Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

Pandit Rasraj, the one eminent singer who performed regularly at the sammelan, and was distantly related to the family (their forefathers had, fifty years ago, stirred out of the scoured desert landscape of Rajasthan and set out for this brittle, teeming metropolis), said: ‘I cannot sing before Shyam’s picture. No, I can’t do that. He was very dear to me. No, I cannot sing before his picture.’ He shook his head from side to side, as he sometimes did when he sang. He sounded bitter — almost as if he envied Shyamji. Rasraj was now almost an icon. The classical musician has a short creative shelf life; that is, there’s a relatively brief period in which his creative powers and his visibility coincide. Pandit Rasraj was now in his second phase, of canonisation, and it promised to be long. He was losing his spontaneity and mastery in music; but, otherwise, he had every reason to be content. But he was strangely impatient. ‘No, no, I can’t sing before Shyam’s picture,’ he said.

‘KARKHANIS has failed,’ wrote Mrs Sengupta in a letter in her large-hearted scrawl. ‘What kind of doctor is he? Pyarelal keeps having to go back to the nursing home.’

It was March now. Despite reading Frege and Wittgenstein, Nirmalya was still not cured of metaphysics; the world, for him, hadn’t been demystified. Which was why he continued to rail against it secretly and blame it as if it were an errant and immoral object. Cross and lonely, he went out. The leaves had barely begun to come back to the parks in London, to Regent’s and Hyde Park, to the neat green but shorn barricades near Buckingham Palace. But it was still cold. He did not see the leaves returning; he looked straight through the frail physical outline of things into their essence as if he had X-ray vision; and he went about everywhere, in rain and shine, in the hooded, grey, featureless anorak.

Ah, the embrace of poverty! It was much less attractive here than it was at home; you felt the fight was going unnoticed, somehow. Yet he kept at it, glowering in the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the metallic beat of the music in his ear as he retired, anonymous, to a corner and emptied a sachet of sugar into the styrofoam cup.

News of Pyarelal’s bad health kept penetrating the ennui of exile. ‘What kind of nursing homes are these?’ wrote his mother, and her outrage was audible to his inner ear. ‘They are running a business, that is all.’ That nursing homes were businesses like any other was clearly a revelation to her. The wound in the leg had lingered; Pyarelal had been admitted to hospital again; there had been a complication, and he’d contracted jaundice.

Nirmalya sighed as he refolded the aerogramme. He sat and looked straight in front of him. Where did this sudden melancholy come from? Was it Pyarelal, or the light outside, or the way in which Shyamji had gone abruptly? Or was it something without history, a dull, buzzing ache which had first announced itself to him during his transformation from a child into a young man, and which had no present and immediate cause?

Thanks are due to a few people.

Firstly, Peter Straus,

for belief and friendship when it mattered.

At Picador, Andrew Kidd and Sam Humphreys,

for the continuance of old and important ties, and for warmth and attentiveness.

Sunetra Gupta,

for her unstinting support and friendship during the writing of this novel.

Aamer Hussein and Rohit Manchanda,

old friends and respected practitioners, whose kind words mean a great deal.

I would like to thank Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Damayanti Basu Singh, and OUP Delhi for giving me permission to use Buddhadeva Basu’s ‘Transformation’ as an epigraph.

Finally, my family:

my parents, who made these explorations possible in more ways than one;

my daughter, for her obliviousness;

and my wife, companion through the work’s various stages and phases, for creating a space, and providing perspective and composure.