Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

No, here, in Bombay, things had to take their tried and tested course; the small, forthcoming celebrations of which life was constituted. Sumati went to a jeweller’s to look at dainty gold bangles for newborn children, frozen, glimmering but shrunken, resting on the red velvet; for her eldest daughter, who lived in Delhi, was eight months pregnant.

AFTER SHYAMJI’S death, Pyarelal received a new lease of life. After the first dawning of doubt and anxiety — for he’d been shamelessly dependent on Shyamji — he’d emerged into a teeming world where he was no longer under Shyamji’s protective umbrella.

It was around this time that he’d acquired Madhu, the one-film-old star, who’d stepped down from her brief tenancy in the firmament, and had come to him to refine her skills in kathak. She was like a being from a fairy-tale kingdom, but what Pyarelal saw before him was a talented dancer and an average, middle-class suburban woman, alight with ambition. And she could dance; she was already accomplished in kathak when she discovered Pyarelal, had conquered, with her mother standing guard shadowily behind her, the competition circuit. Something about the man’s gestures, the subtlety of his style in abhinaya, which could lift him from his hyper-tense, beedi-smoking, traffic-negotiating, itinerant state into becoming Radha herself, and the compositions in his store, all these drew Madhu to him; so he became her ‘guru’ — unofficially, of course, as he for the most part seemed destined to be: never quite acknowledged, but constantly turned to. There was another Pyarelal somewhere in the city, a well-known dance teacher from Banaras who got mentioned occasionally in the Times of India ; Pyarelal would dismiss him peremptorily with a flick of the hand when people rang him up to congratulate him.

‘Woh doosra hai,’ he’d say. ‘He’s not me.’

And he’d be incensed when people thought that Madhu’s teacher was this other obtrusive and recurring Pyarelal.

‘I will present Madhu in a performance,’ he promised Nirmalya, as they stood together on the balcony of the flat in Bandra, his beedi lit and shrinking, nature rustling about them. ‘You will miss it, baba, because you’re going back to London’ — by which he meant not the city, but a distant place, more distant than Russia (which he’d visited in the fifties as part of a government-sponsored entourage, bringing back with him pictures of himself in a warm black sherwani, standing, slight as a snowflake, next to Sitara Devi). ‘I wish you could have been here — it’ll be wonderful!’

‘What about Ashaji?’ Nirmalya asked Pyarelal, ingenuous as ever, always flummoxed by human behaviour. They were discussing the troubled financial circumstances, the fresh uncertainty, this family had fallen into after Shyamji’s death. But what of Ashaji — the great playback singer who still crooned into people’s dreams, the one who’d sung for the eternally shelved film Naya Rasta Nayi Asha ? With such admirers, legends themselves, after all, surely there wasn’t cause for worry?

‘She cried a lot,’ said Pyarelal, grave, histrionic in his ponderousness, as if her tears were a form of capital which few people ordinarily saw her part with. ‘She called bhabhi on the phone and cried.’

But Pyarelal, Nirmalya discovered, was clear-eyed and undeceived about Madhu. For, on this visit back home, he’d been seeing billboards displaying giant-sized versions of her, as the car went into Haji Ali toward the sea and the mosquito-frail worshippers weaving their way in the rain through the wave-lashed path to the mosque. There she was at the corner of Haji Ali, newborn and windswept like Venus, the gods and mortals agog around her, about to spring her second film on the world, exposing a bit of midriff — and when he’d asked Pyarelal how seriously she took her dance in comparison to the movies (for surely to be an ‘artist’, if you had the talent, was superior to being a ‘star’), Pyarelal, taking a drag on the leaf-stub of his beedi, had said:

‘Baba, Madhu knows exactly what she wants. She wants to be recognised by people when she walks down the street. She has the talent, but I don’t know how long she’ll keep dancing.’

And he took another hungry drag; while Nirmalya puzzled over this logic and on the apparently calculated, short-lived movement of Madhu’s small ghungru-wearing feet.

It was during these vacations that the song in the new movie, with the infectious words ‘Tin tin na tin, yeh ratein rangeen’ to which she’d danced a pert athletic number, became a big hit and was on everyone’s lips, or at the very least invaded everybody’s ears, even in Bandra — its tinny, electric chorus flowing in waves from a radio in the evening, across the chirruping of bats — confirming her fame and charm.

PYARELAL WAS returning to his small flat in Borivli after the Wednesday presentation at Tanjore in the Taj, where Jayashree Nath danced before the American tourists under his hawk eye and to his ever-dependable singing and tabla playing. By the time he was near home, walking punctiliously in his nagra shoes past the peeling, frayed poster of Gini and Jony on a much-urinated-upon wall, the many-hued paper exfoliating around Mehmood’s mournful face, heading towards the dark, inhabited avenue, all of whose lamp posts were lightless except two, it was after ten; the sweat and press of the local train and the lurching of the bus were gradually leaving him. He’d smoothed his long yellow kurta after getting off on the platform. As he was crossing the road to the compound that led to his building, avoiding, with jaw set, the potholes the rain had thrown before him, it seemed a bat flew out of the darkness and swooped down upon him; he was knocked to the ground.

He couldn’t understand at first what had happened; he was at a loss; he only heard the snarl in his ear, withdrawing, fading. He sat there for a while, mulling the incident over and over; and then two or three people, he realised, had picked him up — he wasn’t really too heavy — and taken him to the flat, portable and voluble in his wet clothes. With every movement, worryingly, there was pain; his pyjamas, he saw to his disapproval when he was in the flat, were soaked with blood.

There was excited chatter, the sort of chorus you heard during weddings and departures, when everyone wanted to drown everyone else out, neighbours looked in, serious-faced phonecalls were made; he listened to some of it, still and bent with the ennui of inevitability. No, not a bat; it was obvious an auto rickshaw had borne down on him in the badly lit lane, knocked him down, driven away.

‘The suburbs have too many autos,’ said a neighbour, a clerical officer, a kind man, thin as a reed, but an unbending one. ‘All kinds of miscreants are driving them.’

Pyarelal, in his mind’s eye, saw the bat’s face, human in its internecine suddenness, appearing, and vanishing forever.

‘What kind of hospital is it?’ asked Nirmalya, speaking of the place that Pyarelal had been transferred to. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’ He was beginning to feel, again, the stealthy, irresistible pull of afternoon and twilight; everything around him, including the geckos and fruit bats, was whispering to him to stay, but he was going to leave in twelve days. Only this morning, while ambling toward Hill Road to buy medicine for his mother, he’d watched, struck, as a skeletal vendor in white had picked up a cob of corn from a basket, and ripped the closed umbrella covering it, then singed it on a fire till it was covered in a shadow of soot, with all the while a boy waiting for the spent crescent of lime to be scraped upon it. This basket of corn was among the largesse of the monsoons; but he’d had neither the time nor the urge to stop for a cob.