The Immortals (15 page)

He was now sixteen, this ‘offering to the gods’. He went about with
The Story of Philosophy
; he was reading about Santayana. The doctors had said there was ‘no need to touch him’ till he was forty.

Apurva Sengupta was a model of reasonableness; he deprecated his wife for being too emotional. He attended board meetings; flew to and from Delhi, wearing his dark suit and aimed towards the sky, and, later, towards home, in an Indian Airlines plane; he brought back home bits of company gossip, and, from the longer journeys, stubs of boarding cards and Parry’s lozenges which he presented to Nirmalya like a bribe. ‘There is nothing to worry about,’ he said to his wife.

But then he brought with him a yogi; an unbridled, wild-looking bearded man, tame for the moment, with a caste-mark on his forehead, bare-bodied except for a loincloth tucked up above his thighs; accompanied sheepishly by Mr Sengupta, radiant in his dark suit and tie. He brought the man to the flat in Thacker Towers – Arthur and Jumna speechless after retreating into the kitchen – to tell Nirmalya’s future.

Nirmalya felt both sympathy and a hint of contempt for his father’s unembarrassed lapse into this experiment, he suddenly realised he was not as calm, as immersed in company life and practicable solutions as he pretended he was. Nirmalya was impatient with the yogi; he was still too young, too newly romantic, to understand, in real life, the irrationalities of filial love. He remembered a line from a poem he’d had to learn in class, a poem he disliked, partly because a man with an Indian, or at least non-European name, had had the temerity to write something about the universal human condition in English called ‘Night of the Scorpion’. A child – an idea, almost, not a flesh-and-blood creature – had been bitten by a scorpion; the grown-ups were trying to save it from death. The poet says: ‘My father, rationalist, sceptic, tried every curse and blessing . . .’ Ramachandra, the swotter, the cleverest boy in class, who sometimes fell asleep on his elbow during lessons from studying at night but was never pulled up by teachers who were nervous that they knew less than he did, had asked shrilly, ‘Miss, if the father was a sceptic and rationalist, why was he resorting to curses and blessings?’ as if he’d tripped the poet up. The others in the class only had a vague idea of what ‘sceptic’ and ‘rationalist’ meant. The question had occurred to Nirmalya too, but he already knew the answer. He thought Ramachandra was showing off.

The yogi consulted Mrs Sengupta first. He sat magisterially on the edge of the sofa, with Mallika Sengupta in his line of vision. He read the future not by looking at her palm, but staring at the screen of the forehead and then retreating into himself.

‘Sangeet,’ he exclaimed at last; his expression, which refused to register any awe at what he saw around him – paintings; the crystalline vases; even the plump, well-fed cushions on the sofa – held the slightest hint of surprise. ‘Music!’ Mrs Sengupta looked at her son and husband in both consternation and triumph; though much of the world was ignorant of her gift, this man, undeceived by her sari, her make-up, had discovered what she really was; her destiny, neglected by everyone, including herself, was clear to him.

Then Nirmalya, like something between a reluctant bride and a chastised pupil, was made to sit before him. The man still hadn’t moved from the edge of the sofa; red eyes narrowed, the bare back and torso upright. He furrowed his brow, counted on his fingers, some obscure calculus that he kept to himself.

‘Unhappiness,’ he said finally. ‘You are not happy.’

Nirmalya had been waiting for some other news; some prognosis of greatness, at least some glimmer of being singular. But, secretly, he was startled by what the man had said to him without any feeling except, it seemed, one of conviction. Yes, he was unhappy. But how had the man known? Was it an absurdly easy thing to say – would most people recognise unhappiness in themselves if they were told they were unhappy?

‘You will not be big director like father,’ continued the yogi, strangely dismissive now, as if he’d had enough of other people’s lives. ‘Small director.’

This, in spite of it being deflating, amused Nirmalya, the measuring of success in this odd vocabulary of directorship. Where had the yogi picked it up? In spite of the dark, brand-like impress of his appearance, which made you think he had stepped out of a storybook, he must have a very particular clientele.

Later, when he’d gone, they – father, mother, and son, each with different degrees of curiosity, awe, and irony – discussed how he might have known Mallika Sengupta was a singer. Were there any musical instruments in the sitting room – a tabla or a harmonium? No, the musical instruments were inside, in a room inaccessible to the yogi. It was an episode their rational minds could neither accept nor leave alone.

B
UT THE HEART MURMUR
caused Nirmalya’s parents less anxiety of late than it once used to. Because a doctor had said Nirmalya needn’t be ‘touched’ till he was forty. That seemed a very long time from now, more than a quarter of a lifetime. ‘Now’ was a time of terrace parties, of evening conversation, of daytime drifting between exhibition and hotel lobby and the sitting room at home. Nirmalya at forty – the world would be different then; unrecognisable, but a world in which unthinkable possibilities were a part of the everyday.

Jumna, to whom Mrs Sengupta used to confide her sorrow, her anxiety, had changed. Her body hadn’t aged; but her face had. Seven years ago, her husband, the bewda, had knocked her front teeth out. Each time there was a headline that said, Seven Die in Country Liquor Tragedy, the Senguptas thought of Jumna’s husband. When Jumna came in to work, and went into the kitchen to pick up the jhadu, Nirmalya would say to her: ‘See what happened to these bewdas.’ ‘Every evening he goes and drinks bewda,’ she said, shaking her head, staring at the floor, jhadu in hand. Nirmalya, who’d never seen her husband, pictured him sitting inside a roofed place with tables and an electric light, with men like him who, in this image that flashed upon Nirmalya, had nothing in particular on their minds. When he tried to imagine the liquor that killed these men, gradually or suddenly, it was golden or transparent, like the alcohol he’d noticed being poured out in parties. Then one day he realised it was milky white, like toilet cleaner.

So Jumna’s husband came to inhabit Nirmalya’s life, a malevolent visitor, unredeemable, present but never there. He never saw him.

One cheerful, company-sponsored morning, the husband came to the flat in La Terrasse. Only a few months ago, Jumna had related how she’d woken up in the middle of the night to find herself soaked: her husband, utterly drunk, had drenched her with kerosene, and was trying with little success to light a match, muttering ‘Saala! Saala!’ in the darkness. Now this man was here in La Terrasse, ensconced in the servants’ quarters at the back. Everyone in the house was transformed, as at the advent of a difficult bridegroom; no one, the servants or the Senguptas, knew whether to smile or to be outraged. Jumna had a smile on her lips; you couldn’t tell what it denoted – embarrassment, sadness, a strange affection. The man had broken his leg; he’d come to borrow some money.

Nirmalya, twelve years old, was away in school; he narrowly missed seeing him. He desperately wanted to know what Jumna’s husband looked like.

‘He’s quite sober-looking,’ Mallika Sengupta said. She used the word ‘sober’ to mean ‘serious’. ‘A very quiet man.’

This was the figure of joy in Mrs Sengupta’s and Nirmalya’s lives, this woman, more than a decade in their employ, whose own life was like a frayed fabric. Mrs Sengupta still sought her out when she had a nagging doubt, an anxiety.

Jumna mimicked the other servants wonderfully: she exactly caught their turns of phrase, their vanity, recreated effortlessly Arthur’s frequent curious glances at the mirror. The kitchen and its dramas came alive in her stories. They sat and listened to her and laughed loudly.

Even her tales of hardship seemed intended to seep into their secure, company-engendered lives with a tinge of sadness they would not otherwise have.

This woman who had nothing – they were oddly obliged to her.

T
HE FAMILY PLANNING
programme had failed Jumna: she had five children. Her husband had not used Nirodh: Nirodh, which was advertised everywhere like a health warning or a royal edict, in cinema halls and on billboards. When he was small, Nirmalya used to upbraid her for adding to India’s population, to the number with several zeros he’d memorised in school, each zero the sum-total of fate for almost all the people that number comprised; this, he was certain, like her ignorance of the alphabet and of the facts about the universe he was daily introduced to, was a source of her sorrows.

‘Kya karu, baba?’ she said, as he sermonised intently. ‘What can I do?’ The matter was, mysteriously, out of her hands.

What was Nirodh? Was it a sort of mixture, or medicine? Was it available in bottles or packets? How exactly did it perform its curtailing purpose?

Jumna went to a government hospital and had a tubec-tomy; she vanished from work that day. ‘What could I do,’ she said. ‘
He
would never stop.’ Mrs Sengupta smiled, relieved. ‘You’ve taken the right decision, Jumna,’ she said, congratulating Jumna for making a shrewd investment.

‘But why did she have so many children?’ Nirmalya enquired of the driver. This driver, George, a dashing Tamil Christian, had a drink problem, he had come back to work from lunch, drunk, declaimed to everybody present in the flat, hectored the other servants about their employer, taken off his white shirt with epaulettes – known, in conjunction with his trousers, as the ‘driver’s uniform’, a striking ensemble – he’d impatiently divested himself, after his speech, of one half of the uniform and fallen into a deep sleep in the servants’ quarters. Later, sober and attempting to shore up his shattered dignity, he’d listened to a description of his behaviour from Apurva Sengupta with a mixture of disbelief and contrition. He also had an eye for women; when driving, he had a habit of speeding up the car brusquely, becoming abruptly focussed, whenever women were crossing, and braking in front of them with a jerk in the nick of time. To Nirmalya’s surprise, the women seemed to enjoy the thrust of the car; once they’d recovered from their startlement, they’d smile in complicity at this mockery of their unassailability.

‘She too must want it,’ said George with a lopsided grin.

Usko bhi mangta hai, were his words.

The idea shocked the boy; Jumna, who could never be rich or happy in this life, and who yet seemed to have transcended desire, the idea that Jumna wanted
it
.

‘Y
OU’R TEACHING
Mallika these days.’ Motilalji had brought up the name after several years. Shyamji flinched: at the use of the first name, the air of – not so much disrespect, as the proprietorial casualness with which it was uttered. It was as if he owned her forever, as he did all his students, the new ones as well as the ones who’d shrugged him off like an old set of clothes. Motilalji, eight years ago, had taken Shyamji to Mallika Sengupta: at that time,
he
used to be her teacher; he had swaggering right of entry into the flat. How quickly that stint had ended, and how long memory was! Mrs Sengupta shuddered when she thought of Motilalji; but she spoke with sad respect of his gift. ‘He used to sing beautifully,’ she said to Shyamji. ‘When he was sober.’

‘Yes, twice a week,’ said Shyamji now, morose and prevaricatory at the observation.

Motilalji had had a stroke a year and a half ago. Part of his face had been paralysed, flesh turned into stone; but it was almost all right now. He was keeping off the drink; sobriety made him taciturn and despondent. Behind him, where he lay supercilious and spent on the divan, knelt the child Krishna; and the smell of his wife’s cooking, mixed with traces of sandalwood incense, hung motionless but elusive in the room.

Shyamji was virtuous in many ways; he had no vice to speak of. People remarked that he didn’t drink; he never smoked. His weakness was sweets; he loved eating jalebis with milk.

When he praised this combination to Mrs Sengupta, she said: ‘Disgusting! You Marwaris and Punjabis have such awful things for sweets. Jalebis with milk. Halwa made from carrots!’

His other weakness was life itself – life and its material reward. Its great material promise. He didn’t want to forgo it.

The idea of withdrawing – into himself, into some temple of art, or some space uncontaminated by the sort of life his richer students led – never occurred to him. Or if it did, it was as a metaphor; something to be admired fervently and solemnly for its truth, while avoided carefully in reality. You couldn’t confuse a fiction, however sacred and beautiful it was, with what life could actually offer you. Because life could be bountiful; he observed, every day around him, its generosity and largesse.

The memory of his father made him reverential and nervous. He praised him constantly; at the same time, he was at work all the time to distance himself, in effect, from Panditji’s legacy. The immense sacrifice Ram Lal had made for the classical arts! This is what he’d left them in the end, the chawl in King’s Circle, from which you could constantly hear the gurdwara loudspeaker.

This was how the story of the family lineage went. Hanuman Prasad and Kartik Prasad – two brothers. No one could say with certainty where Hanuman Prasad got his talent from. His brother, Kartik Prasad, was a farmer. Their mother had a strong and tuneful voice – she used to be heard, before she died, at festivals and at nighttime, singing lullabies in that almost masculine voice.