Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

Nirmalya and Mrs Sengupta went backstage, through a door from which people were already emerging, sated, having passed on their congratulatory messages. The artists now had ridiculous bouquets in their arms. Tara, large in a maroon sari, was standing next to Pyarelal; and Pyarelal, flushed with the congratulations and the performance, spotted them and said:

‘Aao, aao, baba, tell me — what did you think?’

He spoke to the young man, still marked by the pathos and specialness of one who’d come back from ‘foreign’, as if he were the celebrity, or mysteriously, but inevitably, was about to become one.

‘Wonderful,’ said Mrs Sengupta.

‘Thanks for coming,’ said Jayashree Nath to Nirmalya in English, in her brisk all-purpose tourist-guide manner, where the veneer of confidence was a sort of defence mechanism, her face, from close quarters, grotesquely exaggerated and motionless with paint. ‘He speaks so much about you!’ And Pyarelal, girded by Tara and two of his sons, dark boys wearing high-power spectacles, found time to blush at these words, realising his feelings were being described.

‘Mallika?’ a dry and perfectly audible voice said; and Mrs Sengupta turned, smiling, and saw the thin stern man in white kurta and pyjamas. Motilalji — sober but still impudent as ever, with the temerity to address her by her first name! Not the slightest hesitation about him, or respect for the passage of time; he may as well have been drunk. She felt a wave of exasperation; but also girlish wonder, at seeing him after all these years. ‘How are you Motilalji?’ she asked; and she was actually concerned; nervous he might drop dead from his previous excesses before her. ‘Aren’t you going to do pranam, Mallika?’ The impudence — asking her, she who was older than him, to touch his feet! It was as if he’d derive some sort of pleasure in extracting an obeisance from the bada sahib’s wife, not least because she had the audacity to be conscious of her abilities as a singer.

As at the parties she went to, she pretended she hadn’t heard; and, outraged though she was, she was also amused that he hadn’t changed. He, too, pretended, the next instant, he hadn’t spoken; it was as if everything had happened, in a flash, on a different, unverifiable plane of existence. There was nothing to do but continue the exchange of pleasantries and information, and let the small moment of theatre pass. ‘Bas chal raha hai. Pulling along,’ he confessed without enthusiasm, upright and dead as a plank of wood, a prisoner amidst the mundane.

NOW, AFTER Shyamji’s death, Banwari and Pyarelal, the latter in his joking, persistent way, the former with the sweet-faced presumption of entitlement that family members have, began to make increasing demands on the Senguptas — for loans, for advance payments which they couldn’t hope to ‘adjust’ or return — as if (and this was implicit, but a constant undercurrent) the death were a justification.

‘Why?’ asked Mrs Sengupta, as Pyarelal stood before her with a suitably contrite face after having asked her for three thousand rupees.

She thought, ‘He doesn’t realise we don’t have black money. He sees a lifestyle, has seen it for years, but doesn’t see what it takes to maintain it.’

‘Tara is not well,’ he said, pulling an interesting face — ever the performer. ‘She’s in the nursing home, didi. Bilkul thheek nahin hain. Doctor says it might be an ulcer.’

Those all-night vigils, fasts, and prayers! Years later, the sore hidden inside bringing pain.

‘Which nursing home?’ asked Mrs Sengupta sceptically.

‘Why, Laad Nursing Home,’ said Pyarelal, clearing his throat, as if it were a world-famous institution. ‘Run by Dr Laad.’

‘Pray more,’ she said, shaking her head, but picking up the key to the cupboard. ‘Perform more fasts!’

Pyarelal too shook his head from side to side, at the stubborn idiocy of the world as well as at the startling, uncomfortable insights ‘didi’ offered sometimes. He listened for the key turning in the lock.

Nirmalya sat on the carpet in the living room and tuned the tanpura; his palm ensconced each giant, resistant key, and, with a deep breath, he tightened it with the distant attentiveness of an engineer. It had been standing, like a forgotten heirloom or a stopped clock, upright and untouched in its place in his bedroom for more than nine months now. Pyarelal, fussy, witch-like, chattering constantly, had turned the keys and loosened the strings before Nirmalya had left for England, so that they wouldn’t snap in his absence. Now Nirmalya tightened the strings that had been resting, suspended in a reptilian twilight, turning his face away as he did so; he’d seen Pyarelal doing the same, narrow his eyes nervously and avert his face as the string grew tighter and tighter with a droll but ominous twang, because it could snap sometimes, and sting viciously.

The tuning went off without event or injury; only the lint that had accumulated on the strings flew out in small, lazy particles as he began to play. The sound filled his ear, the four strings combining to create not only a single vibration, but a world. It was a world without time, and Nirmalya was alone in it; he forgot, for the moment, the confusion and distress he’d felt when he’d heard Shyamji had died. And then, as he kept playing, his predicament returned to him, the real world intruded into the world of sound the strings had created: he was without a teacher — he didn’t know where to go from here. ‘What should I sing?’ he wondered; because his tanpura-playing was a preamble, a doorway into the world of the raga, but he was content to sit, dazed and speechless, at that doorway, to wait in that world of sound, to be undecided about what to practise. A minute passed; a surprisingly soothing breeze reminded him that it had rained last night, clattering on the back of the air conditioner, making him think for a second, as he lay in bed, of the tin roofs of houses he used to stay in when visiting relatives in small towns as a child. ‘Malhar — it has to be a Malhar, of course,’ he thought. He allowed the tanpura, aloof sentinel, to embrace and envelop him.

‘She doesn’t smile any more,’ said Mrs Sengupta, her face stricken, like a child’s. ‘She has not smiled since that day.’

Ram Lal’s widow — that sturdy and unstoppable woman in the white sari. Mallika Sengupta was momentarily overcome; the pain of a mother at her son’s death — she’d lived it many times in her imagination; and now to see it so plainly before her!

‘How did you hear about it?’ he asked, drawn again and again to the same story, the story of that day; and she recited it, tremulous and obedient.

‘And upon reaching there I found Kusum Deshpande — you know her, the doctor,’ said Mrs Sengupta. ‘She was very kind,’ she observed, as if it was she who had somehow been the victim of a misunderstanding. Then, speaking to him in the old, quietening, timeless voice with which she used to tell him stories as the evening ended and he was already, mentally, in exile, at his desk in the classroom, ‘None of the women of the family were there’ — she meant the crematorium — ‘the women don’t go there, Nirmalya.’

In his mind, Rajasthan, from where the family had originally come, was mixed up with spectacular tales of sacrifice from abandoned textbooks, of newly widowed women leaping or being pushed on to a funeral fire. Would Sumati, two hundred years ago, have become a woman of pure soul, and burned while Banwari and Pyarelal watched in terror and humility and adoration? The fantasy, in which he couldn’t quite picture the protagonists, only the pure white sari and the flames, ran away with him.