Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

Disturbingly free, for a student, of a plan of action or an impending deadline, he poured the water into a mug and watched the colour swim away unhurriedly from a tea bag.

He was unhappy — and undecided for the first ten days about practising. ‘At least I’m alone in this room,’ he thought, granting himself the luxury of asking for the one hundredth time, ‘What on earth possessed me to come to this country?’ He’d always envied Goopy and Bagha, the two buffoons, for their magic nagra shoes, which could transport them in an instant from one kingdom to another; London made him ache with such impossible longings. And just when he’d grown used to listening to the silence and its thin, unvarying pitch, he heard, one grey afternoon, his neighbour in the next room, coughing. Nirmalya was trapped; he froze at his table; his heart plummeted suddenly. The cocoon-like fabric of rumination and subterfuge he’d spun around himself in the first week was unravelled by this bodiless presence, whom he couldn’t see, but who became, in his or her ordinariness, a focus of Nirmalya’s suspicions and speculations. For an interminable fifteen minutes after hearing the solitary, but astonishingly candid, cough, Nirmalya kept very quiet, newly aware of every sound. The changing light from morning to afternoon, as he sat petrified in his room, took on a despondent significance.

Then he ran into his neighbour in the corridor at midday, and saw he’d been imagining a monster. A large, chunky, brown-haired man stuffed unevenly into a sweater like a pillow in a pillowcase, he’d clearly just woken up, and was on his way to do something necessary in the toilet. ‘Hello,’ he nodded to Nirmalya, his hair ravaged and made untidy with sleep, his freckled face full of a simple, childlike trust as he made his way through the corridor.

Tentatively, Nirmalya began to sing; hitting the sa, but no more than murmuring the note, feeling foolish too, afraid, almost, of being thought mad. Like many other singers, he too, in an unthinking ritual, took off his wristwatch and placed it beside himself before he began, as if he were about to dive into water, or embark on a journey for which there must be some form of material evidence and record; the white dial, he noticed, sighing deeply from the pressure of some unspecified responsibility, said five past ten. He began with the Asavari composition Shyamji had sung for him once, which then, quickly bringing out the two-in-one, he’d taped, then run over in secret with the maternally nurturing Pyarelal, a sweet, melancholy piece. Outside his window, the sun was waning; a very different sun from the one he was used to. What sense, he asked himself, does it make to sing Asavari here? Yet he steeled himself, his voice much louder, magnified, in the deceptive late-morning hall-of-residence silence.

His tutor, a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket, grey-black hair combed back to announce a thinker’s forehead (his name was Dickinson, an elegant interlocutor who seemed, on principle, not to have produced anything of note), wanted to cure Nirmalya of his philosophical hunger. He responded to his intensity with a cup of tea and a tin of biscuits, never forgetting to round this off with the question that effectively stemmed the questions his student might have asked: ‘Sugar?’ He approached Nirmalya’s unspoken sense of civilisational crisis as a doctor might a hypochondriac’s ailment, wryly, warily, not wishing in any way to offend. ‘Existence is not the chief problem of philosophy,’ he said, tolerant, good-humoured, as if he were breaking news that had long gone stale, ‘language is. But of that, more later.’

EXPLORING THE epicentre of London, with its cinemas, Anne Summers lingerie shops, ghostly doner kebab outlets and overcrowded sandwich-purveying delicatessens, its windows displaying the slashed prices of electrical goods or silent constellations of wristwatches, its private sex shops with indigo-blue doors, he entered a narrow sunlit avenue called Charlotte Street. Here, utterly despondent, walking past grim buildings, he found himself face to face with a barber’s shop in a corner. ‘A haircut is long overdue,’ he thought; but hesitated, desolate, conscience-stricken, on the pavement. His hair, straight on the whole, a glimmering black, in which mysterious waves appeared as it descended the tide-mark of the collar, was precious to him. Yet, resolved to tackle the unpleasant but necessary ceremony head-on, he entered the shop, hung his deep-sea-fisherman’s anorak from a hook, and sat down upon a sofa beside two other obedient victims who were pretending to read. He was beckoned, finally, with a forefinger; and as the Italian smashed the white cloth against the air like a child’s magician, he, before removing his spectacles, checked his reflection sadly in the mirror. ‘Just a trim, please,’ he said, diffident, for a moment, that he must make this deeply felt plea in a language he had no proprietorial right to — and because he, and his whole being, were now in the barber’s hands. The barber paid no attention; unsmiling, as detached as a blind man, he flashed his scissors and ran the comb through Nirmalya’s hair as if stroking a musical instrument. Then, like one who knew exactly what he was doing, he chopped off a great deal of the hair, as its young owner sat helplessly still. The hair which Nirmalya had started growing after school, this emanation, no less peculiar than a halo, which he allowed to be touched by complicit hands only once in two and a half months, lay irrevocably on a dark floor in Charlotte Street.

Two weeks later, as if in penitence, and in a moment’s hurtling recklessness, he shaved his moustache and his goatee; the face he saw above the basin was completely ‘normal’, surprisingly pleasant-looking, almost certainly respectable. He felt a great relief, and an irrepressible desire to laugh — delighted to return to the human race, to all the ambitions and desires it decreed were valid, and which he, too, surreptitiously shared. His razed but gleaming cheeks protested at the slap and sting of Tabac.

‘THERE’S AN INVITATION, ji — from outside Bombay,’ said Sumati, adjusting the curve of her aanchal as she replaced the handset in its cradle. Shyamji was on the divan, his head propped on the palm of one hand, talking animatedly to a relative, an old man in white who sat on the carpet in a way that made it seem he could see all the way to the horizon. ‘From Dongri. Some bada officer posted there lagta hai — I think “Collector”-hi was what he said — his daughter is getting married. He said he’ll pay twenty thousand rupees and, arrey wa, first-class fare for you and Banwari and Pyareji. For you to sing, saheb, the night after the wedding for a small group of friends.’

Shyamji frowned more and more at Sumati’s unflagging cheer. Dongri was a nowhere place; but twenty thousand rupees!

‘He says he heard you sing in Khemkar saab’s house and is mad about your singing,’ she continued softly, caught in the vision of a time when she used to sit hunched in the background, face partially concealed by the aanchal, listening, her husband singing to a hall packed with government servants and businessmen, when Khemkar was no longer Chief Minister, but still a person of influence. She was very proud of her husband. Her indulgent, teasing adoration used to irritate the other relatives.

‘What did you tell him?’ he asked, half-listening to what she’d said. He used the familiar ‘tu’: married for more than twenty years, they were like a sister and a brother who’d almost approached an understanding about living with each other; half the time, they didn’t notice one another, except in fleeting glances of recognition, or with mild distaste and weariness. ‘Arrey, Suman, why didn’t you give me the phone?’ He only excavated her pet name to address her when he was close to exasperation.