Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

“No, the one he gave me last week. It still needs polishing. The one about the Rana—‘My Ranaji, I will sing the praises of Govind.’ It’s a beautiful tune.”

“Well, you must sing it for me,” he said, sighing as he got up from the sofa, resigned to the evening ahead. She looked at his back with a sort of indulgence.

* * *

THE SONG,which she’d once sung to a different tune, and which she’d been practising assiduously for the last ten days or so, was about how Meera had given herself from childhood to her one lord, the Lord Krishna, and couldn’t bring herself to live with her husband, the Rana, the king. The Rana, said the song, sent her a cup of poison that became nectar when she touched it to her lips; if the Rana was angry, she sang, she could flee his province, but where would she go if her Lord turned against her? Mrs. Chatterjee rather liked the song; in her mind, of course, there was no confusion about who was her Rana and who her Lord. Krishna’s flute was second fiddle for her, although it, too, had its allure. But its place in her life was secondary, though constant.

* * *

IN ANOTHER AGE,Mr. Chatterjee, with his professional abilities and head for figures and statutes, his commitment to see a project through, might have been a munshi in a court, or an advisor to a small feudal aristocracy. Now it was he who, in a sense, ruled; he ran a company; he was the patron as far as people like Mohanji were concerned. It didn’t matter that, when he sang before him, Mr. Chatterjee didn’t understand the talas, that he simply smiled quizzically and shook his head from side to side in hesitant appreciation. That hesitant appreciation, to Mohanji, meant much.

Coming back home from the party, Mrs. Chatterjee would be so tired that sometimes she fell asleep with makeup still on her face. At such times, she felt almost glad she didn’t have children, because she would have lacked the energy to look in on them. All the same, she couldn’t sleep for very long and was awake, although she looked as if she needed more rest, when the cleaner came in for the keys to wash their two cars. She stood near the balcony with a teacup in her hand as the day began, not really seeing the sea, its water resplendent with sunlight. Then she might remember the guru was to come that day, and begin to think of the last song she’d learnt from him.

On these days, she’d sometimes be a bit listless during the lesson, and the guru would say, “Behanji, you seem a bit tired today.”

“It’s this life, Mohanji,” she’d say, preoccupied, but not entirely truthful in the impression she sought to give of being someone who was passively borne by it. “Sometimes it moves too quickly.” And she’d recall the exchanges of the previous night, now gradually growing indistinguishable from one another. Mohanji would regard her with incomprehension and indulgence; he was used to these bursts of anxiety and lassitude; the way an evening of lights, drinks, and strangers, when she was transformed into something more than herself, should change back into this sluggish morning, when she was unreceptive to the lesson and to him.

* * *

IN THIS BUILDING ITSELF,there were other amateur singers. On the seventh floor, Mrs. Prem Raheja sang devotionals. Her husband was a dealer in diamonds, and occasionally flew to Brussels. For her, singing was less an aesthetic pastime (as it was for Mrs. Chatterjee) than a religious one; she was devoutly religious. Then there was Neha Kapur on the eleventh floor, who liked to sing ghazals. No one really knew what her husband did; some said he was in “import-export.” These people were really traders made good, many times richer, in reality, than Mr. Chatterjee, though they lacked his power and influence, and inhabited a somewhat different world from his.

The guru had increased his clientele, if his students could be called by that name, in visiting this building and this area. Mrs. Raheja was now one among his students, as was Mrs. Kapur; and there were others in the neighbouring buildings. When he came to this area, he usually visited two or three flats in a day. The “students” were mainly well-to-do or even rich housewives, with varying degrees of talent and needs for assurance, their lives made up of various kinds of spiritual and material requirements. What spiritual want he met was not clear, though it was certain he met some need; and his own life had become more and more dependent, materially, on fulfilling it.

Mohanji’s life was a round of middle-aged women, mainly in Colaba and Cuffe Parade, and a few in Malabar Hill; in his way, he was proud of them, and thought of them as Mr. So-and-So’s wife or, where the surname denoted a business family, Mrs. So-and-So. He moved about between Cuffe Parade and Malabar Hill and the areas in between using buses and taxis, glimpsing, from outside and within, the tall buildings, in which he ascended in lifts to arrive at his appointed tuition. This was a daily itinerary, before it disappeared, too temporarily for it to be disturbing to him, when he took the fast train to Dadar at night.

* * *

MR. CHATTERJEE’S COMPANY(although he didn’t own the company, it was known among his friends as “Amiya’s company” and among others as “Mr. Chatterjee’s company”) manufactured, besides other things, detergent, which was its most successful product; and, since the company had substantial foreign shareholdings — the word “multinational,” like a term describing some odd but coveted hybrid, was being heard more and more these days — he, with his wife, made occasional trips to Europe (he to study the way detergent was marketed there), every one and a half to two years.

Upon their return, the vistas and weather of London and Zurich would stay with them for about a week as they resumed their life in Bombay. They’d distribute gifts among friends and business associates: deodorants, eau de toilettes, ties; for Mohanji, a cake of perfumed soap, polished like an egg, serrated like a shell. He, in his gentle, qualified way, would pretend to be more grateful than he was, but nevertheless wonder at this object that had travelled such a huge distance.

* * *

THERE WERE SO MANY PROJECTSinside Mr. Chatterjee’s head; he had only a year to bring them to fruition. Though he was to retire, he was inwardly confident he’d get an extension.

In other ways, he felt that he was entering the twilight of his life in the company; though there was nothing more substantial than an intuition to suggest this. He suppressed this feeling before it could become a concrete thought. Among the more minor and personal, but persistent and cherished, projects he had in mind was to present his wife, Ruma, before an audience of friends and peers, with the repertoire of new songs she’d learnt from the guru. With this in mind, he’d ask her sometimes, with a degree of impatience:

“Isn’t he teaching you anything new? I’ve been hearing the same two songs for the last three weeks!” This might be said in the midst of talking about three or four other things, after he’d returned, yet again, late from the office.

He asked the teacher the same question in the course of the week, when he happened to come back earlier than usual, and found the lesson midway, in progress. He’d had a distracting day at the office, and he was about to go out again. He said, looming in his navy blue suit over the teacher sitting on the carpet with the harmonium before him:

“Do give her another one, guruji! I’ve been hearing the same one — the one about ‘Giridhar Gopal’—for about two weeks now.” He called him “guruji” at times, not as a student or acolyte might, but to indicate a qualified respect for a walk of life he didn’t quite understand. He used the term as one might use a foreign word that one was slightly uncomfortable with, but which one took recourse to increasingly and inadvertently.