The Immortals

by Chaudhuri, Amit

  * * *

  HE KEPT GOING to the window of the little room, almost habituated now to its odd smell of carpet and fittings and the faint hovering ghost of a cigarette smoker; it was a concourse of people he wanted to see, but each time found other windows reflecting the modest light, and a courtyard on which it rained often. From the beginning, he was struck by the excess of silence; and he began to realise that his famous love of solitude was not real, that he loved company and noise much more than his own thoughts. He ate badly; half-eaten green apples, bitten into without pleasure, were thrown into the waste-paper basket; he went into the kitchen like a mouse at three o’clock in the afternoon, when there was no one else there, and put a Ginsters’ Cornish pasty into the oven. It smelled awful; but it was an absurdly, almost cheeringly, simple solution, and the rank but appetising smell made him impatient with hunger; the first bite always burnt his lips. Later, dead with solitariness, he switched on the kettle to make himself a cup of tea, its rumble growing like an approaching storm and chastising him and making him nervous, until the entire room filled with its roar. He needn’t have worried; it became silent, like everything else, including the plumbing behind the walls – where, as a matter of fact, the real pulsations of the place seemed to be hidden. The steam emerging from the spout pleased him; as any signal of life, even from things not really alive, had begun to please him.

  Disturbingly free, for a student, of a plan of action or an impending deadline, he poured the water into a mug and watched the colour swim away unhurriedly from a tea bag.

  He was unhappy – and undecided for the first ten days about practising. ‘At least I’m alone in this room,’ he thought, granting himself the luxury of asking for the one hundredth time, ‘What on earth possessed me to come to this country?’ He’d always envied Goopy and Bagha, the two buffoons, for their magic nagra shoes, which could transport them in an instant from one kingdom to another; London made him ache with such impossible longings. And just when he’d grown used to listening to the silence and its thin, unvarying pitch, he heard, one grey afternoon, his neighbour in the next room, coughing. Nirmalya was trapped; he froze at his table; his heart plummeted suddenly. The cocoon-like fabric of rumination and subterfuge he’d spun around himself in the first week was unravelled by this bodiless presence, whom he couldn’t see, but who became, in his or her ordinariness, a focus of Nirmalya’s suspicions and speculations. For an interminable fifteen minutes after hearing the solitary, but astonishingly candid, cough, Nirmalya kept very quiet, newly aware of every sound. The changing light from morning to afternoon, as he sat petrified in his room, took on a despondent significance.

  Then he ran into his neighbour in the corridor at midday, and saw he’d been imagining a monster. A large, chunky, brown-haired man stuffed unevenly into a sweater like a pillow in a pillowcase, he’d clearly just woken up, and was on his way to do something necessary in the toilet. ‘Hello,’ he nodded to Nirmalya, his hair ravaged and made untidy with sleep, his freckled face full of a simple, childlike trust as he made his way through the corridor.

  Tentatively, Nirmalya began to sing; hitting the sa, but no more than murmuring the note, feeling foolish too, afraid, almost, of being thought mad. Like many other singers, he too, in an unthinking ritual, took off his wristwatch and placed it beside himself before he began, as if he were about to dive into water, or embark on a journey for which there must be some form of material evidence and record; the white dial, he noticed, sighing deeply from the pressure of some unspecified responsibility, said five past ten. He began with the Asavari composition Shyamji had sung for him once, which then, quickly bringing out the two-in-one, he’d taped, then run over in secret with the maternally nurturing Pyarelal, a sweet, melancholy piece. Outside his window, the sun was waning; a very different sun from the one he was used to. What sense, he asked himself, does it make to sing Asavari here? Yet he steeled himself, his voice much louder, magnified, in the deceptive late-morning hall-of-residence silence.

  His tutor, a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket, grey-black hair combed back to announce a thinker’s forehead (his name was Dickinson, an elegant interlocutor who seemed, on principle, not to have produced anything of note), wanted to cure Nirmalya of his philosophical hunger. He responded to his intensity with a cup of tea and a tin of biscuits, never forgetting to round this off with the question that effectively stemmed the questions his student might have asked: ‘Sugar?’ He approached Nirmalya’s unspoken sense of civilisational crisis as a doctor might a hypochondriac’s ailment, wryly, warily, not wishing in any way to offend. ‘Existence is not the chief problem of philosophy,’ he said, tolerant, good-humoured, as if he were breaking news that had long gone stale, ‘language is. But of that, more later.’

  * * *

  EXPLORING THE epicentre of London, with its cinemas, Anne Summers lingerie shops, ghostly doner kebab outlets and overcrowded sandwich-purveying delicatessens, its windows displaying the slashed prices of electrical goods or silent constellations of wristwatches, its private sex shops with indigo-blue doors, he entered a narrow sunlit avenue called Charlotte Street. Here, utterly despondent, walking past grim buildings, he found himself face to face with a barber’s shop in a corner. ‘A haircut is long overdue,’ he thought; but hesitated, desolate, conscience-stricken, on the pavement. His hair, straight on the whole, a glimmering black, in which mysterious waves appeared as it descended the tide-mark of the collar, was precious to him. Yet, resolved to tackle the unpleasant but necessary ceremony head-on, he entered the shop, hung his deep-sea-fisherman’s anorak from a hook, and sat down upon a sofa beside two other obedient victims who were pretending to read. He was beckoned, finally, with a forefinger; and as the Italian smashed the white cloth against the air like a child’s magician, he, before removing his spectacles, checked his reflection sadly in the mirror. ‘Just a trim, please,’ he said, diffident, for a moment, that he must make this deeply felt plea in a language he had no proprietorial right to – and because he, and his whole being, were now in the barber’s hands. The barber paid no attention; unsmiling, as detached as a blind man, he flashed his scissors and ran the comb through Nirmalya’s hair as if stroking a musical instrument. Then, like one who knew exactly what he was doing, he chopped off a great deal of the hair, as its young owner sat helplessly still. The hair which Nirmalya had started growing after school, this emanation, no less peculiar than a halo, which he allowed to be touched by complicit hands only once in two and a half months, lay irrevocably on a dark floor in Charlotte Street.

  Two weeks later, as if in penitence, and in a moment’s hurtling recklessness, he shaved his moustache and his goatee; the face he saw above the basin was completely ‘normal’, surprisingly pleasant-looking, almost certainly respectable. He felt a great relief, and an irrepressible desire to laugh – delighted to return to the human race, to all the ambitions and desires it decreed were valid, and which he, too, surreptitiously shared. His razed but gleaming cheeks protested at the slap and sting of Tabac.

  * * *

  ‘THERE’S AN INVITATION, ji – from outside Bombay,’ said Sumati, adjusting the curve of her aanchal as she replaced the handset in its cradle. Shyamji was on the divan, his head propped on the palm of one hand, talking animatedly to a relative, an old man in white who sat on the carpet in a way that made it seem he could see all the way to the horizon. ‘From Dongri. Some bada officer posted there lagta hai – I think “Collector”-hi was what he said – his daughter is getting married. He said he’ll pay twenty thousand rupees and, arrey wa, first-class fare for you and Banwari and Pyareji. For you to sing, saheb, the night after the wedding for a small group of friends.’

  Shyamji frowned more and more at Sumati’s unflagging cheer. Dongri was a nowhere place; but twenty thousand rupees!

  ‘He says he heard you sing in Khemkar saab’s house and is mad about your singing,’ she continued softly, caught in the vision of a time when she used to sit hunched in the background, face partially c
oncealed by the aanchal, listening, her husband singing to a hall packed with government servants and businessmen, when Khemkar was no longer Chief Minister, but still a person of influence. She was very proud of her husband. Her indulgent, teasing adoration used to irritate the other relatives.

  ‘What did you tell him?’ he asked, half-listening to what she’d said. He used the familiar ‘tu’: married for more than twenty years, they were like a sister and a brother who’d almost approached an understanding about living with each other; half the time, they didn’t notice one another, except in fleeting glances of recognition, or with mild distaste and weariness. ‘Arrey, Suman, why didn’t you give me the phone?’ He only excavated her pet name to address her when he was close to exasperation.

  ‘Lo!’ she said with a gruff laugh, drawing back in wonder as the old visitor gaped open-mouthed. ‘You are the one who does not want to take phone calls, and now you are the one to change your mind without telling anyone else. Tell me, is that right?’ she asked, smiling, shifting her benign, blessed squint towards the old man. She was careful, while rebutting her husband, to use ‘aap’, investing it at once with respect and a mischievous reproachfulness.

  ‘I said you’d let him know tomorrow,’ she added, as she vanished into the bedroom.

  He was silent for a short while, neither saying anything after her or to the old relative, taking determined refuge, instead, in one of his ever-returning reveries.

  The idea of travelling to Dongri quickened him; three fingers forming a chord, D sharp, on the harmonium, he crooned a ghazal – what did people listen to these days but ghazals? He decided to tell Banwari the next day: a tiny bit of good news that he deliberately delayed passing on.

  In the morning, though, he had an irregular heartbeat, and, coming out of the bathroom, fresh from the effort of evacuation, he felt dizzy. The cardiologist who was now seeing him (arranged for by a student, one of the many who comprised the inexhaustible drove of new learners), Dr Readymoney, paid him a visit (three hundred rupees he’d charge him at the end, Shyamji knew; there was no way out) and, with a fastidious, metronomic gaze, took his pulse. ‘Telephone hai?’ he asked, in that richly musical Parsi Hindi, which had Sumati swooning over him in haste and anxious nodding compliance. He made a terse, polite call to have the music teacher admitted into a private nursing home in Versova.

  Shyamji wasn’t overly worried. There was every chance he’d be better in a month’s time for Dongri and the Collector’s daughter and the wedding audience; he could smell that house; no need to refuse the Collector – if that’s what he was – this very moment. ‘Tell him I’m on a trip when he calls,’ he instructed his wife, sombre and moral, thinking it was the least consequential and most effective lie possible in the circumstances. Two middle-class disciples had been marshalled along with Dr Readymoney; they hovered by the doorway and ran up and down the stairs, quite oblivious of the lift; he – his family – was in his students’ hands; he was safe. Sumati, too, was unworried by the truant heartbeats; the sight of Shyamji’s students was a source of great pride and comfort, of almost a lulling rightness. She was smiling, as ever, at the way the different pieces were coming together. ‘Remember to take the pills!’ she cried out as an afterthought.

  As he was being moved out of the ambulance in the cornice-and-lawn-bordered compound of the nursing home, his mind, not taking in the birdcall at all, was working at a terrific speed; he was comparing the costs of the treatment with his earnings and what he could expect from his students, and he was on the brink of arriving at a figure, like a musician, goose-fleshed, coming to the end of the allocations in a cycle of laya. Then he felt tired and closed his eyes, murmuring, ‘He´ bhagwan’ – almost a pleasurable blankness, as he entrusted his volition to the men around him, and was suddenly carried forward.

  The flat in Sagar Apartments was in morningtime disarray. The forgiving pre-luncheon fragrance of worship, sandalwood incense, had spread from Mataji’s secretive, jealously-attended shrine in the bedroom to the sitting room. The maidservant was bent, a wet and dripping sheaf of spinach bunched in one fist. When Nisha, the youngest daughter, powdering her dark, acned cheeks, heard, she cried in terror – ‘Papa!’ – as she used to when she’d see bandicoots scurrying into the chawl in King’s Circle, and fainted. Sumati, her daughter’s head on her lap, sprinkled water on her face, intent, proper, ceremonial; she revived, dazed by her mother’s face, by the closeness of the ceiling, by the daylight, the cawing. ‘Hai Ram, hai Ram,’ Sumati said. ‘Kuchh samaj me nahi aa raha hai!’ She was lost. Of all the children in the family, Nisha was the least musical; she was learning, with an elemental buoyancy, to be a hairstylist. She was supposed to leave in half an hour for her training, curling her fingers, in a cramped and artificially nocturnal interior, around people’s hair.

  Mataji, in her white widow’s sari, sat on the divan, silent, worship peremptorily abandoned, as if every part of her had been cut out of stone.

  It was Banwari who called Mallika Sengupta; eyes bloodshot, nervous, he’d been making phonecall after phonecall, like a businessman desperate to trace a product on the market, his pale fingernail curving round the dial of the phone. She’d just been instructing a maidservant, one of Jumna’s many temporary, and inadequate, replacements in the last two months, to fold a sari she’d taken off before going to sleep. The young woman stood behind her, with childlike simplicity pinning down one end of this striking sari with her chin. Mallika Sengupta and her husband had gone to a party last night on the other side of the city, and returned late, exhausted, to the nighttime idyll of Bandra.

  ‘See what has happened to your brother, didi!’ said Banwari, his voice, as ever, hoarse, but passionate with bewilderment and injustice.

  She had not heard from Shyamji for two weeks – an unusual neglect, to do with Nirmalya’s absence, of the steadfast, placatory role the music lesson played in her day. Instead, she’d been going to the Neogis’, not altogether happy to be there, watching Nayana Neogi, large in her smock, reigning in her inert way over the bed, she herself in the wicker chair, never, even now, completely sans the aura of the successful executive’s wife, surrounded by lackadaisically incumbent dogs, and one self-assured feline who appeared and faded at will. Sometimes, when Nayana (both of them having run out of chit-chat) lay worryingly silent – was she napping? – Mallika, in the remote presence of her old friend, took out a brand-new aerogramme from her handbag, and began to fill its paper-aeroplane-like folds with her large, impatient English handwriting: ‘Our shona Nirmalya . . .’ This was what retired life should be like; but Mallika Sengupta could never accept her life as a superannuated one, and soon wanted to get back home; but wondered, too, at how everything at the Neogis’ had been reassembled after the disaster of the rains, when water had flooded this ground-floor flat, as it did every monsoon, making Prashanta Neogi walk about ankle-deep in the sitting room, rescuing the avant-garde ashtrays, gathering up an armful of old spotted copies of Imprint (for which he once worked), Nayana, a dog cradled in her own arms, warning him: ‘Arrey baba, be careful of the electric wires!’ ‘We’ll have to vacate this flat,’ she confessed to Mallika, comfortably retrospective now, and semi-horizontal on the bed. ‘The water’s become too much of a nuisance; it’s not safe here any more’: but where would they go? Property prices were incredible; and what savings did a retired commercial artist have? ‘The only safe place to go is upstairs,’ she concluded, metaphorical but subversive at the end of her worldly tenancy; she was loosening her ties in a way that Mrs Sengupta could not. But the rhythm of these social exchanges had become, for Mallika Sengupta, a substitute for the music. She’d once again begun thinking of Shyamji, lately, with a mixture of puzzlement and suspicion: he’d made use of her as he’d used his other students, but, in return, had failed to back her in the way he should have. The disciple wants nothing of the guru but knowledge; but Shyamji was not a teacher in the mythological sense. He lived in a world of transactions. He expected his students t
o promote him; his students expected him to promote them; it was a relationship of interdependence at once less calculating, less final, and more human – with all the oscillations of judgement and misunderstandings that humans are prone to – than one might be led to believe.

  Her husband was sealed in a meeting; trembling in the universe-illuminating mid-morning light, she changed into a sari and rushed out, hoping to catch up with the procession that Banwari had said, before disconnecting, was about to embark with the body toward a crematorium. ‘Which crematorium, Banwariji? How to get there?’: relieved, and the brunt of the news tempered, by the banalities of the quest. Once in the back of the Ambassador, she passed on, in her familiar summations so confusing to drivers (as if facts and destinations were beneath her), but noticeably emotional, the directions Banwari had given her with a peculiar, protective calmness. Half an hour passed as the hallowed, leaf-encircled, church-dotted streets of Bandra changed, and changed again, into the dusty edges of a metropolis of small retail outlets, large hoardings, cars tense and quiet at traffic lights. Then, past a dark, stifled PCO distributing the manna of long-distance calls to those who were hungry for the sound of the human voice, and the large, inviolate sanctum of a temple to Lakshmi, she saw a sizeable but straggly group, some of whom she knew, by sight or name or personally, joined together by their common, day-to-day pursuit of music, undertaken with varying degrees of intensity, or simply for its soothing, medicinal qualities, by, too, a currency of ghazals and bhajans that had been circulating among them, and, by choice, but as good as inadvertently, to the fate of a man who now occupied their thoughts and had left them temporarily baffled and disoriented. ‘He’s gone in,’ said Dr Kusum Deshpande sadly, a paediatrician who’d been a student of Ram Lal in another time, a ‘guru behan’ – a sister by virtue of having had the same guru – of the man who might as well have entered that doorway (such was the almost comic wistfulness of her words) to keep an appointment. She and Mallika Sengupta were the only women in the company, both educated, out of place, not women in the traditional sense (who were discouraged, as children might be, from being anywhere near the pyre, as if they might catch an infection); these two could not cry, but only have a conversation, and discuss – a look of utter disbelief on Mrs Sengupta’s face, a faint, wise smile on Dr Deshpande’s – the irrationality of what had occurred. She was six years older than Shyam; remembered him as a taciturn, precocious boy in and out of the room in which she used to sit and learn bandishes from the thin, idiosyncratic, but jubilant Ram Lal. ‘He was so talented,’ she said in English, shaking her head, struck by the memory of the boy, and the immediacy of his incursions into the room. ‘He would have been famous.’ The men around them were largely silent, mistaking physical discomfort for emotional dislocation, pushing back the collars of their shirts, not knowing what to do, waiting, again, to be needed or required.