The Immortals (25 page)

The synthesiser dazzled Sanjay, starting from the special excitement of the name – Yamaha; and, as had been promised, there seemed to be no sound he couldn’t extract from it. It was as if an orchestra, minus the heavy, inconvenient corporeality of human beings, lay latent inside it, constantly changing shape, obedient to his fingertips. It was portable; like a wand, he carried it from location to location, room to room.

When Shyamji and Sumati had exchanged garlands when they were eighteen, their respective, impeccable musical lineages had been taken into account to create a gene for the future, a gene which Sanjay, ruffling his hair with one hand, and running the other across the keyboard, represented. But such calculations don’t allow for the fact that propensities suppressed in one generation might find freer rein in another, that the gene is self-perpetuating but also self-divided, that it contains within it its own destruction and mutation.

‘Music is leaving the house of the ustads, the maestros,’ an ageing and somewhat pompous singer, a friend of Ram Lal’s, had said not long ago to Shyamji, bitterly, as if the younger man were in some way responsible. Shyamji had nodded solemnly, placatingly, in all sincerity; at that moment, he’d thought it safest to be in complete agreement with the octogenarian. But, at this point in his life, he didn’t really care – he didn’t care exactly where music was located. And he had no pressing worries about whether the splendid but little-known inheritance his father had created would peter out; true, Sanjay hadn’t been patient enough to acquaint himself with all the beautiful, difficult compositions, and Shyamji too had become busy of late – but there was time; he was forty-four, Sanjay was sixteen; it would be done, though, of course, it would require diligence and hard work! The gharana was the least of his worries. He cared – he wanted to ensure – that life expanded for him, his children, his children’s children, and that when opportunities came or returned – as they seemed to be doing suddenly – he made full and intelligent use of them. And, in spite of himself, he was somewhat won over: without appearing to relent or altering his rhetoric, he was obviously quite pleased with Sanjay’s new toy; gingerly, inquisitively, he tried out the keys himself – he was adept at the harmonium – taking stock of its brazen, tinny sound.

Not everyone was happy, though, about Shyamji’s move to Sagar Apartments – not, for instance, his younger brother Banwari. Tall, dressed spotlessly in white, naturally affectionate and respectful, but with the innate helplessness and misplaced pride of a younger brother, he circled about, gazing downward, a small area in the sitting room in Borivli, torn between wanting to complain about Shyamji and defending him to his wife and the rest of the world.

‘Our father wanted things to be divided equally between us,’ he grumbled, neglecting to remember that he earned very little in comparison to his elder brother, and that what he did came courtesy of the ‘tuitions’ Shyamji arranged. His eyes were bloodshot, perhaps from lack of sleep – but, actually, they were always a bit red. ‘I didn’t get my full share when we left King’s Circle.’ Suddenly, he looked up, and, in a single god-like gesture, decided to physically shrug off the whole business, and became, at once, sentimental and shrewd: ‘Anyway, he knows more than I do,’ managing to sound both utterly sincere and offended, ‘he is my gurujan.’

Pyarelal didn’t – couldn’t – say anything, although he always had an air about him simultaneously of compliance and complaint; he only raised an eyebrow in judgement, with the dancer’s poise and suggestion. But Tara, his wife, grumbled quietly but audibly – everyone carried about with them expressions of fortitude, insider knowledge, and suppressed insights, and did nothing but blink slightly yet tellingly at any mention of Sagar Apartments.

For one thing, the flats in which Banwari and Pyarelal lived with their families – they had two and three children respectively – were too small; rudimentary one-bedroom affairs which had looked welcoming and larger than they really were when they were new but now silently exacerbated their nerves. They lived in them almost festively, investing them with all the bustling, makeshift energy that homes have. But they’d have been ready to go anywhere else. Oddly, they missed the congestion of King’s Circle; there was nothing to replace that sense of being surrounded by human activity, with its own untidy ebb and flow, in this environment. There was no nature either; only shops and, from the balcony, the prospect of fresh air. Occasionally, a crow would alight on the balcony, breaking journey between two invisible points in the outskirts of the city, looking into their lives, the assorted jumble of furniture and musical instruments in the small room, before the younger children rushed forward to chase it away. There was no other representative of nature’s variety here except this sly intruder.

‘No one knows what it takes to travel from this place to the Taj and back twice a week,’ Pyarelal muttered, and his words embodied, like an epic, the entire terrible, many-stopped journey; by ‘no one’ he meant Shyamji.

But these sentiments weren’t conveyed directly to Shyamji; the medium who buzzed them into his ear was his mother, mataji.

‘You’re doing well, beta, by the grace of God and the good deeds of your father.
Lekin
, beta, don’t forget Tara and Banwari.’

D
URING
S
HYAMJI
’
S
absences in England, Pyarelal became both Nirmalya’s accompanist and teacher, guiding him about the outlines of ragas, helping him to memorise the compositions Shyamji had taught him. They spent hours together sometimes, from late morning to afternoon, the boy ignoring but protected by his father’s existence, the handsome man in the suit, going out of the apartment, then coming back, somewhere on the margins of his consciousness. At such times, the boy was the real monarch, with the day and its luxuries entirely his own, as well as being a fugitive with the small, long-kurtaed older man for company. Just after practising a composition in the raga Yaman, or attempting the complicated, resonating web of Puriya Dhanashri, they would rise and go out onto the balcony to watch the sun set, the orange fragment losing its shape as it touched the horizon, becoming immense, maudlin daubs of colour after it had gone under. Pyarelal would light a beedi with his usual mixture of stealth and furtive theatre, as if all the world had no other concern but to catch him red-handed in the act. Then he would embark on a piece of proselytising, half monologue, in which he’d talk about how the movement of the universe and planets and the pull and push of the tide were all connected to laya, the tempo and rhythm of the compositions they had sung, and were indivisible from it. ‘
This
is laya,’ he’d say, gesturing grandiosely toward the water into which the childlike fragment of the sun had disappeared, ‘this movement of
brahmanda
,’ obviously transported and moved by his own words, although it was probably excessive to call the view
brahmanda
. By the orange-rimmed ocean, reflecting the light still spread everywhere in the sky, the Marine Drive bristled with droves of impatient cars departing from offices.

He knew, however, never to
presume
to call himself Nirmalya’s ‘guru’; you could see from his face sometimes that he was greedy for acknowledgement, but he knew instintively where to draw the line; much of his life had been about knowing how far to advance, and when to stop. Importantly, Nirmalya, too, never made the mistake of thinking he was his teacher. Pyarelal was his accompanist, that was all; he was also something else, true, for which Nirmalya’s feelings were becoming deeper and more abiding, but that ‘something else’ had no name or official status.

When it was evening, and the immense, plush sitting room lit only by a couple of lights, while the great city glittered outside like a chimera, they would descend solemnly upon the sofa and the boy would play him some of his records – not the old collection, part of which had been procured directly from America, rare and precious as the world’s treasure, the long-haired angelic choirs of Crosby, Stills, and Nash and the others who’d gathered for that sunstruck week at Woodstock, all of which had one day, unaccountably, transformed into so much dross for the boy, but the Hindi film songs which he had discovered belatedly in the twilight of his growing up and adolescence, from the fifties and sixties, when he was not yet born, or was about to be, or had barely come into the world. ‘Listen to this,’ said Nirmalya to Pyarelal, and, of course, the older man had already heard the songs from when they’d first been sung, and he nodded and they sat listening gravely as the stylus stopped its hissing and Kishore Kumar began to sing ‘Chhod do aanchal zamana kya kahega’, Nirmalya reiterating his discovery with the satisfaction, almost, of having invented that bygone world, the other, already superannuated, rejuvenated by the rediscovered songs and the younger man’s faith in them.

In the acute loneliness of Nirmalya’s life, these hours with Pyarelal were animated with actual happiness. For Pyarelal, too, it was an extraordinary transposition; being here, in this apartment. And he worked hard with the boy; he went beyond his brief, although – perhaps even because – he was not his true guru. At lunch, he was never comfortable at the large glass table, with its grid of mats and cutlery carefully laid out, sitting with Mrs Sengupta and Nirmalya, confronted, in a strange kind of isolation, with the variety of china. Rotis were made for him, because he was not a natural rice-eater, and he tore these delicately, shaking his head slightly, as if he were in a private conversation with the bits of the roti that he dipped in the daal, and as if he could, by keeping his eyes fixed on the plate, wish away the context of the dining room. The thick glass dining table on elaborate legs was the only place where Pyarelal was uneasy; then it was back to discussion, perhaps a temporary parting of ways, then practice again.

The boy was fond of Pyarelal, and, spontaneously and without calculation, took advantage of his love during this residency. ‘Pyarelal, could you tape the tabla thekas for me?’ or ‘Could you tell me how Asavari goes?’; and the man would comply. Learning with Pyarelal was a form of playfulness, even competitiveness, in which the older man was always surrendering to the younger one. ‘Well, that taan is too difficult for me; you do it,’ Pyarelal would say, looking glum and pleased. He wasn’t lying; he was exaggerating. His love for the boy made him, during these hours of practice, ingenuously overplay his limitations.

By the end of the fourth day, the boy had actually grown a bit weary of this camaraderie; once or twice, he caught himself wanting to be alone, and tried to keep this fact from himself. But Pyarelal, attuned finely to the unsaid, sensed it, and it hurt him and made him behave badly at dinner with the servants who were intent on serving him daal or chicken, shooing them away peremptorily, or barely acknowledging them in a curt, bureaucratic way, as if they had no business being there – and so further aggravating Nirmalya’s belated but untimely sense of being intruded upon.

The next morning, as if to consolidate the illusion that he was going to be with them for many more days, Pyarelal finished his pujas, and, as he’d been doing for the last three days to everyone’s slight embarrassment, paraded the flat with three lit incense sticks (from a bundle Mrs Sengupta had given him), pausing before various icons and deities scattered everywhere in the form of decorations, as well as pictures and portraits of the Senguptas’ long-departed parents, closing his eyes, bowing and muttering some sort of a spell, waving the incense sticks, then hurriedly, self-importantly, resuming his tour before suddenly stopping in exactly the same way before the next picture or likeness. This extraordinary demonstration had led, partly, to Nirmalya’s frayed nerves; but, on this last morning, he didn’t know what to feel – whether to be touched, or thankful that it wouldn’t be happening tomorrow.

Before ‘guru purnima’ that year, Tara, Pyarelal’s wife, dropped a hint:

‘Baba, won’t you give your guru something?’

Everywhere that evening, under the light of an immense full moon, disciples and students of a variety of accomplishments would go throughout the city towards their dance or music teachers with yards of raw silk in packets, awaiting to be tailored into kurtas, or with flat red boxes crammed neatly with sweets, the thread with the shop’s name faintly printed on it knotted professionally and efficiently round the box; then, with a mixture of apprehension and self-effacement, touch the teacher’s feet and leave the packet wordlessly next to him. Nirmalya stared open-mouthed at his extortionist – uncertain of whom she was talking about. She was smiling, so it could all be put down to teasing. The temerity – she obviously meant Pyarelal.