Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

THE BOMBAY Chamber of Commerce was one hundred and three years old, and though nothing now could match the contented but animated milling of suited gentlemen and their wives that the hundredth-anniversary celebrations had comprised — like a reunion of heads of companies and heads-to-be, a reunion in which everyone, magically, conveniently, seemed to have fulfilled their early promise — still, the captains of industry and their bedecked spouses gathered in the basement hall of the Oberoi with their enthusiasm undiminished. A long, breathy speech was made by the President, an amiable duffer, while people laughed both at his jokes and at him, and he beamed at them and continued, relentless; and then the speech ended and everyone was standing, and, in the crowd, there was a subtle insinuation of men in white shirts and black trousers with trays of canape´s, receding at the moment of the sighting. Two days ago, Mr Makhija, secretary of the Chamber, had phoned them; Makhija, whose slow, courteous phone calls and reminders they’d grown used to in the past few years, a doorkeeper to the world of commerce, neither outside it nor, thankfully, quite of it. ‘Please do come, sir,’ he had said, a kindly long-distance spy on their lives, and hectorer. There Mrs Sengupta stood, suddenly having lost her husband; no sign of Makhija either. She held a wine glass half full of mango juice in one hand. The crowd in the large, outstretching room had broken up into circles of men making toasts and telling each other jokes; she was surrounded by people she knew and faces she recognised — it had almost become a habit, this cursory, neutral assignment of names, characteristics, and positions to certain features — and suddenly, far away, she spotted her husband, radiant — he had hardly aged at all — holding a drink aloft nebulously (he drank deceptively, without involvement, and would sip self-importantly and misleadingly from this one glass all morning), his hair as impeccably black as when, on his wife’s urgings, he’d begun to dye it twenty-five years ago, only a plume of white in the front held steady all these years like a flame. He was eager as ever, ignoring the bearer of canape´s hovering fruitlessly next to him, his expression charged with a strange simplicity and expectancy, and she could not believe that they were not in the middle of things, so impossibly far away the limits of the horizon and emptiness seemed; surely two lifetimes were needed to do justice and give proper shape to, to learn from and perfect, a career of what even now felt like promise and youthfulness? For they were not inheritors of property or fortunes, as the business families were; there was nothing static about what they symbolised; for the Senguptas, the career and the life were what they made of them, constantly surprising, a constant, strenuous, but genuine exploration, and everything that happened before or after these years in the company would be marks announcing what had essentially been their life. They would then disappear, in a way it looked the business families never could. Their life would become memory; their own, and in the minds of people like the ones she ran into at these anniversaries, an immense variety but really a narrow range of faces that seemed, with hindsight, to have been put together, unforgettably, by chance.

It was a time crowded with celebrations. In November, the great, bizarre event was Chanchal Mansukhani’s older son’s marriage in a fake village specially created on the lawns on Wodehouse Road, walking distance from the Regal Cinema. People were getting out of cars, urgent men slamming their doors, slow women in organza saris, unsteady on their feet in their jewellery, eager to confer not only wedding gifts but legitimacy upon this man. The Senguptas arrived in a state of minor distractedness and excitement. Chanchal Mansukhani stood, in black suit and dark spotted tie, welcoming the guests, smiling at them whether he recognised them or not, doing namaskar, sometimes taking the palms of their hands uninsistingly in his own, not holding them, but cradling them for a few moments. The donning of the ubiquitous black suit was almost ironical; it was as if it was meant to remind you that he’d made his fortune in textiles, beating to number one place in the market a far better-educated rival of a distinguished political and business lineage; and it was meant to adorn the myth, that this was the son of a man who’d arrived with no belongings at the Victoria Terminus soon after Partition, and who’d worked as both shoeshine boy and coolie. Queueing up to shake hands with him, the creator of Mansukhani Suitings and Shirtings, Apurva Sengupta couldn’t decide whether he was a monster or an angel; he had a boneless posture, his edges were rounded and blunted, and the compassionate, maternal smile of a man who’d grown up in a large, disorderly family, an ensconcing microcosm, played on his lips. There were rumours (whether they had credibility or not it was difficult to say) that he’d used hit men and that murder had been useful to him during his remarkably uplifting — for doesn’t everyone want the man who reigns to have once been like one of the beggars on the road outside? — rise. How many mill-hands, their means of redressal completely at an end, the tall chimneys empty of smoke, were sitting at home or in idle, despondent groups playing cards because of him? Wedding music filled the background, and returned to them optimistically in the middle of their own words; not the shehnai, but some sort of taped, assuaging expression of the human voice. After the muttered but gracious mantra of the ‘Congratulations’, Apurva and Mallika Sengupta felt they’d dissociated themselves from their host, and they wandered about the lawn entirely as if they’d come here on their own business — although they’d continue to talk about the wedding, with irony and pleasure, for a few days. They stopped at stalls offering kababs; others were distributing, equally generously, but to their surprise, Bombay junk food. Her husband was partly in a trance, with a faint smile on his face, as if there was still a possibility that something might happen. She was possessed by curiosity; she was never brave enough to eat street food except in five-star hotels. She tugged purposefully at his coat sleeve, a small, charming plea (he was elsewhere, and hardly aware); ‘Come, let’s go there,’ she whispered, pulling him like a small, unappeasable girl towards the pani puris.

Mr Wilson, from the lower echelons of the company’s personnel department, arrived at the flat late one morning. Having been let in, he stood there sheepishly. Then, almost casually, with the enquiring look of a man in a museum, he strolled into the main hall.

News was relayed down the long corridor to the main bedroom, by Arthur, then Jumna, then another, that Wilson was here. Finally, Mrs Sengupta, fresh from a bath, equanimous for the moment in a tangail, came out from the corridor into the sunlight of the drawing room.

She knew Wilson; as far as she was concerned, he was an odd-job man. When something needed to be done — when she needed to find out if the flight her husband was on was delayed; or to book a private taxi because the driver hadn’t turned up — he was the one she got in touch with. He was a big, burly man who spoke English in his brief polite responses with a South Indian accent, rolling his r’s and everything else softly; and he got the job done.

‘Madam,’ he said, apologetic, but also as if he were sharing an unpleasant secret, ‘I must have an inventory done before you move. Which things are belonging to the company, which things are not. .’

‘Wilson,’ she said quickly, ‘are you mad? What are you talking about?’

In all these years, his sanity had never been questioned. He was wounded, but he was also ashamed.