The Immortals (33 page)

S
HYAMJI SCRATCHED
his cheek (he was a bit untidy; fine needles of stubble spread across the dark skin, making it look almost purple) and told the Senguptas, at the end of another lesson, in a bored, throwaway remark of what had been diagnosed as the cause of the cough: water had collected in his lungs.

Mrs Sengupta wasn’t sure how serious this was; the condition was unfamiliar to her. Water in the lungs; what a nuisance – if it was taken out, would the cough go away? She wasn’t unduly worried; Shyamji was in the thick of things, trailing exhaust fumes and traffic lights and junctions as he entered, having moved in an hour from one end of the city to another, gently pushing his hair back as he appeared in the doorway, preoccupied.

‘Also, the blood sugar is high,’ he admitted shame-facedly, delicately lifting his kurta as he lowered himself on to the carpet; he always felt contrite when what he saw to be the superstitions of the educated about health – listen to what the doctor tells you, take your pills, do nothing in excess – when these superstitions proved right, and his own belief, his unspoken but absolute taking for granted of the fact that the supernatural would look out for him (a pale orange thread from a baba, a sort of supplement or insurance policy, was tied round his wrist) seemed, for some reason, not to have worked, at least not this time. Besides (and he didn’t elaborate on this to Mrs Sengupta), he’d been meeting families visiting Sagar Apartments to congratulate him and Sumati for the birth of their second grandson – born to their elder daughter in Delhi in May; how not to finish the rich red swirl of gajar ka halwa on the plate when you were thinking of your own flesh and blood?

‘Shyamji!’ she admonished him. ‘You’ve been eating sweets. Really, you people are so careless!’ It wasn’t clear whom she meant by ‘you people’ – his family, or a wider category of the similarly blithe and faithful. But she took it up with Sumati when she saw her floating prevaricatingly in their flat in Sagar Apartments.

‘Didi, look what’s happened to your brother!’ said Sumati, in mock consternation, as if discussing a wayward but absorbing child.

‘Really, you must take this more seriously,’ said Mallika Sengupta, small but firm, trying to puncture Sumati’s spontaneous attempts to inject levity into the everyday problems of existence. ‘He
must
take his medicines. And he must stop eating sweets. Jalebis and milk – nothing seems less appetising.’

‘Don’t worry, didi,’ she replied, ‘I am going to become like Hitler’; and she became erect, her bangles shook as she drew her aanchal around her and adopted a stern posture, approximating the fierce man, the tiny moustache and the manic disciplinarianism.

A leading cardiologist on Peddar Road, ensconced in his chamber and standing up and looking out moodily, between receiving patients, at the traffic. She did not like thinking of him; six months ago, he’d examined Nirmalya, distant, avian, circling round him and zeroing in with his stethoscope.

Dr Samaddar’s ‘chamber’ was not far, in fact, from where Motilalji lived – Motilalji, Sumati’s elder brother, who’d taught Mrs Sengupta and, that morning many years ago, a bit hazy, for him, with alcohol, introduced Shyamji to her.

Sunil Samaddar was a disconcertingly quiet man. Dealing with people who believed he could perform miracles but didn’t really listen to him had, to all appearances, tired him and left him largely immune to the unexpected; the great and undisappointingly regular amounts of money he earned each day from speaking the truth had probably made him a little cold.

He made Nirmalya, who loved to go on unhappy, poetic walks, but almost never ran, take the treadmill test; surprised into chasing something that was unattainable, in fact, nameless, the boy embarked on the run silent and unquestioning, stoic in his obscure errand; then, like a young soldier who’s unsure of having already outlived his usefulness, he was stripped waist upward, led to one side of a room, and attached to an ECG, and then to the strange gulps and grunts of an echocardiogram; the gulps and grunts, Nirmalya realised (though Dr Samaddar, hovering in his precise steel-framed spectacles, was ironical and taciturnly remonstrative as a teacher in a school), of his heart.

Seeing her son in this way, gleaming dully next to the machine, brought Mallika Sengupta close to tears; but she couldn’t look away. All his promise was reduced to that thinness.

When the family of the Senguptas had recomposed itself before the doctor’s table, he said with the clipped, ironical finality he seemed to say everything: ‘He’ll need to have an operation.’

They’d heard this before, but each time it thoroughly unsettled Apurva and Mallika Sengupta. Without moving an inch, they drew together silently, like a couple suddenly confronted with oncoming bad weather.

‘What kind of operation?’ asked Mr Sengupta, his corporate self-possession not so easily humbled; there was hope until the doctor became more specific.

Dr Samaddar, looking in a rehearsed way at the notepad before him, spoke casually, as if he were reading out the name of a common commercial product:

‘Open-heart surgery, of course. They’re a dime a dozen these days.’

Again, silence, and shock; as with all taboos, it was the temerity of mentioning it in what was almost approaching a social conversation that was more outrageous and unforgivable than the taboo itself.

‘Does he have to be operated on straight away?’ asked Mallika Sengupta, her eyes brimming in wordless reproach, but deliberately making her question an absurd one, and unanswerable in the affirmative. The doctor, though, was on to her game; dryly, he replied, barely tolerant of the nuisance that human emotions represented:

‘Well, not straight away; I don’t know what you mean by “straight away” – but there’s no getting around it. Better sooner than later. Shubhashya shigram. “Haste is auspicious.” By forty, he’ll
have
to be operated upon.’

Forty, again, that magic number – it was as if a demon had begun to materialise, and had melted before it could become fully visible! Nirmalya’s parents relaxed imperceptibly, without feeling any happier. But, by the time Nirmalya was forty, all sorts of new technologies would have sprung into existence, open-heart surgery would become obsolete (as they’d been hoping it would for almost twenty years now), like the 78 rpm record and ether (they had witnessed the demise of both), perhaps something as simple as a pill or an intravenous tube would perform the rescue and repair work, travelling like an emissary through the blood, as catheters did these days while performing more minor missions, and the heart, the human heart, would be released from its long history into new possibilities.

‘No, they won’t touch him,’ said Apurva Sengupta grimly as they drove down the slope of Peddar Road towards Haji Ali, past the Cadbury’s building, which had stood there, incontrovertibly promising sweetness and the white goodness of a glass of milk a day, ever since they’d first arrived in Bombay – Nirmalya, sitting within earshot in the front of the car, absent-minded and calm, as if they were talking about someone else; a cousin or a twin. Neither livelihood nor life was as yet his concern; he still had, glancing from glinting windshield to dashboard to window to the vistas they were quickly passing, the freedom of his moods and startling intimations. Apurva Sengupta, though, spoke not just from paternal emotion, but from the authority of having been a successful man, of having his views listened to, of having run a large company, of knowing a thing or two about the computations that ensured (in conditions that provided little that was helpful or congenial) a company’s longevity. He adjusted the knot of his tie irritably, full of a long-standing and ingrained certainty. He may have retired, but being an executive, a man in charge of other men, for so many years had given Apurva Sengupta a sense of conviction and moral weight.

Dr Samaddar’s examination of Shyamji was brief. Looking hesitant and politely suspicious, as if he wasn’t sure (like a man who’s been given enthusiastic but indecipherable street directions) that he’d arrived at the right place, Shyamji had entered the air-conditioned room with Mr Sengupta. There he was, only partly at ease with the distinguished man in the black suit and neat striped tie who smelled pleasantly of aftershave. Dr Samaddar regarded them speculatively.

‘This is Pandit Shyam Lal,’ said Apurva Sengupta, smiling like one continuing an old, recognisable conversation, ‘a well-known singer. As I said to you on the phone, he’s my wife’s music teacher.’

Dr Samaddar nodded, as if to say he understood Mr Sengupta’s compulsions. But the nod was oddly premeditated; there was no real sign of memory – either of the dialogue on the telephone, or of Mr Sengupta himself; memory was something of a misfit in this large room with its motionless framed certificates from fifties’ London, and the small plastic figurine of the human heart on the table, its cheeks red and full, its arteries springing from the top stubby and incomplete, like sawn-off antlers. Then, without looking at Shyamji, all the while gazing at the flecked mosaic floor, the doctor listened to the singer’s gentle, puzzled description, in Hindi, of his condition.

He gave no indication he’d understood what Shyamji had said. Speaking only one word, ‘Aiye,’ he led Shyamji to a high bed on one side of the room. There, as if they were miles away from Apurva Sengupta, the two faced each other in silence, Shyamji, who had perched himself on the bed, then taken off his kurta, and Dr Samaddar, who stood before him, listening to his heartbeat. Head bowed, in silence; never seeming to actually see the singer, not even when he stared fixedly for a few moments at the dark chest traversed diagonally by the sacred thread or the mournful, patient face, regarding them with the glazed, other-worldly air of someone looking at his reflection in the morning. The stethoscope moving nervously from spot to spot. Apurva Sengupta looked out of the window; he had a great, albeit easily underestimated, capacity for patience, a quality that had been useful to him – more useful even than his skills, his various professional qualifications – from the beginning of his working life. It had given him something that was surprising in one who’d had material success; or perhaps successful people needed to have it more than others: something resembling selflessness. He seemed to be thinking of nothing at all, to be bereft of all sense of boredom, while Dr Samaddar carefully attached the nodes of the ECG to Shyamji.

Later, unperturbed, the doctor addressed Apurva Sengupta:

‘Pleurisy hoyechhe.’

Mr Sengupta was surprised by this unconscious – or was it quite deliberate – slip into Bengali. Dr Samaddar had never claimed any kinship with him; they’d both ignored the fact that they were Bengalis, and had, with one another, opted for the neutrality, the comforting even keel, of English. Now, in the presence of the man sitting on the bed and pushing the silver buttons into the buttonholes of his kurta, it was as if they were suddenly old friends, or something else – who knew? Apurva Sengupta had misgivings about what this meant.

‘If we put him in Jaslok’ – he gestured to the hospital towering silently on the other side of the road – ‘we could give him a few more months.’

Apurva Sengupta – unexercised; in the generally benign, reasonable mood he experienced when engaged in transactions with others who were as successful in their own fields as he was in his – didn’t understand what he meant by ‘a few more months’; but, because Dr Samaddar hadn’t broken any bad news to him, as he’d threatened to in the case of his own son, he didn’t ask for a clarification, and let it pass. In his mind, the doctor’s words were transformed to something like – ‘If we put him in Jaslok, we could make him better in a few months’ – or a similar sentence, one that he could understand perfectly and do business with. Shyamji had begun to look unhappy, though, as if Dr Samaddar were conspiring to force him to break some religious taboo, or to eat meat. He distrusted, fundamentally, allopathic medicine; distrusted it because, in the end, it saved very few, and because he had a hunch that its bases, like the lives of so many of the well-off, were irreligious; and you couldn’t be saved unless the means were, in some way, connected to the sacred, and the sacred itself wanted the continuance of your life and good health. He felt detached and impatient, but he sat on the chair, dignified, contained; he wanted to go home.

‘What about the cost?’ asked Apurva Sengupta.

‘I’m a consultant there, I’ll take care of it,’ muttered Dr Samaddar, as if he were worried his gesture might be mistaken for weakness.

Jaslok Hospital was where Pandit Ram Lal had been admitted twelve years ago, after he’d had two strokes, the second in the taxi in Mulund, groaning ‘He´ bhagwan’ like a saint, full of compassion and endurance even in his suffering, while younger, agitated incarnations of Pyarelal and Shyamji flanked him on either side; the third seizure occurred as he was being bundled into his room in Jaslok – this dark, teeming factory of the living and partially living, with the much-garlanded statue of Ganesh at the entrance, was associated forever for Shyamji with his father’s death. Whenever he went past it on Peddar Road, he averted his eyes; often, he wasn’t even aware of doing so. Ram Lal had died there, in one of those numberless rooms whose windows were opened very occasionally and hesitantly to let in the sound of the traffic, after a week.

‘Sengupta saab,’ Shyamji said in a couple of days, apologetic, but with the conviction of someone who’s finally opened a locked door, and seen something irrefutable, ‘I cannot go to that hospital.’