The Immortals Read online

  He’d come armed with a disability as well; but an invisible one. When he was three and a half years old, a stethoscope had paused, padded around the sternum, then returned to the top-left corner of the chest. The doctor’s face had darkened. ‘There is a murmur,’ he said, puzzled; it wasn’t the kind of sound he’d expected to hear. He’d glanced nervously at the mother, as if expecting to be castigated for speaking out of turn. He was a mere GP after all. Confronted with a happy family, an upwardly mobile family, his first diagnosis was that the fault was in himself, in his instrument. But the murmur wouldn’t go away.

  At first there was disbelief, then mourning – the preamble to the journey to a heart specialist in a tottering building. Nameplate stacked untidily upon nameplate indicated that at least half the building was occupied by doctors. Once you got out of the giant hencoop of the lift, after the brief journey up a shaft in which only the cords and pulleys were constantly alive and never at rest, you walked down an unpromisingly dark corridor and came to a glass-doored chamber with a small sitting area that was fluorescent-lit and air-conditioned. It was like a world that the building didn’t seem to know existed within it.

  His father would be dressed in a suit for work. The heart specialist too would be in a suit. As they sat across the table from one another, they’d have the manner of colleagues in tune with each other, the father still with his post-breakfast, corporate, I-know-what-I’m-doing air about him. That air was actually a great comfort to the mother in her printed silk sari, which she’d put on hastily before the appointment; it was however her – with her implacably nervous air, who looked like a child that had been startled by a thunderclap – that the doctor repeatedly addressed, as if it were she who were the patient, and he a family elder who had to persuade her to go to a doctor. Any little thing might make her cry; and the doctor didn’t want that to happen in the tranquillity of the chamber.

  When Nirmalya was slightly older, and had had further experience of doctors, he asked his father: ‘Baba, why do these doctors always have their chambers in awful buildings?’ He’d always wondered if it was humility or otherworldliness, because the doctors he knew seemed absent-minded, and invariably had bad handwriting. ‘It’s cheap for them,’ said his father. ‘They pay very little rent.’

  And at last the logic of these successful doctors seeing him in tottering buildings became clear to him.

  As the mother and father waited, he in his dark suit, she in her printed sari, as if they were about to embark on a trip, Nirmalya lay recumbent for twenty minutes on the narrow high bed, while the moist-lipped nozzle connected to the various nodes of the electrocardiogram kissed his skin and ribs wetly. A kindly lady in a white sari moved the nozzle from one point to another on his chest; the little space behind the curtain was ice-cold from the air conditioning. By the time he’d wiped the stuff from himself with a tissue and put on his shirt, he’d grown used to the cold.

  These buildings were dark, and the various doctors’ chambers were little bigger than large cupboards. But the cupboards were all bright and air-conditioned. After they were finished, the three of them got into the lift and descended into daylight again.

  After that, his parents felt temporarily free and lightened. And, since Nirmalya had anyway missed the morning’s school, they stopped at a small new cafe on Marine Lines. Mr Sengupta, dressed for a business appointment, sitting with wife and child at a table in a cafe; but it was as if simply emerging from the doctors’ building had bequeathed upon him another day. They had chicken sandwiches.

  Often, Mrs Sengupta would think back to that day in January in Calcutta, when Nirmalya was one and a half years old, and she, in Calcutta for two months, had been invited to judge a competition at a music school, where the children would be singing Tagore songs. Her co-judges were two distinguished singers, Sumita Mullick and Banani Ray, and, in a way, it was quite an honour to sit at the same panel as them.

  But they – Apurva and Mrs Sengupta – didn’t know what to do with the child; they decided, after a long discussion, to leave him in the car with the ayah. The competition continued longer than expected; it went on and on; one girl after another approached the microphone and sang Rabindranath’s lyrics with the utmost solemnity; and Mrs Sengupta sat ill-at-ease and restless with her co-judges. When they returned to the car, they found that, despite the windows being rolled up, there were mosquitoes inside. The child was howling and angry; he had been bitten. As if he were some sort of deity before which she must be contrite, Mrs Sengupta bent forward and picked him up from the ayah’s lap. ‘E Ram! E Ram!’ she said. A few days later, the child had a fever – it turned out to be the dengue, of which there was an epidemic in Calcutta at the time.

  Years later, she would return to that day in Calcutta; the competition, which had now receded into the background; her own neglect, as she saw it; and the dengue, which she could hardly believe had happened to her own child. She’d read that both dengue and rheumatic fever could damage the heart; and she wondered if she were responsible for her son’s condition. She could not bear to think it, but she couldn’t help thinking it. ‘No,’ said the specialist. ‘This is congenital; the defect was there from birth.’ Yet she couldn’t help thinking of the day of the competition.

  ‘Jumna, will everything be all right?’ By ‘everything’ she meant Nirmalya; Nirmalya was twelve years old. She sat on the sofa of the new flat, behind her a new mirror. She looked into the distance; there were tears inside her eyes.

  Jumna – who lived in a slum in Mahalaxmi – said: ‘Why do you think so much, memsaab? Don’t you see how well our baba is?’ Mallika Sengupta nodded tearfully. She envied Jumna, almost. She envied her her four healthy children. Vipul, Ramesh. Shankar, Asha. Four children who went to a municipal school. Would she, Mallika Sengupta, have changed places with Jumna? Perhaps not. But she would have liked to have had Jumna’s easy taking-for-granted, as Jumna bent low before the carpet, jhadu in hand, of her children. And she knew she couldn’t have it.

  ‘What do you think will happen?’

  And so Jumna had to lay down the jhadu and sit beside the centre table. Mrs Sengupta was a small statue of pain; Jumna must console her. For a long time they’d just sit together in silence. ‘Nothing will happen,’ Jumna said, as if she’d casually dismissed the powers-that-be. ‘Arrey, what can happen?’ Then, slowly, after an interval of brooding and staring into the distance, she’d get back to work.

  Jumna lived in the large sprawling slum in Mahalaxmi, not far from the Race Course. In spite of its size, it was invisible from the main road; it had to be arrived at by a couple of narrow by-lanes and gullies. The people at the Race Course and the members of the Willingdon Club probably didn’t know it was there. Once, Nirmalya and the driver had dropped her off on a road next to the Willingdon Club which had a large expanse of untended green on one side. She’d got out of the car, and Nirmalya didn’t know in exactly which direction she’d gone. The car had gone back up the road; and when Nirmalya turned back to look, Jumna was already gone, there was only the road and the expanse of overgrown green. But Nirmalya knew now that this – not the exact location, but somewhere here – was where Jumna returned in the afternoons.

  Today, it was to Jumna that Mrs Sengupta turned. It wasn’t the first time she’d done so. It was as if the very fact that Jumna possessed almost nothing, that there was nothing, really, she could offer to her employer, that made Mrs Sengupta turn to her as an inexplicable source of comfort.

  ‘What will happen, then, Jumna?’ asked Mrs Sengupta. Jumna, sitting on the carpet, pulling the aanchal of her sari to cover her head, said, ‘What will happen? Memsaab, you worry for nothing.’ Jumna was moved; she was not insincere; the poor have a special ability, after all, to understand the torments of their employers, to empathise with them. It was as if she absorbed some of Mallika Sengupta’s pain.

  Her real name was Heera. Before she came to work for this family six years ago, a bearded jamadar with red eyes and a paunch used to
come in the mornings to clean the bathrooms in the Cumballa Hill flat. While going down the hill one evening, Nirmalya had suddenly seen him from the car, staggering drunkenly on the road. Nirmalya had always wondered what the man did for the rest of the day. ‘He’s a strange man. His kind eat crows,’ said the driver. ‘Crows?’ Nirmalya was awe-struck. Nirmalya thought of the jamadar sitting in a room, a dead crow in his hand; he was preparing to cook it. One of those crows that sit on parapets, balconies, behind the windows of toilets, and fill the day with their cawing. Nirmalya couldn’t decide whether to add a family to the scene – children in the room, sitting next to the jamadar as he began to cook. ‘Yes, yes, “they” eat crows,’ said the driver, and, from the way he said the word, Nirmalya could see the shadowy ‘they’ the jamadar belonged to was, in the driver’s eyes, beyond the pale. Then the jamadar was back the next morning, silently wiping the floors.

  If the jamadar came from the realm of night and darkness, Jumna came from the world of light. Of course she was a jamadarni, and maybe came from the same caste as the jamadar, but, from the beginning, Mrs Sengupta had been won over by her demeanour – ‘She’s cultured, more cultured than the ladies I meet at parties.’ This spoke for Jumna’s manners and intelligence in that dawn of her employment, and it also spoke for Mrs Sengupta’s own dislike of, and her unease at, the increasing number of company parties she went to. As for Jumna, she’d come, like the jamadar, to wipe the floors, to clean the toilet bowl, but gradually she shed her jamadarni sweeper-woman status. She became all things – confidante; surrogate mother to the boy; slave and friend; part-time servant – and the hands that held the bucket and toilet brush also came to make chapattis. ‘She makes very good chapattis,’ said Mallika Sengupta, ‘she puts them straight on to the gas flame and they swell like balloons.’

  The boy took it upon himself to educate Jumna. He was also profoundly curious about why she was poor. Already, at eight, though he despised school himself, he was an advocate of the religion of education; he was convinced that going to school could have changed Jumna. They had long and serious dialogues. ‘Baba, I only went to school till the second class. Then I’d tell my mother I was going to school, but I wouldn’t go. I would go somewhere with a friend and come back and say I’d been to school.’ ‘And that is why you are in this state now,’ the boy said, his thesis proved.

  During other conversations, Jumna, abandoning her jhadu, would provide more metaphysical explanations.

  ‘It must have been some paap I’d done in my last birth,’ as if she’d hit upon a reason that was actually plausible, ‘which is why I’m leading this life in this birth.’

  ‘Something you did in your last birth,’ said the boy, looking at the familiar face of the woman before him. The logic appealed to him. Although his eyes were open, the world went dark for a second, and he wondered who Jumna might have been, and what terrible transgression she might have committed: this person who rang the doorbell at nine thirty in the morning.

  ‘But since you’re having such an awful life in this birth,’ said the boy, leaning forward on the heavy drawing-room chair, ‘you should have a wonderful life in the next one.’ He smiled, because it was a joke; but he also hoped it might be true.

  ‘I hope so,’ she said solemnly, picking up the jhadu. She too was joking; but she didn’t completely reject the idea.

  ‘You’ll probably live in a palace,’ said the boy, elaborating. They shared the joke together in the drawing room. In this way, they’d become close. The sorrow of this woman, without his knowing it, had – like something you eat or drink early in life, whose effects become clear only in adulthood – entered and penetrated him.

  He wanted to cure her and educate her. When he was still a child, his parents brought him a doctor-set; temporarily, he became her doctor. She was ignorant; she must be treated and warned. ‘You drink tap water,’ he accused her. ‘It has germs.’ Indeed, she drank tap water in the kitchen, cupping her hand and bending, then wiping her mouth with the back of her hand in absent-minded satisfaction.

  So, the treatment commenced. He had to inoculate her. He used the plastic syringe from the doctor-set. Then, to be more thorough, he pricked her with needles from his mother’s large dressing table. ‘Why must you do this, baba?’ she asked, genuinely bewildered. ‘Because you have germs inside you,’ he replied. She could say nothing to the boy.

  Two days later, tearful but smiling, she said to his mother, ‘Baba is playing doctor. He pricks me with needles.’ And she showed the marks on her arm. ‘He’s been giving me injections,’ she said, still smiling.

  ‘I was trying to cure her,’ the boy said stubbornly.

  The treatment stopped.

  * * *

  HE WAS LORDLY with her, and at home in general, but he was afraid of the outside world. It wasn’t fear as much as a shyness of contact – a mild terror of people he already knew. He disliked convivial occasions; he particularly disliked festivals. During Holi, he was the last to go and play; once, when he’d been standing among the furniture in the Cumballa Hill flat, unsure of whether to join the friends who were clamouring outside the main door and indulging in profligate bouts of doorbell-ringing, he was horrified to see, suddenly, purple water trickling underneath the door into the flat; one of the boys outside was busy; it was like a horror film.

  He didn’t like Diwali either, though he hadn’t entirely admitted this to himself. Come Diwali, Apurva Sengupta journeyed dutifully to Teen Batti to bring back a small package of sparklers and firecrackers. Then nighttime, and the dark umbrella of the sky flashing with meteors; but Nirmalya wanted the sky to be quiet again. There was a small back garden in La Terrasse from which his father tentatively launched rockets into the sky. But, while chocolate bombs exploded in the neighbourhood, it was clear that Apurva Sengupta didn’t care much for the festival either. When Nirmalya had asked him why he never bought chocolate bombs (because, although he was uneasy with the festival, he was also eager to be part of it), Mr Sengupta said:

  ‘This is the way businessmen use up their black money,’ as a pudgy boy in shorts on Little Gibbs Road advanced and swiftly lit a fuse and then ran away again. ‘They have all that money lying around, they have to find ways of spending it.’

  A one-night conflagration of undeclared assets! This was one of the revelations of Nirmalya’s childhood. Almost all his friends’ fathers had ‘black money’. Yet he always sniffed the air when a bomb went off, because he loved the sweet smell of burning explosives.

  * * *

  THE BOY CAME OUT into the sitting room; his mother had called him repeatedly. At fifteen and a half, he had a shadowy goatee under his chin. For more than a year, he’d shaved with pride, even when there was only the slightest evidence of facial hair; standing in front of the bathroom mirror, it was half daydream, in which he felt separate and aloof from his classmates. But now there was a sudden change, and he allowed the goatee to grow. He also allowed his hair to grow. He’d let it grow once before, when he was in school, and had been punished for it; there had been warnings in class, and then an order to stand outside the classroom, and finally a trek to the vice-principal’s office. He was disciplined, lectured, his parents notified; he’d had to have a haircut – his mother had forced him to have it cropped. Now he let it grow again; his exams were over; he felt answerable to nobody.

  He looked a bit unkempt when he came out to meet the music teacher. He wore a faded kurta with his jeans. But the sandals he wore were expensive, bought from the Taj.

  ‘This is Nirmalya, my son,’ said Mrs Sengupta, smiling. Shyamji looked at him critically. He tried to reconcile the boy with the flat, the furniture, the background of the Arabian Sea.

  ‘Baba, listen to this song!’ said Shyamji to Nirmalya in a friendly, direct way just as the boy was thinking of going out; it was his second tuition. Shyamji sat alone before the harmonium, pressing the keys, immune to hurry. Behind him, a crow sat on the wide concrete balustrade of the sunken balcony. Reluctantly,
Nirmalya lowered himself on the sofa; Shyamji, in his distracted but effective way, had recruited him into his audience.

  And right from the beginning, he called Nirmalya ‘baba’, consigning him, albeit affectionately, to the ‘babalog’, the eternal children of the rich. ‘Listen to this song, didi! You will like it,’ he said to her with equal candour.

  It was the first song he taught her. It was plain but attractive; she’d never heard of the poet – not one of the great names. He began to sing: ‘Hai aankh wo jo Ram ka darshan kiya kare.’

  Those eyes are truly eyes that have seen the Lord.

  The song was an admonitory one; he sang it in a low voice.

  Futile are those mouths that remain busy in chatter.

  Those lips are truly lips that utter the name of Hari.

  Shyamji had set the words to a simple tune, a tune that, even for a beginner, would be easy to pick up. But there were embellishments in his singing that she carefully noted:

  Jewelled bangles do not lend grace to those hands.

  Those hands are truly hands that are joined in prayer to the Lord.

  The song was not meant ironically; the words were not a message directed by Shyamji towards the three gold bangles – three of many – that Mrs Sengupta presently wore round her wrist. The song belonged to the realm of ideal possibility, some other world in which such notions were not only desirable but possible. But the song was just a song; and that world was not this world. Nirmalya, sipping a glass of water and listening, didn’t even understand all the words.

  Mortal, that man wins immortal fame

  Who sacrifices his life to the love of the Lord.