The Immortals

by Chaudhuri, Amit

  Her expression now indicated that she’d lighted upon a simple solution. She rose and went to the cupboard and, parting its slatted doors, put her head into its faintly twinkling darkness for a few silent but busy minutes and eventually took out a sari with a deep pink colour. ‘It’s that synthetic sari I got as a gift that I don’t know what to do with.’ She looked sublimely pleased. He gazed at it with horror, but trusted her, and her knowledge of other people, implicitly; he knew she wouldn’t take a false step and embarrass him or herself. ‘I’ll give it to Tara. It’s the kind of thing she likes.’

  * * *

  THERE WERE RUMBLINGS in the background Nirmalya was hardly aware of, mild but far-reaching tectonic shifts in the topography of the company, from whose tremors the boy was on the whole insulated.

  ‘That Thakore,’ muttered Mr Sengupta, when he’d come back home at six o’clock, as if he’d just had an absolutely stupid argument. This was followed by a reminiscent look of dismayed wonder; he was slightly red-faced, and embarrassed. To all appearances, he’d been made to look foolish in a game of some sort. He was speaking of the non-executive chairman he’d inducted to the board a few years ago, in the euphoria of the first weeks after being appointed chief executive; every gesture, at the time, had seemed not only an exercise of judgement, but of generosity; a new set of peers had come into existence, with whom he was quickly on casual first-name terms, and each one was a friend. ‘They’re not renewing my extension,’ he said to his wife. She was seated in front of the dressing table; she stared at his reflection behind hers in the mirror, as if he were wandering about in an imaginary room. ‘What does that mean?’ she asked, her lips suddenly thin. Coat-less, he shook his head and laughed. ‘They’ve created a new post for me – Special Advisor. It means nothing really; I have no executive powers.’ Then, as was his habit, he decided to round off the news with a positive interpretation – his longevity was dented but not damaged; this was a hiccup; he’d change direction and recover. ‘I continue to draw the same salary, and I keep this flat for a year.’ Mrs Sengupta was silent; then, with a somewhat aggrieved deliberateness, she began to powder the face through which contradictory thoughts were flitting. ‘I should never have trusted Thakore,’ he remonstrated with himself, speaking again of the pompous chairman who was not content to be a rubber-stamp. ‘It seems he conspired with that fool Dick,’ he was referring to the British shareholder who materialised unfailingly for the Annual General Meeting like some lost, amnesiac member of a scatterbrained royalty, put his arms round the shoulders of the directorial fraternity, sang songs, then vanished again, ‘and Raman.’ Raman, soft-spoken, cold, who spoke perfect English, and regularly went with his wife to classical concerts, and looked like he would have been a curator if he hadn’t been a corporate executive. ‘They all have their interests in marginalising me. Raman is the new Managing Director from next Monday,’ he added without interest or emotion, as if the changes, astonishing in their unexpectedness and finality, had failed, for some reason, to impress or move him. ‘So you’re still the Managing Director?’ she asked without irony, like a child who needed to be instructed in these things. He didn’t answer her.

  That evening, like almost every other evening, they had to go to a party. One part of her mind in a state of febrile blankness, the other part carefully chose a sari from the folded piles and the ones listlessly dangling in their many concentrated colours from hangers, a subdued Chanderi, of a faint glowing green that bordered on white; then, swiftly, efficiently, a drawer unlocked and opened, went through the ritual of jewellery-wearing. It was the humiliation she minded; not of herself, but of her husband; she had outgrown her parents and her brothers and her friends, but not him. In her mind, in spite of his defects, he had always been infallible; to see him deceived like anybody else was shocking. She was almost proud, though, that his most glaring shortcoming was naivety, trusting the wrong people, gauging the others by the standards of his simplicity (for that was how she saw him, as a simple man); or would he have courted Laxmi Ratan Shukla for so long, hoping this taciturn man would produce her disc? Already, she began to make small readjustments to her understanding of the husband she’d known for twenty-nine years. Really, with hindsight, she marvelled that a man as simple as he had been as successful as he was.

  They were to have dinner at the Danish Consul’s house; the Danish Ambassador, whoever he was, was visiting. The card, with the black, self-conscious, italicised letters embossed on white, had arrived, and the envelope been opened, two weeks ago. Dinners at these Europeans’ residences were, at times, a little easier to bear; her hosts instinctively sensed her reserve and dignity, and were unconcerned and ignorant of her small-town background; she had nothing special to say, and they liked her for it. Tonight she had to put on a sort of show; she mustn’t think she had only another week as a Managing Director’s wife; at the same time, she must be herself. She shivered with contained anger at the thought of running into Raman and his wife; how easily, decorously, unremarkably, everything had changed between yesterday and now for both them and her. Yet nothing had changed; life was as it was.

  Often, that evening, as she sat seemingly self-contained and complete with a glass of sweet sherry upon the sofa, she had to control herself. She smiled determinedly and blankly when the Ambassador’s wife described to her in fond detail, the homesickness in her voice politely, expertly, transformed into anecdote, her two grown-up children, a son and a daughter, whom she’d left behind in Copenhagen. The Consul’s flat was on the third floor of a grand, cool art deco building on an elevation in Breach Candy; the hosts had kept the windows open for the sea breeze to breathe through their transitory posting and its convivial gatherings, and often Mallika Sengupta found herself being fanned by nature, a vast, gentle solace coming out of nowhere; a large doorway opened invitingly onto the semicircular balcony, a dim promontory that jutted out into the compound’s protected darkness.

  The food was a diversion; an instance, as ever, of buoyant self-absorption and fantasy in the cricket-infested nighttime of these seven conjoined islands. An invisible cook, quite likely from Kerala, had been given free rein and command. She’d, of course, had no inkling that the Danish had a cuisine; she had a vague conception that they had hams and sausages and cold cuts. But the soup, a milky broth that a bearer took around in bowls, calmed her greatly. They could have served her anything tonight, and she would have connected it with Denmark. Tears formed spontaneously in her eyes; they dried by themselves, no one around her noticing them; even she was hardly aware of them. The change in their lives was a secret, but she wouldn’t mind if it weren’t; already she’d begun to accept how things would be from tomorrow. The buffet appeared, with its daunting array of cold meat; the eager carnivores made a beeline for it, glasses balanced forgetfully in one hand. Among the long china dishes was one that held a smoky mass, which Mrs Sengupta paused at, thinking it was some sort of confection. She broke its surface stealthily with a spoon and transferred some to her plate. Eating it later, she was puzzled; it tasted very delicately of fish. It was fish mousse; in all her years, she’d eaten nothing like it.

  * * *

  THERE WAS no great change the following day; from afar, Nirmalya could see Jumna squatting at one end of the drawing room, cutting swathes across the floor with the grey wet rag. Nirmalya was unperturbed they’d be leaving Thacker Towers. Then, the day passed and dwindled, the hard glitter of the Arabian Sea and the curving panorama visible from the balcony becoming the inevitable scattered nighttime dazzle.

  More and more, he felt philosophy was his future; that he had to have his say on various mysteries – God, Being, consciousness, the self, etcetera. He’d long finished the chapters on Croce and Santayana and Nietzsche in The Story of Philosophy; he’d responded with an innocent, assenting delight to the Santayana and the Croce, but Nietzsche and Zarathustra had maddened him with incomprehension. Only Spinoza he’d formed a special fondness for, without understanding him at all, but because it
seemed that he’d proved, with a logician’s tools, that God and the universe were one thing. What a wonderful hypothesis, and how magical if it should be irrefutable! He turned to a book in his father’s study, a Grolier classic (one of a handsome bound set his father had purchased from a distant, once-youthful regard for masterpieces), to read, minutely, the steps in logic by which Spinoza had demonstrated his argument: his mind glazed over. A phrase stood out, ‘God-intoxicated’, which, a note said, had been used once of the seventeenth-century philosopher. Gulp by gulp, in the air-conditioned study, he swallowed civilisation.

  As his parents made sketchy and unserious preparations to move to the suburbs after a year, discussing it half-jokingly amongst themselves, he thought increasingly, too, of gods and the divine nature of the universe. At thirteen, he’d dismissed God as a fiction; now, through Tulsidas and Kabir and the pseudonymous authors of the classical compositions, and their constant invocation of Krishna’s lips, his eyebrows, his antic childhood, Shiva’s tangled locks, his undecipherable moods, silences, and fantastic temper, Nirmalya was made to laugh at how profligate and real the universe of the gods actually was. Unkempt, loitering in Joy Shoes sandals, he was trying to make sense of the anarchic creation of the poets. How messy that world of eternal beings was: Shiva’s matted hair infested with the moon and the Ganges, as if they’d nested there like cheap trinkets or bats rustling inside a den or ruin; and all the buttermilk spilt in Yashodha’s kitchen as Krishna rummaged clumsily among the utensils. The songs were full of such workaday calamities and disturbances.

  As he walked down the driveway and then out of the gates of Thacker Towers, he’d be observed warily by the security guard, and sometimes glanced at, with sudden recognition, by the driver of his father’s Mercedes. What was this boy in the kurta all about? Neither the driver nor the guard had quite decided. The guard knew by now that Nirmalaya wasn’t a student who’d wandered into the compound, but was the son of the man on the twentieth floor who, flickering in his suit, went to work in the white Mercedes.

  Nirmalya, now that his sojourn in Thacker Towers was coming to an end, felt more than ever that his home, his calling, were elsewhere. He walked past Snowman’s Ice Cream Parlour, where boys in slim-fitting trousers and girls with horizontal bits of midriff afloat playfully above their jeans laughed loudly and devoured the fragile ice-cream cones they held in their hands. Were they laughing at him? Rows of expectant motorcycles stood crowded in the parking space in the centre of the road, booming at the touch of a boy’s hand, roaring as he turned his wrist and straddled the taut, muscular epidermis of the seat, always exploding into speed rudely. He didn’t care. He was preoccupied with existence itself, with the question almost made nonsensical by repetition, ‘Why do I exist?’

  ‘The question in itself is not as interesting,’ he jotted down in a little notebook he’d bought from a small, fragrant, forgettable stationery shop in the shopper’s arcade near Thacker Towers, ‘as the way, or spirit, in which it is posed. “Why do I exist?” might be the beginning of an intellectual query, a scientific or rational investigation, the answer to be arrived at by reasoning and deliberation, at the end of which there will be no satisfactory answer. Or it might be a cry of pain, “Why do I exist?”; here, the answer is no longer important. The answer lies in the question, which is the result of suffering.’

  He avoided a car and crossed the road. He’d felt pleased after writing those sentences. His sympathies lay with the cry of pain; if someone asked him, What have you suffered? he’d have to say, Very little. Yet, in a mood of visionary despondency, he walked, in his incipient philospher’s agony and undecidedness, through this area that was still, every day, changing shape, new lights being added, still newer buildings coming up, with parks thrown willy-nilly in between, for people to explore and circle round in in the evenings, and wildernesses and unkempt places being constantly curtailed, but still surprising you by springing upon you at times. Walking, he found himself before a strange, wide, white building, that seemed to have descended, like many of the other things he’d encountered, laconically from nowhere, providing no explanation or justification; he knew, from some useless snippet of information stored away in his head, that it was called the World Trade Centre. He stood for barely a moment, trying to reconcile himself to the building’s apparent lack of function; neither trade nor the world seemed to have anything to do with it. Perhaps it would grow into its name? Was it here that his mother had come visiting briefly two weeks ago, getting out of the car and then advancing in a predetermined way, as if this environment were already familiar to her, through a litter of unused shop space in this ghost town called the World Trade Centre, till she finally arrived at an outlet with two perfectly ordinary human beings, from whom she bought, after giving the matter some, but not too much, thought, tiny stick-on bindis arranged in rows on a piece of paper? And had he been with her, inside? Nevertheless, the building struck him as at once charmless and completely unexpected; he couldn’t imagine ever having had anything to do with it. When he returned to the apartment, he heard excited voices coming from the room in which music was usually practised, accompanied by a few incongruous taps on the tabla, and sporadic, short-lived chords on the harmonium. They were taking a break. Shyamji, his face as animated as a child’s with speculation, was asking, ‘Then where will you go, didi? Will it be a different side of the city?’ Banwari was sitting Buddha-like on the coir mat, smiling faintly, listening, unmoved by the many revolutions of the earth, his hands still on the tabla. ‘Come to our side,’ Shyamji said, biting into a biscuit, entertained, obviously, by this idea of geographical proximity translating into a form of spiritual closeness. ‘Then you will be near us.’ And then, suddenly, he spotted the boy by the door, and his expression changed into one of strange, guileless mischief. ‘Kya, baba, didi says you never liked this area at all?’ Shy and exasperating as a new bride, the young vagrant in the narrow churidars and severe-looking khadi kurta smiled and nodded quickly and escaped; avoiding, as ever, ordinary conversation with his guru, never able to see his teacher without reverence, but never, because of his pride, able to behave with the expectedness and ease of a student. ‘Now where did he go?’ Shyamji asked Mrs Sengupta, puzzled, and, his thoughts already changing, drank from the remaining shallow pool in his cup.

  * * *

  THE BOMBAY Chamber of Commerce was one hundred and three years old, and though nothing now could match the contented but animated milling of suited gentlemen and their wives that the hundredth-anniversary celebrations had comprised – like a reunion of heads of companies and heads-to-be, a reunion in which everyone, magically, conveniently, seemed to have fulfilled their early promise – still, the captains of industry and their bedecked spouses gathered in the basement hall of the Oberoi with their enthusiasm undiminished. A long, breathy speech was made by the President, an amiable duffer, while people laughed both at his jokes and at him, and he beamed at them and continued, relentless; and then the speech ended and everyone was standing, and, in the crowd, there was a subtle insinuation of men in white shirts and black trousers with trays of canape´s, receding at the moment of the sighting. Two days ago, Mr Makhija, secretary of the Chamber, had phoned them; Makhija, whose slow, courteous phone calls and reminders they’d grown used to in the past few years, a doorkeeper to the world of commerce, neither outside it nor, thankfully, quite of it. ‘Please do come, sir,’ he had said, a kindly long-distance spy on their lives, and hectorer. There Mrs Sengupta stood, suddenly having lost her husband; no sign of Makhija either. She held a wine glass half full of mango juice in one hand. The crowd in the large, outstretching room had broken up into circles of men making toasts and telling each other jokes; she was surrounded by people she knew and faces she recognised – it had almost become a habit, this cursory, neutral assignment of names, characteristics, and positions to certain features – and suddenly, far away, she spotted her husband, radiant – he had hardly aged at all – holding a drink aloft nebulously (he d
rank deceptively, without involvement, and would sip self-importantly and misleadingly from this one glass all morning), his hair as impeccably black as when, on his wife’s urgings, he’d begun to dye it twenty-five years ago, only a plume of white in the front held steady all these years like a flame. He was eager as ever, ignoring the bearer of canape´s hovering fruitlessly next to him, his expression charged with a strange simplicity and expectancy, and she could not believe that they were not in the middle of things, so impossibly far away the limits of the horizon and emptiness seemed; surely two lifetimes were needed to do justice and give proper shape to, to learn from and perfect, a career of what even now felt like promise and youthfulness? For they were not inheritors of property or fortunes, as the business families were; there was nothing static about what they symbolised; for the Senguptas, the career and the life were what they made of them, constantly surprising, a constant, strenuous, but genuine exploration, and everything that happened before or after these years in the company would be marks announcing what had essentially been their life. They would then disappear, in a way it looked the business families never could. Their life would become memory; their own, and in the minds of people like the ones she ran into at these anniversaries, an immense variety but really a narrow range of faces that seemed, with hindsight, to have been put together, unforgettably, by chance.

  It was a time crowded with celebrations. In November, the great, bizarre event was Chanchal Mansukhani’s older son’s marriage in a fake village specially created on the lawns on Wodehouse Road, walking distance from the Regal Cinema. People were getting out of cars, urgent men slamming their doors, slow women in organza saris, unsteady on their feet in their jewellery, eager to confer not only wedding gifts but legitimacy upon this man. The Senguptas arrived in a state of minor distractedness and excitement. Chanchal Mansukhani stood, in black suit and dark spotted tie, welcoming the guests, smiling at them whether he recognised them or not, doing namaskar, sometimes taking the palms of their hands uninsistingly in his own, not holding them, but cradling them for a few moments. The donning of the ubiquitous black suit was almost ironical; it was as if it was meant to remind you that he’d made his fortune in textiles, beating to number one place in the market a far better-educated rival of a distinguished political and business lineage; and it was meant to adorn the myth, that this was the son of a man who’d arrived with no belongings at the Victoria Terminus soon after Partition, and who’d worked as both shoeshine boy and coolie. Queueing up to shake hands with him, the creator of Mansukhani Suitings and Shirtings, Apurva Sengupta couldn’t decide whether he was a monster or an angel; he had a boneless posture, his edges were rounded and blunted, and the compassionate, maternal smile of a man who’d grown up in a large, disorderly family, an ensconcing microcosm, played on his lips. There were rumours (whether they had credibility or not it was difficult to say) that he’d used hit men and that murder had been useful to him during his remarkably uplifting – for doesn’t everyone want the man who reigns to have once been like one of the beggars on the road outside? – rise. How many mill-hands, their means of redressal completely at an end, the tall chimneys empty of smoke, were sitting at home or in idle, despondent groups playing cards because of him? Wedding music filled the background, and returned to them optimistically in the middle of their own words; not the shehnai, but some sort of taped, assuaging expression of the human voice. After the muttered but gracious mantra of the ‘Congratulations’, Apurva and Mallika Sengupta felt they’d dissociated themselves from their host, and they wandered about the lawn entirely as if they’d come here on their own business – although they’d continue to talk about the wedding, with irony and pleasure, for a few days. They stopped at stalls offering kababs; others were distributing, equally generously, but to their surprise, Bombay junk food. Her husband was partly in a trance, with a faint smile on his face, as if there was still a possibility that something might happen. She was possessed by curiosity; she was never brave enough to eat street food except in five-star hotels. She tugged purposefully at his coat sleeve, a small, charming plea (he was elsewhere, and hardly aware); ‘Come, let’s go there,’ she whispered, pulling him like a small, unappeasable girl towards the pani puris.