* * *
BUT SHYAMJI didn’t leave the country — at least, not permanently. In the following year, he made two more trips to England; his life, and his lifestyle, improved, as if one of those tiny, mute goddesses, whose vermilion-smeared pictures he bowed his head before, had impulsively decided to shower him with bric-a-brac and useful things. So he acquired a second-hand Fiat and employed a young driver to make that long journey from Borivli to various parts of the city.
‘Whatever Hari wishes,’ he’d say, glancing heavenward at the clouds from which the second-hand car had descended.
He arrived at Thacker Towers in it; it saved him the travail of trains and taxis. He was still not a ‘bada saab’; he couldn’t afford an upmarket ‘vehicle’; but he was proud of the turn in his fate that had brought him his own ‘vehicle’.
Very apologetically, he raised his tuition fees; ‘What can I do, didi?’ he said, with a pained but firm expression, fairly comfortable that what most of them gave him was a fraction of what they spent every day on a decoration, a painting, or a sari.
After his third trip abroad, he had cleared most of his outstanding debts. And he had enough money left over to sell his own flat in Borivli, and, with that money and some of what he’d recently earned singing for enthusiastic, cushion-propped, sprawling drawing-room audiences in Frognall Lane (how noisy and drink-and-peanut infested that quiet house became during soirees!) and performing in other places in London, he bought a two-bedroom apartment in Versova, facing the sea. This building complex, ventilated and its windows shaken from time to time by sea breezes, was appropriately called Sagar Apartments; it had been built for traders who’d acquired social pretensions and a bit of extra, unaccounted-for money and wanted not to be left out of the property boom; living for years, even generations, next to shops and godowns in humid rooms, they’d developed a longing for the sea. The porch and the corridors leading to the lift were laid with marble, the one stone that, in the city, had the ability to confer prestige indiscriminately upon a habitation. When Shyamji moved here, the building was brand new, and the white surface was still smudged by the footprints of labourers; but his eyes were temporarily, pleasantly, engulfed by that whiteness. With him moved to that smart two-bedroom flat mataji, the mother, and his wife, and his two unmarried daughters and son.
‘Papa,’ said Sanjay, Shyamji’s fifteen-year-old son. He spoke softly, but in an abstracted insistent sing-song. ‘Papa, Motilal mamu’s son Kailash was saying that to learn music arrangement properly you have to have a keyboard.’
‘Hm? Who said?’ asked Shyamji, tugged against his will from the wideness of a reverie into the constricted space of this non sequitur. He was full of these absent moments, when he seemed to be thinking neither of his family nor his students.
‘Kailash,’ repeated his son determinedly.
‘Bewkoof hai,’ said Shyamji swiftly, serenely. ‘He’s an idiot.’
But Sumati, Shyamji’s wife, who was within earshot, smilingly and defiantly took up cudgels on this Kailash’s and her son’s behalf: ‘After all, learning the keyboard now will mean that our Sanjay will be able to become a music arranger by the time he’s eighteen, God willing’ — she’d had a vision of that moment in the future, it was an image that had a certain power over her — ‘and’ — here her prescience was lit by tenderness — ‘see how beautifully he already plays the guitar.’
All these Western instruments. . They were glamorous because they’d arrived, intact, after a long journey; once here, they could merge intrepidly into the texture of almost any musical background — it was not as if Shyamji wasn’t won over by their virtues and innate youthful qualities himself. A man who could play a Western instrument would always have a livelihood in today’s world: so it seemed to the old music families. The tanpura, with its four strings, hadn’t lost its magic, but it became more and more difficult to make time for it; still, its sound shocked you every time you heard it — like a god humming to himself, its vibrations difficult to describe or report on, the solipsism of the heavens.
A slim white synthesiser with an apparently interminable row of white and black keys arrived in that room; Sanjay began to toy with it at once — the tinselly cascades of sound introduced a new and slightly embarrassing atmosphere to the small apartment, filmi, but upbeat and busy with possibility.
For two days, a series of chords, seemingly arbitrary, but executed in a variety of keys in quick succession, took over life in the little drawing room. People began, eventually, to ignore the boy; from time to time an awareness registered on Shyamji’s face in a faint smile, as if his son were a child again, and kept encroaching obstreperously, in his single-mindedness, upon his own concerns — for this is what it had been like when Sanjay could neither walk nor talk, but possessed, in his play, the same glassy-eyed, silent, dogmatic zeal.
The synthesiser dazzled Sanjay, starting from the special excitement of the name — Yamaha; and, as had been promised, there seemed to be no sound he couldn’t extract from it. It was as if an orchestra, minus the heavy, inconvenient corporeality of human beings, lay latent inside it, constantly changing shape, obedient to his fingertips. It was portable; like a wand, he carried it from location to location, room to room.
When Shyamji and Sumati had exchanged garlands when they were eighteen, their respective, impeccable musical lineages had been taken into account to create a gene for the future, a gene which Sanjay, ruffling his hair with one hand, and running the other across the keyboard, represented. But such calculations don’t allow for the fact that propensities suppressed in one generation might find freer rein in another, that the gene is self-perpetuating but also self-divided, that it contains within it its own destruction and mutation.
‘Music is leaving the house of the ustads, the maestros,’ an ageing and somewhat pompous singer, a friend of Ram Lal’s, had said not long ago to Shyamji, bitterly, as if the younger man were in some way responsible. Shyamji had nodded solemnly, placatingly, in all sincerity; at that moment, he’d thought it safest to be in complete agreement with the octogenarian. But, at this point in his life, he didn’t really care — he didn’t care exactly where music was located. And he had no pressing worries about whether the splendid but little-known inheritance his father had created would peter out; true, Sanjay hadn’t been patient enough to acquaint himself with all the beautiful, difficult compositions, and Shyamji too had become busy of late — but there was time; he was forty-four, Sanjay was sixteen; it would be done, though, of course, it would require diligence and hard work! The gharana was the least of his worries. He cared — he wanted to ensure — that life expanded for him, his children, his children’s children, and that when opportunities came or returned — as they seemed to be doing suddenly — he made full and intelligent use of them. And, in spite of himself, he was somewhat won over: without appearing to relent or altering his rhetoric, he was obviously quite pleased with Sanjay’s new toy; gingerly, inquisitively, he tried out the keys himself — he was adept at the harmonium — taking stock of its brazen, tinny sound.