Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

Her husband was sealed in a meeting; trembling in the universe-illuminating mid-morning light, she changed into a sari and rushed out, hoping to catch up with the procession that Banwari had said, before disconnecting, was about to embark with the body toward a crematorium. ‘Which crematorium, Banwariji? How to get there?’: relieved, and the brunt of the news tempered, by the banalities of the quest. Once in the back of the Ambassador, she passed on, in her familiar summations so confusing to drivers (as if facts and destinations were beneath her), but noticeably emotional, the directions Banwari had given her with a peculiar, protective calmness. Half an hour passed as the hallowed, leaf-encircled, church-dotted streets of Bandra changed, and changed again, into the dusty edges of a metropolis of small retail outlets, large hoardings, cars tense and quiet at traffic lights. Then, past a dark, stifled PCO distributing the manna of long-distance calls to those who were hungry for the sound of the human voice, and the large, inviolate sanctum of a temple to Lakshmi, she saw a sizeable but straggly group, some of whom she knew, by sight or name or personally, joined together by their common, day-to-day pursuit of music, undertaken with varying degrees of intensity, or simply for its soothing, medicinal qualities, by, too, a currency of ghazals and bhajans that had been circulating among them, and, by choice, but as good as inadvertently, to the fate of a man who now occupied their thoughts and had left them temporarily baffled and disoriented. ‘He’s gone in,’ said Dr Kusum Deshpande sadly, a paediatrician who’d been a student of Ram Lal in another time, a ‘guru behan’ — a sister by virtue of having had the same guru — of the man who might as well have entered that doorway (such was the almost comic wistfulness of her words) to keep an appointment. She and Mallika Sengupta were the only women in the company, both educated, out of place, not women in the traditional sense (who were discouraged, as children might be, from being anywhere near the pyre, as if they might catch an infection); these two could not cry, but only have a conversation, and discuss — a look of utter disbelief on Mrs Sengupta’s face, a faint, wise smile on Dr Deshpande’s — the irrationality of what had occurred. She was six years older than Shyam; remembered him as a taciturn, precocious boy in and out of the room in which she used to sit and learn bandishes from the thin, idiosyncratic, but jubilant Ram Lal. ‘He was so talented,’ she said in English, shaking her head, struck by the memory of the boy, and the immediacy of his incursions into the room. ‘He would have been famous.’ The men around them were largely silent, mistaking physical discomfort for emotional dislocation, pushing back the collars of their shirts, not knowing what to do, waiting, again, to be needed or required.

ALONG WITH an invitation to join a discussion on the second coming of Christ by members of the New Church, a scribbled note on the back of a scrap of circular from Mr Dickinson, asking whether the time of the next tutorial could possibly be changed, a terse pamphlet, full of exclamation marks and a smudged picture of Winnie Mandela, exhorting the reader to become one of the many who no longer ate South African oranges, there was, in Nirmalya’s pigeonhole, an aerogramme, a silent traveller from India, its blue peering out from amidst the white and yellow. Surprisingly, it bore his father’s small, ornate handwriting. Despite directions provided to the recipient, the aerogramme always threatened to come apart in Nirmalya’s hands as he tore it open. Exhuming its contents like something that had been hidden in a magic box, he found a message written in a formal, somewhat stiff style, the style of a man who’d grown more used to officialese than to personal disclosure; but it masked deep emotion, the emotion of a father who’d successfully protected his son from the world, and wanted to continue to protect him. ‘Such things happen,’ he wrote. ‘Your Shyamji didn’t know where his best interests lay.’ He spoke of Shyamji as if he’d committed a minor transgression, something that could be forgiven and forgotten.

Shyamji was in a hurry, thought Nirmalya; as he read — ignored by students in the common room who hardly knew him, who were bending, congregating, spontaneously breaking away — he felt, for once, poised and centred in his aloneness, and his eyes filled with tears too fine and crystalline for anyone to have noticed, while, as ever, he sat in judgement upon his teacher. Taking a Tube from the Strand, numb, like everyone else on the train, but vivid with a secret grief that made him, in his own eyes, separate from the other commuters, and suddenly immune to the awkwardness of exile, he got off finally at Tottenham Court Road, and wandered, as he often did without rhyme or reason, among the crowds and theatres, but this time to clear his thoughts. He’d wanted too much too soon, he thought, as he upbraided his dead teacher for his impatient — even irresponsible — departure. What would Nirmalya, guruless, do now? And what was that ‘too much’? Certain of what it was, he didn’t — couldn’t — specify it to himself.

Three months later, he was in the lane off Pali Hill, relieved to be back home for the excess and heat of summer in this sloping, tapering neighbourhood. When Banwari and Pyarelal came to see him, he said, ‘The weather over there is so gloomy, I don’t feel like singing most of the time. I try to sing Purvi, and I think: what’s the point? Pyarelalji, the light isn’t right. Ekdum theek nahihai. Some days in London, evening doesn’t come, because it’s like evening from the morning onward.’ Pyarelal nodded vigorously, delighted, not because he understood exactly what Nirmalya meant, but because he expanded with pride while listening to him hold forth; Banwari seemed non-committal and suffused with responsibility, as if he were weighing, with exaggerated gravity, Nirmalya’s words.

Nirmalya was happy to see Banwari and Pyarelal, quickened as of old with a simple wonder at their reappearance. They were like friends; he’d never felt that tension with them that he had with Shyamji, where his feelings had been complicated, set on edge, by reverence and expectation. But he noticed that, despite their cheerfulness, they were oddly at a loss at their own juxtaposition, courteous elders of the bridegroom’s party where the bridegroom had gone missing, leaving them embarrassed and clearing their throats; Shyamji’s death had disoriented them — the intensely shy younger brother, and the garrulous, fidgety older man who’d married into the family and felt shackled to it ever since.

‘Baba looks nice with the haircut, doesn’t he?’ said Pyarelal, looking at Banwari, as if the thought had just dawned on him, as if Nirmalya were not present but a thing of the past, and they were reminiscing about him.

There was a faint smile on Banwari’s lips, suggesting matters concerning ‘baba’ were beyond the realm of mere truth and observation, as he agreed.

‘He used to talk about you a lot before he died,’ said his mother, as the young man strode about in his pyjamas in the sitting room with a cup of tea in his hand at ten thirty in the morning. He was still under the spell of jet lag, its early-morning startlements, its creeping heaviness. He’d woken up at dawn, looked for a while at the milky light outside the window, which had grown so beloved to him in his absence, and didn’t know when he’d fallen asleep again. ‘He told me, “Baba will make a mark in the world.” ’ Nirmalya, uncomfortable, uncertain of where to store this prophecy, listened to his mother repeat the dead man’s words as if they had a special mystery, a magic; as if they weren’t about him. Mallika Sengupta, leaning forward in a low chair in her housecoat (how she loved to sit with her son at breakfast!) was tearful; she’d become maudlin after moving to Pali Hill with her husband’s retirement.