Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

She, in the long hours that he was away, leaned more and more on the guru. It wasn’t that she felt lonely; but no one leading her kind of life in that flat, her husband in the office, could help but feel, from time to time, alone. The best she could think of someone like the guru, given his background, was as a kind of younger brother, “kind of” being the operative words — not as a friend; certainly not as the guru he was supposed to be. There was one guru in her life, and that was her husband. But she needed Mohanji. She might spend a morning shopping at Sahakari Bhandar, but needed to, also, learn new songs. And yet her mind was focussed on a hundred other things as well. When her focus returned to her singing, it was sometimes calming, and sometimes not.

One day she said to him mournfully:

“I wish I could sing like you, Mohanji. There are too many parties these days. I can’t practise properly.” Mohanji was always surprised by the desires that the rich had, a desire for what couldn’t be theirs. It also amused him, partly, that it wasn’t enough for Mrs. Chatterjee that she, in one sense, possessed him; she must possess his gift as well. Perhaps in another life, he thought, not in this one. The guru was a believer in karma phal, that what you did in one life determined who and where you were in the next; he was convinced, for instance, that his gift, whatever he might have done to perfect it in this life, had been given to him because of some sadhana, some process of faith and perseverance, he had performed in an earlier one. Of course, there were advantages to the position he was in now; in another time, he’d have had to submit to the whims of a rajah, with the not inconsiderable compensation that the rajah loved music. That empathy for music was still not good enough, though, to make you forget the frustrations of living under a tyrant. Now, in this age, all he had to do was attend to the humours of executives and businessmen and their wives who thought they had a taste, a passing curiosity, for music; it was relatively painless.

“Why do you say such things, behanji,” he said, unruffled. He scratched the back of his hand moodily. “There’s been a lot of improvement.” His eyes lit up slightly. “All those bada sahibs and their wives came up and congratulated you the other day after you sang, didn’t they, behanji,” he said, recalling the scene, “saying, ‘Bahut achhe, Rumaji,’ and ‘Very nice.’” He shook his head. “If you’d come to me ten years ago, I could have…” He sometimes said this with a genuine inkling of accomplishment at what he might have achieved.

“They may be bada sahibs,” said Mrs. Chatterjee, vaguely dissatisfied that this appellation should be given to someone else’s husband. “But Mr. Chatterjee is a bigger bada sahib than all of them.”

The guru did not dispute this.

“Bilkul!” he said. “Even to look at he is so different.” He said this because he meant it; Mr. Chatterjee, for him, had some of the dimensions of greatness, without necessarily possessing any of its qualities. There were so many facets to his existence; so little, relatively, one could know about him.

* * *

BUT THE GURU WASN’Talways well. A mysterious stomach ulcer — it was an undiagnosed ailment, but he preferred to call it an “ulcer”—troubled him. It could remain inactive for days, then come back in a sharp spasm that would leave him listless for two days. To this end he’d gone with his mother and wife to a famous religious guru called, simply, Baba, and sat among a crowd of people to receive his benediction. When his turn came, he was asked only to touch Baba’s feet, and, as he did so, the Baba whispered a few words into his ear, words that he didn’t understand. But after this, Mohanji felt better, and the pain, though he hadn’t expected it would, seemed to go away.

When his behanji heard about this one day, she was properly contemptuous. “I don’t believe in baba-vaaba,” she said. The guru smiled, and looked uncomfortable and guilty; not because he’d been caught doing something silly, but because Mrs. Chatterjee could be so naively sacrilegious. It was as if she didn’t feel the need to believe in anything, and affluent though she might be, the guru was not certain of the wisdom of this. “If you have a problem, it should be looked at by a real doctor,” she went on. The guru nodded mournfully, seeing no reason to argue.

Of course, the problem was partly Mohanji’s own fault. As he went from flat to flat, he was frequently served “snacks” during the lesson, the junk food that people stored in their homes and dispensed with on such occasions. Sometimes the food could be quite heavy. Mohanji could never resist these, eating them while thinking, abstractedly, of some worry that beset him at home. This irregular consumption would leave him occasionally dyspeptic.

* * *

HE SUFFERED FROMtension as well, a tension from constantly having to lie to the ladies he taught — white lies, flattery — and from not having a choice in the matter. He had raised his fee recently, of course; he now charged a hundred rupees for lessons all around, pleading that a lot of the money went towards the taxi fare. In this matter, his “students” found him quietly inflexible. “I can’t teach for less,” he said simply. And because he was such an expert singer, his “students” couldn’t refuse him, although a hundred rupees a “sitting” was a lot for a guru; making him one of the highest-paid teachers doing the rounds. But they’d begun to wonder, now and again, what they were getting out of it themselves, and why their singing hadn’t improved noticeably, or why they — housewives — couldn’t also become singers with something of a reputation: it would be a bonus in the variegated mosaic of their lives.

“But you must practise,” he’d say; and when a particular murki or embellishment wouldn’t come to them, he’d perform a palta or a vocal exercise, saying, “Practise this: it’s for that particular murki,” as if he were a mountebank distributing charms or amulets for certain ailments.

* * *

MR. CHATTERJEE’S OFFICE HADa huge rosewood table; now, on the third anniversary of his being made Chief Executive of this company, a basket of roses arrived; after a couple of files were cleared away, it was placed on a table before him, and a photograph taken by a professional photographer arranged by Patwardhan, the Personnel Manager. “Okay, that’s enough; back to work,” he said brusquely, after the camera’s shutter had clicked a few times. Once the photograph was developed and laminated, its black-and-white colours emphasised, rather than diminished, the roses.

The guru loved this photograph. “Chatterjee saheb looks wonderful in it — just as he should,” he said, admiring it. “He must have a wonderful office.” He ruminated for a little while, and said, “Brite detergent — he owns it, doesn’t he, behanji?” “He doesn’t own it,” said Mrs. Chatterjee, tolerant but short. “He runs it.” The guru nodded, not entirely convinced of the distinction.

He continued to give her new songs, by the blind poet Surdas, and by Meera, who would accept no other Lord but Krishna. During these lessons, he came to know, between songs, in snatches of conversation, that Mr. Chatterjee had got his two-year extension at the helm of the company. He took this news home with him and related it proudly to his wife.

Two days later, he brought a box of ladoos. “These aren’t from a shop—” he pointed out importunately. “My wife made them!” Mrs. Chatterjee looked at them as if they’d fallen from outer space. There they sat, eight orbs inside a box, the wife’s handiwork.

“Is there a festival?” asked Mrs. Chatterjee. In the background, John, the old servant, dusted, as he did at this time of the day, the curios in the drawing room.