‘Baba looks nice with the haircut, doesn’t he?’ said Pyarelal, looking at Banwari, as if the thought had just dawned on him, as if Nirmalya were not present but a thing of the past, and they were reminiscing about him.
There was a faint smile on Banwari’s lips, suggesting matters concerning ‘baba’ were beyond the realm of mere truth and observation, as he agreed.
‘He used to talk about you a lot before he died,’ said his mother, as the young man strode about in his pyjamas in the sitting room with a cup of tea in his hand at ten thirty in the morning. He was still under the spell of jet lag, its early-morning startlements, its creeping heaviness. He’d woken up at dawn, looked for a while at the milky light outside the window, which had grown so beloved to him in his absence, and didn’t know when he’d fallen asleep again. ‘He told me, “Baba will make a mark in the world.” ’ Nirmalya, uncomfortable, uncertain of where to store this prophecy, listened to his mother repeat the dead man’s words as if they had a special mystery, a magic; as if they weren’t about him. Mallika Sengupta, leaning forward in a low chair in her housecoat (how she loved to sit with her son at breakfast!) was tearful; she’d become maudlin after moving to Pali Hill with her husband’s retirement.
The doorbell rang. The young servant opened the door, and a conversation of stops and starts, of monosyllables and broken sentences, could be heard taking place in an undertone; Mrs Sengupta, naturally curious, naturally suspicious, followed. ‘Achha?’ she could be heard exclaiming in disbelief; and then re-entered the sunlit perfection of the sitting room, as if she couldn’t keep the news from her son, displaying a mango in one hand, a faint stain like a shadow on one side of the skin. ‘This is from the tree in our compound,’ she said to Nirmalya, who was still immune to the taste of the fruit. ‘The watchman’ – the invisible interlocutor outside the door – ‘has given us a few’; more pleased than if it were a lottery draw.
‘He needn’t have died,’ said Nirmalya, shaking his head, chasing the thoughts that had been preoccupying him since she’d got up. ‘It was nothing but stupidity.’ He finished the tea. He saw Shyamji’s life, in the last few years, as a series of errors in judgement: choosing glamour over art, light music over classical, death over life. It wasn’t diabetes or even heart disease that had killed him; it wasn’t drink, or the hidden self-destructive impulse that finished other artists – Shyamji was a calm, reasonable man, who had no vices. It was wanting too much from life. ‘Why was he in such a hurry?’ he said irritably to Mrs Sengupta, as she stood there, solemnly listening, still delicately cupping the fruit. ‘Why couldn’t he wait?’
‘Didi, baba,’ said Pyarelal in an urgent, sheepish whisper, pretending to underplay the importance of his announcement, ‘my student Jayashree Nath – you’ve seen her, baba, in the Taj – will be dancing at the Little Theatre on the fifteenth. Please come. I want some samajhdaar, knowledgeable people in the audience. Baba is very samajhdaar – yes, absolutely!’
And so Nirmalya, who’d been conferred the status of ‘critic’ by Shyamji, and Mrs Sengupta, whose long, distracted line of music teachers since she moved to Bombay appeared to have abruptly and finally disbanded with Shyamji’s death – they, mother and son, in their old, persistent companionableness, were persuaded to set out that evening for the National Theatre of the Performing Arts, which hovered like a bleached fragment in their memory, because they used to see the white squat building across the waves every day from the balcony of Thacker Towers. An hour’s journey on the way, an hour in the Little Theatre, an hour returning; a quarter of the day, at the very least, spent on the cause of Jayashree Nath. But, getting ready, they were busy with anticipation; Mrs Sengupta, as ever, consuming the last twenty minutes applying the finishing touches to her face. It meant going to the other end of the city, where the land shrank into the sea: where Nirmalya had grown up, and dreamed, and looked out on the curving drive to school, and seldom been happy. Tara, Pyarelal’s wife, was waiting in the aisle of a hall in which people were still settling into seats; she said, ‘Aiye, didi, aao, baba, your gur’ – but she checked herself quickly before she said ‘guru’ – ‘your Pyarelalji was so excited that you’re coming.’ As Tara seated Nirmalya and Mrs Sengupta in the second row, she bent and, kohl-blackened eyes narrowing with her familiar teasing smile, said in Nirmalya’s ear: ‘See, your Pyarelalji’s new student Madhu is sitting next to you – woh jo film star.’ Once seated, Nirmalya glanced deftly to his right. He’d heard about Madhu; she’d acted in one film; it had been a great success. And she – a diminutive young woman, fair and light-eyed, pretty but not unusual, as ordinary as a college girl – was learning kathak dance from Pyarelal. Her chaperone, her mother, sat next to her – now, where had he read about her? It was a long time since he’d turned the pages of the magazines of film gossip his mother used to subscribe to when he was a child, skimming them objectively for a stray piece of titillating data. And now they took the stage, Pyarelal, stiff and small with reflected glory, then a wiry, bespectacled man who, aloof with what looked like a secret source of amusement, went and sat before the harmonium, and, anklets resonating, Jayashree Nath. Everyone clapped; Madhu joined her small, angelic hands to give them a warm ovation. Pyarelal, from behind the tablas, saw Nirmalya – the sort of glance of recognition, satisfaction, and subterfuge that’s exchanged between accomplices separated by crowds in busy places.
‘That’s Motilalji!’ whispered his mother.
She was looking straight at the wiry man, who’d begun to sing, straightaway climbing the high notes. Her teacher, who used to miss his lessons because he’d be fast asleep, lulled and sedated by drink in the mornings, who used to take some time during each lesson to both praise and insult her in his casual, perfunctory way: Sumati’s elder brother, Shyamji’s brother-in-law, who, late one morning, had taken the reticent ‘Shyam’ to her flat in Cumballa Hill with its long veranda of potted plants just because he wanted to show off –
I have rich students like these.
How embarrassed and compromised Shyamji, poor man, had been; and always uncomfortable, quick to move on to some other subject, on being reminded of that first visit.
‘So he’s singing again,’ she ruminated, not sure whether to feel surprised or intrigued.
Nirmalya listened carefully as he sang the thumri about Radha venturing towards the banks of the Jamuna; he’d heard Motilalji had once been a great singer, but, in the flat in Cumballa Hill, he’d been more interested in hide and seek, the ‘servants’ quarters’, and imaginary exigencies and companions. But, sober and recovered, this voice, whose actual timbre Nirmalya could hardly recall, lacked pliability and freshness, though he realised, once or twice with a thrill of recognition, that there were flashes of the old gift.
There were no microphones; the auditorium boasted special acoustics that were usually disappointing. And so, when Pyarelal spoke the bols of the tabla rapidly, or recited two lines from an Awadhi poem to his own grand tabla slapping, Nirmalya thought he’d have to strain to hear, but was surprised today that Pyarelal was clearly audible. The two items that followed the weaving of the thumri were staples of kathak dance, almost cliches; but novel and compelling to Nirmalya, who, silently watching the narratives dilate and ebb before him, still had a child’s innocence and enthusiasm about the world of Indian art: whatever was beautiful was incomparable, and endlessly more exciting than anything to be found in a European museum. It was the moment of Radha’s sringar: and as the wiry man sang, practised, unhesitating, noticeably without inspiration, Radha adorned herself before her tryst, consulting a mirror she held in her hand, examining herself from one angle, then another. The entire audience – kind-hearted Parsi ladies, buttoned-up marketing executives and their wives, men from advertisement agencies, fresh from composing copy, older couples from ‘cultured’ families, with the sheen of some rare substance about them, brazen regulars who’d strayed in for the air conditioning, all the usual migrants who made up an audience for a performance, preferring, for an hour, this interior to the shelter of home – everyone in the hall attended, for five minutes, to the beauty of Radha’s toilette, giving her the utter privacy to make herself up bit by bit.
Then, after satisfied applause, there was the episode of Draupadi’s rape – Yudhishthir’s last throw of the dice, accompanied by a dire, confirming thump on the tabla by Pyarelal; Shakuni’s bronchial laughter, his head thrown back; and then, for the millionth time since this story was born, Dushasana enlisted to strip Draupadi of the yard of cloth that covered her. And there was Krishna, beatific, almost smug, effortlessly extending the yard of cloth that the hapless Dushasana, puzzled, then vanquished, by the length of the sari, kept trying to pull off. And Nirmalya, lost in his seat in the spectacle, couldn’t help admiring the way Jayashree Nath, despite her unrelenting Hindi-film-style jerks of the head, became, disconcertingly, about a quarter of the cast of the Mahabharata. It was striking how what was really a magic trick, something worthy of a circus, had been transformed by Jayashree Nath and Pyarelal and Motilalji and kathak dance into an instance of the terrifying but undeniable dependence of human beings on divine intervention. Everyone was moved; it was as if, teetering on the brink of disaster, they’d glimpsed the smirking Krishna and fallen back into the safety of Bombay, the air-conditioned auditorium, the soft but resolute seats, and the knowledge that, outside, the cars were parked silently in rows by the Arabian Sea.
Nirmalya and Mrs Sengupta went backstage, through a door from which people were already emerging, sated, having passed on their congratulatory messages. The artists now had ridiculous bouquets in their arms. Tara, large in a maroon sari, was standing next to Pyarelal; and Pyarelal, flushed with the congratulations and the performance, spotted them and said:
‘Aao, aao, baba, tell me – what did you think?’
He spoke to the young man, still marked by the pathos and specialness of one who’d come back from ‘foreign’, as if
he
were the celebrity, or mysteriously, but inevitably, was about to become one.
‘Wonderful,’ said Mrs Sengupta.
‘Thanks for coming,’ said Jayashree Nath to Nirmalya in English, in her brisk all-purpose tourist-guide manner, where the veneer of confidence was a sort of defence mechanism, her face, from close quarters, grotesquely exaggerated and motionless with paint. ‘He speaks so much about you!’ And Pyarelal, girded by Tara and two of his sons, dark boys wearing high-power spectacles, found time to blush at these words, realising his feelings were being described.
‘Mallika?’ a dry and perfectly audible voice said; and Mrs Sengupta turned, smiling, and saw the thin stern man in white kurta and pyjamas. Motilalji – sober but still impudent as ever, with the temerity to address her by her first name! Not the slightest hesitation about him, or respect for the passage of time; he may as well have been drunk. She felt a wave of exasperation; but also girlish wonder, at seeing him after all these years. ‘How are you Motilalji?’ she asked; and she was actually concerned; nervous he might drop dead from his previous excesses before her. ‘Aren’t you going to do pranam, Mallika?’ The impudence – asking her, she who was older than him, to touch his feet! It was as if he’d derive some sort of pleasure in extracting an obeisance from the bada sahib’s wife, not least because
she
had the audacity to be conscious of her abilities as a singer.
As at the parties she went to, she pretended she hadn’t heard; and, outraged though she was, she was also amused that he hadn’t changed. He, too, pretended, the next instant, he hadn’t spoken; it was as if everything had happened, in a flash, on a different, unverifiable plane of existence. There was nothing to do but continue the exchange of pleasantries and information, and let the small moment of theatre pass. ‘Bas chal raha hai. Pulling along,’ he confessed without enthusiasm, upright and dead as a plank of wood, a prisoner amidst the mundane.
N
OW, AFTER
Shyamji’s death, Banwari and Pyarelal, the latter in his joking, persistent way, the former with the sweet-faced presumption of entitlement that family members have, began to make increasing demands on the Senguptas – for loans, for advance payments which they couldn’t hope to ‘adjust’ or return – as if (and this was implicit, but a constant undercurrent) the death were a justification.
‘Why?’ asked Mrs Sengupta, as Pyarelal stood before her with a suitably contrite face after having asked her for three thousand rupees.
She thought, ‘He doesn’t realise we don’t have black money. He sees a lifestyle, has seen it for years, but doesn’t see what it takes to maintain it.’
‘Tara is not well,’ he said, pulling an interesting face – ever the performer. ‘She’s in the nursing home, didi. Bilkul thheek nahin hain. Doctor says it might be an ulcer.’
Those all-night vigils, fasts, and prayers! Years later, the sore hidden inside bringing pain.
‘Which nursing home?’ asked Mrs Sengupta sceptically.
‘Why, Laad Nursing Home,’ said Pyarelal, clearing his throat, as if it were a world-famous institution. ‘Run by Dr Laad.’
‘Pray more,’ she said, shaking her head, but picking up the key to the cupboard. ‘Perform more fasts!’
Pyarelal too shook his head from side to side, at the stubborn idiocy of the world as well as at the startling, uncomfortable insights ‘didi’ offered sometimes. He listened for the key turning in the lock.
Nirmalya sat on the carpet in the living room and tuned the tanpura; his palm ensconced each giant, resistant key, and, with a deep breath, he tightened it with the distant attentiveness of an engineer. It had been standing, like a forgotten heirloom or a stopped clock, upright and untouched in its place in his bedroom for more than nine months now. Pyarelal, fussy, witch-like, chattering constantly, had turned the keys and loosened the strings before Nirmalya had left for England, so that they wouldn’t snap in his absence. Now Nirmalya tightened the strings that had been resting, suspended in a reptilian twilight, turning his face away as he did so; he’d seen Pyarelal doing the same, narrow his eyes nervously and avert his face as the string grew tighter and tighter with a droll but ominous twang, because it could snap sometimes, and sting viciously.