‘Have some of this,’ said Priya to Nirmalya. She pushed the copper container of daal towards him. He liked the sisters. They were gently attentive. He nodded. But his father still had not had the gumption to broach the subject of the recording. They concentrated on eating; the food, disappointingly, was unremarkable – only the name of the restaurant, Tanjore, was ambrosial, and promised to transform its taste.
After about forty-five minutes, the dancer and her accompanists left the platform with a mixture of awkwardness and embarrassment; probably to eat where neither guest nor waiter could see them. They completely ceased to exist, and the wind-chimes again became audible; now, paradoxically, they were missed slightly, and Nirmalya caught his mother glancing at the platform, with its harmonium and the outspread sheet on which the singer had been sitting. Dessert arrived; kulfi, for everyone except Nirmalya. Laxmi Ratan Shukla, chipping at his with a spoon, remained unfathomable.
Someone waved at Mr Sengupta. A man from another company. Apurva Sengupta smiled and waved back. Then he returned to Shukla.
Would anything be achieved with Shukla? The man had his own goals; he was actually a perpetrator of bad taste. He had created Om Prakash Vrindavan – one didn’t know if that was his real name – a marketing success, a modern-day saint-poet, a faux Kabir with great lung power. Like the old saint-poets, he composed his own songs, and the last stanza had his signature in it; ‘Saith Vrindavan’, like ‘Saith Kabir’, or ‘Meera says’, and he’d hold the note for ‘Saith Vrindavan’ with his reed-like voice for a full minute. Nouveau riche society ladies trembled; they thought, This is what Kabir must have been like, or Surdas; and they were transported to antiquity without having to vacate the present, or giving up their taste for Hindi film songs.
‘The man is an affront to the bhajan,’ said Mallika Sengupta to her husband one day. She’d met him twice; once in a room above a hall in a house in Dadar, where singers had gathered to ‘warm up’ before a function. He was seated on a rug, wearing saffron as usual, in front of his harmonium, making his wife, a fair, extraordinarily tinselly woman, much younger than him, rehearse some lines in a bhajan with him. She was crooning them in the same thin voice, almost a metallic, machine-like whine, that millions of women had cultivated after Lata. A fan swung forgivingly overhead. She glanced at Mrs Sengupta without warmth; but Om Prakash Vrindavan interrupted the exercise to do a brief, humble namaskar.
Meanwhile, Laxmi Ratan Shukla had finished most of his kulfi; what remained had melted to a puddle in the base of his bowl.
At any bhajan sammelan, Om Prakash Vrindavan would be the star turn. There he would be, his eyes bulging, his long hair falling smoothly round his face, bent over the harmonium, the whites of his eyes visible during moments of rapture. He was singing the commercial success you could hear every day on the radio; ‘Meri chadar purani’ – ‘My old shawl’. ‘Saith Vrindavan,’ he sang, as the ladies glowed with spiritual light. He was clearly another Kabir; for Kabir, the weaver’s son, the shawl or covering, or any piece of cloth, was a symbol of the body – the way it must be woven and made, the ease with which it could be torn – and the work of the loom a symbol of the divine activity of creation, and the sound of the loom – jhini jhini jhini – of the humming of the universe. But Om Prakash Vrindavan’s ‘old shawl’? The thought of it made Mr Sengupta, sitting in his dark suit in the audience, wrinkle his nose in distaste.
‘What’s all this about his wrapper?’ he said to his wife. ‘The idea’s unpleasant.’
They were in a minority, though; the record had sold more than fifty thousand copies.
* * *
SHE KNEW she could have been famous; but she had opted for the life of a Managing Director’s wife. It wasn’t only because she’d wanted the easy way out; it was because she couldn’t deal with the likes of Shukla; the world was full of Shuklas. She hid behind Apurva Sengupta, almost physically.
And then she’d hear Lata on the radio, and feel a stab of irritation. Lata and Asha, Lata and Asha – the sisters’ high-pitched voices, almost indistinguishable from one another, everywhere. This wasn’t the India she’d grown up in; India had been transformed into an island, with only one radio station, and she had to listen to the same singers again and again.
Then she’d go to a sari exhibition, and contemplate a Baluchari, or buy a Kanjeevaram. She’d be lost for half an hour in the red and deep blues of the sari.
She knew, after all, she’d made the right decision. Look at Lata in her white sari, unmarried, living like a hermit in Prabhu Kunj. Mallika Sengupta didn’t want to be a hermit: she still loved life. At fifty-four, her husband having become Managing Director, she felt she’d just begun to discover existence; she’d accepted the benefits that came with her husband’s position without affectation, as if they had always been her due. And Asha, deserted by her husband; Asha Bhonsle, who fell in love with the music director dressed in white, O.P. Nayyar, who then tried to dominate all she did – this seemed to Mallika Sengupta like no life at all; it made her shudder. And to Mallika Sengupta, Lata was no goddess Saraswati, as her admirers claimed, but a lonely woman, too private, not close to anyone. She was glad of her husband, her son, the flat she renovated from time to time: it would be madness to exchange these things that so filled up her day for the fulfilment of some grand personal ambition – she had neither the courage nor the desire to do it.
There was a pall on their lives, though: on the cocktail parties; the flat in Cuffe Parade, the Mercedes; the impulsive purchase of curios. It was the constant, nagging knowledge, like a secret, of their son’s health – he wasn’t unhealthy, or ill, but the murmur the doctor would hear in his chest every time he put a stethoscope to it, for whatever reason, a cough or the flu, was audible to Mallika Sengupta beneath all she did. It made her regret the name her mother had given him: ‘Nirmalya’; an offering to the gods. She had no intention of offering him to the gods; of letting them interfere with her life.
When he was a boy, she had a great terror of losing him. Each day she’d send him off to school, hair wet and combed, shirt tucked into laundered half-pants, tie knotted and dangling from the collar, as if she had the merest suspicion that he was on the verge of disappearing forever. She’d read a story recently, in a newspaper, about a kidnapping. These demons could spoil her morning, even when, later, a free spirit at large in the shops from Amarson’s in Breach Candy to Sahakari Bhandar in Churchgate, she, hair tied in a bun, wearing a light, printed sari, was buying knick-knacks across the counter.
The children who ran towards cars in traffic jams were part of her bad dreams in those days. Not just the lepers, whose noses and fingers were wearing away, disappearing inexorably like a bar of soap on a basin; nor the Red Cross volunteers, who came and rattled their tin hypnotically, as if it were a cymbal or tambourine; nor the grimy men in rags that opened on to bits of skin, who were neither maimed nor blind, only forlorn and nameless. It was the children. They knocked on her window with their knuckles and harangued her for change; one child might paw it absent-mindedly with the palm of the hand, as if this were a game and his mind partly elsewhere; another’s face might suddenly float into the square, singing, ‘Give, give, give, haven’t eaten’; she waved them away or gave them a coin. What she felt was not compassion; it was inescapable and personal, as if the voices were in her head, inside her life and memory, rather than outside. She was troubled by a recurring fear in her many automobile reveries – what if it were Nirmalya? Constantly, the face of the unknown child knocking petulantly changed, and became Nirmalya’s: she could do nothing about it. Among her many secret, absurd obsessions, this was one of the most acute: the snatching away from her, in a moment, of her son; the loss of her life as she knew it. The child, asking her again and again for the coin, was what she couldn’t keep out or deny, though she shooed him away with one hand; on the way back from school with Nirmalya, or to the hairdressers’, at Kemp’s Corner or Chowpatty, the same fear and pity repeated itself, inextricably linked,
somehow, to Nirmalya’s childhood. Sometimes the light changed from red to orange before she could open her purse; the child was gone; he’d be there tomorrow.
He was now sixteen, this ‘offering to the gods’. He went about with The Story of Philosophy; he was reading about Santayana. The doctors had said there was ‘no need to touch him’ till he was forty.
Apurva Sengupta was a model of reasonableness; he deprecated his wife for being too emotional. He attended board meetings; flew to and from Delhi, wearing his dark suit and aimed towards the sky, and, later, towards home, in an Indian Airlines plane; he brought back home bits of company gossip, and, from the longer journeys, stubs of boarding cards and Parry’s lozenges which he presented to Nirmalya like a bribe. ‘There is nothing to worry about,’ he said to his wife.
But then he brought with him a yogi; an unbridled, wild-looking bearded man, tame for the moment, with a caste-mark on his forehead, bare-bodied except for a loincloth tucked up above his thighs; accompanied sheepishly by Mr Sengupta, radiant in his dark suit and tie. He brought the man to the flat in Thacker Towers – Arthur and Jumna speechless after retreating into the kitchen – to tell Nirmalya’s future.
Nirmalya felt both sympathy and a hint of contempt for his father’s unembarrassed lapse into this experiment, he suddenly realised he was not as calm, as immersed in company life and practicable solutions as he pretended he was. Nirmalya was impatient with the yogi; he was still too young, too newly romantic, to understand, in real life, the irrationalities of filial love. He remembered a line from a poem he’d had to learn in class, a poem he disliked, partly because a man with an Indian, or at least non-European name, had had the temerity to write something about the universal human condition in English called ‘Night of the Scorpion’. A child – an idea, almost, not a flesh-and-blood creature – had been bitten by a scorpion; the grown-ups were trying to save it from death. The poet says: ‘My father, rationalist, sceptic, tried every curse and blessing . . .’ Ramachandra, the swotter, the cleverest boy in class, who sometimes fell asleep on his elbow during lessons from studying at night but was never pulled up by teachers who were nervous that they knew less than he did, had asked shrilly, ‘Miss, if the father was a sceptic and rationalist, why was he resorting to curses and blessings?’ as if he’d tripped the poet up. The others in the class only had a vague idea of what ‘sceptic’ and ‘rationalist’ meant. The question had occurred to Nirmalya too, but he already knew the answer. He thought Ramachandra was showing off.
The yogi consulted Mrs Sengupta first. He sat magisterially on the edge of the sofa, with Mallika Sengupta in his line of vision. He read the future not by looking at her palm, but staring at the screen of the forehead and then retreating into himself.
‘Sangeet,’ he exclaimed at last; his expression, which refused to register any awe at what he saw around him – paintings; the crystalline vases; even the plump, well-fed cushions on the sofa – held the slightest hint of surprise. ‘Music!’ Mrs Sengupta looked at her son and husband in both consternation and triumph; though much of the world was ignorant of her gift, this man, undeceived by her sari, her make-up, had discovered what she really was; her destiny, neglected by everyone, including herself, was clear to him.
Then Nirmalya, like something between a reluctant bride and a chastised pupil, was made to sit before him. The man still hadn’t moved from the edge of the sofa; red eyes narrowed, the bare back and torso upright. He furrowed his brow, counted on his fingers, some obscure calculus that he kept to himself.
‘Unhappiness,’ he said finally. ‘You are not happy.’
Nirmalya had been waiting for some other news; some prognosis of greatness, at least some glimmer of being singular. But, secretly, he was startled by what the man had said to him without any feeling except, it seemed, one of conviction. Yes, he was unhappy. But how had the man known? Was it an absurdly easy thing to say – would most people recognise unhappiness in themselves if they were told they were unhappy?
‘You will not be big director like father,’ continued the yogi, strangely dismissive now, as if he’d had enough of other people’s lives. ‘Small director.’
This, in spite of it being deflating, amused Nirmalya, the measuring of success in this odd vocabulary of directorship. Where had the yogi picked it up? In spite of the dark, brand-like impress of his appearance, which made you think he had stepped out of a storybook, he must have a very particular clientele.
Later, when he’d gone, they – father, mother, and son, each with different degrees of curiosity, awe, and irony – discussed how he might have known Mallika Sengupta was a singer. Were there any musical instruments in the sitting room – a tabla or a harmonium? No, the musical instruments were inside, in a room inaccessible to the yogi. It was an episode their rational minds could neither accept nor leave alone.
* * *
BUT THE HEART MURMUR caused Nirmalya’s parents less anxiety of late than it once used to. Because a doctor had said Nirmalya needn’t be ‘touched’ till he was forty. That seemed a very long time from now, more than a quarter of a lifetime. ‘Now’ was a time of terrace parties, of evening conversation, of daytime drifting between exhibition and hotel lobby and the sitting room at home. Nirmalya at forty – the world would be different then; unrecognisable, but a world in which unthinkable possibilities were a part of the everyday.
Jumna, to whom Mrs Sengupta used to confide her sorrow, her anxiety, had changed. Her body hadn’t aged; but her face had. Seven years ago, her husband, the bewda, had knocked her front teeth out. Each time there was a headline that said, Seven Die in Country Liquor Tragedy, the Senguptas thought of Jumna’s husband. When Jumna came in to work, and went into the kitchen to pick up the jhadu, Nirmalya would say to her: ‘See what happened to these bewdas.’ ‘Every evening he goes and drinks bewda,’ she said, shaking her head, staring at the floor, jhadu in hand. Nirmalya, who’d never seen her husband, pictured him sitting inside a roofed place with tables and an electric light, with men like him who, in this image that flashed upon Nirmalya, had nothing in particular on their minds. When he tried to imagine the liquor that killed these men, gradually or suddenly, it was golden or transparent, like the alcohol he’d noticed being poured out in parties. Then one day he realised it was milky white, like toilet cleaner.
So Jumna’s husband came to inhabit Nirmalya’s life, a malevolent visitor, unredeemable, present but never there. He never saw him.
One cheerful, company-sponsored morning, the husband came to the flat in La Terrasse. Only a few months ago, Jumna had related how she’d woken up in the middle of the night to find herself soaked: her husband, utterly drunk, had drenched her with kerosene, and was trying with little success to light a match, muttering ‘Saala! Saala!’ in the darkness. Now this man was here in La Terrasse, ensconced in the servants’ quarters at the back. Everyone in the house was transformed, as at the advent of a difficult bridegroom; no one, the servants or the Senguptas, knew whether to smile or to be outraged. Jumna had a smile on her lips; you couldn’t tell what it denoted – embarrassment, sadness, a strange affection. The man had broken his leg; he’d come to borrow some money.
Nirmalya, twelve years old, was away in school; he narrowly missed seeing him. He desperately wanted to know what Jumna’s husband looked like.
‘He’s quite sober-looking,’ Mallika Sengupta said. She used the word ‘sober’ to mean ‘serious’. ‘A very quiet man.’
This was the figure of joy in Mrs Sengupta’s and Nirmalya’s lives, this woman, more than a decade in their employ, whose own life was like a frayed fabric. Mrs Sengupta still sought her out when she had a nagging doubt, an anxiety.
Jumna mimicked the other servants wonderfully: she exactly caught their turns of phrase, their vanity, recreated effortlessly Arthur’s frequent curious glances at the mirror. The kitchen and its dramas came alive in her stories. They sat and listened to her and laughed loudly.
Even her tales of hardship seemed intended to seep into
their secure, company-engendered lives with a tinge of sadness they would not otherwise have.
This woman who had nothing – they were oddly obliged to her.
* * *
THE FAMILY PLANNING programme had failed Jumna: she had five children. Her husband had not used Nirodh: Nirodh, which was advertised everywhere like a health warning or a royal edict, in cinema halls and on billboards. When he was small, Nirmalya used to upbraid her for adding to India’s population, to the number with several zeros he’d memorised in school, each zero the sum-total of fate for almost all the people that number comprised; this, he was certain, like her ignorance of the alphabet and of the facts about the universe he was daily introduced to, was a source of her sorrows.
‘Kya karu, baba?’ she said, as he sermonised intently. ‘What can I do?’ The matter was, mysteriously, out of her hands.
What was Nirodh? Was it a sort of mixture, or medicine? Was it available in bottles or packets? How exactly did it perform its curtailing purpose?
Jumna went to a government hospital and had a tubec-tomy; she vanished from work that day. ‘What could I do,’ she said. ‘He would never stop.’ Mrs Sengupta smiled, relieved. ‘You’ve taken the right decision, Jumna,’ she said, congratulating Jumna for making a shrewd investment.
‘But why did she have so many children?’ Nirmalya enquired of the driver. This driver, George, a dashing Tamil Christian, had a drink problem, he had come back to work from lunch, drunk, declaimed to everybody present in the flat, hectored the other servants about their employer, taken off his white shirt with epaulettes – known, in conjunction with his trousers, as the ‘driver’s uniform’, a striking ensemble – he’d impatiently divested himself, after his speech, of one half of the uniform and fallen into a deep sleep in the servants’ quarters. Later, sober and attempting to shore up his shattered dignity, he’d listened to a description of his behaviour from Apurva Sengupta with a mixture of disbelief and contrition. He also had an eye for women; when driving, he had a habit of speeding up the car brusquely, becoming abruptly focussed, whenever women were crossing, and braking in front of them with a jerk in the nick of time. To Nirmalya’s surprise, the women seemed to enjoy the thrust of the car; once they’d recovered from their startlement, they’d smile in complicity at this mockery of their unassailability.
The Immortals Page 11