Amit Chaudhuri: Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

As if he were being rocked from side to side, and backward and forward, in a train compartment, Khusroo’s hips and torso shook, as, more frugally, did his legs. “On the shuffeling maadness,” he sang, “of loco-motive bryeath — da da da all-time loser’s hurtlin’ to his dyeath…” Melody was replaced by a menacing curl of the lips. All the time, Khusroo seemed to lean forward quickly and spectatorially, then immediately retreat backward with a mildly alarmed air; meanwhile, his arms, quite irrelevantly and encouragingly keeping time, appeared to treat these two ostensibly unconnected movements as part of a single motion, accompanying them with magical and peremptory snaps of the fingers. “You try, too,” said Khusroo. Gautam, sitting on the floor and looking up, pretended cunningly not to hear. Khusroo stopped and stamped his foot. “Gautam Bose, what am I doing here if you’re not going to get up and do something?” he said sternly. “Khusroo, I’ve just realised…,” mumbled the other. “Realised?” said Khusroo, enraged, as if it had been a particularly poorly chosen word. “You haven’t realised anything! Come on, get up.” Gautam obeyed, out of embarrassment; he lifted himself from his brooding inactivity with a giant, ostentatious effort. Then he stood with both his arms by his sides, like a boxer who doesn’t know what to do. Khusroo uttered unexpected soothing words: “It’s easy, Gautam, just loosen up.” But each part of Gautam’s body felt like a mechanism that had been jammed and rusted and made useless by shyness and sensitivity, and some miraculous lubricant, like forgetfulness, was now required. He remembered his parents, who, for about two months in the middle of their lives, used to put a 45 r.p.m. on the gramophone, and then, in broad daylight, amidst the drawing-room furniture, watched by Gautam looking past the twin peaks of his knees, sitting huddled on the sofa, try out their recently memorised dance steps. His mother, repeatedly adjusting the aanchal on her sari, and saying “Cha-cha-cha” under her breath, as she had no doubt been told to by her instructor, would dance with an expression of utter determination on her face. There were times when, on Gautam’s request, she did this when his father was not there, alone, in the drawing room, and the look of determination reappeared. Every Saturday evening, they would go to the first floor of an old mansion behind the Taj Mahal Hotel, where Mr. Sequiera conducted his dancing classes. Mr. Sequiera even advertised on the slides in cinema halls, illuminating this message: BE A SOCIAL SUCCESS: LEARN BALLROOM DANCING! For a while, thus, cha-cha-cha was mentioned in the house, and also that word that could have come straight from a fable: foxtrot. Then, after two months, almost overnight, his parents gave up dance and stopped playing those records and quite calmly took up other habits. Though it is said that children pass through “phases,” Gautam found that his parents probably passed through as many phases, if not more, than he did. They were always changing, developing, growing. For instance, when Gautam was eight, his mother would return from the hairdresser with her hair leavened into a full-grown bun, set and lacquered into a marble repose. Now, however, those accessories — hair net, false hair, lacquer spray — were lying in some drawer untouched, and his mother’s hair, on evenings out, had taken on another, less extreme, incarnation. His father, too, he remembered, once had two personable sideburns, which, one day, without explanation, had been reduced to a more modest size. There was nothing fixed, constant, or permanent about his parents.

Even as Gautam was summoning within himself the preparedness to set his body moving, without safety, without company, in mid-air as it were, there came a bang from not too far away, and then the sound of a muffled, amplified voice: “Check … one-two-three … check.” “Come on,” said Khusroo, losing interest in Gautam’s lonely fledgling efforts to translate into motion. “Let’s see what those chaps are doing. If you don’t mind,” he added, “we’ll continue later.” “No, no,” said Gautam. “No, let’s see what those chaps are doing.” They went down the corridor and turned right, and walked a little way to the first door to the hall. At the other end of the now empty hall, where only this morning they had stood distractedly with their hymnbooks, the stage was occupied by the Phantom Congregation, who were practising, in resounding fits and starts punctuated by gaps of silence and slouching, the songs that would set this hall and the bones and vertebrae of various eager neophytes vibrating next Saturday. Rahul Jagtiani, the lead singer, a tall, unextraordinary boy with spectacles and a moustache, was holding the mike with one hand casually, as if it were a perfectly mundane, everyday object, and talking to Keki Antia, the bassist, who, as he struck the strings on his guitar with his plectrum, produced fat, ponderous globules of sound. The other two were bent upon their instruments in introspective postures of study and absorption: the thin, spirit-like, demoniacally stubble-cheeked Freddy Billimoria, who leaned with a mixture of swooning pleasure and fatigue over his drums, now thudded, with a pedal at his foot, the great bass drum standing upright, and now, superfluously, hit the floating cymbal with a polished attenuated stick that seemed a fitting extension of his own skinniness, creating a marvellous sound that rippled outward, a reverberating whisper. And Rajat Kapoor, also splenetic and unpredictable, hit his guitar strings at times to release that loud electric bang that Khusroo and Gautam had heard from a distance, which they now understood to be a particular chord. Then he would rapidly turn one of the four knobs on the guitar’s incandescent flame-red box and prick his ears for a prophetic hum on the speaker. To Khusroo’s and Gautam’s awe, Rahul Jagtiani suddenly turned and exclaimed, “Hey — one-two-three,” and all those individual technological noises were gathered into a single united wave, and they began to sing “Smoke on the water, fire in the sky.” The combined voices of Antia, Jagtiani, and Billimoria could hardly be heard over Rajat Kapoor’s guitar, which had been, midway through the song, launched into the wayward kinks and corkscrew effect of the wa-wa mode. Khusroo and Gautam felt jolted by the scruff of their necks and shoulders, a cavity forming in their solar plexus, and they looked on speechless with wonder.

The stage was not always such a profane site. In fact, in the morning, at nine o’clock, the Principal stood upon it and took the lead in folding his hands together and, uncharacteristically, closing his eyes to say, rather haltingly, the Lord’s Prayer. Gautam knew only some of the words—“vouchsafe,” “Almighty God,” “daily bread” (when he involuntarily and quite logically pictured a white Britannia slice), and the incomprehensible last lines, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, forever and ever, Amen.” The other words in the prayer, which far outnumbered these intervals of continuity, he substituted with approximate reverent vowel and consonant sounds. On some mornings, the head boy, or even a house captain or prefect, read out the prayer with a zeal and a correctness of elocution which the Protestant Principal from Kerala himself lacked. These prefects possessed an enviable purposefulness of bearing that told one there were no stains on their conscience, and that an awareness of duties, theirs and others’, was never far from their minds; and they carried out, whenever they could, the Principal’s and even the Lord’s will in school. To the ordinary boys and girls in class, however, God was a figure whose qualities were daily advertised and who was deferred to each morning, but who, in their lives, they had discovered through an inuring process of trial and error, was an absent friend, a perpetually missing advisor, and an unreliable and niggardly petitionee. On Thursday mornings, Father Kurien, in a long white habit, looked down apocalyptically upon the heads of the boys and girls and, doubling the size of his own eyes, fulminated about a God who had eyes everywhere, or lowered his voice to make gentle, ironical jabs at Darwin’s theory of evolution. He had a flowing Malayali accent, where one consonant, without quite ending, liquidly siphoned off into another—“m,” for instance, became “yem.”