The Immortals (28 page)

And, in spite of their satisfaction with the new charming little flat, with the quiet lane off Pali Hill and its gulmohur trees with fan-like leaves and churches that emerged silently but busily at the end of a street and reminiscent bungalows that still belonged to Goans, they felt compelled to make the trip, each day, to the centre of Bombay, to Dhobi Talao and Flora Fountain, to partake of their old life: the life they considered shallow and a bit fake. Like interlopers, they arrived, having burnt an hour’s worth of fuel on the way, at the club they used to frequent; ordered food, feeling dishevelled after the journey; disappeared into the spacious, forgiving gentlemen’s and ladies’ bathrooms to splash water on their faces, adjust the bindi on the forehead, smooth their clothes; then, like people who’d been pacified and made whole, returned to their sofa and ate wonton soup and fried rice or a plate of steak sandwiches.

One day, Mrs Sengupta, an hour after her music lesson, found Shyamji at the top of Pali Hill, determined but anguished, his Fiat uncooperative and impenetrable, he about to push it up the slope, while his driver, collar hanging back from his bare brown neck, stood next to the car, one arm plunged into the window, his hand on the steering wheel. Mrs Sengupta was seized by a moment of pity; leaning out of her window, she surprised him with, ‘Shyamji, I will drop you – where are you going?’ Nirmalya, her only company in the back, smiled indecisively. Shyamji smiled too, in a pained way, as if neither he nor the second-hand car was to blame, but something more mysterious and inscrutable that had acted up this hot, dazzling morning.

He was grateful, settling into the front seat; he’d have had to take the local train otherwise. ‘Where are you going now, didi?’ he asked, politely, almost an afterthought, delicately adjusting the kurta sleeves which had dark patches beneath the armpits; but with a curiosity that hovered on the brink of wonder, as if he were convinced that her daily routines were bound to be interesting and unpredictable. And, having known Mrs Sengupta for four years, having been close to the family, he was circumspect and cautiously concerned about the sort of journey she was making now, he didn’t want her to ever be too far from what had been her sources of pleasure and well-being. Her reply gladdened him immediately:

‘We’re going to the club. We’ll have lunch there,’ she revealed in an unflappable sing-song, ‘and wait for Mr Sengupta to join us for tea.’

So things were more or less as they were, he thought, nodding in assent inwardly, becoming increasingly calm in the interrupted air conditioning after the little incident with the Fiat; this move to the suburbs, the retirement, hadn’t really changed anything. After a moment, Mallika Sengupta said:

‘In fact, Shyamji, why don’t you join us for lunch? If you’re not doing anything else?’

Traffic lights changed into a church and into mosques. She was pleased with the idea. Residential buildings with names like Jaijaiwanti and Ahir Bhairav widened into new office blocks; the sea came and went slyly. Shyamji was uncomfortable but full of curiosity.

‘Didi,’ he said, looking at the road ahead of him in Shivaji Park, ‘will I be allowed in these clothes?’ for he was in his usual loose white pyjamas and kurta.

‘Of course you will,’ she said, in a tone that dismissed all imaginary opposition in advance. ‘There are no dress restrictions.’

In the foyer of this old, slate-roofed building, she impatiently signed him into the voluminous register which was open upon a page full of names and signatures and distinguished scrawls, while Shyamji stood beside her, with the mildly questioning furrow on the brow that was almost always present these days, adorned by the remnant of a small orange tika that had been put there by his mother after the morning pujas, neither at a loose end nor relaxed, waiting for something – some embarrassment or unforeseen glitch. The moment didn’t come; as you entered the corridor, the members usually looked up from their food or conversation or glass of fresh lime soda to stare at you, but only if they already knew you or thought they should; unashamedly, almost with warmth, certainly without hostility, they rested their eyes on the newcomer, as if they were about to smile; but they had an instinct for not dwelling at all on people or detail that didn’t interest them. Hardly anyone noticed Shyamji.

Climbing up the three steps to the veranda, Mallika Sengupta, unaware of Shyamji’s discomfiture, clutching her handbag, led the way. They entered the dining hall. Shyamji, decorous, eyes lowered in expectation, and Nirmalya, his chappals making a slight hissing sound as he dragged them on the wooden floorboards, followed. Shyamji would not have understood Nirmalya’s embattled defiance, or what he thought he was fighting. He, unimpeachable in his white kurta-pyjamas, had become very serious, and mildly disapproving, as he always was, of any hint of flippancy.

They were surrounded by the din of waiters and executives, lawyers, businessmen. They sat at a table, the menu card, propped up on a holder, upright before them. It said in undistinguished bureaucratic type, ‘Chicken Xacutti, Brown rice, Daal, Kachumbar salad’, and, beneath this, the same list was faithfully repeated, except that ‘chicken’ was substituted with ‘paneer’. And, further below the main course, the terse but inviting addition, ‘Ginger pudding and custard’.

‘What will you have, Shyamji?’ asked Mallika Sengupta. Waiters were disappearing at the far end of the hall behind a partition that separated kitchen from dining room.

‘Vegetarian,’ he said, simply, as if that would solve all his problems; he glanced around him, bemused. Orders were placed with a tall, swarthy waiter who suddenly loomed before them, nodding and writing with a pencil as Mrs Sengupta spoke. Then they sat silently for a while, Shyamji toying with and unfolding the napkin, Mrs Sengupta momentarily contented, as if she were giving him not only lunch, but the club on a platter. Words were unnecessary between teacher and students; finally, as water was being poured from a jug into their glasses, Shyamji enquired, his brow creased, thoughtful:

‘Didi, how much does it take to be a member of this club?’

And Mrs Sengupta felt a pang for him, too brief to be called sadness – again, it was a sort of pity she felt, as when she’d seen him standing absently in the bright sunlight on Pali Hill next to the broken-down Fiat.

‘Seven or eight thousand,’ she said quickly; she noticed the gold-plated buttons on the kurta, the hair combed serenely back. ‘Mr Sengupta would know.’

He nodded, abstracted and serious.

‘Achha hai,’ he said firmly, dispassionately, as if he didn’t mind facing up to the truth, however surprising it might be. ‘It’s a nice place.’

Shyamji left them soon after lunch; his series of ‘tuitions’ in this part of the city began from early afternoon. Mother and son approached the sofas on the veranda; they stood against the nets that had been hung along the side to keep out crows, marauding cats, and the cricket ball, waiting to bid farewell to Shyamji.

‘Bhojan se anand aa gaya,’ he said, referring to the food. He smiled affectionately, teasingly, at the boy; then the smile became formal, but nonetheless remained warm, as he turned to look at Mrs Sengupta. ‘It was a great joy.’

‘Shyamji, you did not eat properly,’ she remonstrated.

‘What, didi,’ he said, upbraiding her gently; his kurta looked as good as new – there wasn’t a hint of dishevelment about him.

Nirmalya and his mother sat on one of the sofas, waiting for early afternoon to dilate to teatime. Others were immobile, holding the first evening papers in their hands, with digestion. The nets hadn’t succeeded in keeping the club cat-free; they crept to the tables and meowed persuadingly, begging adeptly, without desperation; and the smaller children, who’d already finished school, and were sitting oddly alone in their uniforms, their ‘house’ colours displayed on sashes or badges, or had been briefly reunited with a parent, dropped bits of steak sandwich in their paths, pleased to be showering them frugally with their teatime snacks, which the cats pawed without eagerness. And, on the whole, there were few ‘dress restrictions’; grown-up men danced slowly past in shorts and strapped sandals; and once, a handsome, well-built teenage boy, taking a short cut between the bathroom and the pool, ran across in swimming trunks, a towel over his shoulders, his hair ink-black and wet, raising a few eyebrows and titters.

At half past four, when an ageing gentleman at a neighbouring table had begun to doze, Apurva Sengupta arrived, his jacket folded over the crook of one arm.

‘Ah, there you are!’ said Mallika Sengupta, savouring the accident of suddenly spotting him.

And Nirmalya, seeing his father in his post-retirement incarnation, of the world of corporations and yet not quite of it, content to be part of the ghostly transitoriness of the afternoon and teatime as he wouldn’t have been before – Nirmalya could sense, almost, as he used to when he was a schoolboy, that they had something in common, which he didn’t try to put a name to.

A
FEW OF
the things that had furnished the apartment in Thacker Towers reappeared now in this small flat. A large oil by the soon-to-be-forgotten Vithal, of two white horses galloping in a green space, a picture with a technicolour air, full of melodramatic energy, hung above the sofa from the wall on the left, and seemed to dominate the room with its drumming of hooves. It had been a coveted acquisition when they’d bought it four years ago. But, otherwise, the drawing room and the flat itself had a crisp, post-retirement elegance; things were scaled down in comparison to the spaces they’d inhabited before, and the arrangement of furniture, carpets, plant-life and decoration was economical and bright.

But there wasn’t a place for everything that had left the big company apartment, and some of it found its way to other places. The large green carpet, for instance, had, alas, to be snipped; it was much too big for a drawing room of this size. The snipped bit had swiftly become a rug in Shyamji’s flat: welcomed and appropriated there with much delight, with nodding assent at the rightness and inevitability of this transfer, and of course gratitude. Two chairs and a low Sankhera table also quietly travelled there, and an old cupboard had been claimed shyly but impetuously one day by Shyamji’s younger brother Banwari (‘Didi, what about us?’ he’d said at last after a sitting, frowning, mock-offended, like a child trying to charm an elder: ‘Everything goes to Shyam bhaiyya.’).

When Mrs Sengupta went to visit Shyamji in his flat (it was easier to do so now; the anonymous but impatient developments of Versova weren’t too far from Pali Hill), she encountered the snipped-off bit of carpet, not recognising it for a moment, but feeling an odd proprietorial affinity toward it. Severed from its previous expanse, it had merged with and made a home of its present surroundings, a small table stacked with pans looming above it on the left and the detached rectangle of the first-floor veranda opening on to twilight not far from it; once she remembered where it had come from, it gave up its subterfuge and she was buoyant and was translated into a mood of mischief on seeing it. ‘Arrey, isn’t this
my
carpet?’ she squinted. The others nodded vigorously at the sensibleness of this query, as if they were just trying to take care of certain things that had been entrusted to them. And there were the two chairs, and the pretty low table with the glass top and the rounded, fluted wooden legs she’d bought years ago from Gurjari. ‘They are looking nice,’ she said, so distant a judgement that it was removed from, at once, irony and literal truth.

‘Didi,’ said Sumati, Shyamji’s wife, ‘do sit down,’ and led her to one of her ‘own’ chairs.

Notwithstanding these gifts, there had been a slight cooling in relations between the Senguptas and Shyamji. The old grievance, that Shyamji hadn’t really been serious about enhancing Mrs Sengupta’s prospects as a singer, that he’d never really taken her talent in hand, returned: ‘After all, what exactly is he doing for
you
that he isn’t for all the others?’ Nirmalya demanded of Mallika Sengupta, long-haired, immovable, angry. An irritability about the constant ritual of singing-lessons going nowhere from ever since he could remember, from when he was a boy in the flat in Cumballa Hill, trespassing quietly into the bedroom while his mother practised the last song she’d been taught sitting on a bed, her harmonium before her, her distant figure and the look of questing, unworldly dedication on her face captured in the dressing-table mirror, song after song by Meera or Tulsidas or Kabir being added to an already teeming ‘stock’ of songs – the pointlessness of his mother’s career as a singer made him brutal. And the relationship between guru and student was complicated by an undertone of suspicion that, after Apurva Sengupta’s retirement, Shyamji, always smooth but with an intuition for sensing in which direction the future lay (for how else could he survive?), would have less time for Mallika Sengupta. That was the natural way of things in Bombay after all; it was one of the mild tremors and shocks of post-retirement life here, even for the very well-to-do, this slow orbiting away of the familiar. ‘His mind is elsewhere. I can feel it,’ complained Mrs Sengupta. ‘He taught me the same song for three sittings, and then he gave me one with a slightly cheap tune. I told him, “Shyamji, yeh gaana mujhe pasand nahi aaya, I didn’t like the song,” and he looked puzzled and irritable and said, “Achha gaana hai didi, it’s a good one.”’