Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

‘I must then prepare the song I have to sing,’ she said, to him but really to herself, very seriously. ‘Where is the temple?’

‘Not far away, somewhere in Versova,’ he said. ‘But we will need a car.’ He’d recently sold the second-hand Fiat. ‘Will your car be free, didi?’ he enquired very quickly, almost a random question. ‘If we could use it. .’

Mrs Sengupta felt a flash of impatience. Did Shyamji really want her to sing, or did he just want to use the car?

‘Of course the car will be available,’ she said, like a fairy godmother speaking of what’s most predictable and cursory among her enchantments; and Shyamji looked visibly gratified.

On the afternoon, they set out for the outer reaches of Versova. The macadam road cut deep into a landscape on which nothing much yet had come up, although, here and there, in the dark mud of the monsoons, they noticed the beginnings of construction; on and on they went, in the broad afternoon glare, the tall extinguished lampposts standing in the sun. Finally, the Ambassador, with its cargo of Shyamji, his brother Banwari, Mallika Sengupta, Nirmalya, and the harmonium and tablas secure on their straw rings in the boot, came to the Sindhi temple, which was made of marble; it came to a stop in the dust with a sudden reminiscent whiff of gasoline, the engine over-heated with the air conditioning. A tall, fair man in steel-rimmed spectacles and white kurta and Aligarhi pyjamas ran down the steps to welcome Shyamji, and swooped down on the car door like a melancholy bird: ‘Aiye, aiye Panditji.’ He was all humility; and he emphasised it by stooping and lowering his head slightly, drawing attention to his plangent bird-like poise. Everything about him and his clothes seemed fresh and laundered; Shyamji introduced Mrs Sengupta to him as ‘my own didi’, the wife of the burra sahib of a well-known company (‘But you must listen to her sing,’ he said), and spoke softly of Nirmalya — with a hint of mischief, slyly mocking the obstreperous high-seriousness that the boy carried with him everywhere — as his ‘true disciple’, ‘asli chela’. The tall man nodded in amazement in the approaching dusk, and led them up the steps to where a group of people had been waiting for them, sitting patiently before a raised platform on which there was no human being yet, only an arrangement of microphones. They sat down; tablas and harmonium were brought and placed before them. Almost everyone was dressed in white; they ended up looking, these benign-seeming people, a bit like phantoms (they didn’t mean to, of course), inhabiting, as the sun set, a place somewhere between mercantile activity and the afterlife. The new temple itself suggested a similar ambiguity; the white stone it was built from was meant to calm doubts about the everyday world, to suggest abnegation, purity, but to remind you, too, of the benediction of money, that the gods of the affluent demand to be housed expensively. There were no doors in this main area of congregation; and the absence of doorways gave what would otherwise have looked like a hotel lobby the spaciousness of worship. There were no doors, but there were large pillars; in the midst of all this, Mrs Sengupta’s voice, coming from the speaker (she had begun to sing), sounded almost like a child’s; a child who had still not seen the world, who was still innocent, who still believed in simple rewards and just dispensations. The sweetness of the voice, and its lack of knowingness, surprised the listeners; the old women, hardened by material expectation, began to sing along softly, as if they’d been won over. Then, when she stopped, they smiled and murmured among themselves, letting her return to being who she was: they didn’t want to know her name, as they would if she’d been a professional singer, but glanced sideways at her, at her sari and mascara and bangles, curious, but with no desire to interfere. Now, the boy, long-haired and uneasy, began to sing — an old Surdas bhajan, ‘He´ Govind, he´ Gopal’, at which everyone stirred with recognition. He sang quite sweetly, but they found it difficult to relax; he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height. After he’d finished, Shyamji seemed to speak a word of encouragement — a ‘shabaash’ — into his ear. The sky outside had reddened. As Shyamji began to sing to the soft background of his harmonium, Mallika Sengupta thought of where she was now, how far away from home, wherever home might be; how this was where home had been in the last thirty years, wherever her husband was, or her son, in Malabar Hill, in Cuffe Parade, in Pali Hill, in Versova, wherever she happened to be at that moment, how the old idea and sense of home had faded, and she’d allowed it to fade. Sitting inside the temple, she realised that no place was really alien any more. With part of her attention, she listened to Shyamji; these were the songs she sang away from home, these Hindi bhajans she’d been learning for the last thirty years. If she’d stayed at home, she might probably have sung other songs. Shyamji, now in his second bhajan, coughed twice; the cough irritated him, and he ignored it as he’d ignore a heckler. He cleared his throat, but the cough didn’t seem to have anything to do with it; it came back intermittently. The audience didn’t mind; Shyamji’s music was, to them, anyway, less an aesthetic than a devotional experience; and the flame of their devotion wasn’t so easily put out. Nirmalya noticed that the tall man, who looked about forty, who’d brought them in, was shaking his head and weeping copiously as Shyamji sang. It wasn’t so much a public display as an outpouring of emotion among people whom he knew too well to feel embarrassed in front of. When Shyamji finally stopped after the fourth song, pointing sketchily to his throat and pleading with a smile to be let off because of his cough, the man swiftly returned to what he’d been like when he’d received Shyamji emerging from the car, normal, cheerful, even official, as if his sorrow had mysteriously faded, or as if he could manage to inhabit two planes of existence, on one of which he could surrender to mourning the pain of life, the other on which he polished his glasses, wore his ironed clothes, and cheerfully carried out all its duties. As the audience dispersed without urgency, he took these visitors, his characteristic graciousness restored, on a small, impromptu tour of the temple, to where the holy book (written, surprisingly, in the Arabic script) was kept, reminding Nirmalya, in a way that had never occurred to him, that the Sindhis were a people without a homeland. Finally, he led them to where boxes of sweets had been kept for them; and, no doubt, out of the sight of others, in a private, invisible moment that nevertheless must have elapsed, paid Shyamji discreetly. But Nirmalya was convinced this man did something terrible every day and that his guilt came back to him in moments like the one that Nirmalya, against his will, had just witnessed. Shyamji looked pleased the session had gone well, and that he’d had use of Mrs Sengupta’s car; though Nirmalya, glancing at the tranquil, slightly out of sorts expression on the face of the sick man, always found it difficult to guess at what his teacher was thinking, what it was he wanted.

SHYAMJI SCRATCHED his cheek (he was a bit untidy; fine needles of stubble spread across the dark skin, making it look almost purple) and told the Senguptas, at the end of another lesson, in a bored, throwaway remark of what had been diagnosed as the cause of the cough: water had collected in his lungs.

Mrs Sengupta wasn’t sure how serious this was; the condition was unfamiliar to her. Water in the lungs; what a nuisance — if it was taken out, would the cough go away? She wasn’t unduly worried; Shyamji was in the thick of things, trailing exhaust fumes and traffic lights and junctions as he entered, having moved in an hour from one end of the city to another, gently pushing his hair back as he appeared in the doorway, preoccupied.