T
HE
B
OMBAY
Chamber of Commerce was one hundred and three years old, and though nothing now could match the contented but animated milling of suited gentlemen and their wives that the hundredth-anniversary celebrations had comprised – like a reunion of heads of companies and heads-to-be, a reunion in which everyone, magically, conveniently, seemed to have fulfilled their early promise – still, the captains of industry and their bedecked spouses gathered in the basement hall of the Oberoi with their enthusiasm undiminished. A long, breathy speech was made by the President, an amiable duffer, while people laughed both at his jokes and at him, and he beamed at them and continued, relentless; and then the speech ended and everyone was standing, and, in the crowd, there was a subtle insinuation of men in white shirts and black trousers with trays of canape´s, receding at the moment of the sighting. Two days ago, Mr Makhija, secretary of the Chamber, had phoned them; Makhija, whose slow, courteous phone calls and reminders they’d grown used to in the past few years, a doorkeeper to the world of commerce, neither outside it nor, thankfully, quite of it. ‘Please do come, sir,’ he had said, a kindly long-distance spy on their lives, and hectorer. There Mrs Sengupta stood, suddenly having lost her husband; no sign of Makhija either. She held a wine glass half full of mango juice in one hand. The crowd in the large, outstretching room had broken up into circles of men making toasts and telling each other jokes; she was surrounded by people she knew and faces she recognised – it had almost become a habit, this cursory, neutral assignment of names, characteristics, and positions to certain features – and suddenly, far away, she spotted her husband, radiant – he had hardly aged at all – holding a drink aloft nebulously (he drank deceptively, without involvement, and would sip self-importantly and misleadingly from this one glass all morning), his hair as impeccably black as when, on his wife’s urgings, he’d begun to dye it twenty-five years ago, only a plume of white in the front held steady all these years like a flame. He was eager as ever, ignoring the bearer of canape´s hovering fruitlessly next to him, his expression charged with a strange simplicity and expectancy, and she could not believe that they were not in the middle of things, so impossibly far away the limits of the horizon and emptiness seemed; surely two lifetimes were needed to do justice and give proper shape to, to learn from and perfect, a career of what even now felt like promise and youthfulness? For they were not inheritors of property or fortunes, as the business families were; there was nothing static about what they symbolised; for the Senguptas, the career and the life were what they made of them, constantly surprising, a constant, strenuous, but genuine exploration, and everything that happened before or after these years in the company would be marks announcing what had essentially been their life. They would then disappear, in a way it looked the business families never could. Their life would become memory; their own, and in the minds of people like the ones she ran into at these anniversaries, an immense variety but really a narrow range of faces that seemed, with hindsight, to have been put together, unforgettably, by chance.
It was a time crowded with celebrations. In November, the great, bizarre event was Chanchal Mansukhani’s older son’s marriage in a fake village specially created on the lawns on Wodehouse Road, walking distance from the Regal Cinema. People were getting out of cars, urgent men slamming their doors, slow women in organza saris, unsteady on their feet in their jewellery, eager to confer not only wedding gifts but legitimacy upon this man. The Senguptas arrived in a state of minor distractedness and excitement. Chanchal Mansukhani stood, in black suit and dark spotted tie, welcoming the guests, smiling at them whether he recognised them or not, doing namaskar, sometimes taking the palms of their hands uninsistingly in his own, not holding them, but cradling them for a few moments. The donning of the ubiquitous black suit was almost ironical; it was as if it was meant to remind you that he’d made his fortune in textiles, beating to number one place in the market a far better-educated rival of a distinguished political and business lineage; and it was meant to adorn the myth, that this was the son of a man who’d arrived with no belongings at the Victoria Terminus soon after Partition, and who’d worked as both shoeshine boy and coolie. Queueing up to shake hands with him, the creator of Mansukhani Suitings and Shirtings, Apurva Sengupta couldn’t decide whether he was a monster or an angel; he had a boneless posture, his edges were rounded and blunted, and the compassionate, maternal smile of a man who’d grown up in a large, disorderly family, an ensconcing microcosm, played on his lips. There were rumours (whether they had credibility or not it was difficult to say) that he’d used hit men and that murder had been useful to him during his remarkably uplifting – for doesn’t everyone want the man who reigns to have once been like one of the beggars on the road outside? – rise. How many mill-hands, their means of redressal completely at an end, the tall chimneys empty of smoke, were sitting at home or in idle, despondent groups playing cards because of him? Wedding music filled the background, and returned to them optimistically in the middle of their own words; not the shehnai, but some sort of taped, assuaging expression of the human voice. After the muttered but gracious mantra of the ‘Congratulations’, Apurva and Mallika Sengupta felt they’d dissociated themselves from their host, and they wandered about the lawn entirely as if they’d come here on their own business – although they’d continue to talk about the wedding, with irony and pleasure, for a few days. They stopped at stalls offering kababs; others were distributing, equally generously, but to their surprise, Bombay junk food. Her husband was partly in a trance, with a faint smile on his face, as if there was still a possibility that something might happen. She was possessed by curiosity; she was never brave enough to eat street food except in five-star hotels. She tugged purposefully at his coat sleeve, a small, charming plea (he was elsewhere, and hardly aware); ‘Come, let’s go there,’ she whispered, pulling him like a small, unappeasable girl towards the pani puris.
Mr Wilson, from the lower echelons of the company’s personnel department, arrived at the flat late one morning. Having been let in, he stood there sheepishly. Then, almost casually, with the enquiring look of a man in a museum, he strolled into the main hall.
News was relayed down the long corridor to the main bedroom, by Arthur, then Jumna, then another, that Wilson was here. Finally, Mrs Sengupta, fresh from a bath, equanimous for the moment in a tangail, came out from the corridor into the sunlight of the drawing room.
She knew Wilson; as far as she was concerned, he was an odd-job man. When something needed to be done – when she needed to find out if the flight her husband was on was delayed; or to book a private taxi because the driver hadn’t turned up – he was the one she got in touch with. He was a big, burly man who spoke English in his brief polite responses with a South Indian accent, rolling his r’s and everything else softly; and he got the job done.
‘Madam,’ he said, apologetic, but also as if he were sharing an unpleasant secret, ‘I must have an inventory done before you move. Which things are belonging to the company, which things are not . . .’
‘Wilson,’ she said quickly, ‘are you mad? What are you talking about?’
In all these years, his sanity had never been questioned. He was wounded, but he was also ashamed.
‘I’m sorry, madam. What can I do?’ he said, sullen and obdurate, falling back on the phrase that was a favourite whenever he was in a sticky situation with his superiors. ‘I have orders from office.’
Tentatively, Wilson began to walk around the drawing room, where he’d never been before, either as visitor or guest, with a notepad and pen in his hand. ‘It’s a disgrace,’ said Mallika Sengupta in a clear voice, as the figure moved further away. ‘I will complain.’
‘These will stay,’ he thought, looking at a rosewood cabinet and the large L-shaped sofa with a qualified but proprietorial eagle eye, as if he’d formed some sort of kinship with them. He barely glanced at the Grecian urnlike table lamps. At a huge stretch of carpet, deep and ruddy, he paused, undecided, and glanced at the paper in his hand. He was in a peculiarly emotional mood, at once self-effacing and blithely, insularly unstoppable. The only time he smiled slightly was at three photographs on a rosewood shelf, a close-up of Mrs Sengupta’s face from ten years ago, her charming uneven teeth showing in her blissful smile, and another of Nirmalya when he was eleven and pudgy, proudly wearing a zip-up T-shirt a relative had sent him from Europe, squinting unthreateningly (those were his last days without spectacles) at the sunlight, with parents on either side, against a wilderness that was actually Elephanta island; then another one in which Mr and Mrs Sengupta and nine-year-old Nirmalya, dressed for the Delhi winter, were posing beside a severe woman with a patient but unprevaricating gaze, who turned out to be Indira Gandhi. A spring came to Wilson’s step, a barely noticeable feeling of abandon; till, gradually, once more, he became serious and attentive. Around him, as if he were no more than a fleck of dust, Jumna reached casually with her jhadu for one of the many tables, and then wove herself towards the sofa to plump up a cushion.
When he left, he had the pained, wise air of someone who’d been far happier booking private taxis for Mallika Sengupta, and checking times of flight arrivals and departures. ‘Thank you, madam,’ he said, as if he were referring not to the grace of the last half-hour, but redeeming the small role he’d played in her life.
‘How is your son?’ said a woman whom Mrs Sengupta knew well from these occasions, a Sindhi businessman’s wife. Mallika Sengupta, startled, didn’t know where to begin. They had plates of dessert on their laps, the sort of juxtaposition that was becoming increasingly popular in the business and corporate community, honeydew melon ice cream and semi-transparent, plastic-yellow jalebis. ‘He is reading all the time, very difficult books,’ she said, laughing. She was always defensive about him. ‘What will he study?’ the woman asked, persistent. ‘MBA?’ Mrs Sengupta was pleased, cruelly, because she knew her answer would disturb her companion’s ingestion. ‘He says he wants to study philosophy,’ she smiled. The woman paused, tried to capture, with her spoon, a slippery fragment of ice cream, and said with averted eyes, ‘Very nice.’ Then added, as if speaking of a rare condition she was not going to condemn or probe too deeply: ‘So he is not into money.’
To regroup, she asked: ‘You are leaving this side of the city, Mallika? Where do you plan to go when your husband leaves the company?’ ‘Bombay is such a huge place, and so expensive,’ said Mrs Sengupta, glancing at her reflection to check if her hair was all right; the wall had large glass panels that doubled everything – the fluted frames of the chairs, the doorways opposite opening on to corridors, the hair held ornately in buns or falling darkly upon shoulders, the glow of the chandelier – with various degrees of approval. ‘My son’, she said with secret pride, ‘says he wants to go somewhere quiet and green.’
F
INALLY THEY LEFT
that side of the city forever – too cheap a word, whose meaning you don’t quite get to grasp in a lifetime; you only use it self-indulgently, for a luxurious and elegiac sense of closure. Instinctively, they didn’t use it; they didn’t believe in ‘forever’ – the company had gifted them, almost two decades ago, a permanent sense of the future. Only much later do you learn that there’s no going back; learn it, an incontrovertible, minor lesson, not very difficult to grasp, then move on.
This, maybe, was the ‘quiet, green place’ that Nirmalya had been thinking about, but whose existence he’d never really suspected; a lane off one of the downward slopes of Pali Hill, a blue plaque announcing its name hanging by two rings from a pole at the base of the lane, which swung in a monsoon breeze in an intrepid, self-contained way, a gate opening on to a building, a second-storey apartment, three bedrooms, roughly fourteen hundred square feet, just a little more than a third of the flat in Thacker Towers. It was as if, wandering down Thacker Towers, they’d discovered an annexe no one had noticed before, an annexe whose balcony opened on to a silent neighbour, a jackfruit tree – and they’d decided never to return to the main flat.
The way to the city was long; sometimes it took as much as an hour. Every morning, Apurva Sengupta – he now had a post-retirement job as a consultant in a German firm – went back to it, past the upturned hulls of fishermen’s boats on the sand in Mahim, the new Oil and Natural Gas Commission township breeding in the swamp in the background, the Air India maharaja on the left, full of a droll and emphatic sincerity, promising seven flights to London a week; off he went in a sturdy white Ambassador he’d bought from the company, and in which an air conditioner had been fitted. They’d got used to air-conditioned transport, the sealed air, the busy, glinting, ragged world kept at bay by glass; they couldn’t, any more, imagine long journeys without it. The air conditioner, however, hadn’t been part of the original engine; it had been transplanted in a garage and installed as an extra, and it took something extra out of the machine. Slowly, shamelessly, it was reducing the engine’s life. No matter; it gave the Senguptas comfort – every blast of coolness on a hot, uncontainable day was welcome; it turned the interior of the Ambassador into a time capsule, a seamless continuation of their old, familiar life in the Mercedes, which they’d bid farewell to without much of a pang. But, since the air conditioner wasn’t built into the engine, it worked off and on, it stopped when the car stopped at traffic lights and went into fan mode, warm air emerged from the slats and brought the Senguptas back to where they were with a wave of irritation. Then, as the light changed to green and the car moved on, there was relief again.