‘The question in itself is not as interesting,’ he jotted down in a little notebook he’d bought from a small, fragrant, forgettable stationery shop in the shopper’s arcade near Thacker Towers, ‘as the way, or spirit, in which it is posed. “Why do I exist?” might be the beginning of an intellectual query, a scientific or rational investigation, the answer to be arrived at by reasoning and deliberation, at the end of which there will be no satisfactory answer. Or it might be a cry of pain, “Why do I exist?”; here, the answer is no longer important. The answer lies in the question, which is the result of suffering.’
He avoided a car and crossed the road. He’d felt pleased after writing those sentences. His sympathies lay with the cry of pain; if someone asked him, What have you suffered? he’d have to say, Very little. Yet, in a mood of visionary despondency, he walked, in his incipient philospher’s agony and undecidedness, through this area that was still, every day, changing shape, new lights being added, still newer buildings coming up, with parks thrown willy-nilly in between, for people to explore and circle round in in the evenings, and wildernesses and unkempt places being constantly curtailed, but still surprising you by springing upon you at times. Walking, he found himself before a strange, wide, white building, that seemed to have descended, like many of the other things he’d encountered, laconically from nowhere, providing no explanation or justification; he knew, from some useless snippet of information stored away in his head, that it was called the World Trade Centre. He stood for barely a moment, trying to reconcile himself to the building’s apparent lack of function; neither trade nor the world seemed to have anything to do with it. Perhaps it would grow into its name? Was it here that his mother had come visiting briefly two weeks ago, getting out of the car and then advancing in a predetermined way, as if this environment were already familiar to her, through a litter of unused shop space in this ghost town called the World Trade Centre, till she finally arrived at an outlet with two perfectly ordinary human beings, from whom she bought, after giving the matter some, but not too much, thought, tiny stick-on bindis arranged in rows on a piece of paper? And had he been with her, inside? Nevertheless, the building struck him as at once charmless and completely unexpected; he couldn’t imagine ever having had anything to do with it. When he returned to the apartment, he heard excited voices coming from the room in which music was usually practised, accompanied by a few incongruous taps on the tabla, and sporadic, short-lived chords on the harmonium. They were taking a break. Shyamji, his face as animated as a child’s with speculation, was asking, ‘Then where will you go, didi? Will it be a different side of the city?’ Banwari was sitting Buddha-like on the coir mat, smiling faintly, listening, unmoved by the many revolutions of the earth, his hands still on the tabla. ‘Come to our side,’ Shyamji said, biting into a biscuit, entertained, obviously, by this idea of geographical proximity translating into a form of spiritual closeness. ‘Then you will be near us.’ And then, suddenly, he spotted the boy by the door, and his expression changed into one of strange, guileless mischief. ‘Kya, baba, didi says you never liked this area at all?’ Shy and exasperating as a new bride, the young vagrant in the narrow churidars and severe-looking khadi kurta smiled and nodded quickly and escaped; avoiding, as ever, ordinary conversation with his guru, never able to see his teacher without reverence, but never, because of his pride, able to behave with the expectedness and ease of a student. ‘Now where did he go?’ Shyamji asked Mrs Sengupta, puzzled, and, his thoughts already changing, drank from the remaining shallow pool in his cup.
* * *
THE BOMBAY Chamber of Commerce was one hundred and three years old, and though nothing now could match the contented but animated milling of suited gentlemen and their wives that the hundredth-anniversary celebrations had comprised — like a reunion of heads of companies and heads-to-be, a reunion in which everyone, magically, conveniently, seemed to have fulfilled their early promise — still, the captains of industry and their bedecked spouses gathered in the basement hall of the Oberoi with their enthusiasm undiminished. A long, breathy speech was made by the President, an amiable duffer, while people laughed both at his jokes and at him, and he beamed at them and continued, relentless; and then the speech ended and everyone was standing, and, in the crowd, there was a subtle insinuation of men in white shirts and black trousers with trays of canape´s, receding at the moment of the sighting. Two days ago, Mr Makhija, secretary of the Chamber, had phoned them; Makhija, whose slow, courteous phone calls and reminders they’d grown used to in the past few years, a doorkeeper to the world of commerce, neither outside it nor, thankfully, quite of it. ‘Please do come, sir,’ he had said, a kindly long-distance spy on their lives, and hectorer. There Mrs Sengupta stood, suddenly having lost her husband; no sign of Makhija either. She held a wine glass half full of mango juice in one hand. The crowd in the large, outstretching room had broken up into circles of men making toasts and telling each other jokes; she was surrounded by people she knew and faces she recognised — it had almost become a habit, this cursory, neutral assignment of names, characteristics, and positions to certain features — and suddenly, far away, she spotted her husband, radiant — he had hardly aged at all — holding a drink aloft nebulously (he drank deceptively, without involvement, and would sip self-importantly and misleadingly from this one glass all morning), his hair as impeccably black as when, on his wife’s urgings, he’d begun to dye it twenty-five years ago, only a plume of white in the front held steady all these years like a flame. He was eager as ever, ignoring the bearer of canape´s hovering fruitlessly next to him, his expression charged with a strange simplicity and expectancy, and she could not believe that they were not in the middle of things, so impossibly far away the limits of the horizon and emptiness seemed; surely two lifetimes were needed to do justice and give proper shape to, to learn from and perfect, a career of what even now felt like promise and youthfulness? For they were not inheritors of property or fortunes, as the business families were; there was nothing static about what they symbolised; for the Senguptas, the career and the life were what they made of them, constantly surprising, a constant, strenuous, but genuine exploration, and everything that happened before or after these years in the company would be marks announcing what had essentially been their life. They would then disappear, in a way it looked the business families never could. Their life would become memory; their own, and in the minds of people like the ones she ran into at these anniversaries, an immense variety but really a narrow range of faces that seemed, with hindsight, to have been put together, unforgettably, by chance.
It was a time crowded with celebrations. In November, the great, bizarre event was Chanchal Mansukhani’s older son’s marriage in a fake village specially created on the lawns on Wodehouse Road, walking distance from the Regal Cinema. People were getting out of cars, urgent men slamming their doors, slow women in organza saris, unsteady on their feet in their jewellery, eager to confer not only wedding gifts but legitimacy upon this man. The Senguptas arrived in a state of minor distractedness and excitement. Chanchal Mansukhani stood, in black suit and dark spotted tie, welcoming the guests, smiling at them whether he recognised them or not, doing namaskar, sometimes taking the palms of their hands uninsistingly in his own, not holding them, but cradling them for a few moments. The donning of the ubiquitous black suit was almost ironical; it was as if it was meant to remind you that he’d made his fortune in textiles, beating to number one place in the market a far better-educated rival of a distinguished political and business lineage; and it was meant to adorn the myth, that this was the son of a man who’d arrived with no belongings at the Victoria Terminus soon after Partition, and who’d worked as both shoeshine boy and coolie. Queueing up to shake hands with him, the creator of Mansukhani Suitings and Shirtings, Apurva Sengupta couldn’t decide whether he was a monster or an angel; he had a boneless posture, his edges were rounded and blunted, and the compassionate, maternal smile of a man who’d grown up in a large, disorderly family, an ensconcing microcosm, played on his lips. There were rumours (whether they had credibility or not it was difficult to say) that he’d used hit men and that murder had been useful to him during his remarkably uplifting — for doesn’t everyone want the man who reigns to have once been like one of the beggars on the road outside? — rise. How many mill-hands, their means of redressal completely at an end, the tall chimneys empty of smoke, were sitting at home or in idle, despondent groups playing cards because of him? Wedding music filled the background, and returned to them optimistically in the middle of their own words; not the shehnai, but some sort of taped, assuaging expression of the human voice. After the muttered but gracious mantra of the ‘Congratulations’, Apurva and Mallika Sengupta felt they’d dissociated themselves from their host, and they wandered about the lawn entirely as if they’d come here on their own business — although they’d continue to talk about the wedding, with irony and pleasure, for a few days. They stopped at stalls offering kababs; others were distributing, equally generously, but to their surprise, Bombay junk food. Her husband was partly in a trance, with a faint smile on his face, as if there was still a possibility that something might happen. She was possessed by curiosity; she was never brave enough to eat street food except in five-star hotels. She tugged purposefully at his coat sleeve, a small, charming plea (he was elsewhere, and hardly aware); ‘Come, let’s go there,’ she whispered, pulling him like a small, unappeasable girl towards the pani puris.