The Immortals

by Chaudhuri, Amit

  ‘Ma, you know the train’s a good way of going to the city,’ he revealed to Mallika Sengupta. She looked with loving disbelief at her son, as if it were another one of his wild, testing ideas. The train! It wasn’t something they had ever had any reason to use; when they’d lived in the city and had to visit old friends in Bandra and Khar, the long drive through Breach Candy into Worli and then Cadell Road and Mahim had been the occasion for a magical, purely private, journey, unimpeded, on the whole, by traffic – there were so few businesses, then, on the outskirts – during which the city changed itself several times, seamlessly but unpredictably; and then back again. And now Nirmalya, in his frayed, slightly dirty corduroys (he would not put them into the wash) was suggesting trains; almost as a form of enjoyment! How quickly things had changed in the last few years!

  They still felt the need, of course, to go to the city three or four times a week; the old life was a fix they suffered almost physically without – despite the prettiness of Bandra, despite their avowed contempt for that existence comprising parties and elaborate hairdos. They took a taxi usually, often with shrill Lata Mangeshkar songs playing from the speakers at the back; or, when Apurva Sengupta was picked up in the morning by a colleague, they followed distractedly in the fitfully cool Ambassador. But it cost money, the journey; hundreds of rupees every week at the Shah and Sanghi petrol station at the corner of Breach Candy and Kemp’s Corner. The taxi fare, each time, was almost a hundred rupees.

  ‘And cheap,’ added Nirmalya. It was not like him to be troubled about such things. Nevertheless, he was aware in a faraway, theological way that there was no company now to foot the bills, and he worried – this was a new and pleasurable anxiety – slightly for his father; and, of course, he quite enjoyed embracing whatever little poverty he could. Travelling by the local train was his way of briefly, innocently, taking on a disguise, of insinuating himself into the life of the multitude.

  ‘Really? Where does it go to?’ asked Mrs Sengupta, enthused mildly by the thought of saving the taxi fare; excited, too, to be in a new partnership in this foray with her son. Besides, the idea of saving money had always exercised the puritan in Mr and Mrs Sengupta; the actual practice bored them.

  ‘Churchgate Station,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s try it tomorrow,’ she replied, negotiating.

  They took a taxi – not to the city this time, but to Bandra Station, and, while Mrs Sengupta hovered in the background, near the entrance, watching vendors, abstracted beggars with bandaged, amputated limbs, and auto rickshaws suddenly roaring back to Bandra, he bought two first-class tickets. This theoretical and implausible luxury gave him much pleasure; ordinary tickets were only two rupees; and, if you paid fifteen rupees more, you travelled first class, which was identical to second, except that the seats were slightly cleaner, and, instead of the raw, ubiquitous perspiration of vegetable vendors, errand boys, and people with part-time employment, you inhaled the odour, mingled with aftershave, of clerks and traders’ accountants, their monthly passes (naturally they didn’t buy tickets) in their shirt pockets. The compartment was less than half full because it was half past two; he – because she was so nervous about her feet and balance – had to help her up, clasping her hand tightly; once she was in, she looked about her with a mild, puzzled smile, like one who’d entered a somewhat makeshift drawing room at a suburban social gathering, and then allowed herself, elegantly, silently, to be led to her seat. People seemed to recognise her, and looked at her respectfully, as if they knew she was Mr Sengupta’s wife and what that meant; and then returned almost immediately to their own thoughts. She settled into the seat, without comment, trying to experience the strange magic in the compartment, unworried, for the moment, that the seat was hard and that she had a lingering backache. He glanced at her with a deep, uncategorisable love. Just as the train began to move, barefoot children and tiny, intrepid men with fan-like bouquets of pens jumped on board, displaying them briefly to one tolerant but uninterested person after another; the children took around small plastic packets of peanuts, saying, just a little too familiarly, ‘Timepass?’ Mrs Sengupta looked nonplussed and charmed. ‘Let’s have some peanuts,’ she said, with an air of someone consenting to behave much more rashly than they normally did. Then, surrendering to the breeze, which generally annoyed her when she was in a car because of what it did to her hair, making her quickly roll the window up, she sat munching peanuts with dignity and an impenetrable delight; until, carefully, entering a different phase in her consciousness of the journey, she put the packet into her leather handbag.

  Nirmalya stood by the open doorway, holding, casually, the metal rod he’d lately got accustomed to. ‘Be careful,’ she cried. He nodded curtly and looked away, immersed in his own independence. It was a slow train; it gathered speed and immediately lost it; it stopped repeatedly. At every stop, Mrs Sengupta became dreamy and childlike, her meditation seemed uncomplicated and engrossing, and she was nudged physically out of her reverie only by the jolt the train gave when it started again. Surreptitiously, this experiment saddened her and dampened her spirits; no, she was who she was, she couldn’t, at this late stage in her life, become somebody else. She harboured a small panic within her.

  ‘No,’ she said, getting off, with her son’s help again, on to the wide platform at Churchgate Station, the long train motionless beside her, commuters alighting and vanishing unhurriedly towards the gates and exits by the time she’d found her bearings, ‘this is very nice, but not for me.’ She smoothed the expensive tangail she was wearing. ‘You know I’ve gone round in this city in nothing but a car for the last twenty years,’ she confessed to her son, as if he’d failed to notice. She smiled in apology, seeming to speak of a way of life she’d had no choice but to accept – that’s the way the company had cocooned them all – and how she’d begun to find everything outside it a tiny bit incredible.

  She’d taken a change of sari with her for the cocktails that evening, and a jewellery box with a few bangles and small diamond earrings, all in a small plastic bag. She’d refused to give the bag to Nirmalya to carry, nervous that he, in one of his absent, visionary moods, might leave it lying on a seat upon the train.

  As ever, like pigeons returning to roost, they got out of the taxi at the gothic archway of the club. Here, at twilight, they were reunited with Apurva Sengupta, in view of members seated on neighbouring sofas, not quite noticing them; and returned to afternoon papers and tea, and fresh lime soda. At the stroke of seven o’clock she went into the cavernous Victorian ladies’ dressing room in the club and began to transform herself.

  Nirmalya went to see a movie on his own: Omen II. It was part of his deliberate cultivation of peculiarity; ‘What’s wrong with seeing a movie by myself ?’ he said, not so much to others as, defiantly, to himself. Then he stood in a queue and bought one ticket, and climbed up the steps to the hall, liberated by his anonymity, but also feeling the sad undertow of aimlessness that was constantly part of his life. He gradually lost himself in the terror of the film; his heart, his errant heart, beat wildly. And Mallika Sengupta transferred the old sari into the plastic packet, and then put it behind the rear seat of the Ambassador. She was telling her husband about the journey by the local train, laughing at how simple things, things without special distinction or interest, became, for Nirmalya, the son they’d brought up with more than a god-like attention, and put into the best school – how simple things had begun to become for him portentous adventures. ‘He’s excited by what others would find boring, and bored by what they’d find exciting,’ she said. ‘It’s the way you brought him up. He has no idea of the “real world”,’ the father said, not entirely without pride or admonition. ‘I worry for him.’ She’d begun to defend herself, but was interrupted by a child at the traffic lights at Marine Drive crying to her to buy a small garland of mogra flowers.

  ‘No, no,’ she said, which encouraged the child into assuming a low-pitched whining tone, little more than a whisper: ‘Take i
t memsaab, take it memsaab.’

  She gave in, as she always had ever since she’d discovered the mogra in Bombay. And it was always at this junction that the girl would appear, so that the nocturnal perfume had become associated for her with the traffic lights and the Talk of the Town. She would emboss it on her bun, where, in the dark, it would fit perfectly, like letters of an ancient typeface.

  * * *

  THE CITY HAD begun to glitter; even Pali Hill and Bandra, once cut off, a sanctuary for a different rhythm of life, places in which people lived who were half-hidden, small-scale, even Bandra and Pali Hill sparkled with money. Nirmalya’s rejection of the world of corporations he’d grown up in widened into a disgust with the booming city; weddings everywhere; cars in droves thronging at the entrance of some celebration; clusters of families with children shopping late into the evening.

  A new shop called ‘Croissant’ had opened on Perry Road; and Nirmalya loved croissants. Walking past its gleaming door, blue and silver in the evening with light, he was tempted to go inside. But then he noticed a group of frenetic children – obviously the children of the labourers who were constructing a building behind the one he lived in: he’d seen the irrevocable, emergent skeleton of the building from the rear balcony of the flat, the labourers rhythmically at work in daytime. White dust rose habitually; he knew these were their children because of that dust, which they bore like signs on their hands and parts of their faces. They were in some excitement; one of them, an obdurate waif-like girl, had created a kind of hammock by lifting and holding the bottom of her dress in front of her, and this tiny hammock was crowded with breadcrust. Nirmalya had seen the children emerge from the shop; walk noisily down the steps; the others darted away from the girl but were reunited and ran around her in a chattering group, now and then scooping up bits of the crust. Nirmalya was amazed by their pleasure; he stood there, like an idiot, watching them, and taking in the radiance of Croissant from the corner of his eye. He watched as the children danced into the half-completed building off Perry Road, the girl still holding the end of her dress before her. Returning home, he wrote hurriedly in his notebook, shutting out a television that was within earshot, ‘When the children entered the building site, they became invisible, though I could hear them laughing. The building site, dark with the white dust the labourers had raised, was like the garden in “Burnt Norton”, where “the leaves were full of children,/ Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.” ’

  ‘Let’s go and have tea at the Leela Penta,’ said Mr Sengupta. Saturday morning, and strange parts of the city beckoned. The Leela was the new hotel, not only a new hotel but a new species of hotel, that had come up in the outskirts. Not like the Sun ’n’ Sand, with its respectable, palm-tree-infested charm, overlooking sunsets and quaint horseback rides on the beach, but an excuse, it seemed, for some people to pour money into a freshly built-up wilderness, where you’d least expect it. One morning, Shobha De had surprised them all by describing it as a paradise on the edge of civilisation in a full-page advertisement in the Sunday Times. This had made them suspicious; but also, naturally, curious.

  ‘What is this place? If Shobha De says it’s good, it must be rubbish,’ said Mrs Sengupta. And so they set out for tea at eleven thirty. Featureless, intimidating, promising Versova: wide avenues and thickets of tall buildings, even taller than Thacker Towers. This was the city’s newest suburb – and was this where, long ago, when Nirmalya was a boy and they used to visit the beach in Marve on certain weekends, was this where a connecting road used to run, with fields and marshes beyond, and with a low-roofed South Indian cafe doing surprisingly bustling business on the roadside, where Nirmalya, with his parents, on the long journey back towards home, had once eaten a dosa, agog with wonder at the black mustard-seed seasoning on the potatoes? So it seemed vaguely, as they went this way; that it had been somewhere here; though there was no evidence of it now.

  They arrived, pennant-heralded, at the dun-coloured driveway to the hotel, and got out at the immense porch. A distant gust of chill air greeted them. The hotel, with its line of palm trees, had risen out of nowhere like something in a European fairy tale; it was surrounded largely by waste land. Mr Sengupta had a lost but cheerfully inquisitive air, like someone who’d been forced to take a long diversion and had stopped accidentally; and the doormen willingly cooperated in this little piece of theatre, and received him accordingly, calming him with smiles and bows as he entered. When they’d walked past the catafalque-like lobby, ignoring the small, glassy-looking men and women behind the reception, and settled into the understated but resplendent chairs in the coffee shop, burrowing finally into the heavy menus before them, running their eyes over varieties of Darjeeling tea and cake named and described in sloping letters, Nirmalya, who was looking out through the large sunlit glass windows into the brown tract of land outside, where, in the distance, a boy was squinting and squatting on the edge of a metal cylinder, said: ‘Baba, I don’t want to eat here.’

  Apurva Sengupta looked again at his son in surprise, even wonder, as if he were reminded that the boy represented a puzzling, unforeseeable turn in their lives; he couldn’t help but laugh, almost with pleasure, as he used to when Nirmalya, as a baby, had first begun to exuberantly and insistently utter nonsense, and it had seemed so momentous to his parents. Then, too, he’d felt that fear mingled with joy, as if he’d never confronted anything comparable before.

  ‘Why, what’s the matter?’ he asked his son, without anger or condescension – just as he’d reasoned with him at different points in their lives, while cajoling him to go to school, for instance, or when leaning forward to the small unappeasable boy before he got on to a flight.

  ‘I can’t eat here,’ Nirmalya said, shaking his head slowly, the boyish face, little more than a child’s in spite of the moustache, full of an inexplicable hurt, the eyes almost tearful. ‘I can’t eat here till Shyamji is able to eat here,’ he said, eyebrows knitted, still shaking the head ominously.

  What was this sudden onrush of love for his teacher – a love he seldom displayed openly? What had happened to this boy, for whom all it took to be happy once was to come home from school? Apurva Sengupta felt a twinge of concern, as he struggled to work his way towards a sense of how his son perceived the world. But they – the parents – didn’t argue or admonish; simply tried patiently to understand the truth of this outburst. Returning the ivory-coloured napkin to the table, Mallika Sengupta said: ‘No, I don’t like this hotel either. It has no soul,’ she concluded determinedly; and the father, still strikingly handsome and kind-looking, fundamentally an optimist and a person of faith, faith in the future, nevertheless wondered at the spectacle of his son, and nodded tentatively in agreement. They pushed the chairs back and rose; Nirmalya had already reached the open doorway of the coffee shop.

  Smiling, but with a conviction that they were doing the only logical and admissible thing, the Senguptas followed their son out, leaving the waiters puzzled, Mrs Sengupta glancing tolerantly, without emotion, at the tray of cakes. They crossed the lobby, forfeiting the usual unconscious abandon and easy familiarity they felt when visiting beautiful, welcoming places in Bombay. The boy, in his faded pink kurta and jeans, was already outside in the heat, distant, self-enclosed, the wind tunnelling through the driveway blowing into his hair, as he stood oddly adjacent to a gigantic Sikh doorman. ‘Nirmalya!’ said his mother, coming out of the air conditioning and wiping her nose instinctively with a hanky, the merciless semi-developed expanses of Versova trembling in the heat; the Sikh doorman, an anachronistic but unignorable ornament, half-turned in her direction with an astonishing jerk of recognition and reassurance and smiled.

  * * *

  SHYAMJI WASN’T WELL; he’d developed a cough. It interrupted him again and again like a hiccup that wouldn’t go away.

  ‘Shyamji, what is this?’ asked Mrs Sengupta suspiciously, looking up from the songbook; her antennae were always tuned to illnesses.

  ‘I don’t know,
didi,’ said Shyamji, peeved but distant, as if he were in no way responsible for the tiresome interruption. ‘I don’t have a sore throat.’

  ‘You should have it looked at.’

  Meanwhile, it had begun to rain. June had changed to July without much rainfall, with only, on most days, an expectant, oppressive heat which made the shadows the trees cast in Bandra seem so timeless and seductive; and now, it was suddenly raining in bursts, agitating and disorienting the birds on the balconies, dissolving into a false calm later in which one leaf dripped patiently on to another.

  In the midst of this late-arriving, swirling pool of shadow and cloud and wind, Shyamji became, temporarily, a migrant, moving from one suburban location to another, staying with students in Khar or Juhu who wanted to give him space and respite from duties and family while they looked after his needs, while enriching, of course, their own store of songs and even their lives by being near him. Sometimes, Nirmalya and Mrs Sengupta visited him at these places, getting out of the car after it had been parked on the side of a narrow lane in Khar, the road still moist and muddy with the print of tyre tracks after a brief shower, opening the gate, going in carefully, the scab-rough walls of the old house pale gold with the indecisive, intermittent sun, the small, mali-tended garden outside still wet, the flat leaves shivering with tiny rivulets of water, the bark of the tree seemingly dry and hard; as they approached the door, they could hear Shyamji singing with his students. A young Bengali family – two brothers and a sister – who had musical ambitions and had moved from Calcutta to Bombay for this reason, had rented this apartment.