The Immortals (14 page)

‘What d’you think of that?’ he asked, ingenuous but merciless.

Desai looked the other way, in the direction of a famous chemist’s that was now shut. The tragic mood of the ghazal lingered like an aftertaste in the hot taxi. After a moment, he confessed tersely:

‘It’s funky.’

It seemed to Nirmalya that Rajiv had both opened himself ever so marginally, and then withdrawn immediately, and forever, into the safety of Kemp’s Corner and the familiar cartography of Bombay.

A
PURVA
S
ENGUPTA
decided, again, to court Laxmi Ratan Shukla. Laxmi Ratan Shukla, head of HMV’s light music wing ten years ago, and still, immovably, its head. A persona non grata who held the keys to fortune; a person no one had heard of – except the people who queued up to meet him, to convince him, to plead with him, to give them a chance. He would look back at them through his bifocal spectacles, speaking very softly; you had to strain to hear.

Mr Sengupta, after the board meetings, after socialising with the Tatas, the Poddars, after the poolside cocktails at the five-star hotels, had to readjust himself to Laxmi Ratan Shukla. He was used to the obduracy of this country; used to meeting, in Delhi, after a hurried, solitary, suited breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, some secretary or undersecretary in the ministry near Janpath, about pushing through a new plan for the company that needed government permission. And you needed government permission for everything, in both your personal and professional life – for opening a bank account; for creating a new wing in your firm; for selling a new product. But with Laxmi Ratan Shukla it was slightly different: he was trying to get him to acknowledge, and reward, his wife’s talent. There were no clear rules here. And, for this reason, he was prepared to wait indefinitely; and he was prepared to treat Laxmi Ratan Shukla as, at once, an equal and a special person indefinitely.

Laxmi Ratan Shukla didn’t know what made him special; he knew, really, that he wasn’t special at all; and the strange importance that had been bestowed on him made him perpetually wary. It was almost nine years since he’d muttered, without making eye contact, a half-promise that he might give the go-ahead for Mallika Sengupta to cut a disc of devotionals. They’d reposed their strained faith in the words as if they were a fleetingly heard but mysterious mantra. Nirmalya remembered seeing him in his childhood, drinking tea, eating luchis, and making small, odd noises in his throat, of either satisfaction or discomfort, in their flat near Kemp’s Corner. No noticeable progress had been made since that vision; in the nine years that followed, Mallika Sengupta’s case had neither moved forward nor backward by an inch.

‘She must improve pronunciation,’ Shukla said. ‘It is not enough to have
surili
voice. Her pronunciation is still Bengali.’

To be a Bengali and to sing in Hindi was, in the eyes of Shukla, an original sin, a stain that would not come off easily. Apurva Sengupta, who usually did little to accommodate time-wasters, listened to him attentively, as if he were explaining an arcane art. He never disagreed with Shukla; he smiled, nodded at Shukla’s cryptic wisdom. Mallika Sengupta was repelled by Shukla, and would long ago have had nothing to do with him; but Apurva Sengupta said to her with peremptory, affectionate impatience: ‘You can’t achieve anything if you let your emotions get the better of you.’ She allowed her mood of frustration to be defused by this bit of paternal advice and was almost convinced by it. The message was clear: it was by having a level head that Mr Sengupta had got to where he was, and become chief executive. He had survived Dyer; he’d survived many other things, the ups and downs that were part of the legend of his life. But was a level head and patience enough with Shukla?

Mr Sengupta took Shukla to the Taj for dinner, to Tanjore, the speciality Indian restaurant. Shukla, squat, myopic, almost muscular, and his two daughters, Priya and Sudha, in salwar kameezes, slightly taller than him. Neither was particularly beautiful – in fact, they were quite plain – but they had the charm that young women often have: especially flowers that have grown in a stone’s shadow. Shukla was a widower; and, seeing him with his daughters, Nirmalya sensed, for the first time, the void from which he came and which he probably lacked the gift or naturalness to talk about. And yet, the same opaque, bereft-of-ordinary-speech quality that made him so difficult to read to his supplicants, translated, with his daughters, into a strange, impenetrable familiarity, an intimacy that didn’t need verbal communication. An ordinary family, without signs of privilege or even a pretence towards being acquainted with these surroundings, the girls accepting the solicitous stewards as temporary incarnations.

They sat at the table on the far end on the right, not far from the platform on which the dancing would begin. There was already a sort of musical background as they sat down, a tinkling of wind-chimes. It might have been taped music, or cutlery being moved. A man dressed in waiter’s regalia handed them ornate menu cards, and the two sisters looked at the knife, spoon and fork set before them. Was this meant to be Thanjavur, that place that had burgeoned a thousand years ago, burgeoned and then died, as things do; were they meant to be transported to the splendour of the Cholas?

‘I’ll have saag paneer,’ said Laxmi Ratan Shukla at last with a note of diffident affirmation; confessing to a weakness but, equally, exercising his rights. For eating was part of this ritual of establishing his own domain of power in what was Mr Sengupta’s world. ‘Do you have butter naan?’ he asked the waiter. Tanjore. The dancing had begun. And it continued while they ate after the food was served. Nirmalya tried not to look at her over his shoulder, this woman who wove around the platform, as if unsure she might step over it on to the marble where the waiters were walking past; accompanying her, the tabaliya played looking straight at the eaters at the table, and the singer hunched over his harmonium, singing the stuti to Lord Krishna. No one looked at them; between the doors to the kitchen and the space in which the waiters plied and the guests were seated, they continued to sing and dance and play, as if they were as much a figment of the imagination as the episodes they were enacting from the mythology of the blue god.

‘Have some of this,’ said Priya to Nirmalya. She pushed the copper container of daal towards him. He liked the sisters. They were gently attentive. He nodded. But his father still had not had the gumption to broach the subject of the recording. They concentrated on eating; the food, disappointingly, was unremarkable – only the name of the restaurant, Tanjore, was ambrosial, and promised to transform its taste.

After about forty-five minutes, the dancer and her accompanists left the platform with a mixture of awkwardness and embarrassment; probably to eat where neither guest nor waiter could see them. They completely ceased to exist, and the wind-chimes again became audible; now, paradoxically, they were missed slightly, and Nirmalya caught his mother glancing at the platform, with its harmonium and the outspread sheet on which the singer had been sitting. Dessert arrived; kulfi, for everyone except Nirmalya. Laxmi Ratan Shukla, chipping at his with a spoon, remained unfathomable.

Someone waved at Mr Sengupta. A man from another company. Apurva Sengupta smiled and waved back. Then he returned to Shukla.

Would anything be achieved with Shukla? The man had his own goals; he was actually a perpetrator of bad taste. He had created Om Prakash Vrindavan – one didn’t know if that was his real name – a marketing success, a modern-day saint-poet, a faux Kabir with great lung power. Like the old saint-poets, he composed his own songs, and the last stanza had his signature in it; ‘Saith Vrindavan’, like ‘Saith Kabir’, or ‘Meera says’, and he’d hold the note for ‘Saith Vrindavan’ with his reed-like voice for a full minute. Nouveau riche society ladies trembled; they thought, This is what Kabir must have been like, or Surdas; and they were transported to antiquity without having to vacate the present, or giving up their taste for Hindi film songs.

‘The man is an affront to the bhajan,’ said Mallika Sengupta to her husband one day. She’d met him twice; once in a room above a hall in a house in Dadar, where singers had gathered to ‘warm up’ before a function. He was seated on a rug, wearing saffron as usual, in front of his harmonium, making his wife, a fair, extraordinarily tinselly woman, much younger than him, rehearse some lines in a bhajan with him. She was crooning them in the same thin voice, almost a metallic, machine-like whine, that millions of women had cultivated after Lata. A fan swung forgivingly overhead. She glanced at Mrs Sengupta without warmth; but Om Prakash Vrindavan interrupted the exercise to do a brief, humble namaskar.

Meanwhile, Laxmi Ratan Shukla had finished most of his kulfi; what remained had melted to a puddle in the base of his bowl.

At any bhajan sammelan, Om Prakash Vrindavan would be the star turn. There he would be, his eyes bulging, his long hair falling smoothly round his face, bent over the harmonium, the whites of his eyes visible during moments of rapture. He was singing the commercial success you could hear every day on the radio; ‘Meri chadar purani’ – ‘My old shawl’. ‘Saith Vrindavan,’ he sang, as the ladies glowed with spiritual light. He was clearly another Kabir; for Kabir, the weaver’s son, the shawl or covering, or any piece of cloth, was a symbol of the body – the way it must be woven and made, the ease with which it could be torn – and the work of the loom a symbol of the divine activity of creation, and the sound of the loom – jhini jhini jhini – of the humming of the universe. But Om Prakash Vrindavan’s ‘old shawl’? The thought of it made Mr Sengupta, sitting in his dark suit in the audience, wrinkle his nose in distaste.

‘What’s all this about his wrapper?’ he said to his wife. ‘The idea’s unpleasant.’

They were in a minority, though; the record had sold more than fifty thousand copies.

S
HE KNEW
she could have been famous; but she had opted for the life of a Managing Director’s wife. It wasn’t only because she’d wanted the easy way out; it was because she couldn’t deal with the likes of Shukla; the world was full of Shuklas. She hid behind Apurva Sengupta, almost physically.

And then she’d hear Lata on the radio, and feel a stab of irritation. Lata and Asha, Lata and Asha – the sisters’ high-pitched voices, almost indistinguishable from one another, everywhere. This wasn’t the India she’d grown up in; India had been transformed into an island, with only one radio station, and she had to listen to the same singers again and again.

Then she’d go to a sari exhibition, and contemplate a Baluchari, or buy a Kanjeevaram. She’d be lost for half an hour in the red and deep blues of the sari.

She knew, after all, she’d made the right decision. Look at Lata in her white sari, unmarried, living like a hermit in Prabhu Kunj. Mallika Sengupta didn’t want to be a hermit: she still loved life. At fifty-four, her husband having become Managing Director, she felt she’d just begun to discover existence; she’d accepted the benefits that came with her husband’s position without affectation, as if they had always been her due. And Asha, deserted by her husband; Asha Bhonsle, who fell in love with the music director dressed in white, O.P. Nayyar, who then tried to dominate all she did – this seemed to Mallika Sengupta like no life at all; it made her shudder. And to Mallika Sengupta, Lata was no goddess Saraswati, as her admirers claimed, but a lonely woman, too private, not close to anyone. She was glad of her husband, her son, the flat she renovated from time to time: it would be madness to exchange these things that so filled up her day for the fulfilment of some grand personal ambition – she had neither the courage nor the desire to do it.

There was a pall on their lives, though: on the cocktail parties; the flat in Cuffe Parade, the Mercedes; the impulsive purchase of curios. It was the constant, nagging knowledge, like a secret, of their son’s health – he wasn’t unhealthy, or ill, but the murmur the doctor would hear in his chest every time he put a stethoscope to it, for whatever reason, a cough or the flu, was audible to Mallika Sengupta beneath all she did. It made her regret the name her mother had given him: ‘Nirmalya’; an offering to the gods. She had no intention of offering him to the gods; of letting them interfere with her life.

When he was a boy, she had a great terror of losing him. Each day she’d send him off to school, hair wet and combed, shirt tucked into laundered half-pants, tie knotted and dangling from the collar, as if she had the merest suspicion that he was on the verge of disappearing forever. She’d read a story recently, in a newspaper, about a kidnapping. These demons could spoil her morning, even when, later, a free spirit at large in the shops from Amarson’s in Breach Candy to Sahakari Bhandar in Churchgate, she, hair tied in a bun, wearing a light, printed sari, was buying knick-knacks across the counter.

The children who ran towards cars in traffic jams were part of her bad dreams in those days. Not just the lepers, whose noses and fingers were wearing away, disappearing inexorably like a bar of soap on a basin; nor the Red Cross volunteers, who came and rattled their tin hypnotically, as if it were a cymbal or tambourine; nor the grimy men in rags that opened on to bits of skin, who were neither maimed nor blind, only forlorn and nameless. It was the children. They knocked on her window with their knuckles and harangued her for change; one child might paw it absent-mindedly with the palm of the hand, as if this were a game and his mind partly elsewhere; another’s face might suddenly float into the square, singing, ‘Give, give, give, haven’t eaten’; she waved them away or gave them a coin. What she felt was not compassion; it was inescapable and personal, as if the voices were in her head, inside her life and memory, rather than outside. She was troubled by a recurring fear in her many automobile reveries – what if it were Nirmalya? Constantly, the face of the unknown child knocking petulantly changed, and became Nirmalya’s: she could do nothing about it. Among her many secret, absurd obsessions, this was one of the most acute: the snatching away from her, in a moment, of her son; the loss of her life as she knew it. The child, asking her again and again for the coin, was what she couldn’t keep out or deny, though she shooed him away with one hand; on the way back from school with Nirmalya, or to the hairdressers’, at Kemp’s Corner or Chowpatty, the same fear and pity repeated itself, inextricably linked, somehow, to Nirmalya’s childhood. Sometimes the light changed from red to orange before she could open her purse; the child was gone; he’d be there tomorrow.