Once, he took Pyarelal upstairs, to the veranda outside the Sea Lounge, where his parents, a couple of splendid potted plants their neighbours, sat on cane chairs having tea. ‘Pyarelalji, do sit down!’ said Mallika Sengupta, as he lowered himself cautiously into the forbidding oasis. ‘Will you have some tea?’ asked Apurva Sengupta, and Pyarelal made one of his exaggerated gestures, humble and overwrought, which could have meant anything. Tea arrived, and Pyarelal watched fastidiously as the waiter poured the weak brew into a china cup; ‘Bas, bas,’ he interjected with dignity as the man added milk. He began to relax; thoughtful, but every nerve sensitive, he stirred the tea with a spoon.
* * *
TWO MONTHS AGO, Nirmalya and Mallika Sengupta had gone for the first time to Shyamji’s house.
‘It is very far, didi,’ Shyamji had warned her, as if she’d suddenly threatened, unreasonably, to journey to a wilderness. ‘A very small place — we don’t have much to show. .’
‘What nonsense!’ said Mrs Sengupta, in total control, as usual, of her decision, distracted by the heat, a neglected spot of powder on the tip of her nose.
Shyamji had recovered instantly and smoothed his hair back as he went out of the apartment; he’d said very sincerely, his pride recollected:
‘Please do come, didi. We’d be very happy if you did.’
When they arrived finally after an hour and a half in the summer evening, moving from familiar terrain into unfamiliar Matunga, through dust, oil-slicks and traffic past the slums of Dharavi, they found Shyamji in spotless white kurta and pyjamas, and Sumati, smiling, her pallu covering her head, waiting for them.
‘Aiye, aiye, didi,’ said Sumati. ‘Oh, I’m so glad baba came too. Vel-come,’ she said to him in English. ‘Kyun, did I say it right?’ and laughed loudly.
Shyamji and Sumati vacated their places on the divan for Mrs Sengupta and Nirmalya, and sat on an old sofa opposite. Hurriedly, Sumati went inside to make tea; the small sitting room was divided from the kitchen and the bedroom inside by a curtain and a wall. She came out briefly again with a tray with two glasses of water for the visitors and stood before them; they didn’t know, for a moment, what to do. Caste was not, of course, the problem; for what can keep you from accepting food and drink in a brahmin’s house? No, caste, anyway, was an irrelevance for the Senguptas — but other questions preoccupied them. Shyamji was watching patiently; but the Senguptas didn’t drink water that wasn’t boiled; they’d agreed amongst themselves to ban all water offered to them outside home, unless, of course, it came from a completely trusted source. Still Sumati, in her innocence, hovered like a spirit of solicitude, a half-smile on her lips; Mrs Sengupta, hot in her sari, hesitated, then picked up the glass and, as if this were the logical thing to do, placed it on the table in front of her. Nirmalya, faced with the tumbler, retreated almost visibly into his own awkwardness: ‘No, I’m all right,’ he said, and Sumati protested in disbelief, ‘Kya, baba, you don’t want water?’ and the tumbler returned to the kitchen behind the curtain from where it had come. Behind the divan, on the wall, was Pandit Ram Lal’s portrait, utterly still. And, from a distance, you could hear kirtans from the gurdwara’s loudspeaker.
And yet how wonderful it was to be in his guru’s house, the electric bulbs making the room bright, a room in which visitors were welcomed, but in which the divan where they sat, lightly covered with a sheet, obviously became someone’s bed at night. Mrs Sengupta did most of the talking; Nirmalya was largely silent, as he used to be when he accompanied his mother to the houses of acquaintances as a child; he held Shyamji in too high a regard to ever have a comfortable conversation with him. Besides, what would they talk about? They couldn’t discuss music, because it was not discussable; it was a set of rules and commands that had to be passed on and picked up almost unthinkingly. In fact, it wasn’t certain Shyamji ever thought about the kind of things that Nirmalya considered the province of thought; it seemed that his immediate future and that of his children, and, in that context, the business of proper conduct and what was admissible were what exercised Shyamji in his daily life. Nirmalya didn’t consider this ‘thinking’; his own daily life involved an agonising — punctuated by blank phases of stupefaction — over the history that, from the beginning of time, had gone into forming the moment that he now, in 1981, found himself uneasily in. Shyamji would, in all probability, have met these ruminations with incomprehension. The question, then, of having a conversation with Shyamji didn’t arise — where would it lead? Nirmalya was happy to be there, to sit and listen, as he often did when his mother talked, while two smoking cups of tea, brown with milk, were placed before them, and he, from time to time, as he sat there, became lost in the difficult, tenuous weave of his own speculations.
The second time Mrs Sengupta went to Shyamji’s house, she found a self-conscious, dark woman, somewhat younger than her, sitting on the divan.
‘Didi, this is Ashaji,’ said Shyamji, with an added carefulness and civility. ‘She is singing two songs in the film: we are very lucky.’
Mrs Sengupta looked at her again, this woman whose songs were played every day on the radio, and who, with her elder sister, reigned in a dual tyranny over the Hindi film music world. The face was benign, but mask-like; she seemed slightly ill at ease.
‘My son is very fond of your singing,’ said Mrs Sengupta as she sat down. Asha’s face brightened imperceptibly, but the mask-like composure didn’t change.
‘You should listen to didi some day,’ said Shyamji, assured, mellifluous. ‘She has a very beautiful voice.’
‘Oh I can tell,’ said Asha, smiling faintly. ‘Her speaking voice itself is musical to the ear.’ Her speaking voice was a degree louder than a hoarse whisper; the words were spoken with the slow deliberateness of a child.
These words came back to Mallika Sengupta the next day; yes, she was pleased with them, but she dismissed them; it was beneath her to accept such crumbs of appreciation from this woman, who’d appeared to her in the incarnation of an ordinary working person in a plain printed sari. There was no getting round it; she lived in a world wholly separate from Asha’s, married happily to a successful man, moving about in sparkling, if occasionally vacuous, circles. But she wondered whether it was accident or destiny or her own hidden desire that had made her what she was. She’d never wanted to be Asha; yet what was it about her own talent that made it meaningless without the happiness she had, and also always made the happiness incomplete?
* * *
SHYAMJI’S STOCK had gone up steadily in the last three years: he decided to leave this small rented flat in which he’d lived for decades. Besides, families were growing larger; in neighbouring flats in the row of chawls, Banwari and Pyarelal lived with their wives and children. ‘Beta, Shyam,’ said his mother, small but zealous in her widow’s white sari, ‘you must do something, the children are growing up, there is no room any more.’