Pyarelal too shook his head from side to side, at the stubborn idiocy of the world as well as at the startling, uncomfortable insights ‘didi’ offered sometimes. He listened for the key turning in the lock.
Nirmalya sat on the carpet in the living room and tuned the tanpura; his palm ensconced each giant, resistant key, and, with a deep breath, he tightened it with the distant attentiveness of an engineer. It had been standing, like a forgotten heirloom or a stopped clock, upright and untouched in its place in his bedroom for more than nine months now. Pyarelal, fussy, witch-like, chattering constantly, had turned the keys and loosened the strings before Nirmalya had left for England, so that they wouldn’t snap in his absence. Now Nirmalya tightened the strings that had been resting, suspended in a reptilian twilight, turning his face away as he did so; he’d seen Pyarelal doing the same, narrow his eyes nervously and avert his face as the string grew tighter and tighter with a droll but ominous twang, because it could snap sometimes, and sting viciously.
The tuning went off without event or injury; only the lint that had accumulated on the strings flew out in small, lazy particles as he began to play. The sound filled his ear, the four strings combining to create not only a single vibration, but a world. It was a world without time, and Nirmalya was alone in it; he forgot, for the moment, the confusion and distress he’d felt when he’d heard Shyamji had died. And then, as he kept playing, his predicament returned to him, the real world intruded into the world of sound the strings had created: he was without a teacher – he didn’t know where to go from here. ‘What should I sing?’ he wondered; because his tanpura-playing was a preamble, a doorway into the world of the raga, but he was content to sit, dazed and speechless, at that doorway, to wait in that world of sound, to be undecided about what to practise. A minute passed; a surprisingly soothing breeze reminded him that it had rained last night, clattering on the back of the air conditioner, making him think for a second, as he lay in bed, of the tin roofs of houses he used to stay in when visiting relatives in small towns as a child. ‘Malhar – it has to be a Malhar, of course,’ he thought. He allowed the tanpura, aloof sentinel, to embrace and envelop him.
‘She doesn’t smile any more,’ said Mrs Sengupta, her face stricken, like a child’s. ‘She has not smiled since that day.’
Ram Lal’s widow – that sturdy and unstoppable woman in the white sari. Mallika Sengupta was momentarily overcome; the pain of a mother at her son’s death – she’d lived it many times in her imagination; and now to see it so plainly before her!
‘How did you hear about it?’ he asked, drawn again and again to the same story, the story of that day; and she recited it, tremulous and obedient.
‘And upon reaching there I found Kusum Deshpande – you know her, the doctor,’ said Mrs Sengupta. ‘She was very kind,’ she observed, as if it was she who had somehow been the victim of a misunderstanding. Then, speaking to him in the old, quietening, timeless voice with which she used to tell him stories as the evening ended and he was already, mentally, in exile, at his desk in the classroom, ‘None of the women of the family were there’ – she meant the crematorium – ‘the women don’t go there, Nirmalya.’
In his mind, Rajasthan, from where the family had originally come, was mixed up with spectacular tales of sacrifice from abandoned textbooks, of newly widowed women leaping or being pushed on to a funeral fire. Would Sumati, two hundred years ago, have become a woman of pure soul, and burned while Banwari and Pyarelal watched in terror and humility and adoration? The fantasy, in which he couldn’t quite picture the protagonists, only the pure white sari and the flames, ran away with him.
No, here, in Bombay, things had to take their tried and tested course; the small, forthcoming celebrations of which life was constituted. Sumati went to a jeweller’s to look at dainty gold bangles for newborn children, frozen, glimmering but shrunken, resting on the red velvet; for her eldest daughter, who lived in Delhi, was eight months pregnant.
* * *
AFTER SHYAMJI’S death, Pyarelal received a new lease of life. After the first dawning of doubt and anxiety – for he’d been shamelessly dependent on Shyamji – he’d emerged into a teeming world where he was no longer under Shyamji’s protective umbrella.
It was around this time that he’d acquired Madhu, the one-film-old star, who’d stepped down from her brief tenancy in the firmament, and had come to him to refine her skills in kathak. She was like a being from a fairy-tale kingdom, but what Pyarelal saw before him was a talented dancer and an average, middle-class suburban woman, alight with ambition. And she could dance; she was already accomplished in kathak when she discovered Pyarelal, had conquered, with her mother standing guard shadowily behind her, the competition circuit. Something about the man’s gestures, the subtlety of his style in abhinaya, which could lift him from his hyper-tense, beedi-smoking, traffic-negotiating, itinerant state into becoming Radha herself, and the compositions in his store, all these drew Madhu to him; so he became her ‘guru’ – unofficially, of course, as he for the most part seemed destined to be: never quite acknowledged, but constantly turned to. There was another Pyarelal somewhere in the city, a well-known dance teacher from Banaras who got mentioned occasionally in the Times of India; Pyarelal would dismiss him peremptorily with a flick of the hand when people rang him up to congratulate him.
‘Woh doosra hai,’ he’d say. ‘He’s not me.’
And he’d be incensed when people thought that Madhu’s teacher was this other obtrusive and recurring Pyarelal.
‘I will present Madhu in a performance,’ he promised Nirmalya, as they stood together on the balcony of the flat in Bandra, his beedi lit and shrinking, nature rustling about them. ‘You will miss it, baba, because you’re going back to London’ – by which he meant not the city, but a distant place, more distant than Russia (which he’d visited in the fifties as part of a government-sponsored entourage, bringing back with him pictures of himself in a warm black sherwani, standing, slight as a snowflake, next to Sitara Devi). ‘I wish you could have been here – it’ll be wonderful!’
‘What about Ashaji?’ Nirmalya asked Pyarelal, ingenuous as ever, always flummoxed by human behaviour. They were discussing the troubled financial circumstances, the fresh uncertainty, this family had fallen into after Shyamji’s death. But what of Ashaji – the great playback singer who still crooned into people’s dreams, the one who’d sung for the eternally shelved film Naya Rasta Nayi Asha? With such admirers, legends themselves, after all, surely there wasn’t cause for worry?
‘She cried a lot,’ said Pyarelal, grave, histrionic in his ponderousness, as if her tears were a form of capital which few people ordinarily saw her part with. ‘She called bhabhi on the phone and cried.’
But Pyarelal, Nirmalya discovered, was clear-eyed and undeceived about Madhu. For, on this visit back home, he’d been seeing billboards displaying giant-sized versions of her, as the car went into Haji Ali toward the sea and the mosquito-frail worshippers weaving their way in the rain through the wave-lashed path to the mosque. There she was at the corner of Haji Ali, newborn and windswept like Venus, the gods and mortals agog around her, about to spring her second film on the world, exposing a bit of midriff – and when he’d asked Pyarelal how seriously she took her dance in comparison to the movies (for surely to be an ‘artist’, if you had the talent, was superior to being a ‘star’), Pyarelal, taking a drag on the leaf-stub of his beedi, had said:
‘Baba, Madhu knows exactly what she wants. She wants to be recognised by people when she walks down the street. She has the talent, but I don’t know how long she’ll keep dancing.’
And he took another hungry drag; while Nirmalya puzzled over this logic and on the apparently calculated, short-lived movement of Madhu’s small ghungru-wearing feet.
It was during these vacations that the song in the new movie, with the infectious words ‘Tin tin na tin, yeh ratein rangeen’ to which she’d danced a pert athletic number, became a big hit and was on every
one’s lips, or at the very least invaded everybody’s ears, even in Bandra – its tinny, electric chorus flowing in waves from a radio in the evening, across the chirruping of bats – confirming her fame and charm.
* * *
PYARELAL WAS returning to his small flat in Borivli after the Wednesday presentation at Tanjore in the Taj, where Jayashree Nath danced before the American tourists under his hawk eye and to his ever-dependable singing and tabla playing. By the time he was near home, walking punctiliously in his nagra shoes past the peeling, frayed poster of Gini and Jony on a much-urinated-upon wall, the many-hued paper exfoliating around Mehmood’s mournful face, heading towards the dark, inhabited avenue, all of whose lamp posts were lightless except two, it was after ten; the sweat and press of the local train and the lurching of the bus were gradually leaving him. He’d smoothed his long yellow kurta after getting off on the platform. As he was crossing the road to the compound that led to his building, avoiding, with jaw set, the potholes the rain had thrown before him, it seemed a bat flew out of the darkness and swooped down upon him; he was knocked to the ground.
He couldn’t understand at first what had happened; he was at a loss; he only heard the snarl in his ear, withdrawing, fading. He sat there for a while, mulling the incident over and over; and then two or three people, he realised, had picked him up – he wasn’t really too heavy – and taken him to the flat, portable and voluble in his wet clothes. With every movement, worryingly, there was pain; his pyjamas, he saw to his disapproval when he was in the flat, were soaked with blood.
There was excited chatter, the sort of chorus you heard during weddings and departures, when everyone wanted to drown everyone else out, neighbours looked in, serious-faced phonecalls were made; he listened to some of it, still and bent with the ennui of inevitability. No, not a bat; it was obvious an auto rickshaw had borne down on him in the badly lit lane, knocked him down, driven away.
‘The suburbs have too many autos,’ said a neighbour, a clerical officer, a kind man, thin as a reed, but an unbending one. ‘All kinds of miscreants are driving them.’
Pyarelal, in his mind’s eye, saw the bat’s face, human in its internecine suddenness, appearing, and vanishing forever.
‘What kind of hospital is it?’ asked Nirmalya, speaking of the place that Pyarelal had been transferred to. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’ He was beginning to feel, again, the stealthy, irresistible pull of afternoon and twilight; everything around him, including the geckos and fruit bats, was whispering to him to stay, but he was going to leave in twelve days. Only this morning, while ambling toward Hill Road to buy medicine for his mother, he’d watched, struck, as a skeletal vendor in white had picked up a cob of corn from a basket, and ripped the closed umbrella covering it, then singed it on a fire till it was covered in a shadow of soot, with all the while a boy waiting for the spent crescent of lime to be scraped upon it. This basket of corn was among the largesse of the monsoons; but he’d had neither the time nor the urge to stop for a cob.
‘It’s a government hospital,’ said Mr Sengupta, as, without urgency, he buttoned a bush shirt with a floral print (the sort of fabric Nirmalya would never permit within inches of his skin) that his wife had bought him. (Her taste, even now, after her husband’s retirement, was unapologetically youthful.) ‘There’s no reason why you should have heard of it.’
A government hospital! Free care – but poor facilities. For Nirmalya, a government hospital was preceded by its reputation, by a premonition of its municipal, functional interior of transits and departures. Nirmalya wrinkled his nose, as if he could smell the phenyled corridors in the distance.
Once they had reached this awful but equably accommodating place – the government hospital was a handsome colonial building, and still had a residue of that air of stern justice that the Raj must have once appeared to have – they went to the first floor to the general ward. A large room on the left surprised them, with about ten beds, each quite near the other. Pyarelal – his bed wasn’t too far from the corridor – seemed to be taking a nap on this narrow, high, iron contraption; his eyes were shut. When the nurse told him he had visitors – ‘Dekho kaun aya’ – he opened them immediately. He’d been shaved in the morning; there was no shadow on the cheeks. They murmured their questions, Mallika Sengupta more probing and reproachful than the other two, as if the accident were somehow a result of a lapse in Pyarelal’s judgement, Nirmalya standing close to where the man’s legs were swathed in a green sheet, feeling that unexplainable child-like inner ease he experienced whenever he was close to him. Pyarelal answered in a sprightly way, admitting to his guilt with good humour; it was a bad fracture. Nirmalya kept glancing at the next bed, where a man, pretending to be deaf, was eating diligently from a metal tray carved into tinny crevasses that contained peas, subzi, roti, and daal that was drying into cold scabs at the edges. There was a smell of onions. To be so focussed on the hospital food, bent forward in that buttonless white shirt and loose pyjamas everybody here had to inhabit, seemed terribly lonely to Nirmalya, one man joined to the other by the camaraderie of exile; it was like having to deny, for that moment, what had nurtured and made you.
‘And food?’ asked Mrs Sengupta, frowning, challenging him.
Pyarelal smiled, the smile of a man who knew he was free. He gestured to a humble tiffin-carrier on the floor tucked next to his bed.
‘Food comes from home, didi,’ he said, deprecating but content.
A week later, Pyarelal was relocated in the tinctured safety of Dr Karkhanis’s nursing home, a cramped room with three beds that could be partitioned at will by frayed green curtains, a Voltas air conditioner shuddering in one wall, no windows anywhere so that visitors and convalescents were shielded from the contamination of daylight, connections behind the bedhead for monitors if they were needed, a little bedside table for a glass of water, Marie biscuits, and a banana: a chilly, nocturnal, crowded haven. The name of this orthopaedic surgeon sounded too perfectly apposite to Nirmalya not to be made up – ‘Karkhanis’ from ‘karkhana’ or ‘factory’: it was as if, improbably, the man and his very lineage specialised in spare parts for the body.
‘He’s fine,’ said the shambolic doctor when he had a moment to speak, with the succinctness of a harried but polite young man. ‘The wound is taking time to heal though. It’s a common problem with chronic smokers.’ And then, having imparted an implicit sense of understanding in the perspiring overcrowded corridor next to the lift, he, with a deft, not impolite, movement had shaken off the possibility of the next question, and was gone.
Nirmalya saw the bandaged leg later, as he stood next to the bed along with his mother and Tara, as she drew the screen to blot out the incumbent on a neighbouring chair, a man with well-combed hair with shirt buttons open up to just above the stomach, keeping vigil next to a puzzlingly well-looking woman.
‘Give them space,’ Pyarelal ordered Tara; she, suddenly yielding and obedient, stepped backward to make way for the visitors.
The lower leg beneath the pyjama was supported by a metal splint that had been screwed, it appeared to Nirmalya, on to the bone of the shin and ankle; an intimate streak of blood, like betel juice, had dribbled on to the dressing.
‘Well, you won’t be able to play the tabla with me next week,’ said Nirmalya, pressing his arm with the urgency of their early conversations, an urgency that returned in deceptive waves whenever they were together. Hidden in that clasp were all sorts of things; the first onrush of love, faded misunderstandings, mutual suspicion, and the memory of the transformation, the sense of possibility, that music brings. They’d once held that knowledge like a secret. ‘I was thinking of sitting for some practice. Maybe I can ask your son to play.’ Pyarelal’s son had learnt the tabla; it was going to be his profession too, the gharana deepening, continuing, then losing itself in the mundane.
Pyarelal at once looked apologetic, a bit confused – probably because he was no one’s guru. He’d taught people a few things, yes, but he h
ad no official status. He’d taught Nirmalya many things, but Nirmalya’s guru was Shyamji; he didn’t dispute that. In private, he said to Tara: ‘Arrey, what did Shyam teach him? I taught him much more!’ And then the two of them, the small, darting man who could be full of pestilential fury, the large smouldering wife, became silent and heavy for a minute, probably for very different reasons.
* * *
LATER, AT THE close of the year, as the gentle month of December approached, bright and polished, the sweatiness of October gone, the sun descending marginally early on Marine Drive, Banwari, Shyamji’s younger brother, and Shyamji’s son Sanjay went about half-heartedly trying to set up the Gandharva Sammelan. They would soon be here from California, Zakir Hussain and Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar, the proscenium was being erected in the St Xavier’s quadrangle, you’d have to plan the evenings accordingly with the thin, bangled girls in their shawls and blue jeans. It was a matter of prestige, in the midst of all this, to try to keep the Gandharva Sammelan going. But the irony of having to place Shyamji’s portrait next to Ram Lal’s! For Sumati, that framed picture, taken in London, in Wembley, by a student, the face in it patient, not absolutely convinced by the moment, waiting for the click of the shutter – that picture, in these last months, had become for the newly lost and unmindful Sumati a mute companion.
Banwari, brushing his hair back, his absent gaze riveted to the mirror before he opened the door, and Sanjay, his head bowed, set out to scout for advertisements and donations; they went to the homes of former students, did their inaugural namaskars, descended upon drawing-room sofas, shook their heads and gazed heavenwards while accepting condolences. But most of the students didn’t want to sing. The sammelan, even with its crowded, inbred glamour, in which every singer was like a blessed and exceptional son or daughter in a single remarkable family, had lost its impetus. ‘Not this year,’ said Mallika Sengupta, while Mr Sengupta sat some distance away on the same sofa, not unsympathetic, in fact, perfectly democratic in his sympathies, understanding at once the dead man’s brother’s and son’s requirements as well as his wife’s reservations. The whole burden of opening the hardback songbook again – its spine had begun to break like an old, tattered hive – was too much for her. These bhajans hadn’t gone forever, no; Meera’s agonies over her phantom god, Tulsi chanting and chanting the name of Ram; she was confident they’d return to her. But she didn’t want to have anything to do with them just yet. ‘And, Banwariji,’ she added, glancing at her husband in a way that suggested he couldn’t speak for himself, ‘please don’t ask Sengupta saab for an advertisement. You know he’s not with the company any more.’
The Immortals Page 30