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FINALLY THEY LEFT that side of the city forever — too cheap a word, whose meaning you don’t quite get to grasp in a lifetime; you only use it self-indulgently, for a luxurious and elegiac sense of closure. Instinctively, they didn’t use it; they didn’t believe in ‘forever’ — the company had gifted them, almost two decades ago, a permanent sense of the future. Only much later do you learn that there’s no going back; learn it, an incontrovertible, minor lesson, not very difficult to grasp, then move on.
This, maybe, was the ‘quiet, green place’ that Nirmalya had been thinking about, but whose existence he’d never really suspected; a lane off one of the downward slopes of Pali Hill, a blue plaque announcing its name hanging by two rings from a pole at the base of the lane, which swung in a monsoon breeze in an intrepid, self-contained way, a gate opening on to a building, a second-storey apartment, three bedrooms, roughly fourteen hundred square feet, just a little more than a third of the flat in Thacker Towers. It was as if, wandering down Thacker Towers, they’d discovered an annexe no one had noticed before, an annexe whose balcony opened on to a silent neighbour, a jackfruit tree — and they’d decided never to return to the main flat.
The way to the city was long; sometimes it took as much as an hour. Every morning, Apurva Sengupta — he now had a post-retirement job as a consultant in a German firm — went back to it, past the upturned hulls of fishermen’s boats on the sand in Mahim, the new Oil and Natural Gas Commission township breeding in the swamp in the background, the Air India maharaja on the left, full of a droll and emphatic sincerity, promising seven flights to London a week; off he went in a sturdy white Ambassador he’d bought from the company, and in which an air conditioner had been fitted. They’d got used to air-conditioned transport, the sealed air, the busy, glinting, ragged world kept at bay by glass; they couldn’t, any more, imagine long journeys without it. The air conditioner, however, hadn’t been part of the original engine; it had been transplanted in a garage and installed as an extra, and it took something extra out of the machine. Slowly, shamelessly, it was reducing the engine’s life. No matter; it gave the Senguptas comfort — every blast of coolness on a hot, uncontainable day was welcome; it turned the interior of the Ambassador into a time capsule, a seamless continuation of their old, familiar life in the Mercedes, which they’d bid farewell to without much of a pang. But, since the air conditioner wasn’t built into the engine, it worked off and on, it stopped when the car stopped at traffic lights and went into fan mode, warm air emerged from the slats and brought the Senguptas back to where they were with a wave of irritation. Then, as the light changed to green and the car moved on, there was relief again.
And, in spite of their satisfaction with the new charming little flat, with the quiet lane off Pali Hill and its gulmohur trees with fan-like leaves and churches that emerged silently but busily at the end of a street and reminiscent bungalows that still belonged to Goans, they felt compelled to make the trip, each day, to the centre of Bombay, to Dhobi Talao and Flora Fountain, to partake of their old life: the life they considered shallow and a bit fake. Like interlopers, they arrived, having burnt an hour’s worth of fuel on the way, at the club they used to frequent; ordered food, feeling dishevelled after the journey; disappeared into the spacious, forgiving gentlemen’s and ladies’ bathrooms to splash water on their faces, adjust the bindi on the forehead, smooth their clothes; then, like people who’d been pacified and made whole, returned to their sofa and ate wonton soup and fried rice or a plate of steak sandwiches.
One day, Mrs Sengupta, an hour after her music lesson, found Shyamji at the top of Pali Hill, determined but anguished, his Fiat uncooperative and impenetrable, he about to push it up the slope, while his driver, collar hanging back from his bare brown neck, stood next to the car, one arm plunged into the window, his hand on the steering wheel. Mrs Sengupta was seized by a moment of pity; leaning out of her window, she surprised him with, ‘Shyamji, I will drop you — where are you going?’ Nirmalya, her only company in the back, smiled indecisively. Shyamji smiled too, in a pained way, as if neither he nor the second-hand car was to blame, but something more mysterious and inscrutable that had acted up this hot, dazzling morning.
He was grateful, settling into the front seat; he’d have had to take the local train otherwise. ‘Where are you going now, didi?’ he asked, politely, almost an afterthought, delicately adjusting the kurta sleeves which had dark patches beneath the armpits; but with a curiosity that hovered on the brink of wonder, as if he were convinced that her daily routines were bound to be interesting and unpredictable. And, having known Mrs Sengupta for four years, having been close to the family, he was circumspect and cautiously concerned about the sort of journey she was making now, he didn’t want her to ever be too far from what had been her sources of pleasure and well-being. Her reply gladdened him immediately:
‘We’re going to the club. We’ll have lunch there,’ she revealed in an unflappable sing-song, ‘and wait for Mr Sengupta to join us for tea.’
So things were more or less as they were, he thought, nodding in assent inwardly, becoming increasingly calm in the interrupted air conditioning after the little incident with the Fiat; this move to the suburbs, the retirement, hadn’t really changed anything. After a moment, Mallika Sengupta said:
‘In fact, Shyamji, why don’t you join us for lunch? If you’re not doing anything else?’
Traffic lights changed into a church and into mosques. She was pleased with the idea. Residential buildings with names like Jaijaiwanti and Ahir Bhairav widened into new office blocks; the sea came and went slyly. Shyamji was uncomfortable but full of curiosity.
‘Didi,’ he said, looking at the road ahead of him in Shivaji Park, ‘will I be allowed in these clothes?’ for he was in his usual loose white pyjamas and kurta.
‘Of course you will,’ she said, in a tone that dismissed all imaginary opposition in advance. ‘There are no dress restrictions.’
In the foyer of this old, slate-roofed building, she impatiently signed him into the voluminous register which was open upon a page full of names and signatures and distinguished scrawls, while Shyamji stood beside her, with the mildly questioning furrow on the brow that was almost always present these days, adorned by the remnant of a small orange tika that had been put there by his mother after the morning pujas, neither at a loose end nor relaxed, waiting for something — some embarrassment or unforeseen glitch. The moment didn’t come; as you entered the corridor, the members usually looked up from their food or conversation or glass of fresh lime soda to stare at you, but only if they already knew you or thought they should; unashamedly, almost with warmth, certainly without hostility, they rested their eyes on the newcomer, as if they were about to smile; but they had an instinct for not dwelling at all on people or detail that didn’t interest them. Hardly anyone noticed Shyamji.
Climbing up the three steps to the veranda, Mallika Sengupta, unaware of Shyamji’s discomfiture, clutching her handbag, led the way. They entered the dining hall. Shyamji, decorous, eyes lowered in expectation, and Nirmalya, his chappals making a slight hissing sound as he dragged them on the wooden floorboards, followed. Shyamji would not have understood Nirmalya’s embattled defiance, or what he thought he was fighting. He, unimpeachable in his white kurta-pyjamas, had become very serious, and mildly disapproving, as he always was, of any hint of flippancy.
They were surrounded by the din of waiters and executives, lawyers, businessmen. They sat at a table, the menu card, propped up on a holder, upright before them. It said in undistinguished bureaucratic type, ‘Chicken Xacutti, Brown rice, Daal, Kachumbar salad’, and, beneath this, the same list was faithfully repeated, except that ‘chicken’ was substituted with ‘paneer’. And, further below the main course, the terse but inviting addition, ‘Ginger pudding and custard’.