Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

Her expression now indicated that she’d lighted upon a simple solution. She rose and went to the cupboard and, parting its slatted doors, put her head into its faintly twinkling darkness for a few silent but busy minutes and eventually took out a sari with a deep pink colour. ‘It’s that synthetic sari I got as a gift that I don’t know what to do with.’ She looked sublimely pleased. He gazed at it with horror, but trusted her, and her knowledge of other people, implicitly; he knew she wouldn’t take a false step and embarrass him or herself. ‘I’ll give it to Tara. It’s the kind of thing she likes.’

THERE WERE RUMBLINGS in the background Nirmalya was hardly aware of, mild but far-reaching tectonic shifts in the topography of the company, from whose tremors the boy was on the whole insulated.

‘That Thakore,’ muttered Mr Sengupta, when he’d come back home at six o’clock, as if he’d just had an absolutely stupid argument. This was followed by a reminiscent look of dismayed wonder; he was slightly red-faced, and embarrassed. To all appearances, he’d been made to look foolish in a game of some sort. He was speaking of the non-executive chairman he’d inducted to the board a few years ago, in the euphoria of the first weeks after being appointed chief executive; every gesture, at the time, had seemed not only an exercise of judgement, but of generosity; a new set of peers had come into existence, with whom he was quickly on casual first-name terms, and each one was a friend. ‘They’re not renewing my extension,’ he said to his wife. She was seated in front of the dressing table; she stared at his reflection behind hers in the mirror, as if he were wandering about in an imaginary room. ‘What does that mean?’ she asked, her lips suddenly thin. Coat-less, he shook his head and laughed. ‘They’ve created a new post for me — Special Advisor. It means nothing really; I have no executive powers.’ Then, as was his habit, he decided to round off the news with a positive interpretation — his longevity was dented but not damaged; this was a hiccup; he’d change direction and recover. ‘I continue to draw the same salary, and I keep this flat for a year.’ Mrs Sengupta was silent; then, with a somewhat aggrieved deliberateness, she began to powder the face through which contradictory thoughts were flitting. ‘I should never have trusted Thakore,’ he remonstrated with himself, speaking again of the pompous chairman who was not content to be a rubber-stamp. ‘It seems he conspired with that fool Dick,’ he was referring to the British shareholder who materialised unfailingly for the Annual General Meeting like some lost, amnesiac member of a scatterbrained royalty, put his arms round the shoulders of the directorial fraternity, sang songs, then vanished again, ‘and Raman.’ Raman, soft-spoken, cold, who spoke perfect English, and regularly went with his wife to classical concerts, and looked like he would have been a curator if he hadn’t been a corporate executive. ‘They all have their interests in marginalising me. Raman is the new Managing Director from next Monday,’ he added without interest or emotion, as if the changes, astonishing in their unexpectedness and finality, had failed, for some reason, to impress or move him. ‘So you’re still the Managing Director?’ she asked without irony, like a child who needed to be instructed in these things. He didn’t answer her.

That evening, like almost every other evening, they had to go to a party. One part of her mind in a state of febrile blankness, the other part carefully chose a sari from the folded piles and the ones listlessly dangling in their many concentrated colours from hangers, a subdued Chanderi, of a faint glowing green that bordered on white; then, swiftly, efficiently, a drawer unlocked and opened, went through the ritual of jewellery-wearing. It was the humiliation she minded; not of herself, but of her husband; she had outgrown her parents and her brothers and her friends, but not him. In her mind, in spite of his defects, he had always been infallible; to see him deceived like anybody else was shocking. She was almost proud, though, that his most glaring shortcoming was naivety, trusting the wrong people, gauging the others by the standards of his simplicity (for that was how she saw him, as a simple man); or would he have courted Laxmi Ratan Shukla for so long, hoping this taciturn man would produce her disc? Already, she began to make small readjustments to her understanding of the husband she’d known for twenty-nine years. Really, with hindsight, she marvelled that a man as simple as he had been as successful as he was.

They were to have dinner at the Danish Consul’s house; the Danish Ambassador, whoever he was, was visiting. The card, with the black, self-conscious, italicised letters embossed on white, had arrived, and the envelope been opened, two weeks ago. Dinners at these Europeans’ residences were, at times, a little easier to bear; her hosts instinctively sensed her reserve and dignity, and were unconcerned and ignorant of her small-town background; she had nothing special to say, and they liked her for it. Tonight she had to put on a sort of show; she mustn’t think she had only another week as a Managing Director’s wife; at the same time, she must be herself. She shivered with contained anger at the thought of running into Raman and his wife; how easily, decorously, unremarkably, everything had changed between yesterday and now for both them and her. Yet nothing had changed; life was as it was.

Often, that evening, as she sat seemingly self-contained and complete with a glass of sweet sherry upon the sofa, she had to control herself. She smiled determinedly and blankly when the Ambassador’s wife described to her in fond detail, the homesickness in her voice politely, expertly, transformed into anecdote, her two grown-up children, a son and a daughter, whom she’d left behind in Copenhagen. The Consul’s flat was on the third floor of a grand, cool art deco building on an elevation in Breach Candy; the hosts had kept the windows open for the sea breeze to breathe through their transitory posting and its convivial gatherings, and often Mallika Sengupta found herself being fanned by nature, a vast, gentle solace coming out of nowhere; a large doorway opened invitingly onto the semicircular balcony, a dim promontory that jutted out into the compound’s protected darkness.

The food was a diversion; an instance, as ever, of buoyant self-absorption and fantasy in the cricket-infested nighttime of these seven conjoined islands. An invisible cook, quite likely from Kerala, had been given free rein and command. She’d, of course, had no inkling that the Danish had a cuisine; she had a vague conception that they had hams and sausages and cold cuts. But the soup, a milky broth that a bearer took around in bowls, calmed her greatly. They could have served her anything tonight, and she would have connected it with Denmark. Tears formed spontaneously in her eyes; they dried by themselves, no one around her noticing them; even she was hardly aware of them. The change in their lives was a secret, but she wouldn’t mind if it weren’t; already she’d begun to accept how things would be from tomorrow. The buffet appeared, with its daunting array of cold meat; the eager carnivores made a beeline for it, glasses balanced forgetfully in one hand. Among the long china dishes was one that held a smoky mass, which Mrs Sengupta paused at, thinking it was some sort of confection. She broke its surface stealthily with a spoon and transferred some to her plate. Eating it later, she was puzzled; it tasted very delicately of fish. It was fish mousse; in all her years, she’d eaten nothing like it.