Mallika Sengupta’s voice, for what reason she didn’t know, had the rare devotional timbre. She was not religious; she loved life; but when she sang, the true note of religion and renunciation sounded in her voice, as if from the memory of another existence she’d led in some other world. Even now, when she was quite out of practice from the socialising in the evenings, something of Meera’s illogical desire came to life in her rather guileless singing.
He was friends with his parents. When they went to the Taj for their cocktails and dinners, he went with them in high spirits. Of course, he wasn’t invited; he said goodbye to them in the lobby in which everything shone. He couldn’t help feeling at home in five-star hotels; he’d known them since he was a child. He wandered about, untidy but at ease, a paradoxical master of the terrain; no one challenged him.
After twenty minutes, he walked out and down the wide steps, past the Sikh doormen who’d not long ago deferentially opened the doors of the Mercedes. He first went down the promenade, where couples were leaning against the balustrade toward the water; sometimes there were groups of male friends in limp but apparently unshakeable postures of lassitude, ten- or eleven-year-old soft drink or peanut vendors hoarsely engaged in enterprise; the old and the new Taj looked down at Nirmalya. ‘Mata pita se toont gaya jo dhaga’: Meera’s words in the bhajan, ‘The thread that tied me to Mother and Father has snapped’, could never come true for Nirmalya. He would be lost without his parents. All he had were these snatched hours of solitude: his parents, now, might have been in another city.
There was no part of the by-lanes around the Taj that was not alive; the pavement around the Salvation Army guest house, around Barretto and Shepherd’s, tailors, where his father had his suits made, around the antique shop. This coughing, whispering life frightened him, but he went out searching for it. The cheap hotels behind the Taj, with old doors and ancient lifts; the beggars, in a huddle of amputated limbs and beedis, beneath the Gateway of India – from there he went back past the Eros cinema all the way to the Gothic building where classical music recitals took place, and easy-to-ignore exhibitions; it was not far from his college; the pavement here was empty but lit.
A woman was sitting on the steps of the building, before a locked door. She was dressed like a fisherwoman; a basket next to her contained clusters of bananas piled on top of one another.
‘Come here,’ she was saying. Her teeth were betel-stained; she smelled strongly of drink; it was like a gust – a soft, sour mist. Although he’d seen women drinking at parties, he couldn’t remember alcohol on a woman’s breath before; he was modestly shocked. She was smiling at him with a desolating expectation; she didn’t seem to recognise him for what he was, or at all care: his gentleness, his background, which she could never imagine, his upbringing.
‘You want to feel my breast?’
‘How much?’ he asked without emotion, calm with a detached, febrile composure.
‘Ten rupees.’
This porch was bathed in light sponsored by a reputed business family. Next to them, on the main road, the sides of cars glimmered as they went by swiftly. The spot was bright and unshielded, and he and she were completely visible, but he was sure that no one could see them. She, too, seemed to share the same conviction in her own unmindful way. He sat down next to her. The city closed ranks; ignored them completely. Her breasts, fair but puckered, were already partly out of the blouse; he could see their outline. Once, only, a policeman went past, stopped to scowl unthreateningly for a second, and then walked on as if he were in a hurry to get somewhere.
Back in the Taj, his parents were saying goodbye to an insufferable executive, a man who looked and behaved younger than his years, and who probably saw youthfulness as an irresistible doorway to success. There was the nervous, final eruption of laughter with which these farewells were rounded off, gaiety which could be heard from a long way off. When his mother spotted Nirmalya among the insomniacs loitering in the lobby amidst the opulent, beached furniture, shambolic Arabs and mildly enquiring Europeans and others who seemed to believe it was the middle of the day, it was as if she’d seen a mirage, some beloved phantom who returned to preoccupy her day and night. Something in him, too, was confirmed when he saw his parents; an old and familiar friendship, a trust that had been forged probably in some other birth, some other lifetime, a mutual complicity, that still survived in spite of the distance that had recently separated him from them: he knew he could never completely abandon their world.
‘So – how was the party?’ he asked, as if it, the party, were a necessary diversion in a relentless journey through the ages. His mother, as she walked with him in new-found contentment to the car, described to him the conversations and exchanges with a peculiar, equanimous gusto, for it had dawned on her suddenly that none of it mattered.
The next morning he woke up, and the previous night’s foray receded; the world he knew – his parents’ world, which he could pretend to take the greatest liberties with – came back to him in a deceptive neighbourliness. He went to the balcony near his parents’ room, where they sometimes had breakfast: now empty and sunlight-bright. He couldn’t bear to look at the bedroom; he loathed its decor, its drunken wallpaper. He obdurately looked the other way. Much of the view was the same as the one he’d had from La Terrasse, except it was closer up: the sea beyond the Gateway of India, the dome – the size and colour of an immense pincushion – of the old Taj, before and behind which he’d walked last night, the packed buildings, the islands of Elephanta and Trombay, which, on certain days, did not appear. He blinked at the sun; his eyes were still getting used to the light. That old dream, in which a deluge had risen titanically from behind the islands and covered everything before it, had never left him; and so he regarded the scene with a degree of scepticism, as if it had been hastily put together, as if he were being subjected, once again, to a little deceit that was put on, specially, every morning. The small cars on the Marine Drive disregarded the possibility of apocalypse.
His group comprised an old school friend or two; people brought together by enthusiasms that waxed variably: William Burroughs – more his reputation, and his peers’, than the actual work. (In Nirmalya’s mind, the name was forever proximate with that of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and therefore had a hint of the unclothed white man and hanging vines and of the mystery of Africa.)
And two Rs: rock music and Rimbaud. And
On the Road
– a land of hobos and destitutes, and wisdom gained through bumming. Nirmalya was the only one among them who was no longer interested in the fantasy; he had already lost interest in rock music; he had tried to read, without reward,
A Season in Hell
, pausing only to wonder at the young man’s appetite for words. He was only a little older than Rimbaud had been then, or perhaps the same age; but he felt more tranquil than the Frenchman, changed by his new sense of his country, his air of having journeyed through its millennial blossoming.
His friends were all oddballs in their way; most of them planned to go to America some time in the future and study management and ‘lay’ American women. They had a combination of East Coast mannerisms and snobberies and a San Franciscan carnality; at home, they spoke in their mother-tongues with the parents that hovered in a bewildered way about the house. To their surprise, Nirmalya had begun to burble occasionally about Meera and Tulsi and Surdas. To the others, these sounded too much like relatives from childhood; faintly supernatural, and reproachful, as such relatives are. Only Kabir, among them, was ‘hip’, because he’d been taken up by Ezra Pound. Kabir, the orphan discovered and raised by weavers, they discussed in small doses.
Rajiv Desai’s flat in Breach Candy was a meeting place. When Nirmalya and Abhay Sen and Sanjay Nair rang the doorbell at four o’clock, Rajiv – the gangly, light-eyed Rajiv, who strummed the guitar, scored with girls – was asleep. He was in a short kurta and pyjamas; he had, at the moment, a crumpled look common to affluent children.
‘Shit,’ said Sanjay Nair.
Sanjay, wiry and bespectacled, had seen the hard-on underneath Rajiv’s pyjamas. Rajiv looked down, surprised by something that flouted his rules of governance. ‘Shit,’ he said, getting up. It poked out when he stood up. He rushed into the bathroom as if struck by diarrhoea.
‘I often wake up with one of those,’ he confessed when he came back.
‘We
all
wake up with one,’ said Nair.
‘Guys get them when they’re hanged, can you believe it?’ said Abhay, the short, bright one; his source was, unsurprisingly, Samuel Beckett.
‘What shit!’
The topic turned to masturbation. Rajiv Desai transformed it into a game, like golf, that some people could apparently play better than others.
‘How far can you shoot?’ he challenged, now fully awake, sitting, like a yogi, cross-legged on the carpet. The others seemed puzzled and unnerved by this query; it hadn’t occurred to them that achievement could be measured and graded in this way; realisation dawned gradually.
‘I’ve gone three feet – four feet even!’ bragged Rajiv. The others grinned in shock; Nirmalya thought of the state of the toilet in the aftermath of these eruptions.
‘OK, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever shagged to?’ asked Rajiv. They were now being asked to mine into their darkest, inadmissible recesses, to bring to light what they’d rather deny.
‘What’s the worst thing
you’ve
done it to?’ said Nair.
Rajiv Desai had been waiting for this question. He glanced quickly around him and said with a sheepish grin:
‘The Bible.’ Although the appearance of God in this conversation was no more real to them than the appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost would have been on a theatre set, it still discomfited them with its hint of malevolence and mystery. They were both impressed and embarrassed by the lengths to which Rajiv would go in his solitary quest for pleasure.
‘What’s there in the Bible, yaar?’ someone asked.
‘The Book of Job, yaar,’ said Rajiv, casual and lascivious. ‘Job goes to his daughter and sleeps with her. I found it and got turned on.’
‘What shit! Where’s that?’ asked Nirmalya.
The tall Desai loped to a drawer and rummaged and took out an old school copy of the book in which, at an early age, Nirmalya had first encountered that stentorian voice, ordering Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He had never quite forgotten that incorporeal, irrefutable demand.
‘Wait a sec, let me find it,’ said Rajiv, hurriedly turning the fragile pages and poring over the tiny print.
Rajiv, who was now at the Sydenham College of Commerce, knew even less about Indian classical music than Nirmalya had a year ago; he, with his no-nonsense, primate-like, terrestrial concerns, knew nothing about Indian culture. He thought people who went around talking about ‘Indian’ culture oily and pretentious.
In school, again and again, they’d memorised the dates of conquests and kingdoms, Ashoka and Chandragupta, Akbar and Shahjahan; their eyes had rested unseeingly, a hundred times, on faded reproductions of the Red Fort and the Ashoka chakra, emblems that were meant to evolve into fingerprints of their identity, and appeared almost as smudged as fingerprints on the cheap paper of the textbook; they’d read
The Merchant of Venice
, and had never been sure whether to pity Shylock or detest him; both Edgar Allan Poe and G.K. Chesterton had spoken to them, like voices in a seance, one frenzied and uncontrollable, making the classroom giggle and shudder, the other as sweet and reasonable as he was in life. Khushwant Singh too sometimes materialised on their horizon in a puff of smoke, half mischievous clown, half oriental magician. But the Indian poets of antiquity and thereafter, the court poets of emperors and mendicant singers who walked barefoot through the ancient kingdoms – Kalidasa, Kabir, Chandidas, Jayadeva – they’d barely heard of, let alone read or been taught about. And now Nirmalya found it more and more difficult to communicate to his friends the change that was coming upon him as he opened himself to these ragas, and to the telegraphic declarations in Braj Bhasha of the soul’s longing written by the nameless or pseudonymous composers of khayals, not to speak of the devotional poets – this was a secret education. His emergence from school had landed him, almost accidentally, in the midst of this indescribable period of learning.
At first he told no one among his Breach Candy friends. Then, quietly – and, later, with increasing stubbornness, a near-stupid insistence – Nirmalya began to preach to Rajiv Desai, a steady undertone of grinding dissent in their usual ecstatic declamations about Nashville and the opening chords of ‘Horse With No Name’ that maddened Desai. He feigned boredom, even imbecility; he made strange faces and looked the other way. At first, he’d taken this talk about ragas and ustads and shrutis as a great betrayal on Nirmalya’s part, because Nirmalya, of his friends, had been an erudite supporter of the blues at a time when every object in the universe – not only music, but vegetables, festivities, clothes – was being transmogrified into a condition called ‘disco’. To turn away at this testing time from those magnificent sounds of impecunious Chicago to something that was so formless and god-desiring – it seemed to Rajiv Desai not so much perverse as dishonest.
But sometimes Desai almost gave in; it was as if that secret universe had collided with him, and he had to right himself, shake his head clear, and continue quickly on his way as if nothing had happened. One evening, in a car, Nirmalya sang him two lines from an ancient K.L. Saigal ghazal, his voice sweetly rising above the traffic.