No, the scandalous remark had a context; it wasn’t meant for public consumption, but was a private release, like a curse or a prayer; now, in the early eighties, directors and executives had the satisfaction (as once their English predecessors had) of leading lives that had all the marks of affluence, and a prestige that traders and businessmen lacked: but their salaries were heavily taxed. Most of what constituted the lifestyle belonged to the company; most of the salary belonged to the government of India; and what was theirs (the pay that reached their pockets) was a relatively modest residue. At least that’s how Mrs Sengupta saw it. So she went through the motions and performed the functions of a company housewife and of being the chief executive’s wife, and, at the same time, cultivated the detachment of a sanyasinni, an anchorite — even when she was buying a Baluchari or wearing her jewellery — from this way of life. Or so she thought.
Those who seem to be rich feel compelled to behave like the rich. The money they’d given Shyamji, for instance, was given from real concern; they didn’t expect it back. But their generosity was complicated by superstition; Nirmalya, in spite of his heart murmur, had developed no symptoms, and they never forgot this fact. Someone was watching over him, and them, and their lives in Thacker Towers in Cuffe Parade; in the shopping arcade in the Oberoi; in the office and on the numerous social occasions that threaded the week — watching others too, possibly, but certainly them. In the midst of everything, they — mainly because of Nirmalya — were sometimes aware of being watched. The lifestyle became partly an enactment; they never quite experienced the luxury, the longed-for benediction, of being able to think it was all there was.
* * *
GRADUALLY, SHYAMJI got better. He felt the need to go back to the world, to embrace it, to win it over, to enjoy it — the old desire and restlessness returned. But it was preempted by his family’s optimism and impatience; almost as soon as they sensed Shyamji was recovering, they began to make plans for the future. The discontinuity and disjunction Shyamji’s illness represented was already a thing of the past.
Some of his students were emigrants. Mainly women, they’d lived for years in England; every winter, sometimes earlier, they’d come back, vaguely doubtful about returning, and at the same time questing, eager with expectation, to Bombay, their husbands following them like mascots. And here, for a month, for two months, they’d fold their cardigans and put them aside in a drawer; they’d stop wearing socks beneath their saris. They should have had a sophisticated and superior air, but they didn’t; living in suburban London and its environs made them feel provincial in the whirl of Bombay. Tooting, Clapham, and Surrey were where they lived; one or two lived in Hampstead; in their dowdy saris, they bore no signs of Englishness except an apologetic tentativeness. Now family surrounded them in the crowded flats they were staying in; this didi, that chachi, small, infirm mothers who continued to exist frugally from day to day, nephews and nieces they might have glimpsed as newborns, or not at all.
Music, besides family, is what drew them back — long ago, in the twilight before they left for England, when they were, most of them, newly married and unburdened with children, they used to sing, learn from a teacher. They didn’t sing well, but they didn’t sing badly; emigration, the hurried departure, the half-hearted, disbelieving resumption of their old life in a new locality and new weather, their mutation into the women they had become, had infinitely deferred their flowering as singers. Decades later, their children and their neighbours’ children grown up and ‘settled’, they felt they could resume from where they’d been cut off; their husbands had saved enough money by now to make that yearly journey to the nephews and nieces and the infirm mother. And, unexpectedly, one of the people at the end of that reverse journey was Shyamji.
‘You’ve been unwell, guruji. I hope you’re getting the right treatment,’ said Mrs Lakhani. She was more affluent than the others — she lived in Frognall Lane. She was unexceptional but reassuring to look at, in spite of the tired eyes and drawn face; years of rearing children, of listening to the silence, of rainy days, of socialising with other Indians, had left her just enough time to satisfy her weakness for music without giving up her friendships. Now, back in this difficult but unforgettable country, she sat, head bowed, as Shyamji, slightly recovered, sat on the bed, having donned a white kurta, and taught her a composition in raga Hansdhwani:
pa ni sa, sa re ga pa ni sa
It was afternoon; not the right time for Hansdhwani. Still, in England, there was no right time at all. Evening and afternoon and morning there were much the same.
‘You need a change of air, guruji,’ said Mrs Lakhani, once she’d finished singing the notes with him in her soft, unpractised voice, her uncertain tone and his, sweet but undemonstrative after the illness, in unison for a few minutes. ‘The air over there is very good. Not like here. Even pigeons are fatter there.’ She smiled at his restrained incredulity. ‘Come and stay with us. Come and stay with us over there. I will arrange some concerts, I will arrange everything. My friends are dying to listen to you.’
This seemed to both Shyamji and his family to be a windfall, a great opportunity. The lady, wan, but always in tasteful, expensive saris, the grey in her hair touching her with an added dignity, began to become more and more visible with Shyamji, with the special, concentrated manner that marks the visitor, a lady with some purpose — perhaps no more than to be in Shyamji’s proximity — listening to him, waiting during a recording, discussing something quickly, even, sometimes, self-effacingly going over a song she’d learnt from him. After seeing her in three different places, Nirmalya hummed to his mother: ‘Who is she?’ ‘I cannot remember her name,’ she confessed. ‘She is a student of Shyamji’s from England.’ Nirmalya had overheard her clear her throat and sing once, shyly. ‘Why does he waste his time with the likes of her?’ he asked, the stringent puritan in him provoked. England meant pounds, and pounds were a windfall; they had the power to heal, to renew. ‘Jao, jao, don’t think so much,’ said Shyamji’s mother. But he wasn’t thinking; he’d decided to take up the offer — in his courteous, patient way, he had the passport and visa done with Mrs Lakhani’s help. Secretly, he was pleased to be free of his family for the first time, of the gaggle with its needs and requirements and opinions — from his revered mother to that loiterer and dramabaaz Pyarelal. It would be like a rehearsal of sannyas, the last stage when the householder withdraws from worldly duties, except that he wasn’t retiring to the forest, he was off to Frognall Lane: the trip had some of the benefits of renunciation, and also made good business sense. He underwent a transformation; for the passport photo, he abandoned his loose pyjamas and kurta and wore a shirt and trousers. He looked more efficient in this incarnation. He felt more efficient, too.
The time of departure was 3 a.m. ‘There’s no point in sleeping,’ said Shyamji with weary reasonableness to his family. ‘Haa, Shyam, you sleep on the plane or when you get there. We’ll sleep when you’ve gone,’ said his mother, even-voiced, hiding some complex apprehension, looking at no one in particular through her thick glasses.
He was leaving on a Saturday; so they rented a VCR from a man on Friday, and two video cassettes, Dharam Karam and Namak Halal, from one of the stifling video libraries that had sprung up irrepressibly in the interstices of the new buildings, and had brief and bright lives, like fireflies. By eight o’clock the packing was done, various white kurtas and pyjamas and handkerchiefs put in, the puja finished and a red tilak embossed on Shyamji’s forehead; they all, Banwari’s and Pyarelal’s families included, huddled in front of the television set, adults and children spilling on to one another, and began to watch a bad copy of Dharam Karam. The volume was high; they seemed unaware of this, and laughed and shouted to each other above the dialogue and violins, talking much of the time, because they’d seen it before; the film wasn’t meant primarily to be watched; it was a participant in this gathering as much as they were. Food arrived in the midst of all this, rotis that had swelled in Neeta’s deft hands, and vegetables, and, once more, the remnants of the yoghurt that had been set overnight in a bowl made of stainless steel. By the time Dharam Karam was over, their eyes ached with the trembling pictures and Banwari felt a bit ill; Shyamji’s son Sanjay took out the cassette and lifted the flap and shook his head at the faint line running through the tape; yet they persisted with Namak Halal, pushing it into the VCR and watching, agog, as it disappeared into the slot. Sumati laughed with recognition as the titles came on; Shyamji, sitting on an armchair, was now watching the film, and was now elsewhere; his mind travelled far away, then came back to the ear-splitting dialogue (the volume was turned up so they could hear it over their own exchanges), to the room, with everyone in it, abruptly. He was already in a state of departure, but sleep, which he’d dismissed from the occasion, was returning to him like an old habit; he yawned twice, and no one in the loud room noticed. When the film was only halfway through, becoming festive and precipitous a little after midnight, Banwari softly reminded him, ‘Bhaisaab, we should leave.’