The Immortals

by Chaudhuri, Amit

  Once again, he’d gone out for a walk; he loved the conjunction of foreignness and familiarity in Bandra; he was impelled constantly by a sense of discovery, but also of wonder and recognition, as if he’d once belonged here, to these lanes, these crumbling verandas and families; here were the strange but familiar Goan bungalows again, some of them unsettling him and making him nervous because of the dogs inside that began to bark furiously as he went past; one had a small life-like porcelain dog at the window which stared fixedly at him with a kind of challenge – and he stared back, confident it couldn’t leap at him, waiting tensely for it to bark: and, finally, he understood why it was glowering so silently. These figurines and tame beasts, and their semi-visible owners, were the guardians of these lanes. Nevertheless, some of these houses had already been torn down; unintimidating six- or seven-storey buildings with names like Annabella had risen in their places. What the lanes were called was disclosed on the swinging blue plaques found everywhere in the city, usually with the names of Maharashtrian leaders no one knew, and which could well have been invented, so many-syllabled and incredible these unheard-of names were; except that here they bore names of saints – which, too, with the exception of Paul, had a difficult-to-believe fairy-tale ring: Cyril, Leo. When he came back, he found a woman – he couldn’t tell whether she was looking for work, or was just a visitor; whether she was run-down or was really working class – in a pale blue synthetic sari, leaning thoughtfully on the wall at the end of the corridor in front of his parents’ bedroom. She was smiling faintly, as if Mrs Sengupta had said something amusing. ‘Nirmalya,’ said his mother when she glimpsed him, ‘do you know who this is? Do you remember her?’

  ‘How will he remember?’ said the woman in Hindi, looking up brightly but pointedly; although his mother had spoken to him in Bengali, she must have guessed at what she meant from the lilt of the question; she had an air of intelligence, of a modest, unhurried alertness.

  He looked at her again politely. She seemed embarrassed and happy, and eager to defend him from the charge of forgetfulness.

  ‘Arrey, this is Anju,’ said his mother, delighted for a moment by the unthinkable simplicity of the situation. ‘I’ve told you about her, haven’t I? She looked after you when you were two years old.’

  Ah, so that’s who she was! That explained to him her understated but surprising air of recognition, although she couldn’t have known him if she’d seen him on the street. Recognition is partly imagination, isn’t it, and not knowing what had happened to him in the intervening seventeen years had given her present sighting of him a startling intimacy.

  ‘Do you know,’ said his mother to Jumna, who was sitting agog, a little puzzled, feeling perhaps a tiny bit excluded, on the carpet – and embarked on the story he’d heard more than a hundred times – ‘I was feeding baba moong daal and rice, and he was quite a fat greedy child.’ Both Jumna and Anju laughed together at this frank insight, Jumna showing her gums; Nirmalya looked abashed at being reminded of a time when he was not thin and tortured. ‘He liked the daal so much he began to dance up and down with pleasure. And he bounced so much that he came straight out of the cot!’ ‘Haa?’ said Jumna, sitting up slightly, becoming serious. ‘He would have fallen to the ground, and I don’t know what would have happened, but Anju, who was standing beside me, caught him in an instant.’ And this woman in the blue sari, looking proud, also became self-effacing and appeared deliberately to melt, as if she had no further claim to this distant miracle.

  ‘Baap re,’ said Jumna finally. She, who’d looked after Nirmalya for fifteen years, whose skin had been pricked by his needles when he played doctor, whose hair had begun to grey all at once in the last two years, stared at this woman, who’d appeared out of nowhere, and who’d once, instinctively, with an acrobat’s grace, prevented serious injury to Nirmalya. Jumna’s puzzled smile contained something, a memory and also speculation. She was caught between the past and a present in which she was confronted with this woman, and there was a shadow of disbelief on her face. Anju was still pretty, though a little drawn; almost ghostly in her undecidedness.

  ‘Where do you live now?’ Nirmalya asked of his onetime rescuer.

  ‘Baba, not far from here. Juhu Danda,’ she said, indistinctly gesturing north. ‘I heard from someone who works in this building that memsaab had moved to this part of the city.’ She smiled a little, girlish again. ‘So I decided to come.’

  Juhu Danda: he knew the place slightly. Their car had passed through it once on the way to the Neogis, when they were going to Khar. There it was, at the end of Carter Road opposite to the one from which he’d just returned; a colony of shanties, with dried bombill hanging between poles, the air awash with the rank, tantalising smell, men in shorts standing in the sea breeze, barefoot children running and playing in the space before the shanties, surveyed dispassionately in a few instants before the car moved on.

  When she’d gone, his mother said to him: ‘Her name’s now Saeeda.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, that’s why she left all those years ago, you know. In fact, we used to live in Juhu then; your father, on returning from England, got his first job in Bombay, and was given a flat in Juhu. She fell in love with a Muslim and then married him. They have to change their religion when they do that, you know.’ For to marry a Muslim was to not only change your name but to give up your childhood and your future, to pass discreetly into a different world and mode of existence, to, in effect, disappear; only great and impulsive love could, surely, make one justify such an abdication to oneself. And yet was that, strictly speaking, true? After all, here was Anju, older, but still recognisable, the same woman who’d scooped him instinctively in mid-air when he’d leapt out of his cot in his exuberance.

  ‘Is she happy?’ he asked; for, briefly, he found Anju’s, or Saeeda’s, happiness had become his concern.

  ‘Her husband is a strict Muslim but not a bad man, she told me today.’ Such a belated sharing of confidences! ‘She herself is not a practising Muslim, but the children were raised strictly. The son is in Dubai, and the younger child is a daughter. Life is sometimes good, sometimes not so good, she said,’ said Mallika Sengupta, smiling, as if she was relieved that it was at least good in parts.

  Anju came again one afternoon, this time with her seventeen-year-old daughter.

  ‘Namaste, memsaab,’ the girl said to Mrs Sengupta, and glanced at Nirmalya. Anju, leaning against the wall, looked on as if she was showing off something no one had suspected she had. She herself had obviously been attractive long ago; but the girl was exceptionally lovely to look at; tall, with a large oval face – and the mother seemed pleasurably resigned to being superseded by her daughter. There was a thoughtfulness about her that attracted Nirmalya, a reticence that made her quite different from the lissom girls in narrow trousers and tops, girls from his own social background he passed by every day on the roads, laughing and screaming innocently to each other, as if the world was theirs.

  ‘She’s a pretty girl,’ said Mrs Sengupta to Anju. Almost slyly, she turned her gaze upon the daughter. ‘What is your name?’

  The girl’s eyes were focussed on the carpet. ‘Salma,’ she said softly, as if it were a word she did not use often, and then only with care and reluctance.

  ‘Kya karti hai?’ Mrs Sengupta said, speaking to the mother again, with a register of intimacy and a bygone commandingness. ‘Tell me what she does.’

  ‘Memsaab, she’s got a few small roles in films,’ said Anju, creasing her forehead deprecatingly. ‘Her father doesn’t like it, but I said to her – “Do what you have to do, but in today’s world be careful.” ’ She sounded apologetic, but she was a little thrilled as well – overcome, perhaps, by the irresistible, ancient charm of cinema. She was protective of her daughter, but a sort of distance separated them that was not just generational; perhaps she was also a little in awe of her, a little – who knows – envious.

  So that was where this
girl’s modesty, her inner glow, came from: it must be from that extraordinary sense of destiny that both cinema, with its timeless reassurance, and being seventeen give to you. She was set apart – the future had stored something special for her – she’d grown up in Juhu Danda, but she was a flower; lovelier than any other girl Nirmalya had seen for a long time in Bombay.

  He saw her on the street once, at the corner of St Leo Road; she was with a friend; they nodded at each other, he awkwardly, not sure what to make of this Juhu Danda girl. And she came visiting again with her mother – always in cheaply tailored pale green or yellow salwar kameez outfits, looking like an apparition whatever she wore.

  He had begun to think of Salma with a kind of yearning; there had been times in the past when he’d almost felt ready for marriage, his tortured, inarticulate heart palpitating for the arrival of the long-awaited instantly-recognised bride: there were occasions he’d grown tense with the as-yet unknown person’s imminent arrival.

  ‘Ma,’ he said to Mallika Sengupta, for she was his one confidant, sitting in the car in a traffic jam between Gorbunder Road and Mahim on one of their trips to the city, ‘Salma is beautiful, isn’t she?’ The car had stopped by an old municipal tank it went past almost every day, the railings round it recently painted a garish green.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ said Mrs Sengupta, not insincerely, but only half-attentive, as if this conversation couldn’t, of course, lead to anything serious.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ he hesitated only for an instant, ‘that she’d make a very good wife? I mean, generally speaking, I’d be happy with a wife like that.’

  Ah, the future! It was a time when Nirmalya could say anything he wanted about it; he had a magical, careless sense of abandon about the future. And words had begun to come easily to him; he’d just begun to discover he could express any desire, voice any wish.

  ‘Why,’ said his mother, amused and assured rather than scandalised, as if she knew better than he that this was another of his daydreams, except that now, unlike before, he was at the brink of that age when he could almost turn his daydreams into the life that he, and, by extension, they, would live, ‘will you carry her away on your white horse?’

  Nirmalya looked out of the window to avoid further charges of silliness.

  ‘Such things don’t happen in real life,’ she said, not cruelly, perhaps with a tinge of concern, looking straight ahead as the car began to move. ‘It isn’t possible.’

  What, then, is possible? He saw himself on a horse, galloping down the curve of Carter Road toward Juhu Danda, and dismissed the idea at least temporarily with a wry smile. Not only books and stories, but real life too has its own verisimilitude against which we keep comparing ourselves. He was bound not by social strictures – in the end, he could not be – but by a sense of plausibility that hung over everything, visible and invisible, and which he came up against daily – not like a wall, but a gentle undefinable limit, circumscribing his new adult life; his feelings for Salma would probably come to nothing, he knew, but not because they were socially inadmissable; the sense of plausibility, pervasive in everyday existence as the conventions of narrative are to a story, curtailed what, after all, might otherwise have been possible, and pleasing.

  Then, as suddenly and inexplicably as Anju had first appeared that day in their new flat, they stopped coming – the quiet, beautiful daughter, whom he’d toyed with the idea of falling in love with, and the woman who’d scooped Nirmalya to safety just as he was about to fall. Maybe something had happened; maybe nothing had – maybe somebody had moved out; or hadn’t. The Senguptas didn’t know; but they stopped coming.

  Before that, however, Anju visited them once in the afternoon.

  ‘She had a shooting in Simla, memsaab,’ she said, lowering herself on the carpet before the bed with a mixture of docility and an old bone-tiredness. ‘Chunky Pandey is in the film. See.’

  She’d brought photographs with her today; she took them out of an envelope, one, two, three, four, and passed them silently to Mrs Sengupta half-recumbent on the bed. The first picture was of Salma and two other girls standing upon a hill, a bit unreal and over-made-up, at a discreet distance from the flamboyant (and largely out-of-work these days) Chunky Pandey in his wide-collar silk shirt. The other three photos were more of the same. It pained Nirmalya that the make-up, and maybe the situation itself, had taken away Salma’s glow in the photograph – the glow which was the first thing about her that had struck him, and which was her unique, indisputable and most natural allure – and made her indistinguishable from the other two girls, as well as from the many girls who form the background of the numerous epic scenes in Hindi movies. In each photograph, she looked self-conscious and stiff; and you could feel her stiffness. Nirmalya studied the pictures and returned them to the envelope.

  ‘Bahut achha,’ he said wryly. ‘Very good.’

  * * *

  HE HAD TO HAVE a photograph taken for his passport; and he decided impulsively not to go to a studio in the vicinity, to one of the shops on Linking Road or Hill Road, but – because he needed an instant photo; time was running out – all the way to Churchgate.

  He’d begun to use the local train; he’d never learnt how to drive, of course – his childhood had been almost entirely chauffeur-driven, and then a certain laziness about learning to drive after he’d finished school, which was when most of his friends had swiftly acquired the skill, when they were still not eligible for a licence, but were eager and unstoppable: a laziness at that point had coincided with and enlarged into a superiority to do with anything his contemporaries did, anything that was the natural course of events in his father’s world or his friends’, and he deliberately missed his chance at taking possession of a car. And this refusal had branched out into his indefatigable capacity for walking, which depended on, and emphasised, his increasing, and on the whole self-contained, loneliness, leaving him to explore both the suburbs, the fortuitous ups and downs of Bandra and Pali Hill, and the alleys and familiar roads of the city he’d grown up in, on foot.

  He went now, taking a half-empty two o’clock train from Bandra to Churchgate, to the Asiatic department store near the station, because it had the only passport-photo booth in Bombay. Edging past unflappable, prodigious housewives, he paid for a token at a counter and then, avoiding a mirror, climbed expectantly up the stairs. He was suspended momentarily between two levels on which toys, stainless-steel utensils, yards of cloth appeared and disappeared in an exchange of gazes, words, and consultations, the thin salespersons in white taking out and then once again silently returning the folded bales to their places. There, before him, on the first floor, was the booth, flanked by long counters busily selling things. A lone man in uniform advised him sombrely about what he was to do when he was inside: ‘Be careful not to shut your eyes when the flash goes off ’; ‘Drop the token and stare at the green light before you’; ‘Adjust the stool to the correct level’; all in a low, inhuman, deadpan voice. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Nirmalya, vaguely disturbed; he went in and pulled the curtain, feeling nervous, and also a guilty, solitary excitement, because there’s an unmistakable hint of sleaze about cubicles and drawn curtains. Much as he tried, in that narrow island in the milling hubbub of the shop, the flash, both times, went off a moment before he was prepared for it, leaving him feeling somehow chastised when he emerged from the booth. The man, who’d felt snubbed by Nirmalya’s ‘Yes, yes’ now had the inevitable tranquillity of the powerful; when the photographs fell with a buzz into the slot, he forbade him with an impersonal, imperious gesture to touch them until a few minutes had passed. Nirmalya dawdled there, distracted, as his image composed itself bit by bit upon the whiteness; when he finally picked up the photos, he saw the sense of being imprisoned inside the cubicle had robbed his face of its strangeness, had made it ordinary and disposable as the paper it appeared on. He felt no attachment to it whatsoever; given a choice, he’d have denied to the passport officer it was his picture.