The Immortals (11 page)

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.

N
IRMALYA,
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 and 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.

‘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.

‘I’ll teach him,’ he said reluctantly, addressing Mrs Sengupta, and looked askance at the boy. ‘It will be difficult.’

If Nirmalya hadn’t been Mr Sengupta’s son, Shyamji would have thought the question outrageous. He gazed at Nirmalya with forbearance. He frowned. He was bewildered by the question; he was also slightly amused.

‘These ghazals are – cheap,’ Nirmalya said, implacable in his spectacles and long hair. ‘And look at the way they sing bhajans these days! Bhajans used to be sung in the temple.’

Shyamji assumed an expression of seriousness. ‘All our music comes from the temple, baba,’ he said softly. He glanced at his watch, to check when Mrs Sengupta would come out of her room. ‘The ease with which I sing these taans,’ he confided – because he’d just given Nirmalya some vocal exercises – ‘comes from great labour. I used to practise until I spat blood from my throat.’ The Arabian Sea glittered outside. Leaning forward on the sofa, he shook his head in consternation at the tenacity he’d had in the past; this other, somewhat uncomfortable and raw self he’d been.

Among Shyamji’s students were a Sikh businessman’s daughter; a minister’s son; the wife of an Air India official; a young student who lived several miles beyond what they thought of as ‘Bombay’, in Ghatkopar; and Biswajeet, a young, tall Bengali from Calcutta, a ghazal artiste on the make. This group – there were other groups and other sittings – sat in a democratic circle round Shyamji twice a week in the Sikh businessman’s flat in Thacker Towers. The flat’s decor was innovative; the designer had taken his or her inspiration from hotels or restaurants; there was a predominance of red in the sitting room, and a couple of steps led to a raised level, beyond which intimate, sunken spaces had been created for sofas and tables.

But the session with Shyamji didn’t take place in the sitting room, which never seemed occupied by anyone, but in a small room. The Sikh’s daughter, Priya Gill, was a mixture of the sensuous and the studious; always dressed in a salwar kameez, almost unnaturally fair, frizzy hair drawn tight, myopic, glasses perched delicately on her nose. When she sang, you barely heard her; she whispered in her corner of the room. Shyamji didn’t point out to her that she wasn’t quite singing; he seemed to hear her perfectly. The minister’s son, dressed in a white kurta like the minister, looked like his father – except that the father, Baburao Khemkar, was fat; Raj Khemkar wasn’t. He seemed strangely removed from the configurations of destinies and interests – politicians’, people’s, the state’s – that forever attended his father’s life. Baburao’s picture was in the papers every day; his eyes widened into orbs when he laughed or became angry. Raj Khemkar sang with gusto; this, too, was strange, because those who sang ghazals erred on the side of delicacy and dreaminess. The gusto might be inherited from Baburao Khemkar.