The Immortals Page 8

  His mother went to the Cottage Industries, wandering aimlessly and liberally on its three levels amidst handicrafts and handlooms, children’s playthings made in remote regions of the nation scattered here and there like debris, the dolls limp with concealed life, the horses fished out of some imaginary battlefield and left stranded; she noticed some Moghul miniatures – figures on a white surface.

  ‘Madam, this is ivory,’ said the saleswoman apologetically.

  Ivory! But wasn’t ivory illegal – Mrs Sengupta hardly saw it these days; it was like going down the tunnel of time and glimpsing something decadent and vanished. No, not illegal; but rare. Mrs Sengupta stared for a couple of moments at the figures: the woman in the brocaded top, the man in an ornate cap, the ageing man holding a rose, the small meeting inside a durbar.

  The four miniatures were put down to ‘soft furnishings’.

  The miniatures were hung up on one of the walls of the drawing room, not far from a wooden cabinet that housed the music system with its frozen turntable and the muscular wires at the back. Nirmalya guessed that one was Jehangir, the other figure Noor Jehan. The middle-aged person, his whole figure, from top to bottom, in profile, was clearly the Emperor Akbar; or so Nirmalya presumed from the man’s appearance. He seemed content, standing in the void of a clearing, pausing for a moment in what looked to Nirmalya like wintry daylight.

  Standing alone in the half-empty flat, Nirmalya wondered if the nearest one could come to that kingly world was to be someone like his father – a Managing Director. He saw before him, in his mind’s eye, his father in his black suit, going out to the office. Did he feel some of Akbar’s poised contentment? Because Akbar, in that painting, standing indecisively, seemed not only to be looking, but listening to something. Did his father, too, secretly, listen to the world?

  A woman called Shalini Mathur came to tinker with and reorganise the flowers in the vases twice every week. She was an expert flower arranger – she had a diploma in flower arrangement – and the company had hired her to do something pretty and slightly different with the flowers every few days in the Chief Executive’s flat; to involve these inert, fragrant objects in a delicately changing composition. Shalini came in at about ten thirty in the morning, and began to work; she smiled sweetly at no one in particular, and hardly said anything. She sheared the stalks, trimmed leaves; the vases were always surrounded, while she bent over them, by an autumnal precipitation of disposable plant-life. Pleasant but unremarkable to look at, with thin hair and the efficient but somewhat provisional air of a working woman, always in light chiffon saris that fell upon her like a rag, and rather unexpectedly large-breasted. When she spoke, she spoke to Nirmalya’s mother, briefly, and almost out of earshot. Nirmalya couldn’t remember having heard her voice.

  She leaned forward to place the vases according to some tangible geometry of space, tangible only to her, like a web. The effect was a sort of Japanese calm. When she leaned, the dwarfed aanchal of her sari fell from place; her breasts were full and large.

  Jumna, revealing her mauve gums, said, ‘She has very big “ball”. Look, look at Arthur – dekho isko, baba. He keeps leaving the kitchen and going into the drawing room.’ It was true. Arthur would shuffle out into the drawing room, look blankly about him for a few seconds, while Shalini, in the distance, a mixture of professional seriousness and divine obliviousness, hovered behind the flowers, and go back to the kitchen. ‘“Baap re, what big ball, what big ball!” he keeps saying,’ reported Jumna. And, having heard this report, Nirmalya too found himself gravitating towards the drawing room once or twice, casual and anonymous in kurta and pyjamas, with an air of high-minded absentness that recently-turned voyeurs have. Shalini neither acknowledged nor ignored him; her eyes remained downcast but weren’t steely or unfriendly. She didn’t bristle; she just stiffened slightly, almost imperceptibly as a plant might – partly out of respect for the fact that the ghostly passer-by lurking past was the Managing Director’s son; and partly . . . it was something else that was never quite brought to light.

  Arthur, with quick small hands (he was a tiny man, well below five feet), made food common in storybooks – cottage pie, pancakes, honey roast ham. But, because the Senguptas didn’t eat this kind of food regularly, he found himself with nothing to do. So he became a savant in the kitchen, and browbeat the other servants. ‘Don’t throw them away!’ he ordered Jumna, after the flowers Shalini had arranged had shrivelled up, and were gathered funereally from the vases. He fried the petals diligently in masala and oil, and sometimes the servants had no other lunch. ‘Do you know what he gave us to eat today?’ complained Jumna to Mrs Sengupta one afternoon. ‘Flowers. Phool. I can’t eat them,’ she said glumly, and stuck out a bit of pink tongue. ‘They’re bitter.’ ‘Flowers?’ asked Mrs Sengupta, astonished. ‘Why?’ ‘He says they’re good for you.’ ‘But you can’t give them flowers, Arthur,’ said Mrs Sengupta gently; the old man nodded, his graven, bespectacled face, whose features were quite perfect, expressionless. It was true he was remarkably agile at seventy-four. He believed in the virtues of flower and root.

  He knew some English; this made him comic and grand in everyone’s eyes, and almost incredible, like a member of the British royalty. One day, when Nirmalya had gone to the Dyers’, Matthew had told him, ‘Arthur’s made a chocolate cake for Tina’s birthday.’ ‘Really?’ said Nirmalya. ‘Yes, I’ll show it to you.’ He took the boy to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and showed Nirmalya a large cake on the second rack, spotlit briefly by the fridge’s light, chilled and sealed by its weather. In white, stylish icing, it had inscribed upon it ‘Happy Birthday Dina’. ‘But . . .’ said Nirmalya. His mouth opened in an o. Matthew put a finger to his lips; he closed the fridge judiciously. Arthur called Dyer’s daughter ‘Dina’, and that was who she would be, for all purposes, this birthday.

  Shyamji had no real interest in objets d’art; pictures of saints or gods or film stars he might take a second look at, but of art for its own sake he didn’t have a strong conception. But he was staring at the small durbar scene with interest: not necessarily because it was beautiful, but as if he recognised the people in it.

  ‘Did didi get this?’ he asked. ‘It is new, na?’

  Nirmalya nodded.

  ‘Didi really has an eye for things,’ said Shyamji, looking about him, seeming to take in all the decorations in a glance. Then he became absent-minded, as if he were considering some distant object, something that wasn’t in the room. He waited for Mrs Sengupta to come out into the hall.

  Nirmalya had become interested in this man: Shyamji. He still couldn’t quite make him out: he’d been observing him from a distance – and listening to him sing, of course. He came almost every other day to the flat; a man who was obviously a master of his craft, and who knew he was one. But not ill-at-ease among the furniture, the mirrors, the accessories to luxury; quite in his element, almost unconscious of his surroundings. Nirmalya was moved by his singing: it was like a spray of rainwater. The phrases were delicate and transient, and almost never, he noticed, sung in the same way twice. Shyamji’s ability to spin these beautiful musical phrases out of nothing, thoughtlessly – even, at times, callously, glancing quickly at his wristwatch – was, to Nirmalya, at once wonderful and perplexing.

  Nirmalya had formed all kinds of ideas about art, about artists; although he could see that Shyamji was a great artist, he was trying to reconcile him to what his own idea of an artist was. Here was a man in a loose white kurta and pyjamas; a man who put oil in his hair. And, although his music sometimes sounded inspired to Nirmalya, a man who seemed to have no idea of, or time for, inspiration. A man who undertook his teaching, his singing, almost as – a job.

  At sixteen, having recently entered Junior College, Nirmalya knew what he wanted to do. He had bought a copy of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy; he carried it with him on buses, occasionally reading or rereading a passage. He also possessed a copy of Being and Nothingness; he’d never read beyond
three pages in the introduction – they had taken him a week to read, the dense paragraphs were at once numbing and vertiginous – but the words in the title – ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ – echoed in his head; they seeped into his thoughts. He’d recently become aware of the fact that he existed; and he wanted to get to the bottom of the fathomless puzzle of this new, undeniable truth.

  Shyamji fitted neither the model of the Eastern artist, nor that of the Western musician. The Eastern artist was part religious figure, the Western part rebel; and Shyamji seemed to be neither. Shyamji wanted to embrace Bombay. He wanted to partake, it seemed to Nirmalya, of the good things of life; what he wanted was not very unlike what his father or his friends’ fathers wanted. Nirmalya couldn’t fit this in with the kind of person he thought Shyamji should be.

  It was at this time he’d become interested in music; now, when he was poised between wanting to study philosophy, or economics (as his father and his relatives would have preferred him to). ‘Indian classical music’ – the rash of winter concerts in the city was where he’d discovered it; the oboe-like sound of the sarod, a musician in kurta and pyjamas crested upon his instrument; society ladies, saris dipping at the pelvis, the navel peering out with such a gaze of intimacy that he returned it in public; the husbands in silk kurtas, businessmen and executives, wearing ritual fancy dress: the mandatory pretence at being musical. Here, at these concerts, in the midst of this display, he went through the slow, private, educative process, full of humiliation and excitement, of identifying ragas; of mistaking one for another, of being moved by a melody he didn’t know. He stirred with recognition at the unmistakable ones, the ones with infallible preambles, Jaijaiwanti and Des; then, ragas like Puriya Dhanashree, with their seemingly antique inaccessibility – his ear began to domesticate them too; they remained mysterious, but became part of his life in the evening. Another discovery came to him with these – that very few people in the audience could tell one raga from another. In fact, the audience constantly threatened to come between him and the music; however sublime the music was, it was as if he couldn’t entirely enter its doorway because of his alienated awareness of other people. And yet, everyone, himself included, had, in one way or another, an air of proprietory wisdom about the proceedings. He sat there, appearing to look at no one, but actually noticing more than you’d have thought he had. Once, he’d spotted one of his father’s executive friends, whom he’d seen twice at a party at home, a head of a company, in a bright yellow kurta, quite unrecognisable. The man hadn’t seen Nirmalya. He went in a torn white cotton kurta and jeans whose bottoms were frayed and hung with threads; he glowered at the audience as he sat by himself.

  Sometimes, he’d ask his mother to accompany him. ‘Ma, come on! I’m going to listen to Kishori Amonkar.’

  ‘Oh, all right!’ she’d say; secretly pleased. This honour he’d bestowed on her – his attention – was a recent development, a volte-face from the years of attention he’d demanded as a child. It was music that had brought about the change; a willingness now to share with her, whom he’d promoted without warning to the status of an equal, the phase of discovery.

  He’d ignore her during the performance, hardly speaking to her. Sometimes, she’d fall asleep, tired after a bad night, calmed suddenly by the music. But they were united by the contempt they felt for the audience.

  ‘Look at these fools!’ she’d say.

  She had the unimpeachable superiority, the spiritual unimpeachability, of one who was deeply gifted but whose gift was a secret. She pretended to be a chief executive’s wife, no more. She whispered in his ear, ‘This music is besura,’ when the sitar player hit a false note. And when she fell asleep – and this happened only when the music was at its most spontaneous and transporting – Nirmalya, although a little embarrassed, preferred his mother’s regression into this childlike, unconscious simplicity to the strenuous exhibition of appreciation by the people in the audience.

  Later, after the performance and the applause, there was the long procession outward of smiling, redolent couples, the Deshpandes, Boses, Nanavatis, milling gently behind each other, readying themselves to return to appointed bedtimes and dinners, their pleased stupefaction at the music merging into their general air of contentment. Nirmalya and his mother – hardly aware, as she mingled with the people approaching the exit, of her own short slumber – might run into someone on the way out. ‘Ah, Mrs Sengupta!’ The tone was familiar, friendly, a little condescending.

  The boy brooded in the background as the hall finally emptied, recognising neither the interlocutor nor his mother.

  At first, he couldn’t understand the singing; the human voice was at once too intimate and foreign to listen to. But he found ‘instrumental music’ pleasant. At the same time, he was slightly repulsed by it. The sweet plucked and pulled notes of the sitar, the liquid rush of sound and excitement the tabla created: all these were already familiar to him – like a line from a poem taught in school that’s all but lost its meaning through study and repetition – from bucolic scenes in Hindi films, from government documentaries about road- and dam-building, even from close-up pictures of Mrs Gandhi cutting ribbons or welcoming foreign dignitaries. These images never quite left him, even when he thought he was wholly absorbed, attentive, listening.

  The hall itself – whichever it happened to be – was a strange place; a part of the city, yet with its own weather, seasons, and an eternal daylight in which the audience, once the doors opened, trooped in and took their seats. It was this, perhaps, that made it possible, one day, for Ali Akbar Khan to play Lalit in the evening. The ageing ustad on the stage, struggling with his instrument, his bald pate almost like a sitar’s gourd, perfect; producing the notes of Lalit at six o’clock in the evening. A few people stirred uneasily. Nirmalya wasn’t unduly troubled; he knew, in an academic way, that Lalit was a morning raga, but he still couldn’t quite recognise it, and certainly hadn’t internalised it; he still didn’t associate Lalit with the first rays of daylight and a certain birdsong. Anyway, he couldn’t recall when he’d seen the first rays of daylight, and he didn’t care. A few people in the audience leaned over to each other and murmured, ‘Has the Ustad gone senile?’ The morning raga unfolded. The ustad’s face was calm like a Buddha’s, and stubborn as a child’s.

  For two days afterwards, he carried this experience of Lalit in the evening inside him like something undigested. Is anything possible in 1980? he asked himself. After a few days, he told Shyamji what Ali Akbar Khan had done. Shyamji shook his head.

  ‘How could he do that?’ he said, very grave. ‘It cannot be done.’

  But Nirmalya could see from the exaggerated solemnity of Shyamji’s expression that his mind was elsewhere.

  * * *

  NIRMALYA, unobtrusively but firmly rejecting his father’s Mercedes, stood at a bus stop with The Story of Philosophy in his hand. He didn’t know where he was going. Sometimes he’d go to the college to attend a lecture; to meet a few friends. Sometimes, as if there was an invisible ban on him, he’d just hang about one of the entrances, or roam the environs thoughtfully. If the Mercedes came to pick him up, he ignored it; sometimes it followed him, twenty paces behind him, discreet, trying absurdly to merge with the background, while he walked on, apparently nonchalant, in his khadi kurta and churidar, past peanut vendors and hurrying peons, at one with Mahatma Gandhi Road’s disorganised street-life.

  He sat in a bus, reading The Story of Philosophy; he had trouble subduing his long hair when the bus moved and the breeze came in through the window; he sometimes had to pin it down with one hand. But he read adamantly; and reread the chapter on Croce several times. The work of art precedes actual composition, Croce said; it must be realised in the artist’s head, in the brain, before he actually commits it to paper or to canvas. This seemed irrefutable from Nirmalya’s own experiences of trying to write poetry; that there was an ideal in his head that he tried his best to incarnate on the page. Meanwhile, people kept coming in a
nd getting off, young Goan women in dresses, college students, Gujarati accountants, men who might be mechanics or drivers, chattering couples. When he arrived at his stop, he’d get off and walk to the tall building with the enormous flat.

  ‘He wants to learn from me? Shastriya sangeet?’ Shyamji didn’t seem particularly pleased; he was disoriented by the demand. There was puzzlement on his face. No one wanted to learn classical music from him; in fact, he had no disciple in classical music. His son, Sanjay, wanted to learn the guitar; they were going to procure one from Furtado’s. Shyamji’s wife wanted Sanjay to be a music arranger: ‘There’s money in music arrangement.’

  ‘Shastriya sangeet?’ said Shyamji, as if he’d not heard the term for years. That difficult continent – why would someone from this world want to tread it? The request only confirmed the boy’s oddity to him; most other young men and women in Thacker Towers and its neighbouring skyscrapers – he now had a sizeable clientele – wanted to learn ghazals; love songs in simple Urdu (they preferred simple to difficult Urdu) about wine, liaisons, grief. The older women, wives of diamond merchants and exporters, liked to sing bhajans, chanting the names of Radha and Krishna, slipping in and out of tune. And Shyamji had embraced these forms: not only because they’d pay the rent, and for his son’s and daughters’ weddings (when they came), but because they opened an avenue into the sort of life he wanted – to taste, to partake of. Shastriya sangeet had given him and his father little for the hours, the months, the years they’d put into it. He baulked at being reminded of the fact. These mildly touching songs were a form of currency; classical music – shastriya sangeet – a responsibility.