Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

‘This is Pandit Shyam Lal,’ said Apurva Sengupta, smiling like one continuing an old, recognisable conversation, ‘a well-known singer. As I said to you on the phone, he’s my wife’s music teacher.’

Dr Samaddar nodded, as if to say he understood Mr Sengupta’s compulsions. But the nod was oddly premeditated; there was no real sign of memory — either of the dialogue on the telephone, or of Mr Sengupta himself; memory was something of a misfit in this large room with its motionless framed certificates from fifties’ London, and the small plastic figurine of the human heart on the table, its cheeks red and full, its arteries springing from the top stubby and incomplete, like sawn-off antlers. Then, without looking at Shyamji, all the while gazing at the flecked mosaic floor, the doctor listened to the singer’s gentle, puzzled description, in Hindi, of his condition.

He gave no indication he’d understood what Shyamji had said. Speaking only one word, ‘Aiye,’ he led Shyamji to a high bed on one side of the room. There, as if they were miles away from Apurva Sengupta, the two faced each other in silence, Shyamji, who had perched himself on the bed, then taken off his kurta, and Dr Samaddar, who stood before him, listening to his heartbeat. Head bowed, in silence; never seeming to actually see the singer, not even when he stared fixedly for a few moments at the dark chest traversed diagonally by the sacred thread or the mournful, patient face, regarding them with the glazed, other-worldly air of someone looking at his reflection in the morning. The stethoscope moving nervously from spot to spot. Apurva Sengupta looked out of the window; he had a great, albeit easily underestimated, capacity for patience, a quality that had been useful to him — more useful even than his skills, his various professional qualifications — from the beginning of his working life. It had given him something that was surprising in one who’d had material success; or perhaps successful people needed to have it more than others: something resembling selflessness. He seemed to be thinking of nothing at all, to be bereft of all sense of boredom, while Dr Samaddar carefully attached the nodes of the ECG to Shyamji.

Later, unperturbed, the doctor addressed Apurva Sengupta:

‘Pleurisy hoyechhe.’

Mr Sengupta was surprised by this unconscious — or was it quite deliberate — slip into Bengali. Dr Samaddar had never claimed any kinship with him; they’d both ignored the fact that they were Bengalis, and had, with one another, opted for the neutrality, the comforting even keel, of English. Now, in the presence of the man sitting on the bed and pushing the silver buttons into the buttonholes of his kurta, it was as if they were suddenly old friends, or something else — who knew? Apurva Sengupta had misgivings about what this meant.

‘If we put him in Jaslok’ — he gestured to the hospital towering silently on the other side of the road — ‘we could give him a few more months.’

Apurva Sengupta — unexercised; in the generally benign, reasonable mood he experienced when engaged in transactions with others who were as successful in their own fields as he was in his — didn’t understand what he meant by ‘a few more months’; but, because Dr Samaddar hadn’t broken any bad news to him, as he’d threatened to in the case of his own son, he didn’t ask for a clarification, and let it pass. In his mind, the doctor’s words were transformed to something like — ‘If we put him in Jaslok, we could make him better in a few months’ — or a similar sentence, one that he could understand perfectly and do business with. Shyamji had begun to look unhappy, though, as if Dr Samaddar were conspiring to force him to break some religious taboo, or to eat meat. He distrusted, fundamentally, allopathic medicine; distrusted it because, in the end, it saved very few, and because he had a hunch that its bases, like the lives of so many of the well-off, were irreligious; and you couldn’t be saved unless the means were, in some way, connected to the sacred, and the sacred itself wanted the continuance of your life and good health. He felt detached and impatient, but he sat on the chair, dignified, contained; he wanted to go home.

‘What about the cost?’ asked Apurva Sengupta.

‘I’m a consultant there, I’ll take care of it,’ muttered Dr Samaddar, as if he were worried his gesture might be mistaken for weakness.

Jaslok Hospital was where Pandit Ram Lal had been admitted twelve years ago, after he’d had two strokes, the second in the taxi in Mulund, groaning ‘He´ bhagwan’ like a saint, full of compassion and endurance even in his suffering, while younger, agitated incarnations of Pyarelal and Shyamji flanked him on either side; the third seizure occurred as he was being bundled into his room in Jaslok — this dark, teeming factory of the living and partially living, with the much-garlanded statue of Ganesh at the entrance, was associated forever for Shyamji with his father’s death. Whenever he went past it on Peddar Road, he averted his eyes; often, he wasn’t even aware of doing so. Ram Lal had died there, in one of those numberless rooms whose windows were opened very occasionally and hesitantly to let in the sound of the traffic, after a week.

‘Sengupta saab,’ Shyamji said in a couple of days, apologetic, but with the conviction of someone who’s finally opened a locked door, and seen something irrefutable, ‘I cannot go to that hospital.’

NEVERTHELESS, he continued teaching; the procession of students and petitioner-relatives entering through the open door a flat permeated with kitchen smells and telephone calls at 10 a.m. The bedsheet-wrapped divan in the sitting room in Sagar Apartments became the place where everyone converged, while the family and the flat orbited around the hour of instruction almost unaware of it. It was not so much a sick-bed as a place of instruction and recovery, the pillow an accessory to a moment of comfort, when Shyamji drew back, relieved, to lean against it. Sometimes, there was no harmonium at all; just singing, and the clapping of hands, as Shyamji, like a magician, brought his naked palms together, always urging the student, made meek but attentive by the very sound of the clapping, to keep abreast of the laya and not to stray from the time-signature. Sitting there in his vest and pyjamas, the laundered white cotton innocently tight against the dark skin, humming briefly to refresh his memory, talking rapidly to justify and explain a new composition, as smells of simmering plantain and cardamom and cinnamon bark dropped into hot oil merged with the kitchen smoke, he was still at the centre of things that constituted his world: news of the city and its changing constellation of politicians, gossip about his students’ careers, and the latest on the grapevine about rising property prices. A copy of the Navbharat Times lay often on the divan, momentarily neglected. On a small wooden table was a bottle of water, a glass (usually covered by a plastic coaster) freely leaving its faint ring-marks around it, and an economical clutter of pills. He was a marvellous layakar; it was an instinct and genius he’d inherited from the nervous, febrile Ram Lal, a master of the rhythmic permutations of classical music; and so the melee of the flat was always bright with the sound of clapping, and short-lived jubilation and finality. That active, irrepressible brain, running toward every avenue and neighbourhood and opportunity like a dealer with a new product, would compute, in quick succession, the syllables of a composition set to ektaal as well as the interest he’d earn from an investment he’d made a year ago, how much time it would take to pay back the money he’d borrowed recently from a businessman-devotee of the mother Amba, how much this flat would be worth after six months if property prices rose steadily, until, repositioning his pillow, sighing as if after a performance, he curled up on his side and closed his eyes for one hour in the strange, absolute nullity of the afternoon.