Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

‘Lo!’ she said with a gruff laugh, drawing back in wonder as the old visitor gaped open-mouthed. ‘ You are the one who does not want to take phone calls, and now you are the one to change your mind without telling anyone else. Tell me, is that right?’ she asked, smiling, shifting her benign, blessed squint towards the old man. She was careful, while rebutting her husband, to use ‘aap’, investing it at once with respect and a mischievous reproachfulness.

‘I said you’d let him know tomorrow,’ she added, as she vanished into the bedroom.

He was silent for a short while, neither saying anything after her or to the old relative, taking determined refuge, instead, in one of his ever-returning reveries.

The idea of travelling to Dongri quickened him; three fingers forming a chord, D sharp, on the harmonium, he crooned a ghazal — what did people listen to these days but ghazals? He decided to tell Banwari the next day: a tiny bit of good news that he deliberately delayed passing on.

In the morning, though, he had an irregular heartbeat, and, coming out of the bathroom, fresh from the effort of evacuation, he felt dizzy. The cardiologist who was now seeing him (arranged for by a student, one of the many who comprised the inexhaustible drove of new learners), Dr Readymoney, paid him a visit (three hundred rupees he’d charge him at the end, Shyamji knew; there was no way out) and, with a fastidious, metronomic gaze, took his pulse. ‘Telephone hai?’ he asked, in that richly musical Parsi Hindi, which had Sumati swooning over him in haste and anxious nodding compliance. He made a terse, polite call to have the music teacher admitted into a private nursing home in Versova.

Shyamji wasn’t overly worried. There was every chance he’d be better in a month’s time for Dongri and the Collector’s daughter and the wedding audience; he could smell that house; no need to refuse the Collector — if that’s what he was — this very moment. ‘Tell him I’m on a trip when he calls,’ he instructed his wife, sombre and moral, thinking it was the least consequential and most effective lie possible in the circumstances. Two middle-class disciples had been marshalled along with Dr Readymoney; they hovered by the doorway and ran up and down the stairs, quite oblivious of the lift; he — his family — was in his students’ hands; he was safe. Sumati, too, was unworried by the truant heartbeats; the sight of Shyamji’s students was a source of great pride and comfort, of almost a lulling rightness. She was smiling, as ever, at the way the different pieces were coming together. ‘Remember to take the pills!’ she cried out as an afterthought.

As he was being moved out of the ambulance in the cornice-and-lawn-bordered compound of the nursing home, his mind, not taking in the birdcall at all, was working at a terrific speed; he was comparing the costs of the treatment with his earnings and what he could expect from his students, and he was on the brink of arriving at a figure, like a musician, goose-fleshed, coming to the end of the allocations in a cycle of laya. Then he felt tired and closed his eyes, murmuring, ‘He´ bhagwan’ — almost a pleasurable blankness, as he entrusted his volition to the men around him, and was suddenly carried forward.

The flat in Sagar Apartments was in morningtime disarray. The forgiving pre-luncheon fragrance of worship, sandalwood incense, had spread from Mataji’s secretive, jealously-attended shrine in the bedroom to the sitting room. The maidservant was bent, a wet and dripping sheaf of spinach bunched in one fist. When Nisha, the youngest daughter, powdering her dark, acned cheeks, heard, she cried in terror — ‘Papa!’ — as she used to when she’d see bandicoots scurrying into the chawl in King’s Circle, and fainted. Sumati, her daughter’s head on her lap, sprinkled water on her face, intent, proper, ceremonial; she revived, dazed by her mother’s face, by the closeness of the ceiling, by the daylight, the cawing. ‘Hai Ram, hai Ram,’ Sumati said. ‘Kuchh samaj me nahi aa raha hai!’ She was lost. Of all the children in the family, Nisha was the least musical; she was learning, with an elemental buoyancy, to be a hairstylist. She was supposed to leave in half an hour for her training, curling her fingers, in a cramped and artificially nocturnal interior, around people’s hair.

Mataji, in her white widow’s sari, sat on the divan, silent, worship peremptorily abandoned, as if every part of her had been cut out of stone.

It was Banwari who called Mallika Sengupta; eyes bloodshot, nervous, he’d been making phonecall after phonecall, like a businessman desperate to trace a product on the market, his pale fingernail curving round the dial of the phone. She’d just been instructing a maidservant, one of Jumna’s many temporary, and inadequate, replacements in the last two months, to fold a sari she’d taken off before going to sleep. The young woman stood behind her, with childlike simplicity pinning down one end of this striking sari with her chin. Mallika Sengupta and her husband had gone to a party last night on the other side of the city, and returned late, exhausted, to the nighttime idyll of Bandra.

‘See what has happened to your brother, didi!’ said Banwari, his voice, as ever, hoarse, but passionate with bewilderment and injustice.

She had not heard from Shyamji for two weeks — an unusual neglect, to do with Nirmalya’s absence, of the steadfast, placatory role the music lesson played in her day. Instead, she’d been going to the Neogis’, not altogether happy to be there, watching Nayana Neogi, large in her smock, reigning in her inert way over the bed, she herself in the wicker chair, never, even now, completely sans the aura of the successful executive’s wife, surrounded by lackadaisically incumbent dogs, and one self-assured feline who appeared and faded at will. Sometimes, when Nayana (both of them having run out of chit-chat) lay worryingly silent — was she napping? — Mallika, in the remote presence of her old friend, took out a brand-new aerogramme from her handbag, and began to fill its paper-aeroplane-like folds with her large, impatient English handwriting: ‘Our shona Nirmalya. .’ This was what retired life should be like; but Mallika Sengupta could never accept her life as a superannuated one, and soon wanted to get back home; but wondered, too, at how everything at the Neogis’ had been reassembled after the disaster of the rains, when water had flooded this ground-floor flat, as it did every monsoon, making Prashanta Neogi walk about ankle-deep in the sitting room, rescuing the avant-garde ashtrays, gathering up an armful of old spotted copies of Imprint (for which he once worked), Nayana, a dog cradled in her own arms, warning him: ‘Arrey baba, be careful of the electric wires!’ ‘We’ll have to vacate this flat,’ she confessed to Mallika, comfortably retrospective now, and semi-horizontal on the bed. ‘The water’s become too much of a nuisance; it’s not safe here any more’: but where would they go? Property prices were incredible; and what savings did a retired commercial artist have? ‘The only safe place to go is upstairs,’ she concluded, metaphorical but subversive at the end of her worldly tenancy; she was loosening her ties in a way that Mrs Sengupta could not. But the rhythm of these social exchanges had become, for Mallika Sengupta, a substitute for the music. She’d once again begun thinking of Shyamji, lately, with a mixture of puzzlement and suspicion: he’d made use of her as he’d used his other students, but, in return, had failed to back her in the way he should have. The disciple wants nothing of the guru but knowledge; but Shyamji was not a teacher in the mythological sense. He lived in a world of transactions. He expected his students to promote him; his students expected him to promote them; it was a relationship of interdependence at once less calculating, less final, and more human — with all the oscillations of judgement and misunderstandings that humans are prone to — than one might be led to believe.