Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

‘So you’re going to London,’ said Nayana Neogi, his parents’ friend, sitting in a large, loose smock in the small bright sitting room of the new flat. He felt more comfortable now, more at home, with his mother’s friends than with his own; he felt they could sense his transformation. ‘We’re so proud of you, Nirmalya.’ She leaned forward, this woman who was for years familiar to him, large, engrossed, looking for an ashtray.

Now that they were in this part of the city, his parents had begun to see the Neogis more regularly than before: they were a ten-minute drive away. Not only proximity, but the fact that retirement had restored a sort of parity, that to see Apurva Sengupta was to see an old friend, and not so much to visit a ‘big man’, had made things just a little easier; from the early days, when everyone and everything was full of promise, and Nayana’s husband a young gifted artist and Apurva a charming, beautiful ‘chhokra’ they were fond of, to the middle period, full of unresolved tensions and contradictions, when it seemed infinite opportunities opened up for the slightly less deserving and mysteriously closed for others, to now, when Nayana Neogi seemed more at peace in her oversized frame and with her superannuated bohemian days, happy with her various pets — so much time had been covered, and was represented, in this simple visit now that the friends lived within a few miles of each other: Khar and Bandra! It was in London, of course, they’d first met in the fifties, when Nayana’s husband, Prashanta, and Apurva Sengupta had been students, the former of commercial art, the latter beginning his articleship toward a degree in accountancy: there was that story of how Apurva had, by mistake, on the first night he’d spent at Prashanta’s ‘digs’, used — they had taken an instant liking to each other — the latter’s toothbrush. This outrageous act of presumption on young Apurva Sengupta’s part (for that was how it was seen by the doting Prashanta) had sealed their friendship for life; but the story of the toothbrush was just a little too old now, almost too pat and rounded, for Prashanta to use it to make a special claim on his friend; but he still recounted it; for him, it still had a kind of music. Over the years, they’d not so much grown apart as been divided by what constituted and defined success: the Senguptas suspected the Neogis secretly resented their ‘success’ only because they clung to one particular meaning of that word. The Neogis felt that Apurva Sengupta had sacrificed his freshness, his mischief, and become predictable in his life-devouring pursuit of conventional fulfilments. But now the Senguptas had moved to this part of the city, the subterranean debate about success had lost its urgency; and Mallika Sengupta had begun to visit, every other day, the rented ground-floor flat, two steps up to a wooden door on the left, where the Neogis continued to live, the black-and-white photograph of their dead, smiling son greeting you as you entered the bedroom, a menagerie of pets — a sleek, supercilious grey cat and, recently, a small family of Pekinese — moving constantly and confidently from kitchen to bedroom to hall, the coir chairs waiting to be occupied by visitors.

Once again, he’d gone out for a walk; he loved the conjunction of foreignness and familiarity in Bandra; he was impelled constantly by a sense of discovery, but also of wonder and recognition, as if he’d once belonged here, to these lanes, these crumbling verandas and families; here were the strange but familiar Goan bungalows again, some of them unsettling him and making him nervous because of the dogs inside that began to bark furiously as he went past; one had a small life-like porcelain dog at the window which stared fixedly at him with a kind of challenge — and he stared back, confident it couldn’t leap at him, waiting tensely for it to bark: and, finally, he understood why it was glowering so silently. These figurines and tame beasts, and their semi-visible owners, were the guardians of these lanes. Nevertheless, some of these houses had already been torn down; unintimidating six- or seven-storey buildings with names like Annabella had risen in their places. What the lanes were called was disclosed on the swinging blue plaques found everywhere in the city, usually with the names of Maharashtrian leaders no one knew, and which could well have been invented, so many-syllabled and incredible these unheard-of names were; except that here they bore names of saints — which, too, with the exception of Paul, had a difficult-to-believe fairy-tale ring: Cyril, Leo. When he came back, he found a woman — he couldn’t tell whether she was looking for work, or was just a visitor; whether she was run-down or was really working class — in a pale blue synthetic sari, leaning thoughtfully on the wall at the end of the corridor in front of his parents’ bedroom. She was smiling faintly, as if Mrs Sengupta had said something amusing. ‘Nirmalya,’ said his mother when she glimpsed him, ‘do you know who this is? Do you remember her?’

‘How will he remember?’ said the woman in Hindi, looking up brightly but pointedly; although his mother had spoken to him in Bengali, she must have guessed at what she meant from the lilt of the question; she had an air of intelligence, of a modest, unhurried alertness.

He looked at her again politely. She seemed embarrassed and happy, and eager to defend him from the charge of forgetfulness.

‘Arrey, this is Anju,’ said his mother, delighted for a moment by the unthinkable simplicity of the situation. ‘I’ve told you about her, haven’t I? She looked after you when you were two years old.’

Ah, so that’s who she was! That explained to him her understated but surprising air of recognition, although she couldn’t have known him if she’d seen him on the street. Recognition is partly imagination, isn’t it, and not knowing what had happened to him in the intervening seventeen years had given her present sighting of him a startling intimacy.

‘Do you know,’ said his mother to Jumna, who was sitting agog, a little puzzled, feeling perhaps a tiny bit excluded, on the carpet — and embarked on the story he’d heard more than a hundred times — ‘I was feeding baba moong daal and rice, and he was quite a fat greedy child.’ Both Jumna and Anju laughed together at this frank insight, Jumna showing her gums; Nirmalya looked abashed at being reminded of a time when he was not thin and tortured. ‘He liked the daal so much he began to dance up and down with pleasure. And he bounced so much that he came straight out of the cot!’ ‘Haa?’ said Jumna, sitting up slightly, becoming serious. ‘He would have fallen to the ground, and I don’t know what would have happened, but Anju, who was standing beside me, caught him in an instant.’ And this woman in the blue sari, looking proud, also became self-effacing and appeared deliberately to melt, as if she had no further claim to this distant miracle.

‘Baap re,’ said Jumna finally. She, who’d looked after Nirmalya for fifteen years, whose skin had been pricked by his needles when he played doctor, whose hair had begun to grey all at once in the last two years, stared at this woman, who’d appeared out of nowhere, and who’d once, instinctively, with an acrobat’s grace, prevented serious injury to Nirmalya. Jumna’s puzzled smile contained something, a memory and also speculation. She was caught between the past and a present in which she was confronted with this woman, and there was a shadow of disbelief on her face. Anju was still pretty, though a little drawn; almost ghostly in her undecidedness.

‘Where do you live now?’ Nirmalya asked of his onetime rescuer.

‘Baba, not far from here. Juhu Danda,’ she said, indistinctly gesturing north. ‘I heard from someone who works in this building that memsaab had moved to this part of the city.’ She smiled a little, girlish again. ‘So I decided to come.’