The Immortals (4 page)

This area, which had been water not very long ago, became very quickly populated with towers and offices. The building the company moved to was called Udayan. The offices were on the sixteenth floor. One day, in the afternoon, when he’d gone again to pick up his father, Nirmalya stood before the building, separate among the other buildings, and measured it with his eyes. He felt thrilled by it, as if it were a sword that had, strangely, pierced him painlessly. ‘How tall it is!’ It was a significant moment in his own brief life – a grand, inward episode in the unfolding epic of his father’s employment. This time, the stream of employees emerging was somehow different, larger and more diffuse. It was full of people he didn’t recognise, small men in white shirts, women in saris, both going in and coming out, and then, in the midst of them, he’d spot, from the car, the suited, elegant figure of his father, shorter than Dyer but in his own way striking, then Dyer, and other known faces; his father and Mr Dyer seemed strangely untouched by the crowd around them; they were at ease but inviolable.

Here, the ethos was that of the busy daylight world of the city; at once indifferent and absorbed, focussed and reckless. Nirmalya quickly forgot Nariman Point as he’d first stood on it nervously at night, threatened by waves. And he had no reason to visit Tulsi Pipe Road, where the old office building had been, again.

‘She sings good, but pronunciation must improve.’ The person who said this was Laxmi Ratan Shukla, a stocky man whose thick bifocals made his eyes seem twice their size, and also indistinct. It seemed the whites of the eyes were melting behind the glasses. He spoke very softly, and hardly ever smiled. He was nondescript and boring, and this was a dimension of his dangerousness. ‘The words still sound like Bengali. See – “barsat” is sounding like “borsat”.’ He performed this parody of Mrs Sengupta’s Hindi pronunciation without malice or self-consciousness.

He was, of course, not dangerous at all; or he was as dangerous as he, or any human being, could be made dangerous by others. It depended on you. He was, really, a sort of bureaucrat, the head of HMV’s Light Music wing. But the problem was he was a bureaucrat who thought he was an artist – he composed tunes; he taught young women; he would have liked to create acolytes who said, ‘I was taught this song by Laxmi Ratan Shukla.’ Somehow, it hadn’t happened; but, secretly, he wanted to be more than just an office man.

He sat now with two luchis before him, and a cup of tea. Of course, he was unused to luchis; he pierced one with his finger; then he tore a piece and ate it. ‘She has stopped the maulvi saheb, that is okay,’ he said. ‘She can sing bhajan.’ He referred to her in the third person in her presence, as if she was a child of ten. But he spoke so softly that no one could accuse him of being impolite.

He somewhat despised Bengalis for their inability to speak Hindi, their timid forays into culture as they clung to middle-class propriety, their inability to let themselves go. Even Mrs Sengupta’s voice – it was a mistake on creation’s part to have given it to
her
; when he’d heard it, he’d thought it was beautiful and lost interest in it. He was bored by beauty and by artistic gifts; he wanted something else – but if asked, would have spoken in terms of beauty and art.

He liked Bengali food, though. The luchis were interesting. He put the last piece in his mouth.

‘Laxmiji, some more?’ asked Mrs Sengupta, sitting up. ‘John,’ she admonished the bearer, ‘what are you doing, see, the saab’s plate is empty.’

Laxmi Ratan Shukla raised the palm of one hand. ‘Bas,’ he said.

Two years later, as they were going down the curve of Haji Ali – a grey day, with very few cars on the road, when it seemed it was going to rain – Mrs Sengupta said a little resignedly, ‘Do you know, I don’t think he’s ever going to let me cut a record.’ She didn’t expect a reply from her husband; his policy, she knew, was long term: Wait and see. She was the opposite; she was impatient; there was no point in waiting and watching.

Dark clouds hung over the twin towers of Samudra Mahal. She stirred restlessly in her seat, and he gave no answer. Then, as the car left the panorama of the steel-grey sea behind, he said, ‘Well, let us see. You’ve had the new teacher, Jairam, a little over a year now. I’ll speak to Shukla again.’

She’d got rid of Motilalji, partly because of his drink-induced irateness, and this new man, balding, enthusiastic, had taken his place. Jairam came on Laxmi Ratan Shukla’s recommendation. He was a family man; he had four children. The third was a daughter, an eight-year-old called Kamala, whom he brought home with him one day. She was dark and quiet. ‘Brij Mohan’, said Jairam, referring to a well-known aficionado and concert organiser, ‘says she sings like Lata. In ten years . . .’ The girl was quiet, but sang without much prompting. ‘Gao beti,’ said Jairam – they say that men with a paunch have a cheerful disposition, and this was certainly true of Jairam. ‘Sing a bhajan for behanji.’ She launched, in her thin voice, into a Surdas bhajan.

The little girl stared into the distance as she sang. The parrot-like quality was almost touching. But the Lata-like timbre of the child’s voice grated on Mrs Sengupta’s ears; it inflamed her, this schooling in replicating this voice, and it also made her despair for Kamala. She imagined that this was what Lata herself might have looked like when
she
was a child, and had been taken by Dinanath Mangeshkar (or so the myth went) to audition for a film-maker; and he had been mesmerised. Lata, too, would have been like this child in her orange frock, expectant and unknown, the progeny of a struggling musical family. But Kamala was not Lata; neither in identity, nor in talent. She was just another girl being asked to live up to her father’s dreams.

Jairam was himself a competent teacher, but Mrs Sengupta wasn’t impressed by him. He seemed to lack purpose – except, perhaps, where his daughter was concerned. On that particular day, he’d talked continually about his sons and his daughter, sipped tea and gratefully accepted the snacks offered to him, and gossiped about other singers and music teachers; the morning, Mrs Sengupta had thought privately, had become a family affair. Mrs Sengupta didn’t like too much conviviality during her music lesson.

It began to rain now, on the office buildings between Worli and Prabhadevi. Under the dark clouds, the sky was changing colour; as on the wing of a bird, one colour fades or deepens into another. He is used to giving orders, thought Mrs Sengupta of the man beside her, but how incredibly cautious and accommodating he seems before Laxmi Ratan Shukla! The large drops clattered onto the windshield of the Ambassador and melted against the glass. With a tick-tick sound the wipers came to life, and through their swathes the road between Worli and Prabhadevi became visible.

W
HEN THE FIRST
promotion had come after Mr Deb’s death, to Company Secretaryship, almost the first people to know in Bombay were the Neogis. The Senguptas still had few friends in the city. This friendship was a result of an encounter in the fifties, in a foreign land, in England, where Prashanta Neogi had travelled to study art; Apurva Sengupta to peruse Company Law. The story was that they’d met, in fact, on the ship. Two lonely Indians on deck, they’d begun to talk; and Prashanta Neogi still spoke about it with a wifely shrug of the shoulders that went oddly with his large frame. Later, they’d shared a cold room in Croydon for a couple of days, and, the first morning, to his horror, Prashanta had discovered that Apurva had used his toothbrush by mistake. Prashanta spoke of this with bafflement and indulgence, as if it had sealed their friendship for the future.

The Neogis lived on the outskirts; in a house on a lane off Gorbunder Road. A low two-storeyed building; a small dusty driveway; the railway lines visible beyond the houses on the opposite side of the road – it was a very different kind of life from the one the Senguptas had now begun to lead. The Neogis were tenants who occupied the ground-floor flat; their lives were casually artistic and unconventional; neither Prashanta nor his wife Nayana ever wore anything but hand-crafted clothes; they smoked heavily and drank in the evening as a matter of course; there were long, involved sessions of bridge and rummy in the evening. There were almost always guests in the house – filmmakers who were passing through; painters – and one might catch them in the morning, wandering in their pyjamas. ‘But that’s the way we like it,’ Nayana would say, a woman with a sweet, round Bengali face, made unusual and striking by her height and largeness. ‘We like people in our house.’ ‘People!’ Mallika Sengupta would say to her husband. ‘It’s a strange house – not a moment of silence!’

The Neogis were the first to know. Mallika Sengupta called them and said: ‘I have some news.’

‘Yes, tell me all about it!’ said Nayana, feigning eagerness.

‘Apurva has had a promotion. Poor Mr Deb died suddenly, you know. Mr Dyer called Apurva day before yesterday to his office and told him to take Mr Deb’s position.’

‘O that’s wonderful!’ sang Nayana; she sounded pleased. Both she and her husband had a soft spot for Apurva, the ‘boy’ who’d once erred in using Prashanta’s toothbrush. ‘Thank God that man Dyer has some sense! The things I hear about him . . .’

Of course, Nayana and her husband had an interest in the matter. Their dear friend Apurva’s former boss – Kishen Arora – whose company he’d left to join this one: this former boss was a dear friend of theirs. Kishen Arora: a man from Delhi, with a squint, a tall Czech wife, and a cultivated manner. A man who said little. Apurva had realised that his prospects, working under him, were bleak. But when it came to changing jobs, the Neogis had dissuaded him: ‘That’s what Kishen’s
like
, silly! He
seems
distant. But he’s a man of his word.’

That’s why every advance Apurva Sengupta made in his new job brought the Neogis both happiness and a momentary embarrassment.

T
HAT DAY
, as Motilalji and Shyamji came out from Mrs Sengupta’s house, Shyamji had wondered for a moment what the meaning of the expedition had been. Why had Motilalji taken him there?

He was difficult to fathom, this man.

The answer was obvious, though. Motilalji wanted to impress his brother-in-law. He wanted to show off.

Pyarelal was sitting on the divan in Motilalji’s house. He seemed to have been sitting there for a while; he had been eating something. When Shyamji saw him, he blanched slightly; the man always made his pulse beat a little faster. As the two entered, Pyarelal got up, and went quickly to the kitchen to deposit his plate and glass. Always busy, darting from here to there, as if he didn’t have a moment’s respite; as if he wasn’t the parasite he really was. Shyamji couldn’t stand his nervous energy, his constant compulsion to turn the humdrum into theatre. But Shyamji called out to him wearily:

‘Pyareji!’

He came rushing toward him. He was short – a little more than five feet. In his loose pyjamas and white kurta, all movement. ‘Bhaiyya!’ he said. Shyamji had lain down on the divan and was no longer looking at him. ‘Please press my feet. They’re aching.’

Without a word, Pyarelal sat next to him on the divan and began massaging his calves with both hands. On the wall, a picture of the patriarch: Kishen Prasad. And next to it, a large print of the child Krishna on his knees. Shyamji sighed faintly; almost a sob of relief.

This strange exercise was persisted with for fifteen minutes – Pyarelal went about it as if he were used to it, and this was part of the strangeness. The older man kneading the younger one’s calves as if he were a supplicant or a younger relation. And this happening without embarrassment or self-consciousness on Shyamji’s part or apparent shame on Pyarelal’s. ‘Theek hai bhaiyya?’ said Pyarelal at last. ‘All right?’ ‘Bas,’ said Shyamji. ‘It’s better now.’

‘Must go now,’ said Pyarelal, getting up quickly. ‘Have to reach Sion by three o’clock.’ He spoke as rapidly as he did everything else. That’s why he’d stopped by – to replenish himself. He’d have been hungry otherwise on the bus journey. He ate quickly too; some leftover potatoes from the fridge and a couple of rotis from a metal container. On his way out, he confronted Ramesh, the four-year-old who was the youngest of the five children Motilalji had produced, between bouts of drunkenness and hours of imparting, half-heartedly, music training, seemingly without too much strain in the last fifteen years. ‘Pappi do,’ Pyarelal said, bending low, offering his face: long, with a slightly hooked nose, a thin moustache above the lip. The boy knew the face but didn’t kiss it.

Pyarelal had arrived in Bombay twelve years ago on a railway platform. And then he made straight for Ram Lal’s house, and, finding him there, touched his toes passionately, as if it were a reunion, rather than a first meeting. ‘I am a devotee of yours,’ proclaimed Pyarelal. ‘I heard you sing when you came to Mussoorie many years ago, and your voice has echoed in my ears ever since.’ For some reason, the great man took to him, despite Pyarelal’s alarming tendency towards hyperbole and his elusiveness; probably because he needed someone at the time. For Ram Lal, in spite of his great gifts, had not made an impact on Bombay; the appreciation of his gifts was left to a small circle of admirers. Outside of that circle, he was almost – not quite, but almost – a nobody, marked out in a crowd only by the seriousness of his demeanour, his noble forehead, his very reserve. Perhaps, at that time, he needed someone like Pyarelal in the house, and as part of his life.