Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

But, though Sunder may have worked hard, he was still raw. For the last two years, his father railed and shouted and cajoled as Sunder tried to master the technical aspects of kathak; he’d not even begun to broach its emotive side, abhinaya, where the dancer, through facial expressions and small gestures of the hand, relives the surprise and tenderness and frustrations of Radha’s trysts with Krishna. He was still altogether too gangly; the bells round his ankles sounded too loud when he stamped his feet. It was as if the boy was having a late adolescence.

For forty-five minutes they went on like this, the father, bespectacled, thin, slapping the tabla angrily, Pyarelal playing the harmonium and rapidly saying the bols to which the boy danced. Sunder’s wife gaped at him from the audience as he whirled round three times and came to an anxious stop, his eyes still with controlled terror, his body poised like a pin as it hits the ground; the rest of Shyamji’s family looked politely uninterested. Really, the boy had no grace at all — he couldn’t have entered Radha’s body, her movements, if he tried; not his gender, but some anxiety that locked more and more acutely into him made him wooden but volatile, like one of those Rajasthani puppets that, with the yank of the strings, rush everywhere. Perhaps he still hadn’t recovered from the long, dusty journey from Delhi in the chair car; he’d arrived, dazed but brimming with hope and impatience, yesterday evening.

Pyarelal was poised on the steps of the foyer — beedi in hand, smoking furiously. He’d just finished his stint playing with Sunder; his long blue kurta dazzled in the moonlight, though patches of sweat darkened into indigo beneath the underarms. He was furious; he muttered and spewed smoke alternately. Being a parasite on Shyamji, he didn’t mind the odd jobs assigned to him; playing the harmonium with Sunder, playing the tabla with this or that person. But then, in between jobs, from nowhere his sense of self-respect returned to him, and, with it, outrage; ingratiatingness replaced by mumbled fulminations.

‘Did you see how that boy did his circles? I was afraid he’d fall. Baba, what is the hurry?’ He exhaled, looked away and coughed. ‘It’s a difficult art, learn it for five years, ten years. Just because you’re the damaad of. .’ His eyes glinted and he lowered his voice, as if he mustn’t be heard. ‘Did you see him when the programme began? He went and touched his father’s feet, but he didn’t do pranaam to me. Wasn’t that an insult?’

He looked at Nirmalya for support — bird-like, his gaze, as of a creature that had been threatened with injury. Nirmalya nodded his most sympathetic and convinced nod.

The final recital of the first day would begin soon; Pandit Rasraj would sing. A small, flamboyant, balding man, he was the only truly eminent artist to perform at the Gandharva Sammelan. With real but not altogether unexhibitionistic humility he laid flowers before Ram Lal’s stern portrait. Before beginning, he checked, with a look of tolerant disdain, to see if his disciples’ two tanpuras were in tune. Then he closed his eyes and suddenly became immobile. There was utter silence; as if he were Lord Shiva on Mount Kailash. Then, indeed, he plunged into an invocation to Lord Shiva in raga Puriya Dhanashree, very softly at first, his voice a whisper — his performance, at this early point, full of possibility and god-like suspense. Behind his rapturous awareness of the raga was a shrewd assessment of the microphone; for Rasraj, the microphone was the main deity; without anyone becoming conscious of it, it took on preternatural properties. This happened despite, or because of, Rasraj’s closed eyes; it was as if the microphone, his real interlocutor, was invisible.

The first seven or eight rows were full, but then more and more empty seats appeared, a random scattering of people: the recital was half-attended. This was because most of Shyamji’s ‘crowd’ would come tomorrow, to sing themselves, or to listen to members of their families; they weren’t too interested in Rasraj. Besides, the Gandharva Sammelan, despite its grandiose name, wasn’t well known. For the last three years it had had no advertisements in the newspapers; the only advertisements were the ones put by students for their firms and enterprises in the programme. Then the bada khayal began, majestic, resistant to hurry, taking the first steps in its regal elephantine progress: ‘O blue-throated one, O custodian of the Ganga. .’

Day two, and the students crowded the wings to sing their two songs each. Some of them were barely trained; but Shyamji had put them in anyway, from a compassion for the weak but eager, and also because they, or their fathers, had put in half-page advertisements. He had a shrewd and tender comprehension of the vanity that made people sing. This was the difference between the age in which he lived and the one Ram Lal had inhabited and taught in; not the age of patronage, this one, in which the landlord and his cognoscenti had, at once, cherished and dominated and learnt from and humiliated the musician. This was the age of democracy; the ordinary person, everyman, was supreme. Deep down, notwithstanding the bowed heads, the affectionate, timorous smiles, the rushed feet-touching, Shyamji understood he and his students were equals; that he was their guru, but also, in this age, their coeval; and the patron had merged into the rights and irreducible power of the common man, not only the right to honour and even own the artist that the patron had, in a sense, reserved for himself, but to do away with the very line that separated artist and ordinary human being. And Shyamji subsisted and thrived on this equality; he mingled among his students as if he were one of them. He oversaw them all, paternal but clear-eyed about his own temporary role — nervous girls in salwar kameezes, pampered daughters of businessmen; young professional singers, already smug, humming intricate modulations to themselves, taking on the mannerisms current these days among the more established singers, the vacuous jerk of the head when the tabla returned to the first beat of the cycle, the curving of the hand while executing a grace-note, tics without which they’d be lost, pretending to be moved by a competitor’s mediocre warbling, to be unmoved or momentarily preoccupied when someone else hit a perfect note; elderly ladies in expensive saris, smiling, perspiring, as if in the warmth of paradise, through their make-up. Nirmalya, in goatee and frayed corduroys, trying to mingle in the cat-and-mouse corridors of the wings, escorting his mother backstage, walking past rows of light switches, taking part and yet not taking part.

‘This is Sengupta saab’s son, Sengupta saab, you know, the MD of. .’ When Shyamji introduced him to some of the people going in and out of the green room, they looked twice at Nirmalya, as if, in spite of his guilty, caught-in-transit appearance, he possessed certain qualities: he was Sengupta saab’s son — the famous company was oddly embodied in him, a mark of distinction he wasn’t personally responsible for; they didn’t need to know his name.

They sat in the third row, Apurva Sengupta, in a dark blue suit, his necktie compressed into a perfect knot, and the untidy, intent son next to him, spectacles gleaming, unremarkable except for his quiet air of exercising judgement.

There, on the stage, was Mrs Sengupta, cheeks white in the stage lights, turning the pages of the songbook absent-mindedly, as if she’d never find the page; and, next to her, Shyamji, playing the harmonium as he had with all his students, not looking so much tired as far away and vaguely dutiful. A faint hum emanated from the instrument at his fingers.

This was an important moment, both in and out of her social life, this spotlit pause when she was most alone, when she began to sing the first lines to an audience that was never quite listening. The sari she was wearing was a beautiful purple Benarasi, embossed with silver thread-work. In comparison to the other singers and their hurried ambition and swift attunement to the dark of the auditorium, their smiling, convivial namaskars at the end of their two songs, she was like a slightly forgetful royal personage, half-aware of her listeners, in exile, someone from another age. The audience accepted her entry and her brief, incongruous incumbency good-humouredly. But when she sang, Nirmalya couldn’t stand it; he felt her voice, amplified and made subtly different, a voice from the past and not her own voice, was sounding too sharp, she was not in practice, she was accompanying her husband to too many parties, from which she’d bring back stories of the Tatas and the Singhanias. He could never listen to his mother calmly during a performance. It was only months, sometimes years, later, when he’d overhear something she’d taped for her own purposes, that he’d be struck by the beauty of her voice, effortlessly fresh and immediate, and wonder why he could never hear it in the present moment.