The Immortals Page 7

  ‘Let me get you a refill, JB,’ said Mr Sengupta, and put an arm around Thakore. The bushy-eyebrowed chairman was glad to be led away. Apurva Sengupta took him to the little bar on the far side of the drawing room. Before heading off to the bar, the chairman said (for he liked having the last word):

  ‘We must see more of you, my boy! We haven’t got to know each other.’

  Nirmalya went onto the balcony; the small crowd of two women and a man didn’t notice him, or pretended not to notice him, and made no effort to be nice to him, as people did because he was Mr Sengupta’s son. He looked out. It was the sea, of course, the same sea he’d seen for five years from La Terrasse; but he was looking at it from the other side, and it seemed different. In fact, he could see the faint phantom outline of La Terrasse among the different-sized buildings on that side. Darkness had translated the sea into near-invisibility. Ten days after the move, it was as if he were indifferently looking at a relic from his past.

  Before moving out of La Terrasse into Thacker Towers (that was the name of this sternly clone-like cluster of buildings) they’d gone scouting around the south side of the city for an appropriate flat for the new managing director: the two of them – Mr and Mrs Sengupta, accompanied by a guide delegated by the company, and sometimes Nirmalya.

  Dyer was not going to vacate his duplex flat in La Terrasse for Apurva Sengupta; he was going to sell it on behalf of the company – and probably pocket a cut; a parting present to himself before leaving. ‘Yes, that’s why he’s selling it,’ said Mrs Sengupta. This was a disappointment; they’d been looking forward to moving into the apartment on the seventeenth floor with the goldfish darting in the grey water; where, once the main door opened and you were inside, the staircase swiftly escaped upwards. ‘No matter, we’ll find a better place,’ said Apurva Sengupta, his face grim but reconciled to the sleight-of-hand by which the duplex flat had vanished. He began to search obdurately for a lavish apartment as a sort of rebuff to the departed Englishman.

  But Nirmalya felt bitter and unhappy at the idea of moving house, and wandered sullenly about the flat in La Terrasse as if he were looking for a hiding-place in which to secrete himself, in the hope that he wouldn’t be missed.

  Looking back (and he was already in a retrospective mood), it seemed – although there was no reason to support this – that he was leaving behind a simpler time in his life, of pure white walls and spacious rooms, where even wealth was less ambivalent. It was as if – and his heart sensed this, not his mind – he was now to be caught up, if not as player then as bystander, in a story of ambition; he wasn’t sure whose – perhaps his own, but if not his entirely, then his parents’, or other people’s, or could it be even the city’s itself? The spell of La Terrasse was broken.

  Had it only been his imagination? No, even the pigeons who alighted on the sloping concrete bannister of the balcony had succumbed to it; they were conscious of the evident hospitality of the drawing room. Sometimes one of the Senguptas would find one standing there, next to the sofa or on the edge of the carpet; or even seeming to investigate the immense catacomb-like wall-unit on the left, with its various compartments that held, among other things, the record player and speakers that blasted out, at certain times during those years, Nirmalya’s burgeoning pop and then rock collection. Innocently it stood there, as if listening for the music that was no longer coming; almost solicitious, but wary if you stopped to look at it, escaping, even before you clapped your hands to shoo it away, with a loud flap of wings, a sound that, long after, would be audible and present to Nirmalya’s ear.

  Earlier, when Nirmalya was smaller, and the relationship between the Senguptas and the Dyers was still in its golden period, Mr Sengupta would cajole his son – sometimes command him – into visiting the Dyers, especially when their son Matthew came ‘home’ from England.

  ‘Matthew’s back,’ Dyer would say cheerily on the phone after a long conversation about more official things. ‘It would be absolutely lovely for him – and Tina of course – to see Nirmalya again.’

  Matthew was a nice boy, full of crass jokes and good-natured energy: but a disappointment to his parents. And his parents, especially Philip Dyer, didn’t hide their disappointment from him. Dyer treated his son like a semi-literate. ‘Matthew’s spelling’s quite atrocious,’ he’d confided in Apurva Sengupta once, at the end of a discourse of gloomy opinions about Indira Gandhi’s nationalising fervour and trade union unrest.

  And once, Nirmalya was with the older boy in the study, ensconced by books no one read, a stack of thick faintly shining magazines that Nirmalya wouldn’t ordinarily see anywhere else, Fortune, Life, and Penthouse, too, placed neatly on the glass table, signifying other universes that were always just round the corner for the Dyers, the room separated from the sitting room by its absence of natural light and a tinted glass door; Matthew was in the study, wolfing down ice cream from a plate, when his mother had said to him, ‘I don’t think the Murrays would be amused if they saw you eating that way!’ The Murrays; a couple in some suburb made mythic by power and distance – Paul Murray was a director in the ‘parent’ company in England, its headquarters in Surrey. Nirmalya, seeing Matthew peer up in hurt surprise from his plate, wondered why his own parents had never issued similar instructions to him. What made the Murrays so important to Matthew’s life?

  But Matthew took parental chiding on the chin; he saw them as a source equally of meaningless strictures and endless pocket money; and he’d made a shrewd appraisal of their own shortcomings, and the sort of life, a life created for public consumption, they were leading in India. He himself had a vague longing for the ocean and the deep, to explore the humanless but crowded world underwater; it was only a germ of an idea, but it had already planted itself in his head.

  He was only three years older than Nirmalya, but behaved as if he were much older. Part of his independence from people who were much cleverer than he, or who represented success and otherwise dominated him, like his parents, came from his sexual knowledge. He had many girlfriends, and the moral ambiguity of this fact gave him a sort of secret strength. ‘No girl over sixteen in Britain,’ he’d told Nirmalya one afternoon, like one who, after discussing several exciting possibilities, returns reluctantly to the sheer ordinariness of things, ‘is a virgin.’ This was in response to a stupid question; Nirmalya had asked him, ‘Do you sleep with your girlfriends?’ – for Matthew said he had two, one for weekdays and one for weekends. The reply, an incredible revelation, at first astonished Nirmalya into dumbness; but it also disturbed and excited him physically. Something extraordinary and unmentionable happened to girls in England when they reached sixteen; and the myopic Matthew, in every other way unremarkable, had been inured to it into a state of forgetfulness.

  He was the first English boy Nirmalya properly knew. And, because he was English, he was somewhat exotic, as English books were – exotic not in an antique fairy-tale way, but with toffee and jam, mud and physical effluences. Matthew made Nirmalya blink with nervousness. When he was smaller, he’d been loud and unstoppable, like some volatile foreign toy that has a life of its own. Then Nirmalya grew used to the jack-in-the-box energy and wildness, and realised it was essentially harmless. On the whole, it had to be said that Matthew was the friendlier and more simple of the two.

  At an early age, Nirmalya had entered Matthew’s room on the upper storey and discovered the treasures Philip Dyer had given his son despite being an exacting and sometimes unforgiving father. Among these was a small gramophone, of dimensions that made it look more like a projection of a fantasy than a real object – yet it was not a toy, but played, with precise functionality, Matthew’s limited but munificent record collection. Among these was a song, ‘Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud’, which Matthew put on the record-changer repeatedly, and which seemed to emerge from some hitherto unknown bog of English identity, and which Matthew sang along to in an insistent way, with a personal abandonment that made Nirmalya feel uneasy. But there were other won
ders that filled him with longing during his brief sojourns in Matthew Dyer’s small room; films of the Tramp and Tarzan in bright square packages to be seen at some point on a projector; and thumb-sized toys you could lift in your palm, from which Nirmalya realised that England had the same red postboxes that Bombay had, and the same kind of red double-decker buses.

  Matthew had friends in Bombay, rather shady and stupid-looking, but confident from being ‘experienced’; the sons of some of Philip Dyer’s business contacts who escorted Matthew to, and made him pay for, sunless bars and restaurants and discotheques – the Bombay that lay far beyond Nirmalya’s purview. He’d developed a taste for Hindi films in their company, for their embarrassing exuberance and their helpless bursting into song, their tearful but happy families and prodigious villains; for two and a half hours they gave Matthew something he found nowhere else. Now he nurtured an ambition his parents knew nothing about. ‘I’m going to produce and act in a Hindi film one day.’ Matthew said this with a smile to Nirmalya, but he was quite serious.

  Tina, his sister, went to school in Bombay and was much younger than Nirmalya; eight years old, a child. But the feminine desires and demands that would shape her life had already woken in her, and, almost accidentally, their object was Nirmalya. ‘I want to marry Nirmalya,’ she’d said to her mother. To which Julia Dyer replied coldly: ‘Nirmalya only likes black girls.’ Candid and inquisitive about the mysterious remark, Tina had passed on the statement to Nirmalya: ‘Do you only like black girls, Nirmalya – my mother says you do?’ and Nirmalya was made speechless by the long passage of history newly written, and condensed into an observation that confused him, and barely managed to mumble something. Tina’s desires were genuine and intense, if still out of place at eight. To show her affection, she once lifted her dress in front of Nirmalya and pulled down her panties. Her sudden straightforward insights into Nirmalya sometimes exceeded others’, including his own. ‘I know why you come here,’ she’d said knowingly. ‘You want to see my mother’s mammas.’

  When Nirmalya reported the panty episode to his mother, as if he were relating the charming antics with which all eight-year-olds win over the world, she smiled, but was secretly furious. ‘Is this what working in a company means?’ she said to her husband that night. ‘Is your career so important that our son has to go to that house?’

  From the Dyers the Senguptas ‘inherited’ a cook who made continental dishes, a tiny saintly man, a Malyali called Arthur. Arthur was not his real name. His real name was Thambi. He made chocolate cakes, pancakes, steak and kidney pie, stuffed peppers, fruit trifle, macaroni, Christmas pudding. He’d passed through a procession of European households where he’d minted and reproduced this food with an almost unknowing fidelity. Brought into the world in a village in Kerala, he seemed, oddly, to be born for this task. And, yet again, with this latest departure, he was momentarily marooned, momentarily unsure of who’d value his outlandish gift, but was appropriated immediately by the Senguptas before he had time to make up his mind – and the Senguptas would become the first Indian family to benefit from the skills he claimed to have acquired from those slightly exasperated English memsahibs.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, after the party, when John, and Jumna, his assistant, were still putting away, with stately, valedictory meticulousness, the piles of washed dishes, Nirmalya sneaked out for a walk around Thacker Towers. This part of Cuffe Parade had been ocean not very long ago; it was land that had been fairly recently reclaimed. Upon it had appeared Thacker Towers and its sister skyscrapers: a whole family of tall siblings that didn’t seem to know one another. And Snowman’s Ice Cream Parlour, where different-coloured flavours were frozen inside troughs, a shopping arcade, and the President Hotel with pennants fluttering.

  Walking, he was aware of its newness, as if it were the edge of a young planet. It was a strip of land that had encroached on water. And, because of the encroachment, the water had become flat and grey, like macadam; there was hardly a wave in it. Mornings and evenings, it was, for a while, lacquered by light from a sun that rose and set without comment on this part of the universe. One or two gulls hovered in a puzzled way over the water, as if it were a road stretching to infinity, or at least to the other side of Bombay, where you could see La Terrasse among the buildings.

  If you walked back down the reclaimed land, you came to the fringes of the old Colaba, with its palm trees and its walls on which sea breezes had left shadows, like bruises that had appeared not overnight, but over years. That was another world, where the sea had once ended; where they’d moved to was only a ten-minute walk away. He was intrigued by the the dead calm of the sea around Thacker Towers. This was not the sea he knew, whose waves had the habit of rising twenty or thirty feet during the monsoons and drenching the cars and buses on Marine Drive. Sometimes, as he stood at its edge, like a traveller newly arrived on a planet, it seemed to be an enormous shadow.

  The door was half ajar when Shyamji first arrived at the apartment; so he didn’t have to ring the bell to enter. ‘Didi!’ he cried in his sweet high-pitched voice, and looked blankly at the long corridor on his right. ‘Mallika didi!’ He checked his reflection, when he saw it, in the large mirror above the telephone; he ran his fingers through his hair. Then he saw Nirmalya, in a khadi kurta and jeans, his goatee a shadow beneath the chin.

  ‘Baba,’ he said, ‘look at this apartment – it is wonderful!’

  Mrs Sengupta, who was just coming down the corridor, said, with a playful approximation of a look of concern:

  ‘He doesn’t like it. He tells me he doesn’t want to live here.’

  Shyamji appeared mildly scandalised. He looked closely at Nirmalya.

  ‘But why – why not?’

  ‘I think he liked the old flat – the one in La Terrasse: he liked that better; usko wohi pasand thha.’

  Nirmalya looked uncomfortable and shy, as if everything his mother had said was a joke, and strangely despondent. But Shyamji nodded seriously, like one who was considering the virtues of a dead relative.

  ‘That flat was nice, certainly. But this one . . .’ He was impressed with the little he’d seen of it; it was like a mahal – he’d encountered nothing on this scale before.

  There were flies in the flat. This discovery – of a constant buzzing, a microscopic movement, involved in its own journeys, but coming in your way, challenging and distracting you without even knowing it – this unlooked-for companionship was exasperating. The flies buzzed against windowpanes and flew around your face. You spent a lot of time waving them away. Among other things, they qualified the grand rebuff to Dyer the flat had represented.

  Mrs Sengupta, Nirmalya, even, occasionally, Apurva Sengupta – all attacked them briskly with fly swatters. But it was a losing battle. The flies bred and multiplied in Thacker Towers. And sometimes they sat on surfaces that couldn’t be attacked, like a figurine of the Buddha.

  They put wire gauzes against the windows, delicate and dun-coloured. They did it on the advice of their friend Prashanta Neogi, who’d done the same to keep out mosquitoes from infesting his ground-floor flat in Khar; for that area was home to tanks of stagnant water. ‘It’s the only way to deal with it,’ Prashanta had said grimly, drink in hand. Gauze after gauze was put in wooden frames behind the windows in the Managing Director’s new flat.

  ‘Where do the flies come from?’ A question asked abruptly in the midst of other preoccupations, to do with music, the company, when the buzzing returned to their ears. Because even after the gauze frames, the flat was not flyless.

  ‘It’s that machhimar nagar,’ said Nirmalya, gesturing one morning, prophet-like, toward the sea. The promontory – the fisherman’s colony – that featureless strip of sand. Nirmalya had passed it several times on his louche and aimless walks. Bombay, as everyone had learnt in school, had once been seven fishing islands that had been presented by the Portuguese to the British as a part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry; ‘There was no-thing here then,’
the geography teacher had said, standing before the blackboard, enthralled and relieved for an instant by the sheer recentness of what sometimes seemed eternal: the exercise books, children’s voices, chalk dust. ‘Only these fishermen.’ Walking down Cuffe Parade on his solitary explorations, Nirmalya saw the hull of an upturned boat on the sand. He saw the nets drying against the sun. He smelled the air.

  It was from here that the flies had moved into Thacker Towers.

  Now, paintings were hung in the drawing room. Two Jamini Roys, bought eleven years ago for almost nothing, and the B. Prabha – a terracotta village girl with elongated arms – had adorned the walls of the previous flat and were hung again here. The B. Prabha was newly emerging as a status symbol; a curious example of a painter whose stock wasn’t high among her peers, but whose work was looked upon with increasing tenderness by the affluent. The Senguptas, too, led to her pictures of smoky huts and indecisive village maidens by a gallery owner, viewed them with simple wonder; the painter herself was present, a gentle soul in a white sari with a green border, unsure of whether to maternally cherish or to broker her brood – the family of images – that surrounded her. When Mrs Sengupta praised a picture, she murmured, ‘Thank you,’ and when they asked her the price, she mentioned it – ‘Six thousand’ or ‘This one is five thousand’ – uninsistingly, with dignity, as if she was telling them its name. The Senguptas were as charmed by the artist as they were by the paintings.

  Other pictures were purchased after they moved to this flat – and the cost put down to the ‘soft furnishings’ account. ‘Soft furnishings’ and ‘entertainment allowance’ – these were the two ways in which the company made up for what it couldn’t give its directors through the heavily taxed income, cocooning them from the brunt of the non-company world, making it, somehow, less urgent and real. Yet ‘soft’ – as if the fixtures, in a state of semi-fluidity, resisted the solidity of the Midas touch.