Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

Eyes closed, his face young and tranquil, as it always was during these opening phrases, Shyamji began to sing Shankara into the small whorl of the microphone. Nirmalya and Abhijit sat, one on a chair and the other on a razai rug, and listened; the older student smiling, quite open to being moved and nudged by the unexpected incursion of the notes of a raga. Nirmalya frowned in concentration, as if he couldn’t hear properly, or as if he was trying seriously to shut out the sounds coming from the kitchen or the compound of Sagar Apartments. Of course, Shyamji had probably misunderstood him — just as Nirmalya had often misunderstood Shyamji, reverencing the artist with preconceived but urgent notions of what an artist’s life and behaviour must be like: he’d constructed and created his own Shyamji, and had been bemused and exacting when, again and again, the two Shyamjis had failed to come together. Similarly, it was possible Shyamji had misunderstood his young, politely obdurate student; had mistaken the tear above the pocket for a genuine sign of renunciation. Maybe, not having quite entered the world of the young in Malabar Hill and Altamount Road and Colaba (his own son’s world was noticeably different), he didn’t see that it was an affectation, a necessary phase that some of the children of the rich pass through. Or maybe he’d taken all those ambiguities into account recently and still decided that, in his eyes, Nirmalya was an unusual and uncharacteristic sort of young man.

‘ WHAT CAN YOU DO with a man who won’t be treated?’

Mr Sengupta shook his head and smiled; in a post-retirement moment on Saturday morning, having a cup of tea with his wife in the small but spruce drawing room (the Sea Lounge was too far away these days to drive to every weekend), he was speaking (stirring the sugar in the mild infusion) as he always had, as the voice of sanity and reasonableness. And this was partly why Mrs Sengupta found in him such an anchor, an axis around which her universe turned; because sanity and reasonableness were binding, but were so hard to find.

In the Sea Lounge, they’d cover topics from the banal to the most worrying, as, one by one, portions of chilli cheese toast disappeared from the plate, and replenishments of Darjeeling tea were poured. Now, with the same lingering mixture of concern and aimlessness, they discussed how someone who had a problem and had been offered a solution to it could reject that solution so easily out of hand. What kind of a man was this, paralysed, at the end of the twentieth century, by the sort of absurd superstition they’d seen around them, and left behind, as children? Sipping their tea, they became momentarily silent, experiencing an obstinate knot of irritation and pity, while exhortatory birdcall and human voices burst into the drawing room from the balcony on the right.

But Apurva Sengupta hadn’t quite washed his hands of Shyamji; he was defeated, for the time being, by his soft-spoken intransigence. To not want to be admitted into a private hospital free of cost because his father had died there. . he couldn’t take it seriously; he would persuade Shyamji. But not now, there was no point in coercion; he’d put it off for a few days.

Pyarelal was concerned; at least, he looked more worried than Shyamji’s family did. Part of the reason was that he disagreed with the family he’d married into on everything; and this exhibition of concern was seen as a further instance of making trouble, of being negative and perverse in what was, on the whole, an optimistic, well-networked period for Shyam Lal, of — and this was the most characteristic Pyarelal-like vice — drawing attention to himself.

‘These fools!’ he complained to Nirmalya with the contempt of the clear-sighted. ‘They talk about movies and that minister’s son and this new hotel.’ Then, with a preoccupied, martyred look, he pushed at a bad tooth with his tongue.

After which, satisfied with his prodding, he added, his mood changing at once to exasperation and comedy:

‘He sings that song at the end of each programme. The boring Kabir bhajan: “At least see to it, lord,/ that when my life leaves my body,/ I have the name of Govind on my lips.” Do you know what Durgaji’ — referring to a relative, a fairly well-known singer of qawwalis — ‘calls it?’ He grinned; then was wracked immediately by a beedi-smoker’s cough; but he shook off the tremor that passed through his body in a businesslike way, as if it had happened to someone else, and resumed: ‘He calls it “Shyam’s national anthem”.’ He looked at Nirmalya, a look of irony and entreaty exchanged among partners with similar persuasions and agendas. ‘Arrey, tell him to stop singing it, baba’ — for he’d really had enough of the tearful paean.

Although, like everyone else, Pyarelal believed it was only a matter of time before his brother-in-law was better, he’d begun to feel a subterranean fear; was it an intuition of the end? It came to him in the middle of the tedious and demanding everyday, while scratching his stubble or nagging at a tooth, or boarding a BEST double-decker in the afternoon, standing at attention with a self-conscious jerk of the head if he didn’t get a seat, this unsettling intimation of the void. But it didn’t last long; Bombay said to him, as the bus lurched ahead: ‘Don’t be silly. Life goes on; it has always gone on.’ But then, when he’d finally found a seat, there might be a delay; the bus coming to a halt, the cars next to it frozen, their occupants’ elbows sticking resignedly out of the windows; impatient, grandiosely peremptory, always as if he were playing a part, he’d glance at his steel-banded wristwatch, shake his head; then — thank God! — the bus would begin to inch forward, and menacingly approach, then pass by, a roadside congregation of people, strangely, for the most part, focussed and silent; an accident, the windshield of the Fiat was smashed; this time, there was no intimation, no premonition, just the urge to return to, as soon as possible, the homeward-bound traffic, a quick averting of the eyes and the obligatory muttering of a prayer for no one — no one known, encountered, or imagined — another solitary, wondering shake of the head (again, as if an audience were looking), and the perspiration on the forehead drying as the bus picked up speed and a sea-breeze blustered in through the window. So Pyarelal, in his better moments humming a film tune that had been following him persistently all day, returned home.

THE SUITCASE had been packed: the deep, folded layer of winter clothes, a dark suit that Nirmalya had vowed never to wear, small and diminished inside the suitcase, but possessing, nevertheless, a buttoned-up authority even without a body inside it, trousers — including a couple of frayed, disintegrating corduroys that his mother had at first slyly neglected to put in, and which he’d had to bargain for, with the steely persuasiveness of a counsel and, finally, the relentlessness of a madman. Into the smaller suitcase went The Story of Philosophy , with its psychedelic borders in yellow and orange and blue, the strip of black along the bottom of the jacket, and the comforting, pain-numbing mantra of names on the back, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Santayana; it was a book he’d outgrown since he’d picked it up from a shelf in a bookshop three years ago, but he still needed it as a pacifier. The cheap, commercial binding that held together these great lives and speculations was falling apart; page one hundred and seventeen, from the chapter on Francis Bacon, which he’d glanced at and skipped, had dislodged itself in protest. Yet, armed with Will Durant, although he felt — had always felt, really — somewhat superior to him, to his success, to his solemn trust in Western civilisation, to his somewhat gauche devotion to his wife, proclaimed on the second page — armed with Will Durant, he still hoped to make the journey into the unknown and into deliverance.