to go back to.
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 ha
ted 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.
The Immortals Page 6