The Immortals

by Chaudhuri, Amit

  The form lay on Mr Sengupta’s table for two days, out of place among invitations from the Governor and chambers of commerce; he forgot about it. Then he spotted it, was, for an instant, in a state of blank irresolution, making the instant seem longer than it was, and buzzed for his secretary.

  ‘Tell Nair to do something about it,’ he said.

  But this was not the only time or way in which Shyamji asked for the Senguptas’ indulgence, their support. Apurva Sengupta was, at once, patron and honorary elder. There was Shyamji’s family, after all; and the extended gaggle, all clamouring with various needs and desires. Sumati, his wife, who would say, ‘Didi, don’t forget my sari!’ Shyamji’s younger brother Banwari was shy; a near-ink-dark complexion and the buck teeth that marred his otherwise serious, pleasant face crippled him with shyness. Nevertheless, he too became less and less taciturn with the Senguptas – Mallika Sengupta let down her guard as he let down his – and, smiling, covering his mouth and the teeth instinctively, protectively, with one hand, asked for constant ‘advances’ on the tuition fee. He played the tabla solemnly with Mrs Sengupta; a master of his instrument, Banwari, but forced to subsist on the middle level, to recast himself as one of the many accompanists for ‘light’ music practice-sessions in the drawing room, lowering himself and his instruments on the carpet, his white kurta and pyjamas always photograph-spotless, making his dark skin seem warm and deep, like an ember. On the days he didn’t come, Shyamji’s brother-in-law, the restive, genie-like Pyarelal, came to play the tabla – Shyamji had seen to it, democratically, that the male members of his family, even the ones he didn’t like, had employment. After all, they all had mouths to feed. The sons still too young, too full of unrealistic, swaggering expectation, to work, the daughters mostly unmarried.

  The women, wearing chiffon saris, with the ends of the saris covering their heads and part of their faces, like the residue of a veil, seemed too shy to meet the world. They were not in the least so. They were the engine behind their husbands.

  Tara, Shyamji’s younger sister, sweet-smiling, for many years overweight despite her pious, ostentatious fasts, a small, gold nose-ring piercing one nostril, Tara, whom Ram Lal married off to that jack-of-all trades Pyarelal, was particularly demanding. She was always expecting something from her brother, even when she hadn’t said a word. Shyamji could sense it in her endearments, and in her sudden, dreamy grumblings addressed to no one. It was because of her, and because he loved her through the ties of blood and memory, that he’d taken on the responsibility of supporting the mendacious Pyarelal. And Tara, overweight and settling into life, knew it; for her brother, she reserved her most sugary smile.

  Then the matriarch, Ram Lal’s widow, tiny, barrel-shaped in a white sari, daughter of the bejewelled man who’d once danced before the king of Nepal. Her unspoken edict to Shyamji: always look after your younger brother Banwari, and don’t ever forget our Tara.

  And Sumati herself, Shyamji’s wife, slightly silly and airy-fairy but good-humoured, a little too proud, according to family members, that her husband was doing well.

  Finally, Neeta, Banwari’s wife, fair, exceptionally pretty underneath the pallu of the sari that she pulled over one side of her face, except that her voice was almost rasping, and she argumentative. A pearl concealed from the world, discontent. She’d have felt she was too good for Banwari with his protruding teeth if he hadn’t been Ram Lal’s son.

  The stage was set after the usual series of trials and errors, the pinning up of pennants by workmen that Shyamji would chance cheerily upon, the final raising of garlands; and now there were floral patterns around the piece of synthetic that said 3rd GANDHARVA SAMMELAN. Rajasthani families – neither entirely of Bombay, nor any more of the scoured landscape of desert and oasis-like villages they’d once come from – wandering busily about in the foyer where men smoked during intermission and boys devoured ice cream, everyone from old crones to children; anyone even distantly related to Shyamji was here. And Shyamji, bowing, joining his palms together in namaskar, gracious in receiving businessmen and their wives, the suited, deceptively modest corporate executives who reigned over companies, and their families. Delegating to his son the task of seating them in the second row or third row or fourth, or sometimes escorting them – for they looked distant and faintly undecided without an escort, these driven, nine-to-nine executives – himself. The occasional inspector-general of police walking in; or politician. A show of intimacy then taking place in the front aisle, the inspector-general hugging the musician and overcoming him momentarily while the wife looked on, smiling. Then anti-climactic murmurs as they were led to their seats.

  All this was part of the constant enchantment, the enlargement of life and its prospects for the executives, the businessmen, Shyamji. The sammelan, whatever it achieved, was where these daily premonitions of well-being – that something good was about to happen, that mutual understanding promised mutual benefit – fortuitously came together. All who lived and worked in Bombay believed this as seriously as a dogma or superstition; the music that was to come, or anything else for that matter, was almost secondary to this belief. Ram Lal’s portrait, severe, predictably incongruous, was placed at an angle on the right, a garland strung round it. There was a lamp before it, which Shyamji lit on the first day of the sammelan. Another incongruous moment as he bent over the wick – not of introspection, but in which a memory had no time to come to the surface. It was a little like lighting a pyre, the pyre he had lit eleven years ago, an act of reverence and expiation. But now, after the banality of the intervening years and of the day itself, emotion had withered and little remained but the public gesture; Shyamji was distracted – distracted by the air-conditioned auditorium waiting behind him.

  The first day was pure classical music and dance, starting with the younger artists’ emphatic throat-clearings and improvisatory tentativeness, then, later in the evening, evolving into the familiarity and unapologetic ease of the mature performers; the second day was devoted to ‘light’ music. People tided over the first day somehow; it was the second day they were interested in, because they’d sing themselves then – Shyamji’s disciples, from young struggling ghazal singers to businessmen’s wives, hot but bright in their saris, naked ears dressed provocatively in gold, whose husbands had put a full-page advertisement in the souvenir. Their relationship with music had begun embry-onically, in their prehistory as listeners; they’d hummed along in an undertone with the artists they loved best, or loudly, solitarily, to themselves; and then, at some point, they’d asked themselves the unimaginable, something that wouldn’t have occurred to them six months before, or which they didn’t have the courage to admit: ‘Can’t I be a singer? Can’t it be me?’ Why should they only listen; why shouldn’t they be listened to? Once the question was posed so shatteringly, the answer was simple; and led to its own joy, liberation, and trauma. And here, Shyamji, ironically, was to be not so much teacher as mediator; not only to satisfy the middle-class urge for music, but the relentless, childlike longing to become the musician (how simply the metamorphosis could be achieved!); to move to centre-stage, at least for fifteen minutes, where the traditional musician previously was.

  The lamp was lit, there was a short-lived exhalation of paraffin, the small eye of flame went on burning dutifully, dutifully, no one noticed, but the first day got off to a rather poor start, with Sunder, Shyamji’s young son-in-law, dancing kathak for forty-five minutes. Sunder was twenty-two years old; he was married to Shyamji’s oldest daughter, and lived in Delhi. Sunder’s father had said to Shyamji, ‘Bhaiyya, you must give your damaad half an hour at least. He’s a hardworking boy, and after all he’s Ram Lal’s granddaughter’s husband.’ Shyamji nodded; the man’s logic was irreproachable.

  But, though Sunder may have worked hard, he was still raw. For the last two years, his father railed and shouted and cajoled as Sunder tried to master the technical aspects of kathak; he’d not even begun to broach its emotive side, abhinaya, wher
e the dancer, through facial expressions and small gestures of the hand, relives the surprise and tenderness and frustrations of Radha’s trysts with Krishna. He was still altogether too gangly; the bells round his ankles sounded too loud when he stamped his feet. It was as if the boy was having a late adolescence.

  For forty-five minutes they went on like this, the father, bespectacled, thin, slapping the tabla angrily, Pyarelal playing the harmonium and rapidly saying the bols to which the boy danced. Sunder’s wife gaped at him from the audience as he whirled round three times and came to an anxious stop, his eyes still with controlled terror, his body poised like a pin as it hits the ground; the rest of Shyamji’s family looked politely uninterested. Really, the boy had no grace at all – he couldn’t have entered Radha’s body, her movements, if he tried; not his gender, but some anxiety that locked more and more acutely into him made him wooden but volatile, like one of those Rajasthani puppets that, with the yank of the strings, rush everywhere. Perhaps he still hadn’t recovered from the long, dusty journey from Delhi in the chair car; he’d arrived, dazed but brimming with hope and impatience, yesterday evening.

  Pyarelal was poised on the steps of the foyer – beedi in hand, smoking furiously. He’d just finished his stint playing with Sunder; his long blue kurta dazzled in the moonlight, though patches of sweat darkened into indigo beneath the underarms. He was furious; he muttered and spewed smoke alternately. Being a parasite on Shyamji, he didn’t mind the odd jobs assigned to him; playing the harmonium with Sunder, playing the tabla with this or that person. But then, in between jobs, from nowhere his sense of self-respect returned to him, and, with it, outrage; ingratiatingness replaced by mumbled fulminations.

  ‘Did you see how that boy did his circles? I was afraid he’d fall. Baba, what is the hurry?’ He exhaled, looked away and coughed. ‘It’s a difficult art, learn it for five years, ten years. Just because you’re the damaad of . . .’ His eyes glinted and he lowered his voice, as if he mustn’t be heard. ‘Did you see him when the programme began? He went and touched his father’s feet, but he didn’t do pranaam to me. Wasn’t that an insult?’

  He looked at Nirmalya for support – bird-like, his gaze, as of a creature that had been threatened with injury. Nirmalya nodded his most sympathetic and convinced nod.

  The final recital of the first day would begin soon; Pandit Rasraj would sing. A small, flamboyant, balding man, he was the only truly eminent artist to perform at the Gandharva Sammelan. With real but not altogether unexhibitionistic humility he laid flowers before Ram Lal’s stern portrait. Before beginning, he checked, with a look of tolerant disdain, to see if his disciples’ two tanpuras were in tune. Then he closed his eyes and suddenly became immobile. There was utter silence; as if he were Lord Shiva on Mount Kailash. Then, indeed, he plunged into an invocation to Lord Shiva in raga Puriya Dhanashree, very softly at first, his voice a whisper – his performance, at this early point, full of possibility and god-like suspense. Behind his rapturous awareness of the raga was a shrewd assessment of the microphone; for Rasraj, the microphone was the main deity; without anyone becoming conscious of it, it took on preternatural properties. This happened despite, or because of, Rasraj’s closed eyes; it was as if the microphone, his real interlocutor, was invisible.

  The first seven or eight rows were full, but then more and more empty seats appeared, a random scattering of people: the recital was half-attended. This was because most of Shyamji’s ‘crowd’ would come tomorrow, to sing themselves, or to listen to members of their families; they weren’t too interested in Rasraj. Besides, the Gandharva Sammelan, despite its grandiose name, wasn’t well known. For the last three years it had had no advertisements in the newspapers; the only advertisements were the ones put by students for their firms and enterprises in the programme. Then the bada khayal began, majestic, resistant to hurry, taking the first steps in its regal elephantine progress: ‘O blue-throated one, O custodian of the Ganga . . .’

  Day two, and the students crowded the wings to sing their two songs each. Some of them were barely trained; but Shyamji had put them in anyway, from a compassion for the weak but eager, and also because they, or their fathers, had put in half-page advertisements. He had a shrewd and tender comprehension of the vanity that made people sing. This was the difference between the age in which he lived and the one Ram Lal had inhabited and taught in; not the age of patronage, this one, in which the landlord and his cognoscenti had, at once, cherished and dominated and learnt from and humiliated the musician. This was the age of democracy; the ordinary person, everyman, was supreme. Deep down, notwithstanding the bowed heads, the affectionate, timorous smiles, the rushed feet-touching, Shyamji understood he and his students were equals; that he was their guru, but also, in this age, their coeval; and the patron had merged into the rights and irreducible power of the common man, not only the right to honour and even own the artist that the patron had, in a sense, reserved for himself, but to do away with the very line that separated artist and ordinary human being. And Shyamji subsisted and thrived on this equality; he mingled among his students as if he were one of them. He oversaw them all, paternal but clear-eyed about his own temporary role – nervous girls in salwar kameezes, pampered daughters of businessmen; young professional singers, already smug, humming intricate modulations to themselves, taking on the mannerisms current these days among the more established singers, the vacuous jerk of the head when the tabla returned to the first beat of the cycle, the curving of the hand while executing a grace-note, tics without which they’d be lost, pretending to be moved by a competitor’s mediocre warbling, to be unmoved or momentarily preoccupied when someone else hit a perfect note; elderly ladies in expensive saris, smiling, perspiring, as if in the warmth of paradise, through their make-up. Nirmalya, in goatee and frayed corduroys, trying to mingle in the cat-and-mouse corridors of the wings, escorting his mother backstage, walking past rows of light switches, taking part and yet not taking part.

  ‘This is Sengupta saab’s son, Sengupta saab, you know, the MD of . . .’ When Shyamji introduced him to some of the people going in and out of the green room, they looked twice at Nirmalya, as if, in spite of his guilty, caught-in-transit appearance, he possessed certain qualities: he was Sengupta saab’s son – the famous company was oddly embodied in him, a mark of distinction he wasn’t personally responsible for; they didn’t need to know his name.

  They sat in the third row, Apurva Sengupta, in a dark blue suit, his necktie compressed into a perfect knot, and the untidy, intent son next to him, spectacles gleaming, unremarkable except for his quiet air of exercising judgement.

  There, on the stage, was Mrs Sengupta, cheeks white in the stage lights, turning the pages of the songbook absent-mindedly, as if she’d never find the page; and, next to her, Shyamji, playing the harmonium as he had with all his students, not looking so much tired as far away and vaguely dutiful. A faint hum emanated from the instrument at his fingers.

  This was an important moment, both in and out of her social life, this spotlit pause when she was most alone, when she began to sing the first lines to an audience that was never quite listening. The sari she was wearing was a beautiful purple Benarasi, embossed with silver thread-work. In comparison to the other singers and their hurried ambition and swift attunement to the dark of the auditorium, their smiling, convivial namaskars at the end of their two songs, she was like a slightly forgetful royal personage, half-aware of her listeners, in exile, someone from another age. The audience accepted her entry and her brief, incongruous incumbency good-humouredly. But when she sang, Nirmalya couldn’t stand it; he felt her voice, amplified and made subtly different, a voice from the past and not her own voice, was sounding too sharp, she was not in practice, she was accompanying her husband to too many parties, from which she’d bring back stories of the Tatas and the Singhanias. He could never listen to his mother calmly during a performance. It was only months, sometimes years, later, when he’d overhear something she’d taped for h
er own purposes, that he’d be struck by the beauty of her voice, effortlessly fresh and immediate, and wonder why he could never hear it in the present moment.

  When she came out into the auditorium, hot, but calm, she whispered, ‘Mrs Makhija said to me – You have a wonderful voice!’ Nirmalya’s father smiled, pleased as much at her spontaneous happiness, at the end of the outing, as at the compliment: ‘Very good. Very good.’ She turned to search her son’s face for some indication or sign. He didn’t smile, only nodded curtly. Later, he was filled with pain for not having been kinder.

  By ten o’clock, it seemed like midnight; the singers had finished – only their teacher remained, Shyamji, singing bhajans to an almost empty hall. His family sat in a cluster – and Apurva and Mallika Sengupta, and Nirmalya, because they so loved listening to Shyamji. Most of the others had gone; they had buses to catch.

  In the front row, unmissable because of his largeness, a bearded man, dressed entirely in white, sat shaking his head in appreciation.

  ‘Who’s that?’ whispered Nirmalya to his father, studying the figure in amusement.

  ‘Hanuman Rao,’ said his father in a low voice. ‘Some Congress leader, apparently.’

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