The Immortals

by Chaudhuri, Amit

  ‘Aashun, aashun,’ cried the older brother when he saw Nirmalya and his mother hesitating at the doorway; because he was well aware they were Shyamji’s students, and he knew them slightly.

  The harmonium sighed as Shyamji hooked the bellows. ‘Aiye didi, aiye baba,’ he said. ‘Sit down here,’ he said softly, patting the white sheet that covered the bed. Although he wasn’t in the best of health, he was intent on being hospitable; and though he was in a house his students had rented, it was as much his house – perhaps more his – as theirs.

  He looked tired, but undemonstratively happy. The fragrance and breath of the rains was always a gift that delighted human beings, and Shyamji was no exception.

  In two weeks, in spite of the niggling cough, he was back to accepting invitations and giving in to demands. He said:

  ‘Didi, some people have been asking me to sing in a new Sindhi temple. Will you and baba also sing a song each? I don’t want to sing all the songs myself with this cough. Besides, more people should listen to you, didi.’

  Mrs Sengupta’s role, in her married life, had usually been to sing a song or two on small occasions, after which someone, good-natured and anonymous, would lean towards her and murmur gravely, ‘I haven’t heard a voice like that since Juthika Roy!’; praise that would leave her, each time, happy as a tender seventeen-year-old, but then, as the sense of her body and spirit in time returned to her, essentially unfulfilled. Yet she could never resist adding another nameless venue to the ones her singing-life in Bombay had been dotted with; she agreed now, feeling, in spite of herself, the transient little-girlish excitement and nervousness she always experienced at these moments.

  ‘I must then prepare the song I have to sing,’ she said, to him but really to herself, very seriously. ‘Where is the temple?’

  ‘Not far away, somewhere in Versova,’ he said. ‘But we will need a car.’ He’d recently sold the second-hand Fiat. ‘Will your car be free, didi?’ he enquired very quickly, almost a random question. ‘If we could use it . . .’

  Mrs Sengupta felt a flash of impatience. Did Shyamji really want her to sing, or did he just want to use the car?

  ‘Of course the car will be available,’ she said, like a fairy godmother speaking of what’s most predictable and cursory among her enchantments; and Shyamji looked visibly gratified.

  On the afternoon, they set out for the outer reaches of Versova. The macadam road cut deep into a landscape on which nothing much yet had come up, although, here and there, in the dark mud of the monsoons, they noticed the beginnings of construction; on and on they went, in the broad afternoon glare, the tall extinguished lampposts standing in the sun. Finally, the Ambassador, with its cargo of Shyamji, his brother Banwari, Mallika Sengupta, Nirmalya, and the harmonium and tablas secure on their straw rings in the boot, came to the Sindhi temple, which was made of marble; it came to a stop in the dust with a sudden reminiscent whiff of gasoline, the engine over-heated with the air conditioning. A tall, fair man in steel-rimmed spectacles and white kurta and Aligarhi pyjamas ran down the steps to welcome Shyamji, and swooped down on the car door like a melancholy bird: ‘Aiye, aiye Panditji.’ He was all humility; and he emphasised it by stooping and lowering his head slightly, drawing attention to his plangent bird-like poise. Everything about him and his clothes seemed fresh and laundered; Shyamji introduced Mrs Sengupta to him as ‘my own didi’, the wife of the burra sahib of a well-known company (‘But you must listen to her sing,’ he said), and spoke softly of Nirmalya – with a hint of mischief, slyly mocking the obstreperous high-seriousness that the boy carried with him everywhere – as his ‘true disciple’, ‘asli chela’. The tall man nodded in amazement in the approaching dusk, and led them up the steps to where a group of people had been waiting for them, sitting patiently before a raised platform on which there was no human being yet, only an arrangement of microphones. They sat down; tablas and harmonium were brought and placed before them. Almost everyone was dressed in white; they ended up looking, these benign-seeming people, a bit like phantoms (they didn’t mean to, of course), inhabiting, as the sun set, a place somewhere between mercantile activity and the afterlife. The new temple itself suggested a similar ambiguity; the white stone it was built from was meant to calm doubts about the everyday world, to suggest abnegation, purity, but to remind you, too, of the benediction of money, that the gods of the affluent demand to be housed expensively. There were no doors in this main area of congregation; and the absence of doorways gave what would otherwise have looked like a hotel lobby the spaciousness of worship. There were no doors, but there were large pillars; in the midst of all this, Mrs Sengupta’s voice, coming from the speaker (she had begun to sing), sounded almost like a child’s; a child who had still not seen the world, who was still innocent, who still believed in simple rewards and just dispensations. The sweetness of the voice, and its lack of knowingness, surprised the listeners; the old women, hardened by material expectation, began to sing along softly, as if they’d been won over. Then, when she stopped, they smiled and murmured among themselves, letting her return to being who she was: they didn’t want to know her name, as they would if she’d been a professional singer, but glanced sideways at her, at her sari and mascara and bangles, curious, but with no desire to interfere. Now, the boy, long-haired and uneasy, began to sing – an old Surdas bhajan, ‘He´ Govind, he´ Gopal’, at which everyone stirred with recognition. He sang quite sweetly, but they found it difficult to relax; he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height. After he’d finished, Shyamji seemed to speak a word of encouragement – a ‘shabaash’ – into his ear. The sky outside had reddened. As Shyamji began to sing to the soft background of his harmonium, Mallika Sengupta thought of where she was now, how far away from home, wherever home might be; how this was where home had been in the last thirty years, wherever her husband was, or her son, in Malabar Hill, in Cuffe Parade, in Pali Hill, in Versova, wherever she happened to be at that moment, how the old idea and sense of home had faded, and she’d allowed it to fade. Sitting inside the temple, she realised that no place was really alien any more. With part of her attention, she listened to Shyamji; these were the songs she sang away from home, these Hindi bhajans she’d been learning for the last thirty years. If she’d stayed at home, she might probably have sung other songs. Shyamji, now in his second bhajan, coughed twice; the cough irritated him, and he ignored it as he’d ignore a heckler. He cleared his throat, but the cough didn’t seem to have anything to do with it; it came back intermittently. The audience didn’t mind; Shyamji’s music was, to them, anyway, less an aesthetic than a devotional experience; and the flame of their devotion wasn’t so easily put out. Nirmalya noticed that the tall man, who looked about forty, who’d brought them in, was shaking his head and weeping copiously as Shyamji sang. It wasn’t so much a public display as an outpouring of emotion among people whom he knew too well to feel embarrassed in front of. When Shyamji finally stopped after the fourth song, pointing sketchily to his throat and pleading with a smile to be let off because of his cough, the man swiftly returned to what he’d been like when he’d received Shyamji emerging from the car, normal, cheerful, even official, as if his sorrow had mysteriously faded, or as if he could manage to inhabit two planes of existence, on one of which he could surrender to mourning the pain of life, the other on which he polished his glasses, wore his ironed clothes, and cheerfully carried out all its duties. As the audience dispersed without urgency, he took these visitors, his characteristic graciousness restored, on a small, impromptu tour of the temple, to where the holy book (written, surprisingly, in the Arabic script) was kept, reminding Nirmalya, in a way that had never occurred to him, that the Sindhis were a people without a homeland. Finally, he led them to where boxes of sweets had been kept for them; and, no doubt, out of the sight of others, in a private, invisible moment that nevertheless must have elapsed, paid Shyamji discreetly. But Nirmalya was convinced this man did something terrible every da
y and that his guilt came back to him in moments like the one that Nirmalya, against his will, had just witnessed. Shyamji looked pleased the session had gone well, and that he’d had use of Mrs Sengupta’s car; though Nirmalya, glancing at the tranquil, slightly out of sorts expression on the face of the sick man, always found it difficult to guess at what his teacher was thinking, what it was he wanted.

  * * *

  SHYAMJI SCRATCHED his cheek (he was a bit untidy; fine needles of stubble spread across the dark skin, making it look almost purple) and told the Senguptas, at the end of another lesson, in a bored, throwaway remark of what had been diagnosed as the cause of the cough: water had collected in his lungs.

  Mrs Sengupta wasn’t sure how serious this was; the condition was unfamiliar to her. Water in the lungs; what a nuisance – if it was taken out, would the cough go away? She wasn’t unduly worried; Shyamji was in the thick of things, trailing exhaust fumes and traffic lights and junctions as he entered, having moved in an hour from one end of the city to another, gently pushing his hair back as he appeared in the doorway, preoccupied.

  ‘Also, the blood sugar is high,’ he admitted shame-facedly, delicately lifting his kurta as he lowered himself on to the carpet; he always felt contrite when what he saw to be the superstitions of the educated about health – listen to what the doctor tells you, take your pills, do nothing in excess – when these superstitions proved right, and his own belief, his unspoken but absolute taking for granted of the fact that the supernatural would look out for him (a pale orange thread from a baba, a sort of supplement or insurance policy, was tied round his wrist) seemed, for some reason, not to have worked, at least not this time. Besides (and he didn’t elaborate on this to Mrs Sengupta), he’d been meeting families visiting Sagar Apartments to congratulate him and Sumati for the birth of their second grandson – born to their elder daughter in Delhi in May; how not to finish the rich red swirl of gajar ka halwa on the plate when you were thinking of your own flesh and blood?

  ‘Shyamji!’ she admonished him. ‘You’ve been eating sweets. Really, you people are so careless!’ It wasn’t clear whom she meant by ‘you people’ – his family, or a wider category of the similarly blithe and faithful. But she took it up with Sumati when she saw her floating prevaricatingly in their flat in Sagar Apartments.

  ‘Didi, look what’s happened to your brother!’ said Sumati, in mock consternation, as if discussing a wayward but absorbing child.

  ‘Really, you must take this more seriously,’ said Mallika Sengupta, small but firm, trying to puncture Sumati’s spontaneous attempts to inject levity into the everyday problems of existence. ‘He must take his medicines. And he must stop eating sweets. Jalebis and milk – nothing seems less appetising.’

  ‘Don’t worry, didi,’ she replied, ‘I am going to become like Hitler’; and she became erect, her bangles shook as she drew her aanchal around her and adopted a stern posture, approximating the fierce man, the tiny moustache and the manic disciplinarianism.

  ‘Take him to Dr Samaddar,’ said Mrs Sengupta. ‘See what he says.’

  A leading cardiologist on Peddar Road, ensconced in his chamber and standing up and looking out moodily, between receiving patients, at the traffic. She did not like thinking of him; six months ago, he’d examined Nirmalya, distant, avian, circling round him and zeroing in with his stethoscope.

  Dr Samaddar’s ‘chamber’ was not far, in fact, from where Motilalji lived – Motilalji, Sumati’s elder brother, who’d taught Mrs Sengupta and, that morning many years ago, a bit hazy, for him, with alcohol, introduced Shyamji to her.

  Sunil Samaddar was a disconcertingly quiet man. Dealing with people who believed he could perform miracles but didn’t really listen to him had, to all appearances, tired him and left him largely immune to the unexpected; the great and undisappointingly regular amounts of money he earned each day from speaking the truth had probably made him a little cold.

  He made Nirmalya, who loved to go on unhappy, poetic walks, but almost never ran, take the treadmill test; surprised into chasing something that was unattainable, in fact, nameless, the boy embarked on the run silent and unquestioning, stoic in his obscure errand; then, like a young soldier who’s unsure of having already outlived his usefulness, he was stripped waist upward, led to one side of a room, and attached to an ECG, and then to the strange gulps and grunts of an echocardiogram; the gulps and grunts, Nirmalya realised (though Dr Samaddar, hovering in his precise steel-framed spectacles, was ironical and taciturnly remonstrative as a teacher in a school), of his heart.

  Seeing her son in this way, gleaming dully next to the machine, brought Mallika Sengupta close to tears; but she couldn’t look away. All his promise was reduced to that thinness.

  When the family of the Senguptas had recomposed itself before the doctor’s table, he said with the clipped, ironical finality he seemed to say everything: ‘He’ll need to have an operation.’

  They’d heard this before, but each time it thoroughly unsettled Apurva and Mallika Sengupta. Without moving an inch, they drew together silently, like a couple suddenly confronted with oncoming bad weather.

  ‘What kind of operation?’ asked Mr Sengupta, his corporate self-possession not so easily humbled; there was hope until the doctor became more specific.

  Dr Samaddar, looking in a rehearsed way at the notepad before him, spoke casually, as if he were reading out the name of a common commercial product:

  ‘Open-heart surgery, of course. They’re a dime a dozen these days.’

  Again, silence, and shock; as with all taboos, it was the temerity of mentioning it in what was almost approaching a social conversation that was more outrageous and unforgivable than the taboo itself.

  ‘Does he have to be operated on straight away?’ asked Mallika Sengupta, her eyes brimming in wordless reproach, but deliberately making her question an absurd one, and unanswerable in the affirmative. The doctor, though, was on to her game; dryly, he replied, barely tolerant of the nuisance that human emotions represented:

  ‘Well, not straight away; I don’t know what you mean by “straight away” – but there’s no getting around it. Better sooner than later. Shubhashya shigram. “Haste is auspicious.” By forty, he’ll have to be operated upon.’

  Forty, again, that magic number – it was as if a demon had begun to materialise, and had melted before it could become fully visible! Nirmalya’s parents relaxed imperceptibly, without feeling any happier. But, by the time Nirmalya was forty, all sorts of new technologies would have sprung into existence, open-heart surgery would become obsolete (as they’d been hoping it would for almost twenty years now), like the 78 rpm record and ether (they had witnessed the demise of both), perhaps something as simple as a pill or an intravenous tube would perform the rescue and repair work, travelling like an emissary through the blood, as catheters did these days while performing more minor missions, and the heart, the human heart, would be released from its long history into new possibilities.

  ‘No, they won’t touch him,’ said Apurva Sengupta grimly as they drove down the slope of Peddar Road towards Haji Ali, past the Cadbury’s building, which had stood there, incontrovertibly promising sweetness and the white goodness of a glass of milk a day, ever since they’d first arrived in Bombay – Nirmalya, sitting within earshot in the front of the car, absent-minded and calm, as if they were talking about someone else; a cousin or a twin. Neither livelihood nor life was as yet his concern; he still had, glancing from glinting windshield to dashboard to window to the vistas they were quickly passing, the freedom of his moods and startling intimations. Apurva Sengupta, though, spoke not just from paternal emotion, but from the authority of having been a successful man, of having his views listened to, of having run a large company, of knowing a thing or two about the computations that ensured (in conditions that provided little that was helpful or congenial) a company’s longevity. He adjusted the knot of his tie irritably, full of a long-standing and ingrained certainty. He may have retired
, but being an executive, a man in charge of other men, for so many years had given Apurva Sengupta a sense of conviction and moral weight.

  Dr Samaddar’s examination of Shyamji was brief. Looking hesitant and politely suspicious, as if he wasn’t sure (like a man who’s been given enthusiastic but indecipherable street directions) that he’d arrived at the right place, Shyamji had entered the air-conditioned room with Mr Sengupta. There he was, only partly at ease with the distinguished man in the black suit and neat striped tie who smelled pleasantly of aftershave. Dr Samaddar regarded them speculatively.

  ‘This is Pandit Shyam Lal,’ said Apurva Sengupta, smiling like one continuing an old, recognisable conversation, ‘a well-known singer. As I said to you on the phone, he’s my wife’s music teacher.’

  Dr Samaddar nodded, as if to say he understood Mr Sengupta’s compulsions. But the nod was oddly premeditated; there was no real sign of memory – either of the dialogue on the telephone, or of Mr Sengupta himself; memory was something of a misfit in this large room with its motionless framed certificates from fifties’ London, and the small plastic figurine of the human heart on the table, its cheeks red and full, its arteries springing from the top stubby and incomplete, like sawn-off antlers. Then, without looking at Shyamji, all the while gazing at the flecked mosaic floor, the doctor listened to the singer’s gentle, puzzled description, in Hindi, of his condition.

  He gave no indication he’d understood what Shyamji had said. Speaking only one word, ‘Aiye,’ he led Shyamji to a high bed on one side of the room. There, as if they were miles away from Apurva Sengupta, the two faced each other in silence, Shyamji, who had perched himself on the bed, then taken off his kurta, and Dr Samaddar, who stood before him, listening to his heartbeat. Head bowed, in silence; never seeming to actually see the singer, not even when he stared fixedly for a few moments at the dark chest traversed diagonally by the sacred thread or the mournful, patient face, regarding them with the glazed, other-worldly air of someone looking at his reflection in the morning. The stethoscope moving nervously from spot to spot. Apurva Sengupta looked out of the window; he had a great, albeit easily underestimated, capacity for patience, a quality that had been useful to him – more useful even than his skills, his various professional qualifications – from the beginning of his working life. It had given him something that was surprising in one who’d had material success; or perhaps successful people needed to have it more than others: something resembling selflessness. He seemed to be thinking of nothing at all, to be bereft of all sense of boredom, while Dr Samaddar carefully attached the nodes of the ECG to Shyamji.