* * *
SHYAMJI FELL ILL. He’d felt a sudden pressure on his chest, and rubbed it unhappily with one hand; he’d been taken to a nursing home. It was a mild heart attack.
‘However did it happen?’ asked Apurva Sengupta, phoning his wife in the middle of work. He sounded impatient, as if the knot in his tie felt tight, or his secretary had gestured to him about an appointment; it was three o’clock, a quiet but demanding hour, in which the chief executive, suddenly alone after lunch, has to collect the day around him. ‘Is he all right?’
Shyamji was only forty-three. He was slightly overweight — Nirmalya had seen him changing his kurta before a programme, the rounded, dark body beneath the vest, the tender, secretive folds of flesh, the brahmin’s thread tucked inside: his condition was aggravated by diabetes.
‘You must stop him eating sweets,’ Mallika Sengupta said to Sumati. That irresistible, and, to Mrs Sengupta, inexplicable urge that people from this particular world had towards jalebis and milk. ‘If he, a grown man, can’t control himself, you, as his wife, must control him.’
‘Didi, you know that our Shyamji is like the Shyam after whom he was named,’ said Sumati, with a smile that was lit at once by indulgence and ecstasy. ‘He’ll steal into the kitchen and eat what he pleases — no one can stop him.’
There was an idiotic poetry to Sumati’s words that infuriated Mallika Sengupta; she recalled, for an instant, the child Krishna stealing into his mother’s kitchen to satisfy his truant love of buttermilk. But that Shyam was a god, a diverting figment of someone’s imagination, she thought; your husband has just had a heart attack. Sumati was placated and insulated from anxiety by mythology — the mythology of her religion had entered into, and become inseparable from, the mythology of her husband: no real harm could come to him.
The rich of Bombay came to his bedside in the nursing home as he recovered, his head propped against two pillows, a flower vase, a tumbler, and a bottle of water on the table next to him. ‘Aiye, aiye,’ he said, as if he were welcoming guests to his abode, his gaze incredibly calm. He was fatigued; but it was reassuring, this arrival of the affluent. Outside, ‘sisters’, figments in white, circulated purposefully in the corridor, sending in, now and again, proprietorial glances through the doorway. At different times, the visitors: Priya Gill and her father, indomitable and inspiring in his Sikh’s turban; Raj Khemkar — his father was no longer a minister, but Raj still carried with him the ironical confidence of a minister’s son; Mrs Jaitley, whose husband had been recently promoted to General Manager of Air India — all these, and others like them, brought with them, unthinkingly, the assurance of the everyday and of continuity as they sat kindly by the bed, confirming the solace of the birds and the hopping and buzzing insects outside the window on Shyamji’s left.
And the famous; Asha, who said in a hoarse voice (you were always nonplussed, listening to that voice, that it had sung, full-throated, those melodies): ‘How is he?’ and, putting a bangled hand to his forehead: ‘You have no fever.’
One of the people missing from the bedside was the bearded Hanuman Rao, the Congressman who wore nothing but white. But no one mentioned Hanuman Rao. The film Naya Rasta Nayi Asha — a new road, new hope — had been made, but it suddenly seemed unlikely it would ever be released: that the new road would be taken, the hope materialise. Hanuman Rao had fallen out of favour with the powers-that-be in the Congress, puny men in scheming huddles who resented his largeness, metaphorical and physical; an old but niggling case, to do with his role in his constituency during the Emergency, had been brought back into daylight by a member of the Opposition; the Congress had neglected, carelessly, to bail him out — some said the return of the case was instigated by some malevolent force in the Congress itself. Hanuman Rao hadn’t been arrested; but his assets were frozen, and the film, alas, was one of those assets. Naya Rasta Nayi Asha, soundtrack and all, had been sucked forever into the tunnel of lost prospects; and with it had gone, also, the thousands of rupees that Shyamji had put into it, in the glory and unassailability of having turned, at last, into both ‘music director’ and ‘playback singer’.
‘Shyam, I could listen to your bhajans for hours,’ said Hanuman Rao. ‘Once the film is released, this voice I love so much will be heard by everyone.’ Shyamji had been seduced, not just by Hanuman Rao, but by the magic of the colours — perennial, abiding always in a sort of springtime — of celluloid; the loss of its promise, and, with it, his money, had created a vacancy to which he hadn’t been able to reconcile himself, and brought a pressure to his heart.
No one mentioned Hanuman Rao’s name in that room in the nursing home.
* * *
‘SAAB, WE ARE in need of some money.’ That’s how Shyamji would broach the subject every few months with Apurva Sengupta. Very softly and decorously, not as if he were begging or asking, but sharing a piece of information that had been troubling him. The advance was ‘adjusted’ with the number of ‘turns’ taken teaching Mrs Sengupta; these English words, with their expeditious, dry clarity, had become part of the parlance. ‘Adjust ho jayega,’ said Shyamji, displaying the calm he never deviated from. ‘It’ll get adjusted.’
But this calm wasn’t only a pose he put on for the benefit of his students or family; it had become a dharma, a philosophy of life. It was partly a strategy of self-defence; he’d begun to suspect (but still didn’t wholly believe) that the world he was in love with — Cuffe Parade, Malabar Hill, the mirrored drawing rooms of his older students (plunged by marriage into affluence and anxiety), even the glamour of the film studios — was not quite going to, despite its extravagant, seemingly sincere, gestures of reciprocity, return his love: it had too many other things to do. The thought hadn’t formed itself in his head; but the detachment, the calm, had deepened a little.
‘Saab, what was the need for this?’ he said softly.
This time, money hadn’t been asked for; it had been offered; five thousand rupees in a stapled bundle had been placed discreetly by Mr Sengupta one evening in Sumati’s hands.
‘We are not rich,’ Mrs Sengupta reminded her husband. ‘In fact, we’re poor.’ Nirmalya heard his mother make this statement with a look of preordained, unshakeable conviction. It might be that she was berating herself and her husband for not having saved enough over the years; or just that she was reminding herself that the job, with its army of attendants and comforts, wasn’t forever. The servants themselves seemed blissfully unaware of the fact; symbols of continuity and wealth, they, despite their little quarrels, had the fixity and absence of care that symbols have; Mrs Sengupta almost envied them their strange abandon.