‘Do you know that Laxmi Ratan Shukla is dead?’ said Mr Sengupta, faintly disbelieving (as he always was, afresh, on being told that someone had died) but smiling wryly, as if the reason for a particularly long and tiring wait had been finally disclosed to him; he’d just returned from his journey to the city; with his back to his wife, he opened the cupboard and distractedly impaled his jacket upon a hanger.
‘What?’ cried Mallika Sengupta, looking up and waiting for him to turn and to catch his eye. A strange melange of emotions invaded her; among them was the instinctive realisation that a person’s dying was such a simple solution to so many dilemmas and hesitancies, but a solution never seriously considered till it happened and surprised you with its straightforwardness. He’d been Head of the Light Music wing of HMV when he’d died, though he’d been less on her mind than even two years ago; some people never retire, and become fixed to their employment, like a mask. Very few find out, or even care to, what they were outside it.
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘Two days ago. Died of a stroke.’
An employee at HMV he’d run into that afternoon in the lobby of the Taj had paused a moment to break the news, as if Laxmi Ratan Shukla had to, in some form, briefly inhabit these bits of formal chit-chat between them. A couple of minutes of astonishment and slow questioning — ‘When?’ ‘How?’ — and nods and grim phrases, and that was it, they continued urgently in opposite directions. And it almost seemed to Mallika Sengupta that a burden had lifted, that she’d been delivered from waiting for the day this man would be persuaded just that little bit more — that final push — and produce her disc; and surely there must be many others, in whose thoughts Laxmi Ratan Shukla had become a dull and persistent discomfort, who’d been similarly delivered. That day — the day Shukla would pick up the phone and say to her husband, ‘Sengupta saab, we will do it now; there is a possibility. .’ or rise from his table to say innocuously, with that discomfiting softness, ‘Sengupta saab, please sit down. .’ and give the go-ahead — that day, it was safe to say, would never come, and she was glad she’d give up, now, whatever attachment she’d had to its arrival.
‘Shyamji,’ she said on the phone, wanting to disabuse him as quickly as possible of any notion he might have had of the man’s continuance in the world, ‘Laxmi Ratan Shukla is no more.’
He replied gravely, unfazed, ‘He never did anyone any good’; the seriousness with which he said this made her laugh later; for her, it became Shukla’s epitaph.
For Mr Sengupta, Shukla’s death was, in passing, a day on which to take stock, to understand what music — especially in its incarnation in his wife, his marriage — had meant to him; although there were several other things, to do with the consultancy he was providing the Germans, to preoccupy him in the evening. Had he been too soft, had he given Shukla too much time of day, as Mallika Sengupta seemed to think; would she have fared better if he’d not depended so heavily on this enigmatic man and acted, in his own eyes, with more recklessness? He laughed to himself, as he entered into an imaginary dialogue — composed of strong and inextricable feelings, not words — with his wife and son upon the subject (when he actually had to talk to them about it, he found himself unable to use any but the simplest generalities, which his son infuriated him by dismissing almost immediately); Mallika had wanted recognition, that pure, woebegone desire for a reward for her gift had accompanied her life from the start but never overwhelmed it; but she hadn’t wanted to dirty her hands in the music world; she’d wanted to preserve the prestige of being, at once, an artist and the wife of a successful executive. She knew, with an uncomplicated honesty, what her worth was; to what extent could she compromise or to which level stoop if others pretended not to? She kept her distance; remaining busy all the time, not a moment’s hiatus, busy with the music, busy with the household, busy with Nirmalya’s life and Mr Sengupta’s. That had left him with no choice but to pursue Shukla, who’d been more than happy, in his phlegmatic way — if ‘happy’ was a word you could use of him — to be pursued. Apurva Sengupta hadn’t liked pursuing Shukla; sometimes, he’d found it perplexing and pointless — as a human being, but also as a manager of people and departments. The pursuit had ended; the quarry — though it was Mallika Sengupta who felt more like a quarry herself — had suddenly removed itself, permanently.
* * *
NIRMALYA — though he still hadn’t completed college — wanted to apply to study abroad. ‘There’s no philosophy degree here worth its name,’ he said, contemptuous and impatient after a day spent loitering intractably around the portals of the college at Kala Ghoda.
He found an ally in his mother, who, otherwise, couldn’t bear to let him out of her sight, but who became very serious and nodded at everything he said these days, as if it were of the utmost importance. His mother, who’d disciplined him as a boy when he would plot new and untested devices to ‘bunk’ school, had recently become a sort of acolyte. For thirty years her life had been designed by her husband and by the company; now, like a beacon representing some other order, her son, untidy, brooding, with an opinion about everything, appeared on the horizon.
‘He doesn’t want to be like you,’ she said, berating Apurva Sengupta, as if he and his kind were a species of obstreperous, careless dinosaur whose day had come.
Mr Sengupta smiled. He knew that, although his own days might be numbered, his type, the company type, ambitious, brisk, democratic, convinced in the sacred value of entrepreneurship, was bound to flourish — it made him a bit sad, knowing his son had decided not to be part of this proliferation — in a way that dinosaurs never had managed to. His type would populate the world in unforeseen mutations. Money was like a sea-breeze blowing inland; gentle now, but threatening to uproot everything. He, Mr Sengupta, had never really seen money except in its genteel aspects, had never seen its unbridled form; but he could smell its distant agitation. Nirmalya appeared immune to the smell, or determined to ignore it.
But, surprisingly, Apurva Sengupta felt affectionately about his son’s interest in philosophy; just as you might listen to a piece of music which numbs you to the present and makes your nerves tingle to the daydreams of who you were thirty or forty years ago, Mr Sengupta felt a momentary, youthful enchantment. Then the present returned to him all at once, physically and emotionally; you could not escape being who you were now; he was worried by Nirmalya’s intention to study philosophy and the mundane but unavoidable questions it raised. It seemed quite right, and wonderful, to Mr Sengupta that Nirmalya’s first follower was his mother; there was a small but revolutionary change taking place in his family before his very eyes; and who knows — given time, he too might be converted. What was parenthood, after all, but an apprenticeship (a belated apprenticeship in Mr Sengupta’s case) to the possible greatness of one’s children?