The Immortals

by Chaudhuri, Amit

  HANUMAN PRASAD RAO came from a landowning family from a village on the border between Maharashtra and Karnataka; and this was the manner he carried with him – not of a man of the people, but a protector of the people. Dressed always in white, the slightest spot threatened to besmirch not only his clothes, but his reputation. He had huge hands; he could easily have strangled someone with them. An air of foreboding accompanied him; as if, when he’d be struck down, he’d be struck down simply, by a stroke, or a flash of lightning. But, as of now, he looked quietly, assuredly, invincible.

  One day he’d discovered Shyamji, and, in his expansive way, become a sort of devotee. ‘You are the best singer in the country,’ he said, placing an ample hand upon Shyamji’s shoulder, ‘and some day everyone will know it.’ Here, too, he had the grandiose, proprietorial air, not unlike that of an explorer who reaches a continent and begins to believe he owns it. His admiration for Shyamji was an extension of his egotism, and possessed the charge, the enchantment, of self-love; Shyamji knew he could withdraw it whenever he wished. He might get bored; or he might take offence for some reason, as people did when they thought they were in love. So Shyamji kept Hanuman Rao happy.

  Hanuman Rao was obsessed with films; he loved Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor, their youth full of simple rustic joy and unfathomable magic, their openness to the risk of romance and the uncertainty of the changed world; and Hema Malini and Waheeda Rehman, companions in the changed world – he felt beholden to them, these figures of solace and desire. He was moved by the great films, their deep understanding of the importance of sacrifice; his large frame would go still during the great scenes; he would weep.

  He also saw that politics was a form of cinema – except that it was real. ‘They are not the real heroes,’ he told his wife in private, slapping his chest. ‘We are.’

  He now had what seemed to him a fantastic idea: he wanted to produce a film and – this seemed like the logical thing to do, given his personality and appearance – to act in it. It didn’t matter that he was fifty-one; the movie industry needed a mature protagonist. The film would have the sort of socialist content expected from a Congressman; it would be about a peasant uprising, the overthrowing of a landlord, and he, Hanuman Rao, would play the peasant leader, exiled from his village and then returning to it by subterfuge and bringing about an awakening among the villagers.

  ‘Shyam,’ he said, for he addressed the singer by his first name, as if he were Shyamji’s older brother, ‘you will be the music director. It’s your tunes I hear when I think of the film. It has a wonderful title: “Naya Rasta Nayi Asha”.’ A new road, new hope.

  * * *

  IT WAS SHYMJI’S good fortune that, although he was an accomplished classical singer, a master, he had a pliable and beautiful voice. This meant it could take advantage of the musical currency of the day, of the songs with which a middle class of faithful, hardworking husbands and vivacious housewives expressed its dreams. It lent itself to ghazals, to their gorgeous banalities about drunken love, about heartbreak and desire, which inordinately moved husbands who seemed generally impervious to passion, and made them sigh; it lent itself also to the pieties of the bhajan, to the worshipful mood, the genuflections to Ram and Krishna that were part of the household created by mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Shyamji was at the centre of this solemn self-expression. But the beauty of the voice carried with it a seductiveness – in the old days, the masters were right to be wary of mere beauty. It made Shyamji believe he could do, and sing, all things; that he could return to the other needs of his calling later.

  ‘Shyam, you will sing in the film,’ Hanuman Rao said, the large hand resting on Shyamji’s shoulder. ‘It’s my one condition for making you music director. There’ll be a special song in the scene in which I rouse the villagers. I want you to sing that song.’ Hanuman Rao’s voice made a rasping sound as the vision formed. There was no discrepancy at all, as far as he was concerned, that, on screen, he’d burst into song in the ether of Shyamji’s voice. He was too grand and determined a man to be bothered by detail.

  ‘Didi!’ Shyamji called, as he entered the flat. ‘Didi – it is ready! I’ve brought it with me.’

  He had with him something at once ordinary and charged with unusual significance because of the way he held it – a long-playing record with a bright yellow sleeve. Its back was white, with the names of the songs and details about the film, the music director, the producer, the singers printed neatly, darkly, in English. A third of the yellow side, which was the cover, was enveloped by a looming picture of Hanuman Rao, dressed in white, as he usually was in real life, with what looked like a staff in one hand; behind him, incidental but not negligible, were two smaller figures before a hut – a young woman and a man. Shyamji was dazzled by both the vinyl within and the epic compressed upon the cover; Nirmalya handled the sleeve with diffidence.

  ‘Baba, put it on the record player,’ Shyamji said, the childlike wonder and impatience barely disguised by the softness of the request – he must have already heard the record twenty times.

  A jangly orchestral music filled the room. Shyamji sat with a frown on his face, now and then surrendering to his emotions, staring at the carpet, sighing at the sudden shift of register in the tunes. Mrs Sengupta and Nirmalya too listened to the record with one ear; but, really, they were more intent upon watching, with a mixture of respect and protectiveness, the spectacle of their teacher listening again to his own music.

  ‘When is the film coming to the theatres, Shyamji? Can we go and see it?’ asked Mrs Sengupta brightly at the end of song number two. She had not the slightest intention of seeing it; the effort it took to be mendacious translated, in her tone, into a sparkling enthusiasm. She hardly ever watched Hindi films; although, like others among her contemporaries and peers, she amused herself sometimes by buying Filmfare and reading episodes from the lives of the stars during vacant afternoons – these stories, frivolous and instantly forgettable, were more diverting and less boring than the films themselves.

  ‘It’ll be out soon, didi,’ said Shyamji, humouring Mrs Sengupta, not daring to distrust either Hanuman Rao or fate. He suspected that, on some strangely moral level, Mrs Sengupta didn’t really care, and didn’t want him to care either. ‘The film is ready.’

  ‘Badhai, didi, badhai!’ said Sumati, her eyes (she had a squint, but it was the auspicious ‘Lakshmi’ squint, in which one eye tilted slightly in a different direction) bright, her head covered by the end of her chiffon sari. ‘Congratulations! Your brother is going to be a famous music director!’

  What a silly woman, thought Mallika Sengupta (for she herself, having benefited from it, was superstitious about providential benediction – like a dalal on the stock market who watches from below the index fall and rise nervously); the word that described Shyamji’s wife – she stored it away to relay it to her husband later – was ‘fun-loving’. Sumati’s gaiety seemed to Mrs Sengupta to be almost an affront. Good fortune, whatever the ebullience you felt within, couldn’t for a moment be greeted with levity; it must be welcomed poker-faced, dignified, and serious. To Mallika Sengupta, nervous, too, always about Nirmalya, about any imminent danger to his health, the taking for granted of something that had still not happened was an example of culpable thoughtlessness; her suppression of immediate outward delight at the announcement of good news was, for her, a kind of penance. In Sumati, immediate delight took the form of a sort of innocence. Mrs Sengupta, her soul inured to holding back, secretly wished Sumati would be sombre and quiet until she had cause for celebration.

  Nirmalya’s music lessons were always something Shyamji was doing between things, in a hurry. In the old movies, in the gloom of fake temples or caves made of papier maˆche´ or cardboard, the guru and his disciple spent long hours of struggle, often next to a gigantic graven likeness of Shiva, also made of papier maˆche´, the god silent and aloof from the trials of human ambition, the guru exacting, sometimes capriciously, both devotion and labour from his
young disciple, as a great cobweb grew and grew in one corner, till he finally began to sing in the perfect tone of a famous playback singer. In Thacker Towers, it wasn’t like this: nothing in the end can cocoon you from the effort it takes to master something, from the fact that the returns are wrung reluctantly from the energy invested – but neither can you protect yourself from the banal and the everyday that comprise your life and make it safe and familiar for you. The world that Apurva and Mallika Sengupta had made theirs so completely, the proximity of lunch or tea, the servants coming in or going out, qualified the music lesson.

  The tape recorder made the process of teaching and learning less messy, more compressed and expeditious, for both the time-pressed guru and his undecided disciple, shackled to the modern life that had formed him, eager to learn, but within the secret, exploratory rhythms of his day. For each day was part purgatory for Nirmalya, where he constantly came close to the sinking spirits of damnation; as well as a time for discovering randomly, with impatient, almost dismissive, exhilaration, the cultures of the world and of history. He had lots to do: read philosophy, and novels in which men suddenly discovered in pubs that existence was contingent and absurd, that it had occurred almost for no discernible reason, and poems by women who flirtatiously confessed to being besotted with suicide; flick quickly through pornographic books from European social democracies which had pictures taken from dizzying angles accompanied by crowded, shameless texts in German and probably Danish as well as a sort of English, each a short frenetic paragraph, the German full of militantly erect capital letters. In the midst of all this, Shyamji arrived. Nirmalya sat meekly next to him, tape recorder by his side. It doubled as both student and teacher; when Shyamji sang, half carelessly but magically, into the microphone of the Panasonic, as if he were singing into the ear of the immemorial past, it seemed to listen raptly. And then, later, it became a guru; when Nirmalya played back the tape, Shyamji sang through the Panasonic, it became an extension of Shyamji, and yet it could never be Shyamji, it was at once less clever than him, and more pliant and amenable than he was. But at least it was always there. In a way, it seemed to occupy its own space, its own domain from which it governed; and it made both guru and disciple independent of – and slightly redundant to – each other.

  And so the guru became, to Nirmalya, an ideal figure, a sort of imaginary being, almost unrelated to the fact that his real teacher, Shyamji, was an itinerant with his own compulsions (tuitions, appointments, the hastily improvised recording), who sometimes found it difficult, in the interests of adhering to deadlines, to give Nirmalya the time of day. At what point he began to learn the ragas from the air, from overheard radio programmes, from Shyamji’s tapes and the records of other singers, and exactly which ragas he’d learnt from Shyamji and which from the long-playing record of some dead singer – he could no longer tell, or differentiate between the premeditated, routine, or accidental modes of learning. But this was exactly in keeping with what a young man of his privileges had been trained to do: to increasingly exercise his right to construct his own education. The more he learned, the more independent he grew, and the more he developed a taste for independence – that was the arc he was gradually travelling; learning, for people like him, was really an opening up, despite its communal aspects, into solitariness and freedom; and the music lesson couldn’t compromise this pattern, it had to somehow merge, chameleon-like, into it. Shyamji understood this instinctively; he knew the boy would make more rigorous demands on himself than he, Shyamji, could have. If he ever felt irritated about the way Nirmalya both adored him and also took his musical education – stubbornly, unapproachably – at least partly in his own hands, it was because he felt slightly threatened by the single-mindedness and fierceness of his competitor, the inner guru in Nirmalya, a product not so much of mystical belief as of a life raised to free will and individual choice. In some ways, though, he didn’t altogether mind; it meant he had to take less responsibility. For Shyamji was like a bird that wouldn’t be caged; he fluttered, vanished, and reappeared on the horizon.

  It was August. All morning, it looked like it was about to rain. The sea was agitated; a single white yacht, sophisticated, flippant, tested the water; the sky was pale grey.

  Nirmalya, back from college, grimy, his goatee cloyed with sweat, deliberated with the idea of singing Miya ki Malhar. The weather had put him in a bodily state between anticipation and nostalgia. He sat on the carpet in the huge drawing room, his back against the sofa, the tanpura his parents had bought him before him. Hundreds of years ago, Miya Tansen had lit the lamps in Akbar’s court by singing raga Deepak, and had brought drought to the province; then people had begged him to bring rain – he had sung Megh Malhar and clouds had come to the parched land. The miraculous made Nirmalya sceptical, especially as only the innocent and weak and stupid believed in miracles; but the old story, especially in conjunction with the arrival of the monsoons in Bombay, filled him unexpectedly with a fleeting sense of power. He sang the first low notes of Miya ki Malhar – ni dha ni sa – caressing the ni, adrift for a few minutes in the suspense that would lead back to the sa. This raga Tansen had created himself, a simple but immensely effective modulation on Megh Malhar, a patient, prevaricating dwelling on the nether notes before leaping towards the higher: to Nirmalya, it seemed to mirror perfectly the storm’s mood, the silent, then deep-throated, build-up, and finally the universal release and relief of the rain. It was not a raga that Shyamji had taught him; he’d picked it up himself, stolen it from repeated hearings of records of Bhimsen Joshi and Amir Khan; it was part of the great inheritance of Tansen and the Moghul Empire and something even older. He checked the window from the corner of his eye: nothing. The weather was jammed and frozen; it wouldn’t move. He continued to sing ni dha ni ni sa, overpowered not only by the silliness of his pursuit, but the hugeness of his task – of doing justice to the raga, although he was still in the process of understanding and hesitantly broaching it. A romantic longing possessed him; not to influence and rule the weather, like Tansen, but to be somehow connected to it. After about twenty minutes, he got up, irritable, exhausted. There was still no sign of rain.

  He went to the balcony and leaned despondently against the bannister. Pigeons on the parapets of the building circled nervously; many of them sat in ranks, curiously unperturbed by one another, waiting for something to happen.

  Then, one day that August, it did rain when he was singing. He’d been practising for ten minutes when large drops that had been journeying for miles spattered loudly against the windowpane, and the glass streamed with grey water. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a monsoon raga; it was Bhupali, the verdant, earthly Bhupali, he was very earnestly in the middle of.

  ‘What a nuisance!’ said Banwari, fingers tapping without interruption, small, anxious eyes upon the window. ‘I forgot to bring my umbrella.’

  Banwari, Shyamji’s younger brother, accompanied Nirmalya and Mrs Sengupta on the tabla. He was, at once, composed-looking and nimble, both utterly static and cunningly responsive: like one of those essences or spirits who move everywhere without changing posture, who alter their shape without announcement or without you noticing it. His smile was fixed, almost meaningless, his eyes not half-closed, just small, his hands, always playing, playing, were awake but machine-like, seemingly disconnected from conscious intent. When the song was finished, Banwari’s incarnation altered ever so slightly; it was as if a flesh-and-blood double had taken his place, and immediately decided to savour the air conditioning, the benefits of a physical existence. Conversation ensued; and you noticed his pained civility, bordering sometimes on awkwardness. He still had the awkward air of the young bridegroom who’d lifted the veil off his bride’s face to find an impossibly beautiful woman. Banwari hadn’t recovered from the burden of having a beautiful wife. Everything he did had an air of pained dignity and self-doubt; he felt compromised by his pitch-dark complexion, his teeth. Then, at his wife Neeta’s bidding, he obediently had the two fr
ont teeth removed, and replaced by straighter ones: he took the result personally, and was extremely, silently, pleased. Loss or replacement isn’t something you can always exhibit or display; but, at first, he glowed for some reason that people couldn’t quite understand. He never entirely escaped that memory, though; even now, when he permitted himself a joke during the tea break, he covered his mouth with one hand when he smiled, as if it were haunted by the oversized teeth that had been taken out.

  The other person who accompanied Nirmalya on the tabla and sometimes on the harmonium was Pyarelal, Shyamji’s brother-in-law. Shyamji disliked Pyarelal thoroughly; but he doled out favours to him for the sake of his sister.

  At one point, three years ago, he’d got Pyarelal an appointment in a music school in Jaipur; but he’d come back suddenly, thinner, sporting a new Nehru jacket, darker – something between a returning prodigal son and a visiting dignitary. So Shyamji would not be so easily rid of his brother-in-law. The Jaipur heat (although he’d been born and had grown up there) had been too much for Pyarelal; he couldn’t take it, he said. He’d shown no intentions of leaving Bombay since; the magnetic pull of the city and Shyamji’s family made him hover, hover, like an angel who would not be expelled, in his loose kurta and pyjamas and his pointed slippers.

  One of the favours Shyamji bestowed on Pyarelal was letting him accompany Mrs Sengupta and Nirmalya and allowing him to earn sixty rupees per ‘sitting’ for it.

  But then Nirmalya began to look forward to his visits. He became attached to the spectacle Pyarelal comprised; punctilious, fussy, qualities, somehow, all the more absurd and acute in him. Pyarelal, in turn, having sensed something with his keen instinct for the unspoken, was effusive in the compliments that Nirmalya so wanted to hear and dreamed were his due: