The Immortals

by Chaudhuri, Amit

  Later, unperturbed, the doctor addressed Apurva Sengupta:

  ‘Pleurisy hoyechhe.’

  Mr Sengupta was surprised by this unconscious – or was it quite deliberate – slip into Bengali. Dr Samaddar had never claimed any kinship with him; they’d both ignored the fact that they were Bengalis, and had, with one another, opted for the neutrality, the comforting even keel, of English. Now, in the presence of the man sitting on the bed and pushing the silver buttons into the buttonholes of his kurta, it was as if they were suddenly old friends, or something else – who knew? Apurva Sengupta had misgivings about what this meant.

  ‘If we put him in Jaslok’ – he gestured to the hospital towering silently on the other side of the road – ‘we could give him a few more months.’

  Apurva Sengupta – unexercised; in the generally benign, reasonable mood he experienced when engaged in transactions with others who were as successful in their own fields as he was in his – didn’t understand what he meant by ‘a few more months’; but, because Dr Samaddar hadn’t broken any bad news to him, as he’d threatened to in the case of his own son, he didn’t ask for a clarification, and let it pass. In his mind, the doctor’s words were transformed to something like – ‘If we put him in Jaslok, we could make him better in a few months’ – or a similar sentence, one that he could understand perfectly and do business with. Shyamji had begun to look unhappy, though, as if Dr Samaddar were conspiring to force him to break some religious taboo, or to eat meat. He distrusted, fundamentally, allopathic medicine; distrusted it because, in the end, it saved very few, and because he had a hunch that its bases, like the lives of so many of the well-off, were irreligious; and you couldn’t be saved unless the means were, in some way, connected to the sacred, and the sacred itself wanted the continuance of your life and good health. He felt detached and impatient, but he sat on the chair, dignified, contained; he wanted to go home.

  ‘What about the cost?’ asked Apurva Sengupta.

  ‘I’m a consultant there, I’ll take care of it,’ muttered Dr Samaddar, as if he were worried his gesture might be mistaken for weakness.

  Jaslok Hospital was where Pandit Ram Lal had been admitted twelve years ago, after he’d had two strokes, the second in the taxi in Mulund, groaning ‘He´ bhagwan’ like a saint, full of compassion and endurance even in his suffering, while younger, agitated incarnations of Pyarelal and Shyamji flanked him on either side; the third seizure occurred as he was being bundled into his room in Jaslok – this dark, teeming factory of the living and partially living, with the much-garlanded statue of Ganesh at the entrance, was associated forever for Shyamji with his father’s death. Whenever he went past it on Peddar Road, he averted his eyes; often, he wasn’t even aware of doing so. Ram Lal had died there, in one of those numberless rooms whose windows were opened very occasionally and hesitantly to let in the sound of the traffic, after a week.

  ‘Sengupta saab,’ Shyamji said in a couple of days, apologetic, but with the conviction of someone who’s finally opened a locked door, and seen something irrefutable, ‘I cannot go to that hospital.’

  * * *

  NEVERTHELESS, he continued teaching; the procession of students and petitioner-relatives entering through the open door a flat permeated with kitchen smells and telephone calls at 10 a.m. The bedsheet-wrapped divan in the sitting room in Sagar Apartments became the place where everyone converged, while the family and the flat orbited around the hour of instruction almost unaware of it. It was not so much a sick-bed as a place of instruction and recovery, the pillow an accessory to a moment of comfort, when Shyamji drew back, relieved, to lean against it. Sometimes, there was no harmonium at all; just singing, and the clapping of hands, as Shyamji, like a magician, brought his naked palms together, always urging the student, made meek but attentive by the very sound of the clapping, to keep abreast of the laya and not to stray from the time-signature. Sitting there in his vest and pyjamas, the laundered white cotton innocently tight against the dark skin, humming briefly to refresh his memory, talking rapidly to justify and explain a new composition, as smells of simmering plantain and cardamom and cinnamon bark dropped into hot oil merged with the kitchen smoke, he was still at the centre of things that constituted his world: news of the city and its changing constellation of politicians, gossip about his students’ careers, and the latest on the grapevine about rising property prices. A copy of the Navbharat Times lay often on the divan, momentarily neglected. On a small wooden table was a bottle of water, a glass (usually covered by a plastic coaster) freely leaving its faint ring-marks around it, and an economical clutter of pills. He was a marvellous layakar; it was an instinct and genius he’d inherited from the nervous, febrile Ram Lal, a master of the rhythmic permutations of classical music; and so the melee of the flat was always bright with the sound of clapping, and short-lived jubilation and finality. That active, irrepressible brain, running toward every avenue and neighbourhood and opportunity like a dealer with a new product, would compute, in quick succession, the syllables of a composition set to ektaal as well as the interest he’d earn from an investment he’d made a year ago, how much time it would take to pay back the money he’d borrowed recently from a businessman-devotee of the mother Amba, how much this flat would be worth after six months if property prices rose steadily, until, repositioning his pillow, sighing as if after a performance, he curled up on his side and closed his eyes for one hour in the strange, absolute nullity of the afternoon.

  Life is a longing for betterment: in that sense, Shyamji was very much alive; he’d sold the second-hand Fiat, but he wanted another car now, one that wouldn’t stop and start in bursts and would lift him from his recent, expensive dependence on autos and taxis. But, even at home, suddenly drained of energy and interest, he sometimes lay on his side when teaching a young man who might have journeyed all the way from Marine Lines, the perspiration and heat of the city surrounding him like a nagging but, for the present, bygone impediment, Shyamji propped patiently on an elbow, studying the young arrival with concern, cheek resting against the palm of a hand. He managed to sing from this almost horizontal position, crushing the pillow with his elbow, and kept time by snapping his fingers; of course, Ram Lal’s stern portrait, which had moved from King’s Circle to Borivli to, now, the wall on the left, the same rose-backgrounded picture that was garlanded and placed at a respectful angle on the stage during the Gandharva Sammelans – the face in this portrait seemed unable to comprehend so much movement, all this recent burgeoning of possibility and material well-being, and the vaguely familiar figure of the sick man, and it seemed to have resigned itself to its location, where it was indispensable, but essentially unnoticed. ‘Theek hai, let’s go over it again,’ the recumbent Shyamji would sigh at last to the shy, obedient man sitting erect before him. Oddly, disconcertingly, he felt perfectly well when he sang, and this made him briefly doubt both his and everyone else’s judgement; something to do with the miracle of song and its pleasure, which, whatever the context, seemed to recognise neither age nor fatigue nor disease, but only its complete union with, and absolute necessity to, the world.

  Nirmalya went to him one month before leaving for London, when he was in a state at once valedictory and dutiful and strangely distracted; he kept putting off appointments with Shyamji, but one morning set out without explanation in the Ambassador, a new, inarticulate driver at the wheel, Nirmalya placing, with a mixture of self-consciousness and ironic abandon, the Panasonic two-in-one beside him at the back. His mission was to tape some new compositions and ragas from his guru, to take them with him to the faraway but not entirely unfamiliar country he’d be flying to – something he could practise with for the next eight or nine months, after which he hoped to return home for his vacations. None of this was going to be necessarily spelt out to Shyamji; but clearly this was what was on Nirmalya’s mind. It had rained earlier; and the tyres made a minute grinding noise as the car entered the environs of Sagar Apartments, the not quite pukka driveway
moist and red and dark, the rubble and bricks of nascent construction projects piled randomly in heaps on its borders. It was rumoured that Rajesh Khanna had booked a property in one of these forthcoming constructions; and though Rajesh Khanna was no longer the kurta-wearing, head-flicking, cherry-lipped beau he once used to be, this piece of unconfirmed information had still raised the esteem of Sagar Apartments in the eyes of Shyamji’s family and others. Walking into the flat, Nirmalya found Shyamji with a handsome young ghazal singer in a flowery shirt; he was called Abhijit, a man of some, but not great, talent, who was trying desperately to get a break as a playback singer in films.

  ‘Shyamji,’ Nirmalya said shyly when there was, at last, a pause in the proceedings, ‘I want to tape some new compositions.’ And he angled the Panasonic like an awkward object between himself and the harmonium.

  ‘Do you have Shankara?’ asked Shyamji, running his hands through his oiled hair, expansive and grand at this change of register from the common or garden ghazal he’d been teaching to the rarely-visited, flamboyant raga; and when the boy shook his head, he said almost with a kind of glee, ‘Theek hai, I’ll give you a composition in Shankara. But you’ll have to practise hard to get it right.’ And as an afterthought, ‘I’ll also give you Adana. You don’t have Adana, do you?’ Then, with a look of minor incredulity and puzzlement, as if he’d only just remembered, he asked with a child’s ingenuousness: ‘Baba, when are you leaving?’

  ‘On the twenty-eighth of next month,’ hummed Nirmalya, shy, holding back, always nervous, in company, of being listened to and noticed.

  But Abhijit had, with a disarming matter-of-factness, switched off from the rather highbrow conversation about ragas and international travel, and was crooning a ghazal – not the one he’d just been learning; another one – in an undertone. He was obviously profligate with songs. He was respectfully uninterested in classical music; let the knowledgeable pursue knowledge; what he was after was, simply, melody and success. Someone had told him that his name itself, ‘Abhijit’, had the right sound and weight, the potential to be put into popular circulation; and he now had a quiet faith in his name, and said it undemonstratively but significantly when someone asked him what it was. Glancing once or twice in the direction of the teacher in his vest and the tongue-tied but clearly eager young man, whom he’d met in this flat a couple of times before, he noted with knowing amusement Nirmalya’s shabby clothes, already perfectly aware that Nirmalya was a ‘big officer’s son; Abhijit himself was, of course, always particular about the shirts he wore, and looked quite the hero. Nirmalya, though, was so unremarkably turned out and unprepossessing that it became impossible not to notice him. As he sat down on a chair Abhijit laughed and said:

  ‘Look how simply he dresses!’ and shook his head almost fondly – because Nirmalya was wearing a kurta that was torn near the pocket. It was a kurta Nirmalya felt comfortable in, for the last four or five years now he’d been inhabiting some of his clothes as if they were something between skin and makeshift private territory, so close was he to them that he became unaware of their fading materiality, they faded into him, almost – he was now in a kurta that he’d worn, as usual, too often.

  Shyamji nodded briskly, and murmured, while positioning the tape recorder away from the bellows of the harmonium and before him, ‘Woh sant hai’ – invoking the old word, which was used of saints and poets and the mad or unworldly. Abhijit smiled; he had light cat-like eyes, and they gleamed in pleasure and in crystalline agreement. Shyamji wasn’t mocking Nirmalya; ‘Is the tape in place?’ he asked, almost woeful, looking up from the mysterious, stealthy window of the TDK cassette. He found Nirmalya odd, and his disdain of the whirl and glitter of the city a bit tiresome. He hadn’t been able to understand it. He couldn’t quite see why the boy had to make it a point to head in a direction quite different from the world he’d been fortunate enough to be born into; it was childishness, that’s what it was: once or twice, he’d wanted to say to him, Why, baba, aren’t your parents good enough for you? Isn’t what they gave you good enough? And to add in a tone of guidance and patience, Be happy, baba, that you’re blessed with what you have. But in the last two or three months, he’d become strangely indulgent towards the boy; and, though he hardly thought about it or spent time comprehending it, something about him moved Shyamji against his will. There had been a loosening within, a gradual breaking down of a barrier that had circumscribed, without Shyam Lal even knowing it, everything he’d done; and this change, this forgiving erosion, had expressed itself in his sudden urge to give to the boy whatever compositions he demanded so quietly but insistently, set to these magnificent, ever-returning ragas, ragas you thought you could do without for the time being, but which had a way of coming back to you, the compositions his father had once created and dazzled his listeners with, and which Shyamji imparted to his students with the utmost evasiveness and pusillanimity.

  Eyes closed, his face young and tranquil, as it always was during these opening phrases, Shyamji began to sing Shankara into the small whorl of the microphone. Nirmalya and Abhijit sat, one on a chair and the other on a razai rug, and listened; the older student smiling, quite open to being moved and nudged by the unexpected incursion of the notes of a raga. Nirmalya frowned in concentration, as if he couldn’t hear properly, or as if he was trying seriously to shut out the sounds coming from the kitchen or the compound of Sagar Apartments. Of course, Shyamji had probably misunderstood him – just as Nirmalya had often misunderstood Shyamji, reverencing the artist with preconceived but urgent notions of what an artist’s life and behaviour must be like: he’d constructed and created his own Shyamji, and had been bemused and exacting when, again and again, the two Shyamjis had failed to come together. Similarly, it was possible Shyamji had misunderstood his young, politely obdurate student; had mistaken the tear above the pocket for a genuine sign of renunciation. Maybe, not having quite entered the world of the young in Malabar Hill and Altamount Road and Colaba (his own son’s world was noticeably different), he didn’t see that it was an affectation, a necessary phase that some of the children of the rich pass through. Or maybe he’d taken all those ambiguities into account recently and still decided that, in his eyes, Nirmalya was an unusual and uncharacteristic sort of young man.

  * * *

  ‘WHAT CAN YOU DO with a man who won’t be treated?’

  Mr Sengupta shook his head and smiled; in a post-retirement moment on Saturday morning, having a cup of tea with his wife in the small but spruce drawing room (the Sea Lounge was too far away these days to drive to every weekend), he was speaking (stirring the sugar in the mild infusion) as he always had, as the voice of sanity and reasonableness. And this was partly why Mrs Sengupta found in him such an anchor, an axis around which her universe turned; because sanity and reasonableness were binding, but were so hard to find.

  In the Sea Lounge, they’d cover topics from the banal to the most worrying, as, one by one, portions of chilli cheese toast disappeared from the plate, and replenishments of Darjeeling tea were poured. Now, with the same lingering mixture of concern and aimlessness, they discussed how someone who had a problem and had been offered a solution to it could reject that solution so easily out of hand. What kind of a man was this, paralysed, at the end of the twentieth century, by the sort of absurd superstition they’d seen around them, and left behind, as children? Sipping their tea, they became momentarily silent, experiencing an obstinate knot of irritation and pity, while exhortatory birdcall and human voices burst into the drawing room from the balcony on the right.

  But Apurva Sengupta hadn’t quite washed his hands of Shyamji; he was defeated, for the time being, by his soft-spoken intransigence. To not want to be admitted into a private hospital free of cost because his father had died there . . . he couldn’t take it seriously; he would persuade Shyamji. But not now, there was no point in coercion; he’d put it off for a few days.

  Pyarelal was concerned; at least, he looked more worried than Shyamji’s fami
ly did. Part of the reason was that he disagreed with the family he’d married into on everything; and this exhibition of concern was seen as a further instance of making trouble, of being negative and perverse in what was, on the whole, an optimistic, well-networked period for Shyam Lal, of – and this was the most characteristic Pyarelal-like vice – drawing attention to himself.

  ‘These fools!’ he complained to Nirmalya with the contempt of the clear-sighted. ‘They talk about movies and that minister’s son and this new hotel.’ Then, with a preoccupied, martyred look, he pushed at a bad tooth with his tongue.

  After which, satisfied with his prodding, he added, his mood changing at once to exasperation and comedy:

  ‘He sings that song at the end of each programme. The boring Kabir bhajan: “At least see to it, lord,/ that when my life leaves my body,/ I have the name of Govind on my lips.” Do you know what Durgaji’ – referring to a relative, a fairly well-known singer of qawwalis – ‘calls it?’ He grinned; then was wracked immediately by a beedi-smoker’s cough; but he shook off the tremor that passed through his body in a businesslike way, as if it had happened to someone else, and resumed: ‘He calls it “Shyam’s national anthem”.’ He looked at Nirmalya, a look of irony and entreaty exchanged among partners with similar persuasions and agendas. ‘Arrey, tell him to stop singing it, baba’ – for he’d really had enough of the tearful paean.