The Immortals (3 page)

Now, with Nirmalya before her, dangling his legs from the divan, eating from the trolley, a different set of pleasures and anxieties replaced the previous one.

‘Do you like the fish? How was your day?’

She always asked these or similar questions; but she also viewed him, always, with a mixture of excitement and foreboding. She felt he was special; more special than other children. If asked to explain herself, she probably couldn’t have done so; but, from the moment he was born, she’d held the belief with conviction. Nothing he’d done – at school or at home – had necessarily proved her right. In fact, the time he’d spent at school, until recently, had been miserable. This only strengthened her conviction – the teachers didn’t have the insight to understand him.

He scraped the white fish and its black skin off the bone. He was bright and sunny – thoughts racing in his head – as he always was when he came back home; as if the reluctant boy of the morning had gone to never return.

‘I want to go and fetch Baba today!’ he said.

‘Yes, yes.’

Mrs Sengupta saw this homecoming as an apogee of something; she didn’t quite know what. Next morning it would go bad again; there would be the usual waning of enthusiasm. She would have to cope with the transformation. It repeated itself on every weekday morning.

Once or twice a week, a maulvi saheb came to the flat, a man who looked exactly like a ‘maulvi saheb’ should. He was an extremely polite man with hidden reserves of personality, a thin man with a small skull cap on his head and a beard.

From the start, this had been a bad idea; but the maulvi saheb was such a patient man that he almost turned it into a good one. He taught her Urdu; slowly, patiently. She had no patience, but she was determined in the interests of her new life in Bombay; she must get her tongue around the words in the ghazals. ‘Not jim,’ he said. ‘Jeem.’

In her notebook, she wrote aliph, be, and te. She forgot them the next time he came. ‘Oh maulvi saheb,’ she said, embarrassed but not unduly concerned, ‘I’ve forgotten them.’ He was not so much stoic as calm; he was used to rich students paying him for the ritual of learning Urdu; though he wished he had more well-to-do students. Sometimes he wished he had more; sometimes, when he grew tired, he longed for serious students.

Their business was conducted at this centre table, in this small area in the drawing room, where, you could say, many of her daytime pursuits – call them work, or hobbies – were confined. Here, too, tea came and interrupted them. He always accepted tea tentatively, with the fastidiousness a Victorian Englishwoman might have had. He was clearly thrown off-balance by the prospect of having tea with Mrs Sengupta; he didn’t know what relationship he should have to this interregnum, this moment, and to her during it: was he her equal, her co-tea-drinker, or still the ‘maulvi saheb’? She made it slightly easier for him by ignoring him completely as she finished her tea.

Half her mind, of course, was on whether the furniture had been dusted, whether the decorations had been moved inadvertently from their shelves. Then she would find that her eyes were staring at ‘jeem’ and ‘che’.

‘Bas, maulvi saheb,’ she’d say, ‘enough today. I’ll see you again next week.’

A large sofa with floral upholstery; a patterned carpet with a rectangular centre table whose pug marks showed if it moved slightly out of place; the two dignified armchairs on either side; the shelves on the wall-unit which had been bare and became quickly populated with miniatures and objects – urns, brass lamps – released from their expected uses; the momentarily listless curtains; the dining table glimmering in the distance – this, at least for now, was
her
house.

Sometimes the boy, when he came home from school early, or on a holiday, would see the maulvi saheb and his mother, and approach them. He found the maulvi saheb uncommunicative. Yet he felt he might tell him something. He always felt that visitors from a clearly different background were his natural allies; that when they were pretending not to notice him, they were waiting for the right moment.

‘But why should I sing the ghazal?’ she asked herself one day. Would giving it up mean she had failed? But wasn’t her forte the bhajan, the devotional; isn’t that what they said? Then why was she struggling to sing these love songs? She’d never get them right, and, anyway, they were, in a sense, absolutely foreign to her; she’d never be able to enter their mood, their spirit. Once she realised this, it was as if a burden she’d carried without knowing it had gone. Overnight, the letters ‘aliph’ and ‘jeem’ began to disappear from her memory. She discontinued her lessons with ‘maulvi saheb’.

That evening, they went out for dinner – the company secretary was visiting from Calcutta. Mr Deb was in a room at the old Taj; although it was still not the old Taj – the idea for the new Taj had been floated, but it had still not been built. The old Taj was alone, and had an inviolability about it.

They went to the Crystal Room for dinner. It was good to see Mr Deb again; they ordered naan, palak chicken, daal. The boy was there too; he sometimes accompanied his parents on these occasions. They sat, talking about Calcutta, about the company, about Bombay. When food was served, the dim light almost concealed the colours on the plate; the yellow of the daal, the green of the palak. Yet, though they tore the naan with enthusiasm, they didn’t seem interested in the food. Only Mrs Sengupta said she liked the taste of the daal. Where Mr Deb was concerned, there was always, for them, a sense of waiting and watching. They were not conscious of this, though; but it was almost certain that once Mr Deb retired, Mr Sengupta would take his place. This, perhaps, gave these meetings an air of deferral, where a lot was said, but something couldn’t be.

Two months later, taking them by surprise, Mr Deb died. Death had nipped retirement in the bud by two years. He would now be fifty-six years old for eternity; he was quietly cremated in Calcutta. The company settled the dues. A chest pain, wrongly diagnosed by a family doctor as flatulence, had been followed by a heart attack. They could now talk about it – the mistaken diagnosis – forever. Mr Sengupta flew into Calcutta, on work, but also made his visit coincide with Mr Deb’s shraddh. Mr Deb was, in a small way, part of his private mythology; he’d been one of the people who interviewed Mr Sengupta. He felt, within the constraints of the circumstances, the context of flux in the company the departure of one person created, a sense of bereavement. Mrs Deb, in a white sari, gave a general impression of whiteness, as her hair was almost all white. She spoke to him as someone who was not quite a relative, someone she had got to know, but risked losing. ‘You must stay for dinner, Apurva,’ she said.

T
HE COMPANY OFFICE
was on Tulsi Pipe Road. This was a curious address – not a very distinguished address – for a company of standing. They were framed by the old, declining industrial landscape, by a sense of grease and iron, and of funnels of smoke from chimneys in deathless mills. But now, for two years, the office had become the head office; the head office had moved from Calcutta. It was strange to see, in these surroundings, Mr Dyer emerge from the entrance, debonair, balding, not too long after his pretty secretary, Pamela, had left, and advance towards his car. Apurva Sengupta, too, could be seen coming out not too much later, his jacket on one arm.

Sometimes the boy would come to pick up his father (this was a momentous event in the week) and sit in the car watching the procession of company employees coming out of the incongruous art deco building, the secretaries in their long skirts, the junior executives in chattering groups, invisible as individuals, the directors getting into cars. One day, as they were going back home, a man in rags fell across the bonnet of the car as it paused at the turning; with one arm he banged the windshield, and turned to stare, for one protracted second, inside the car. The driver swore. Ignoring him, the man rose, and, as if he had more important things to do, swayed to the other side of the road. ‘He’s drunk too much,’ said the driver, starting the engine. ‘Bewda!’ Nirmalya didn’t know what it meant to have drunk too much; he didn’t know what had happened for the man to become like this, or what the strangely unseeing stare meant. He sat motionless; inwardly, he shrank with terror. Only when his father, who’d been smiling with astonishment, began to talk about the party in the evening did his sense of being at home – in the car, in the world – flow back to him; the moment receded, like a dream that no longer had the power to touch him.

Some people said that Mr Dyer had affairs with his secretaries; but most of them would have admitted there was more exaggeration in this than truth. But they chose to suspend belief and disbelief, and continued to inhabit a mental realm in which these affairs – plunged into at some hour of the day that lay outside the flow of time as they knew it; probably when he was dictating, behind the shut door, a long letter to either Pamela or Doris – were possible.

He was a charming man. A great part of his charm lay in his physique and his manner: his height, the way he stooped forward slightly, his sideburns – that narrow, perfect-shaped fleece of gold; all things that made the fact that he was balding almost irrelevant.

He gave the impression of listening to you very carefully, his blue eyes fixed over your shoulders, his eyebrows slightly raised in interest and concern, the deep alluring lines creasing his tanned forehead. Behind this manner, he was a dictator who left final and important decisions to no one else, and carried the company, like a personal possession he didn’t want to misplace, in his pocket. But he had been specially charming with Mr Sengupta: he gave him exactly what he wanted – a chauffeur-driven car, a flat, servants, a decent salary – so as to preclude permanently the possibility of Apurva Sengupta one day moving elsewhere. Mr Sengupta didn’t think of his being here as necessarily permanent; but he was beginning to become happy in the company. He suppressed his instinct that his boss was a type of extraordinary and somewhat disrespectable English adventurer: everyone knew it was largely Dyer who’d made the company the success it now was.

‘Well, A.B.,’ he said one afternoon, leaning over his desk (he’d begun the practice of referring to his colleagues by their initials, perhaps to conceal the fact that he had trouble getting their names right; he himself was known to them by his first name – Philip), ‘you know that, with poor Deb gone, there’s a vacancy.’ He smiled; lines appeared round his eyes. An expression almost like kindness; a moment’s deference to the death, but also a sensitivity to the window it had opened up. ‘I’ve thought about it, and I don’t want to advertise. I’ve been looking at your work, and I think you’re the right man for the job, don’t you?’

At these moments, in the air-conditioned isolation of his office, Mr Dyer’s style was pressing: he was a seducer. He was Mephistophelean; but he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in being Mephistopheles to everybody; and the alternative (which induced nervousness in those who’d seen it) was a blankness in the blue eyes.

‘If you say so, Philip,’ said Apurva Sengupta, outwardly still but quietly elated. He saw the window as well, open, the light shining. ‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Good man! I’m very pleased.’

Dyer, people knew, cared for presentability and appearance as much as – or perhaps more than – he did for ability. He was an aesthete of executive appearance; he wanted decent-looking people in the upper echelons of the company. And this was part of the reason he had his eye on Apurva Sengupta from the beginning: he had the right kind of looks – a sort of measured elegance and modest style, an appearance, at once, of slightness and control, which convinced Dyer.

Parties too – this was part of the Senguptas’ gradual education – were important in the scheme of things; and Dyer’s tolerance for hot Indian food – another feature of his uniqueness, his charm, his slightly scandalous air – was high. When the Senguptas threw a party, he’d stand in a corner alone, perspiring, eating Mrs Sengupta’s fish preparations.

‘What are you making today?’ Mr Sengupta asked this tensely sometimes before a party. ‘Are you making that fish?’ It was Dyer, who seemed to have been weaned on curries, that Apurva Sengupta was thinking of. He cautiously sniffed the air in the flat. Pumpkin and coriander: the smell had filled the drawing room and barely arrived at the bedroom, as he stood there, still in his jacket. It soon occupied the entire flat.

Around this time, when Mr Sengupta was promoted, they decided to move office – all the way to that new reclamation on Marine Drive, that puny strip called Nariman Point. One evening, when this strip was still coming into existence, the boy and his parents had walked down it, past coconut and peanut vendors, towards where it petered out into hunched boulders and, further, the fury of the waves. Nirmalya discovered he was scared of the ocean. The sea here had an ancient energy, as it swirled round the finger extending into the water. On both sides, as mother, father, and son stood there for a moment, Nirmalya threatened by blasts of wind, couples moved dimly and mysteriously, unperturbed, as if inside a foyer in a large building. This – the phantasmagoria of roaring, maddened waves and darkness – was what stood behind, at least momentarily, the city they were becoming intimate with.