Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

He hadn’t finished discovering Bandra. It was here, as he circled the roads with their cottages, the courtyards swept and empty and the gardens overgrown with weeds and flowers, or came up against a stone cross or the warm wall of a church, it was here that his fierce world-denying self began to understand the pleasures of the earthly. Strange that he should embrace the earthly amidst so many signs of transcendence: the cross, the church. But this is what Bandra meant to him.

His father too, and his mother — how different they were in this location! They were the same as ever, of course; but he felt they were more his own now. The grey that had slowly appeared in his mother’s hair in the last few years was only visible if you looked hard at it; otherwise, she was changeless. But she liked the quaintness of these environs; ‘It reminds me of the town in which I grew up,’ she said, not elaborating.

When it rained here, you were aware not only of the rain, but of the other houses, the lane itself, the trees: the disappearing, panicky birdcall, the creak of a gate, loitering schoolboys breaking into a run. And, after the shower, the gulmohur blossoms would have fallen from branches on certain parts of the road with a particular exactness and economy, precise carpets of bright red only in those sections of the lane where the gulmohur trees stood, then, an hour later, becoming pink, then, after another hour, a soiled pink fading into the tarmac’s perennial, unsentimental grey. Inside, of course, the household duties of cooking, cleaning, changing bedsheets, were always unobstreperously unfolding. He was going to leave his parents quite tranquil in these surroundings; they seemed, temporarily, like long-standing citizens of these lanes; they appeared to feel no loss for the Bombay they’d left behind, and would never return to now except for a previously decided and pondered-upon part of the day.

The building his father had bought the flat in had risen, naturally, where a cottage had stood once; so, in a sense, they were a part of the change that was now coming to this lane, as were the others who’d bought flats in the building. Most of the Senguptas’ neighbours were Sindhis — toughened by hard work and migration, but also boisterous and benign with new money. Mr and Mrs Sengupta were on cordial terms with them; but, the moment they entered their own flat, their neighbours hardly existed, and their world, instead of closing in and becoming a microcosm, expanded idiosyncratically through the windows and balcony, embracing the old houses opposite, the lanes that ran parallel to theirs, and the invisible horizon. Nirmalya didn’t really mind the families who lived opposite or on the other floors; he liked them for their openness; he liked them better than the polished, cocky corporate types he’d grown up among. But he wasn’t always sure whether to be amused or affronted by their taste and their sense of display.

A week was all that remained for his departure; and a friend, Mihir, who’d been with him in school and was studying for an engineering degree in Calcutta, had, unxpectedly, made enquiries about his address and come to visit. His childhood was splintering now; different elements of it were being blown towards directions and places that were unthinkable then; and it always surprised him when one of those splinters returned to him, and took the trouble to look him up.

‘You sort of dropped out of circulation, yaar,’ Mihir said, as they stood in patient, forbearing camaraderie on the balcony. ‘But I thought I’d find out what you’re doing these days.’ He chuckled, as if taken aback by an act of transgression from a person he’d always suspected was capable of anything. ‘I didn’t realise you were off to the UK.’

‘What are your own plans?’ asked Nirmalya — partly because they were at the stage of their lives when ‘plans’ were important, when everyone around him was working overtime on a sifting and sorting out of destinies; but also because he’d reached that age when he was curious whether old, rapidly anachronistic friendships could be turned into alliances, when he’d realised that allies had become more important to him than friends. Yet, for all his hints, he had few friends, and even fewer allies. ‘Joining an engineering firm — going abroad?’

‘Probably do management,’ said Mihir, embarrassed and aggressive at once, because they’d wanted to be poets and artists two years ago, adding, ‘Philosophy-tilosophy is not for me.’

‘I thought you were quite interested in it,’ Nirmalya reminded him, anxious that the undefined cause had lost, again, a possible recruit, but confirmed in his own singularity.

‘Oh, that’s OK to patao the chicks!’ laughed Mihir loudly, vastly amused that anyone could think it had another purpose; and Nirmalya laughed too, at the validity of the suggestion, slightly apologetic that he hadn’t pursued its ample possibilities.

They were startled from their lugubrious sharing of thoughts by firecrackers. ‘Gosh!’ said Mihir; for a simple bang had woken him up to where he was. People Nirmalya knew vaguely by sight were rushing out of the porch, laughing breathlessly, long, festive kurtas shimmering, setting alight coils of serpent-like firecrackers that then exploded, in a rapid series of white flashes and spent smoke, deafeningly and endlessly. When one coil had burnt itself out, or even before, a tall young man would light another and, giggling as if at an old man’s unintimidating scolding, jump away as it began to go off.

‘Shit,’ said Mihir, trying to ignore the noise suavely, like an officer in the middle of artillery, ‘that’s black money, you know.’

The fragrance of burning crackers filled their nostrils. A man in a radiant sherwani and turban — the younger son of a family that lived on the second floor, transformed without forewarning into a bridegroom — walked stiffly towards a nervous but obedient horse that had appeared in the lane, and mounted it. Nirmalya was about to speak, but a fresh burst of crackers took his breath away; pigeons, now almost accustomed to the general atmosphere of disturbance, took off again lazily from the neighbouring mango tree.

‘This is what the Jews must have been like,’ said Mihir, his youthful, good-natured face (he wasn’t handsome, but something about him drew you to him) expressionless with irony, leaning on the bannister as they watched the family dancing in the lane, ‘before the Nazis came along.’

Nirmalya, already silenced by the crackers, was made speechless by the observation. A great gust of history seemed to blow towards him, threatening to spoil the idyll, but passed him by without harming him. What exactly did Mihir have on his mind; and in his heart? The fanfare, in its own quite organised way, moved left, probably towards some hall where the wedding would take place; the bridegroom, his face now covered by the screen of flowers dangling from the turban, sat still and lifeless on the horse, while the revellers, snapping their fingers and dancing round him, kept drawing more and more family members, the ones staying aloof and dignified in the background, into the dance; and it took these initiates only a second or two to cast off their aloofness and dignity, and to be converted to the pleasure of being a public spectacle. How many times in their life would they be asked to dance, after all? The horse would have looked ancient and fairy-tale-like, had it not been conveying, in spite of itself, its very animal discomfiture and unsureness to the onlooker. It was a relief to finally see it go, and the euphoric humans as well, towards the wedding. ‘Beautiful place,’ said Mihir, when it was quiet again (only the two latecomers, plump fifteen-year-old girls in gleaming white silk dresses, ran out to the lane to search for the lost party). ‘Your parents are lucky to have a flat here.’ Glancing cannily at Nirmalya, he added: ‘So much nicer than Cuffe Parade — don’t like Cuffe Parade at all.’ They lingered on the balcony for ten minutes, letting the scene, the lane, the trees, melt into twilight. Nirmalya felt a strange pang: it was more time he wanted, he half-realised, without the desire really breaking to the surface; a little more time to be with Mihir, more time before going to England, more time for the day itself to last. He mourned the fact that the day could not be longer.