The Immortals Read online

  ‘Mark my words, baba will be singing these bandishes like a bird in ten years’ time!’

  And the endless and improbable life-history, which he disclosed readily:

  ‘I used to dance in Raja Man Singh’s court . . .’

  This sort of thing ordinarily bored Nirmalya; yet Pyarelal, almost an invention, a man not only without status, but without provenance, could never bore him.

  ‘Man Singh’s court? When was that?’

  A deliberate sip of tea, then:

  ‘I danced before Man Singh when I was four.’

  And so Pyarelal had a bit of the stardust of the vanished courtly life around him; and he made it seem entirely believable. He was a jetsam of the old world, part of the coterie of artists that had been disbanded with the palaces, or so he fashioned himself for Nirmalya; not like his younger brother-in-law, who’d been shaped by a city of tuitions, and husbands in the background, and fees. And he sensed that Nirmalya, though he belonged to this particular world, was not in harmony with it, and that his own appeal to the boy lay in his anomalousness; he’d quickly discovered in Nirmalya a powerful nostalgia, a thirst for another time and place almost, that made the boy restless and ill-at-ease. Only Pyarelal noticed this nostalgia; and he’d never seen it in any other young person, certainly not in his three sons or any of the students he played with.

  He was a self-styled teacher of kathak dance (though Nirmalya had never seen him teach) who’d picked up, as a child, the various arts of singing, tabla-playing, and harmonium accompaniment. An obscure accident in the past – what it was wasn’t clear; he’d never specified to Nirmalya – had taken away from him the ability to be a performing dancer; he’d now grandly given himself the name of ‘kathak teacher and guru’, although what he was, in spite of the two or three students he reportedly had, was a loyal practice-session man, banging on the tabla while the dancer memorised her routine, twirled round and thumped the floor with her feet till she got it right.

  ‘Every raga has a roop – a form,’ he’d say with a very adult wistfulness, as if he’d had a vision of a raga once. ‘It has a chehra, a face’ – and here, with the involuntary dancer’s movement, he’d etch the face in the air before him, his own stubbled, hook-nosed face narrow-eyed in concentration – ‘a body. When you sing Yaman properly, for instance, you can see its form. Yaman comes and stands beside you.’

  The implication was, of course, that this was not an age in which you saw the raga any more; that for musicians today the raga was an agglomeration of notes, conventions, and rules, to which they brought their subjective passion, their instinct, and different degrees of ability; but to Pyarelal, scratching his chin and imparting his vision to the boy, they were in error – the raga had not only to be played correctly or well; it had to be courted and pursued.

  When Mrs Sengupta found them talking, Pyarelal smiled with a mixture of mischief and satisfaction, as if two lovers had been interrupted by a friend. If Shyamji happened to find them, he started guiltily and got up.

  Unlike many male dancers, there was nothing effeminate about Pyarelal: he was short and sturdy. Wrestling had been one of his passions in his youth; he used to spend hours at the akhara, watching indefatigably as men rolled in the sand, or strained, bull-like, their arms locked around each other; bending introspectively, he’d practise holds and positions. ‘Being a man’ was always important to him, as were its fierce attendant concerns, honour and pride.

  His face – thin lips, thin moustache, hooked nose, a small wart beneath one eye, the longish hair combed back from his forehead – was hard and bony. Only the occasionally raised left eyebrow, arched and kept dangling briefly in the course of a conversation, bore testimony to the dancer’s art.

  ‘Kathak’ derives from ‘katha’ or ‘story’; Nirmalya hadn’t realised this before. Words hoarded meaning like treasure; and Nirmalya was at an age when mere etymology brought to sight and lit up an avenue – whose pull was mysterious and irresistible – he hadn’t known had existed. The dancer was not only a virtuoso but a storyteller; this fact was contained in the word ‘kathak’ itself. Sitting on the carpet in the air-conditioned room, the curtains half drawn behind him, Pyarelal showed Nirmalya how Radha would pull the end of the sari before her face to protect herself from prying eyes when she went out into the lanes towards her lover; a motion of the wrist, an avertedness of the eyes, were enough to convey Radha’s vulnerability, her racing heart. Nirmalya, in blue jeans and kurta, for the moment seemingly without occupation, education, or future, leaned against a cupboard door as this fifty-four-year-old man tried, at once, to impress him and to do what was surely legitimate: to reveal to him the elements of his craft. Pyarelal shook one foot slightly to remind him that the bells strung round Radha’s ankle were too loud; that any moment her mother-in-law might awake and discover her liaison. He never got up from the carpet. Sometimes he whispered the song that told the story, which was really a litany of complaints to the divine, blissfully imperturbable lover who was awaiting her, ‘How do you expect me to come on this full-moon night, my ankle-bells ring and threaten to wake up my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, etcetera’, while his nostrils, as he sang, flared imperceptibly.

  When Nirmalya asked Pyarelal to write down for him one of the many songs he had recited or sung for him in the last few months, he discovered that the older man was barely literate. The Devanagari script was largely uncharted terrain, a country Pyarelal felt no pressing need to visit, and which he’d avoided visiting for the greater part of his life with no excessive sense of loss. For Nirmalya’s sake, though, he made an attempt, and set down four lines in the exercise book that was Nirmalya’s songbook in a faint and almost illegible handwriting. He smiled, as if asking indulgence for a disability (not a serious or harmful one, but a disability nonetheless) for which there was no immediate cure, and which it was in slightly bad taste to discuss.

  However much he hid it from the boy, and however much his memories spoke of a spontaneous joy in life, Pyarelal was marked by a sense of inadequacy. All his memories were, strangely, from before his marriage, his restless loiterings between Rajasthan and Dehradun (where he’d lived for four years) and then Bombay, where he’d deliberately inserted himself into Ram Lal’s life and then, as Shyamji would have it, got himself married to Ram Lal’s daughter. Pyarelal’s memories dried up after this; life seemed to have become more real, less surprising, and, somehow, less life-like. He compensated for that sense of inadequacy, his sense of the lack of the respect due to him, in his own way. It was common knowledge that he got drunk in the evenings; and, since everything in a family becomes familiar and then comic, especially to children, this fact became a joke, to Shyamji’s children in particular, who, since they were small, had both lovingly and mockingly called him ‘Puaji’, a lisping abbreviation at first, unable as they were then to pronounce ‘Pyarelalji’, and then just an appellation, like ‘uncle’ or ‘kaka’. People seldom mentioned the unfortunate closeness of ‘Puaji’ to ‘paji’, or ‘wicked’, but come evening, and the children in the neighbouring house knew that Puaji became garrulous and beat up Tara, their aunt. In his home, he was unassailable. Who was he? He was Ram Lal’s daughter’s lord and master, after all. Shyamji didn’t, wouldn’t, intervene; he was scrupulous about washing his hands of this unpleasantness, as he was about many others. What Pyarelal and his family did in the confines of their four walls was their business.

  * * *

  ‘WHAT DO YOU talk to him about, baba?’ asked Shyamji sadly. He looked calm, but his resentment was essentially stubborn, unappeasable.

  Pyarelal had just made an exit, scraping, bowing, saying ‘Yes, bhaiyya, no, bhaiyya, bilkul, bhaiyya’ to Shyamji.

  Nirmalya was at a loss for words.

  ‘He’s a master of drama,’ said Shyamji, before Nirmalya could answer his question.

  Pyarelal had his own method of exacting, quite ingenuously, revenge on Shyamji; he did it by extolling his father-in-law, the dead Ram Lal.
/>   ‘The first night of the conference in Calcutta, Bade Ghulam Ali sang Bihag,’ he recalled with a half-smile, as if the ustad’s voice were audible to him. ‘And then there was Bihag and only Bihag in the air. The second night Panditji’ – that was how he referred to Ram Lal – ‘sang Malkauns. And then there was Malkauns and only Malkauns!’

  The son-in-law, who’d arrived out of nowhere and inserted himself into Ram Lal’s affections, recounting the dead.

  ‘But what about Shyamji?’ asked Nirmalya, his heart brimming with feeling for his often-absent teacher. ‘He sings wonderfully too, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He sings very well, but he’s only four annas compared to Panditji,’ said Pyarelal with a ruminative laugh. Four annas; a mere twenty-five per cent. And since it was the father who was being praised, even Banwari, the younger son, had to nod solemnly when remarks like these were made. Not only Banwari – a swift shadow passed over Shyamji’s face when words like ‘But no one can sing these songs like Panditji’ were said, and he’d nod in defeat and add, ‘He’s right, baba, you did not hear my father.’ It was as if, at such moments, logic deserted him, and the insurmountability of life revealed itself. And the sixteen-year-old would be filled with pity, and at the same time convinced the claim was a lie; that people create lies about the dead to torment the best of the living.

  The best of the living: although Nirmalya was convinced his teacher was among the ‘best’, he was disappointed by Shyamji’s pursuit of the ‘light’ forms, his pursuit of material well-being. An artist must devote himself to the highest expressions of his art and reject success; he was going to be seventeen, and these ideas had come to him from books he’d read recently, but he felt he’d always known them and that they were true for all time. He put it to Shyamji plainly:

  ‘Shyamji, why don’t you sing classical more often? Why don’t you sing fewer ghazals and sing more at classical concerts?’ Shyamji was always unimpeachably polite. He now turned to study the Managing Director’s son’s face with curiosity, as if he were reminded again of the boy’s naivety.

  ‘Baba,’ he said (his tone was patient), ‘let me establish myself so that I don’t have to think of money any more. Then I can devote myself completely to art. You can’t sing classical on an empty stomach.’

  Nirmalya had heard a version of this argument in college: that you must first satisfy your physical needs, of food, shelter, clothing, before you can satisfy your psychological ones – like culture. He wasn’t persuaded by his guru’s words. How did you know when you arrived at that point, when you were safe enough to turn exclusively and fearlessly to the arts? How, and for when, did you set the cut-off date? Nirmalya had never known want; and so he couldn’t understand those who said, or implied, they couldn’t do without what they already had.

  * * *

  HE WENT TO the balcony, considered the view: much-praised, much-prized – more valuable than any of the artefacts inside, it raised, in its daily, innocent rehearsal of daylight and sunset, the price of the apartment to what it was. La Terrasse, white and wide, was in the distance; as was the long strip of beach, like a thin ore of gold, tapering towards the Governor’s house.

  When you looked straight down from the balcony at dusk, you could see the outlines of people on the edge of the land. Thacker Towers had begun to be repainted before the monsoons, and now work continued in bursts between rainy days. Bamboo scaffolding had been erected around the buildings: and sometimes, when Nirmalya was reading or listening to music in his room, he’d see a man, or men, appear just beyond the balcony, careless as sailors on the top of a mast, seemingly uninterested in his presence.

  Word circulated that Mr Thacker hadn’t provided them with toilets – or maybe it hadn’t occurred to him that they’d need toilets. It was these men and their families who gathered below at dusk on the edge of land in the shadow of Thacker Towers.

  Almost seventeen, he was leaving his father’s world behind – the sitting room behind him, its paintings, ashtrays, curios, vases, the study at the far end with its bound volumes, the dining room with the thick oval glass table, the four bedrooms. Since moving to Thacker Towers, he’d stopped feeling at home. Only the flies, which, in spite of the wire gauze, kept returning, amused him; he eyed the doomed one beadily and killed it heartlessly.

  When he was a child, home was escape – from the terrifying terrain of nursery and school, of shiny alphabet charts with their motionless constellation of cats, balls, and vans; of a physical education of running and falling, and singing lessons when you stood like soldiers; and glancing every few minutes at the great hands on the white clock-face. But now, his father having assumed the mantle of the Managing Directorship, this flat in Thacker Towers, with all its furniture – the Himalayan peak of his father’s career and probably Nirmalya’s own material life – was strangely arid to come back to, like a place that could never be properly inhabited, lit by the sun at different points in the day, and by the electric lights heavy with crystals in the evening.

  He seemed on the verge of discovering some new definition; he didn’t know what it was, but it set him apart, a bit cruelly, but also providentially; and it turned his latent lack of self-belief into a bristly superiority he carried about with him always. Even the servants noticed it.

  As he began to shed the meanings he’d grown up with, he busily assigned new ones. He fell almost belligerently in love with an idea, to do with an immemorial sense of his country; and music was indispensable to it. The raga contained the land within it – its seasons, its times of day, its birdcall, its clouds and heat – it gave him an ideal, magical sense of the country; it was a fiction he fell in love with. Having subscribed to the fiction, everything else was a corruption or aberration: the Marine Drive, Thacker Towers, the company his father ran, tea at the Taj Mahal hotel – nothing was ‘true’ enough. Looking, soon after sunset, at the sky above La Terrasse and its neighbouring buildings – careful to deny the Marine Drive and the neon advertisements – he thought of raga Shree and how appropriate it was to this moment, only the latest, in history, in numberless such days’ endings – in some place that was both here, and not here, not in Cuffe Parade or Thacker Towers.

  A vase catching the light; fresh flowers. Shalini must have come that day to trim the stalks. Teatime; a circle of ladies; one of them, wearing a dress, was English.

  Gradually, a thought had begun to niggle in his mind: the ragas had no composer. Where did they come from; and why was no one bothered that the question didn’t have an answer? Indian music had no Bach, no Beethoven – why was that? Instinctively, privately, in a confused way, as he looked evening after evening out of the balcony, the notion of authorship came to him – a difficult thought, which he spent some time grappling with. It was the idea of the author, wasn’t it, that made one see a work of art as something original and originated, and as a piece of property, which gave it value; it was what made it possible to say, ‘It belongs to him,’ or ‘It’s his creation,’ or ‘He’s created a great work.’ And this sense of ownership and origination went into how a race saw itself through its artists. He realised, in a semi-articulate way, with a feeling of despair as well as an incongruous feeling of liberation, that this, though, was not the way to understand Indian music; the fact was a secret that dawned on him and which he had to keep to himself. He discussed it with no one; not with Shyamji, although he’d been tempted once or twice to explore the topic with Pyarelal, but had given up before he’d even started. In the meanwhile, as he read his beloved philosophers and poets, he encountered the celebration of genius everywhere – ‘So-and-so did it first’; ‘So-and-so did it best’ – and he acquiesced in it; but some part of him now, in light of the raga, began to resist it too. Only when rereading Yeats’s poem about Byzantium did he appear to find an acknowledgement in what he read of an art without an author, at least in certain lines and phrases: ‘Those images that yet/ Fresh images beget’ and ‘flames begotten of flame,/ . . . An agony of flame that cannot singe a sl
eeve.’ What kind of image could that be, except an image whose author was unknown, and which seemed to have been born of, or authored by, art itself ? The lines contained the mystery of what it meant to come into contact with a work of art whose provenance was hidden and, in the end, immaterial. It didn’t matter that you couldn’t put a signature to that ‘image’. Elsewhere, Yeats had called those images ‘Presences . . . self-born mockers of man’s enterprise’; Nirmalya thought he grasped now what ‘self-born’ meant – it referred to those immemorial residues of culture that couldn’t be explained or circumscribed by authorship. It was as if they’d come from nowhere, as life and the planets had; and yet they were separate from Nature. Dimly, he saw that, though the raga was a human creation, it was, paradoxically, ‘self-born’.

  The painting of the building was three-quarters complete. The men stood on the scaffolding, sometimes they clung to a pole and stretched to the left or to the right, they moved sideways, they squatted casually on a pole, their rags flapping, almost riding nothingness. They never looked through the glass at the tranquillity within; they were too busy, gossiping, shouting, laughing and showing their teeth (he could see the inside of a workman’s mouth, and wondered if he ever spat tobacco from such a great height), all the while at work on that platform. Nirmalya spied on them through the large window. ‘I couldn’t have done it, I couldn’t have done it,’ he told himself, ‘not if my life depended on it.’ One of them slipped, fell; Nirmalya heard about it later. He imagined the young man – they were all young – arms beating helplessly against the emptiness. Work went on.

  Nirmalya began to see less of his friends. In the twilight world he’d created, or chanced upon, in the intersection of the raga and nature, his friends were intruders; that world accommodated a great part of the universe – sun, dark, rain, the beating of a pigeon’s wings, a crow’s harsh cry – but it couldn’t accommodate Rajiv Desai, Sanjay Nair, and the others.