* * *
MRS LAKHANI’S home was a two-storeyed house with a garden at the back. She manoeuvred the car dexterously into an expectant space in the front; there seemed to be no garage. Then they — she and a curious but slowly acclimatising Shyamji — both got out into the sunlight and shut the doors. A passage on the right, a small half-lit sliver, disappeared somewhere — to the garden, Shyamji found out later. Light came in from that garden into the sitting room. Shyamji had never encountered such silence before, so much composure; so many things everywhere, and not one that looked out of place — the cushions on the sofa, the beer mugs, the plates with pictures of places on them, the orderly crowd of framed photos of ancestors and the Sai Baba and children and grandchildren, a copy of the Radio Times, a large upside-down face emblazoned on its cover, upon the table before the sofa. The air had a curious, still smell that was faintly familiar to him and confused him: cumin and asofoetida.
He liked the silence immediately; it didn’t oppress him. The next morning he opened his eyes early, and stared at the wall opposite him with a mixture of surprise and panic, but after that, once he heard Mrs Lakhani call out, ingenuously, ‘Guruji?’ from the kitchen, he quickly, obligingly, exorcised his disorientation and grew used to the weather, the duration of the day. He was happy, in a way carefully contained but spontaneously childlike, to be free of the cacophony he’d left behind. Here, in this weather, he had a momentary but strong premonition of being able to give his music a home, a sanctuary.
She brought him to the harmonium on the upper storey that two years ago she’d ordered and had shipped from India. It too had made a journey, but it had merged into its home and internalised the hardly-broken stillness in the little children’s room, empty now. Shyamji ran his fingers over the keys almost blithely; and, finding them alien and hard, furrowed his brow and attacked them with a bit more aggressiveness. Then the instrument and he had made their peace, and he was ready to give his first lesson, and, the next day, to receive Mrs Lakhani’s adoring friends.
He made no attempt to discover London (which he’d, long ago, thought was interchangeable with England) all at once; he was fairly content to walk about Frognall Lane. Dressed in ash-grey trousers, a shirt and new shoes whose tightness he ignored, he walked down the slopes beneath the trees, staring patiently and affectionately at the children — they pretended not to notice him.
‘Don’t go too far, guruji,’ warned Mrs Lakhani.
From the sitting room, he’d look out through the French window into the garden when Mrs Lakhani had gone to work, leaving him with her daily, good-natured farewell, and he had nothing to do but reign absolutely over a house that was not his own; his complete possession of a place that in no way acknowledged him made him fleetingly nostalgic. ‘The pigeons are fatter here,’ he thought, watching the traffic of busy birds strutting on the grass. ‘And so are the sparrows.’ He’d presumed, previously, that the sparrows at home were universal in size and dimension. He now scrutinised these birds in the garden silently. It was his deceptive, inconclusive way of thinking, before Mrs Lakhani turned the key in the lock and opened the door, of where he’d come from.
He emerged, two months later, from the arrivals area at Sahar International airport, blinking in surprise at the sunlight, steering sadly, this man who could neither drive nor cycle, a worn, stuffed burgundy bag with buckles upon a trolley. In the midst of the large crowd, standing in the sun behind flimsy railings and watching the spectacle of passengers coming out one by one and walking down the catwalk before the arrivals exit — in the midst of all this his family was waiting, and broke rank imperceptibly on seeing him; he touched mataji’s feet, she blessed him with a detached, immovable satisfaction at something having come full circle, others came forward awkwardly to lightly touch the returning man’s toes. The first thing his sister Tara asked, with a sardonic lopsided grin, was:
‘What did you bring for me, bhaiyya?’
For some reason, he was disgusted by the question. His eyes, which had had little sleep, stared back at the bright sunlight of the city. Was it being married to Pyarelal that had turned Tara into — a beggar? It wasn’t unusual, he thought (walking, like one already beginning to reluctantly embrace the old habitat, towards the line of quarrelling black and yellow Fiats), for wives to take on the characteristics of their husbands. She was no longer little Tara, his sister and Ram Lal’s daughter; she was Pyarelal’s partner and comrade. But, at a glance, it was true of all of them waiting there for him — they weren’t waiting to receive him, they’d been preparing these months to swallow him up; wanting things from him, wanting things, wanting things. It was hot, but he froze inside; he had nothing of himself to give.
His health had improved noticeably after the two summer months in London; he’d lost weight, and felt younger and the better for it. He still hadn’t abandoned his new clothes; he came to visit the Senguptas wearing shirt, trousers, and strapped sandals. It was like meeting a man who’d returned from the past, with a new alias and a new future. Beneath the clothes, of course, he was the same man; Nirmalya thought of the quaint English phrase, ‘in the pink of health’, and thought how apposite it was to Shyamji at this moment, incongrous though it was to his complexion.
‘It is a good country,’ said Shyamji moodily. ‘I would be happy living there. I was thinking, maybe I should move there.’
Mallika Sengupta smiled, a little alarmed, although she perfectly understood the sentiment — the sense of possibility, which had come a bit belatedly to him, which suddenly makes things plain; she dismissed the possibility herself, because Shyamji emigrating would leave her without a teacher. But the words disconcerted Nirmalya; all his ideas that were derived from reading books on philosophy and English poetry told him the artist must belong to and practise his art in his milieu. How could Shyamji think of giving up his country so easily? Besides, being a Hindustani classical musician, Shyamji’s art was intimately connected to these seasons, this light, an intimacy that Nirmalya had not too long ago discovered for himself. After this discovery, which to him had the force almost of a moral revelation, he couldn’t understand Shyamji’s new-found rootlessness, or the mildly challenging look on his face as he said those words.