Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

At first there was disbelief, then mourning — the preamble to the journey to a heart specialist in a tottering building. Nameplate stacked untidily upon nameplate indicated that at least half the building was occupied by doctors. Once you got out of the giant hencoop of the lift, after the brief journey up a shaft in which only the cords and pulleys were constantly alive and never at rest, you walked down an unpromisingly dark corridor and came to a glass-doored chamber with a small sitting area that was fluorescent-lit and air-conditioned. It was like a world that the building didn’t seem to know existed within it.

His father would be dressed in a suit for work. The heart specialist too would be in a suit. As they sat across the table from one another, they’d have the manner of colleagues in tune with each other, the father still with his post-breakfast, corporate, I-know-what-I’m-doing air about him. That air was actually a great comfort to the mother in her printed silk sari, which she’d put on hastily before the appointment; it was however her — with her implacably nervous air, who looked like a child that had been startled by a thunderclap — that the doctor repeatedly addressed, as if it were she who were the patient, and he a family elder who had to persuade her to go to a doctor. Any little thing might make her cry; and the doctor didn’t want that to happen in the tranquillity of the chamber.

When Nirmalya was slightly older, and had had further experience of doctors, he asked his father: ‘Baba, why do these doctors always have their chambers in awful buildings?’ He’d always wondered if it was humility or otherworldliness, because the doctors he knew seemed absent-minded, and invariably had bad handwriting. ‘It’s cheap for them,’ said his father. ‘They pay very little rent.’

And at last the logic of these successful doctors seeing him in tottering buildings became clear to him.

As the mother and father waited, he in his dark suit, she in her printed sari, as if they were about to embark on a trip, Nirmalya lay recumbent for twenty minutes on the narrow high bed, while the moist-lipped nozzle connected to the various nodes of the electrocardiogram kissed his skin and ribs wetly. A kindly lady in a white sari moved the nozzle from one point to another on his chest; the little space behind the curtain was ice-cold from the air conditioning. By the time he’d wiped the stuff from himself with a tissue and put on his shirt, he’d grown used to the cold.

These buildings were dark, and the various doctors’ chambers were little bigger than large cupboards. But the cupboards were all bright and air-conditioned. After they were finished, the three of them got into the lift and descended into daylight again.

After that, his parents felt temporarily free and lightened. And, since Nirmalya had anyway missed the morning’s school, they stopped at a small new cafe on Marine Lines. Mr Sengupta, dressed for a business appointment, sitting with wife and child at a table in a cafe; but it was as if simply emerging from the doctors’ building had bequeathed upon him another day. They had chicken sandwiches.

Often, Mrs Sengupta would think back to that day in January in Calcutta, when Nirmalya was one and a half years old, and she, in Calcutta for two months, had been invited to judge a competition at a music school, where the children would be singing Tagore songs. Her co-judges were two distinguished singers, Sumita Mullick and Banani Ray, and, in a way, it was quite an honour to sit at the same panel as them.

But they — Apurva and Mrs Sengupta — didn’t know what to do with the child; they decided, after a long discussion, to leave him in the car with the ayah. The competition continued longer than expected; it went on and on; one girl after another approached the microphone and sang Rabindranath’s lyrics with the utmost solemnity; and Mrs Sengupta sat ill-at-ease and restless with her co-judges. When they returned to the car, they found that, despite the windows being rolled up, there were mosquitoes inside. The child was howling and angry; he had been bitten. As if he were some sort of deity before which she must be contrite, Mrs Sengupta bent forward and picked him up from the ayah’s lap. ‘E Ram! E Ram!’ she said. A few days later, the child had a fever — it turned out to be the dengue, of which there was an epidemic in Calcutta at the time.

Years later, she would return to that day in Calcutta; the competition, which had now receded into the background; her own neglect, as she saw it; and the dengue, which she could hardly believe had happened to her own child. She’d read that both dengue and rheumatic fever could damage the heart; and she wondered if she were responsible for her son’s condition. She could not bear to think it, but she couldn’t help thinking it. ‘No,’ said the specialist. ‘This is congenital; the defect was there from birth.’ Yet she couldn’t help thinking of the day of the competition.

‘Jumna, will everything be all right?’ By ‘everything’ she meant Nirmalya; Nirmalya was twelve years old. She sat on the sofa of the new flat, behind her a new mirror. She looked into the distance; there were tears inside her eyes.

Jumna — who lived in a slum in Mahalaxmi — said: ‘Why do you think so much, memsaab? Don’t you see how well our baba is?’ Mallika Sengupta nodded tearfully. She envied Jumna, almost. She envied her her four healthy children. Vipul, Ramesh. Shankar, Asha. Four children who went to a municipal school. Would she, Mallika Sengupta, have changed places with Jumna? Perhaps not. But she would have liked to have had Jumna’s easy taking-for-granted, as Jumna bent low before the carpet, jhadu in hand, of her children. And she knew she couldn’t have it.

‘What do you think will happen?’

And so Jumna had to lay down the jhadu and sit beside the centre table. Mrs Sengupta was a small statue of pain; Jumna must console her. For a long time they’d just sit together in silence. ‘Nothing will happen,’ Jumna said, as if she’d casually dismissed the powers-that-be. ‘Arrey, what can happen?’ Then, slowly, after an interval of brooding and staring into the distance, she’d get back to work.

Jumna lived in the large sprawling slum in Mahalaxmi, not far from the Race Course. In spite of its size, it was invisible from the main road; it had to be arrived at by a couple of narrow by-lanes and gullies. The people at the Race Course and the members of the Willingdon Club probably didn’t know it was there. Once, Nirmalya and the driver had dropped her off on a road next to the Willingdon Club which had a large expanse of untended green on one side. She’d got out of the car, and Nirmalya didn’t know in exactly which direction she’d gone. The car had gone back up the road; and when Nirmalya turned back to look, Jumna was already gone, there was only the road and the expanse of overgrown green. But Nirmalya knew now that this — not the exact location, but somewhere here — was where Jumna returned in the afternoons.

Today, it was to Jumna that Mrs Sengupta turned. It wasn’t the first time she’d done so. It was as if the very fact that Jumna possessed almost nothing, that there was nothing, really, she could offer to her employer, that made Mrs Sengupta turn to her as an inexplicable source of comfort.

‘What will happen, then, Jumna?’ asked Mrs Sengupta. Jumna, sitting on the carpet, pulling the aanchal of her sari to cover her head, said, ‘What will happen? Memsaab, you worry for nothing.’ Jumna was moved; she was not insincere; the poor have a special ability, after all, to understand the torments of their employers, to empathise with them. It was as if she absorbed some of Mallika Sengupta’s pain.

Her real name was Heera. Before she came to work for this family six years ago, a bearded jamadar with red eyes and a paunch used to come in the mornings to clean the bathrooms in the Cumballa Hill flat. While going down the hill one evening, Nirmalya had suddenly seen him from the car, staggering drunkenly on the road. Nirmalya had always wondered what the man did for the rest of the day. ‘He’s a strange man. His kind eat crows,’ said the driver. ‘Crows?’ Nirmalya was awe-struck. Nirmalya thought of the jamadar sitting in a room, a dead crow in his hand; he was preparing to cook it. One of those crows that sit on parapets, balconies, behind the windows of toilets, and fill the day with their cawing. Nirmalya couldn’t decide whether to add a family to the scene — children in the room, sitting next to the jamadar as he began to cook. ‘Yes, yes, “they” eat crows,’ said the driver, and, from the way he said the word, Nirmalya could see the shadowy ‘they’ the jamadar belonged to was, in the driver’s eyes, beyond the pale. Then the jamadar was back the next morning, silently wiping the floors.