So they left King’s Circle; it was almost a wrench, to leave the noise of the gurdwara and the congestion. The task of acquiring the new properties in which the families would now be located, of dividing the money they’d get from their old landlord on vacating their flats in the chawl and using it for this purpose, of applying for loans — all this was left to Shyamji. Pyarelal, barely literate, kept himself in the background (even his withdrawals were dramatic and meant to draw attention), restricting himself to nodding or shaking his head like a deaf-mute when a response was required. On the whole, Shyamji ignored him; his eyes glazed over whenever Pyarelal drifted into the vicinity; but he went about his business stoically, of providing his brother-in-law and his family, besides himself and his brother, with a place to live. Banwari was no help either; he lacked confidence in himself. He continued, silent, decorous, with his old routine, of playing the tabla at various people’s houses, practising, quite deliberately, an abnegation of his own from his brother’s search, as if there were no change in his life.
‘He wants me to be his guarantor,’ said Mr Sengupta to his wife at night. He cleared his throat. The lights had been turned off; they were lying on the large bed, talking to each other. The Tibetan rug by the side of the bed, the carpet between the raised wooden floor that surrounded the bed and the way to the cupboards and the bathroom, the swirling wallpaper behind their heads, the faint moth-like glow of the ceiling which they stared at from the pillow, a deeply soothing sight in the day’s last wakefulness — all this, as one of them flicked the switch, vanished and was reduced to an aftermath where they were nowhere. Their eyes were open, and they lay wondering; the day’s bright magic returned, and its niggling, unresolved questions, loosed from the visible world, hovering like remembered images as their eyes grew used to the dark.
‘Guarantor. . for what?’
‘He said to me yesterday — he was very hesitant,’ here Mr Sengupta switched to his familiar clumsy version of Hindi, ‘“Sengupta saab, I’m applying for a loan to buy the flats. If you are my guarantor, Sengupta saab. . Anyway, I’ll return the bank the money in two or three years.” That’s what he said.’
They were silent against the equanimous, life-giving, sempiternal background of air conditioning. They weren’t entirely happy with Shyamji; he was quick to demand and borrow money from Apurva Sengupta, and to make easy promises to his wife. But he hardly made good those promises; Mallika Sengupta’s career as a singer was there — exactly where it had been ten years ago; Laxmi Ratan Shukla was no closer to recording her first disc than when they’d first met him; she still sang, with the purposelessness and dedication of something between a nun and a housewife who’s in exile in her own household, the bhajans Shyamji gave her, but mainly at home. ‘Didi, that voice can make you famous in the world,’ Shyamji said; but she doubted, during moments of hiatus such as this one, when she was lying on her back, eyes closed, listening, her thoughts everywhere, whether he meant anything he said.
Apurva Sengupta confessed after a few seconds:
‘I’ve decided to sign the form.’
‘He thinks’, Mrs Sengupta warned her faintly visible husband, ‘that we have a lot of money. He sees our lifestyle, and thinks we’re rich. God forbid that anything should go wrong after he buys the flats. . You know you have no money.’ It was the incredible story they kept rehearsing to themselves; that executives like Apurva Sengupta had the perks — the lavish apartment, the Mercedes-Benz, the servants — but, as they saw it and felt acutely, no wealth, no ballast, no substantial material possession, especially in comparison to the people they called, in the simple but expressive language of the age, ‘businessmen’. It wasn’t a story that either convinced or appealed to Shyamji.
‘Didi, you have to come!’ protested Sumati, Shyamji’s wife, laughing and shaking, pre-emptively, her head from side to side. ‘We will not do the grihapravesh without you!’
It was the exaggerated nonsense you expected from Sumati. But Mrs Sengupta agreed; for she also felt a faint quickening, a sense of being expected, of being special — it was the magic of arrival she loved looking forward to, the sort that attended, for instance, her visit to a poorer relation’s house because of some family occasion, when she was at once unremarkable, the same Mallika she’d always been, and transformed and unattainable, the Mrs Sengupta she was today. The flats had been bought in a housing development far away in Borivli in late November; now, before they were properly occupied, the grihapravesh ceremony — the ritual of making the dwelling auspicious — had to be performed. More nonsense, thought Mallika Sengupta; further expenditure on borrowed money. But, one December morning, they — mother and son (Mrs Sengupta, giving the lie to her claims of impatience, wearing a carefully chosen Kanjivaram silk, looking like the mistress of some mythic temple), set out in the white Mercedes-Benz; no question of Apurva Sengupta going — he was in meetings all day.
Borivli was only a name to them; they knew it existed somewhere beyond where their conception of the city stopped, but didn’t know where it was. Actually knowing anyone who lived in Borivli was out of the question. The driver seemed to be taking them toward the airport, but turned right into a busy junction; he went down a road full of small stops and traders’ outlets, then drove down a series of lanes, asking people for directions. It seemed, to their surprise — but, gradually, nothing was surprising — that more and more people lived here. The journey was full of stops and starts, and from time to time Mrs Sengupta said to Nirmalya, as if she were at the limits of her patience, that Shyamji’s family should have known better than to demand they travel to such a remote place. Finally, exhausted by monotony but awed, now and again, by how livelihoods and landscapes were obviously stretching outward, they came to the middle of nowhere, with three new buildings rising before them. They were the sort of building made for the lower-income bracket, plain stone, with only a hint of colour — faint pink — and tiny spaces for balconies. Yet they were noticeably new.
There had been an unseasonal drizzle in the morning, and it had left the ground muddy. Mallika Sengupta had trouble rallying her Kanjivaram round her ankles, and walking to the entrance; her low, two-inch heels marked her wavering, thoughtful progress on the soft ground. ‘Wait here,’ she said once, turning round to address the driver, as if she’d accidentally recalled his significance, and wanted to leave him with some instruction or assurance. He, emerging from the car and standing before it in his white uniform and cap, looked lonely and self-sufficient, an emissary who found himself in surroundings unworthy of him. Nirmalya, as he walked to the building, didn’t notice that anything was absent, but sensed there was something missing. There were no trees in the circumference that formed the horizon round these buildings.
Children were running up and down the gloomy staircase, yelling loudly and incomprehensibly — thin, not well-to-do, but energetic, stopping momentarily to stare at Mrs Sengupta with the familiar guileless gaze of people looking at someone who belongs to a different world — admiring, unresentful, a gaze, oddly, almost of recognition; and when Mrs Sengupta and Nirmalya came to the first floor, they found the door to one of the flats open, and the corridor lit by sunlight. Families of all hues, obviously related to Shyamji, seemed to have come to celebrate the move.
‘Didi!’ said Banwari’s wife, Neeta, when she spotted them, the pallu of her sari, as ever, shadowing a quarter of her face. ‘Please come in and sit down.’