But to go off to England, as Nirmalya wanted to, soon, insatiable, suddenly, in his conviction that the real hunt for knowledge would begin once he’d transplanted himself there — that passage would require funding; where would the funds come from? Nirmalya was too unworldly, too insulated from the material capriciousness of human existence, to be bothered with these particulars. It was left to Apurva Sengupta, who’d once managed a company, to now manage his son and his unworldliness. Mr Sengupta would have to quickly review his savings (which, under Mrs Gandhi’s tax regime, had been small, most of it going every month into a strangely futile insurance premium) and apply for educational loans. It was expensive maintaining a saint, a mystic. Wasn’t it Sarojini Naidu who’d said — Apurva Sengupta’s mind went back to his shabby, peripatetic college days and to the freedom struggle — that it cost a lot of money to keep Gandhi travelling third class? Decades had passed since that remark, exquisite in its irony, had been made and those excitements burnt out into the straight-faced pursuit of well-being in present-day existence. Mr Sengupta smiled as the words — full of a tolerant, even affectionate, mockery he recognised while taking up the task in hand — came back to him.
‘King’s College, London,’ he said, returning from work, the look on his face at once querying and pleased, like a boy who suspects, but is not entirely certain, that he’s carrying a piece of important news. ‘Jane says it has a good philosophy department.’
‘Jane’, thin, hesitant, but large-heartedly helpful, was part of an entourage from the Commonwealth office in whose honour a cheerful and efficient business luncheon had been organised that day, in a conference room in the basement of a five-star hotel. The topics covered in the meaningless, happy hum between the suited Indians and the awkward English, some of them making jerky, shy movements of the head, others complacent and impenetrable, had included foreign investment (naturally), mergers, the annual growth rate, trade restrictions, and, between Jane and Apurva Sengupta, for about seven to ten minutes, philosophy departments.
And so Nirmalya became a correspondent, and entered, reluctantly, his first transcontinental communication, in which someone from the department, a Mrs Sandra Dixon, pleased and ruffled him by writing back to him and sending him, obligingly, an envelope thick with forms. He sat down heavily with them in the morning upon the bed, bending forward, placing them against the hard surface of an exercise book, filling them out laboriously, progressing slowly from rectangle to rectangle, sighing from the start like a sick person (he had a condition close to dyslexia when it came to completing forms; it filled him with a subdued panic and lostness). When it was done, he felt an indescribable sense of liberation, as if he’d never have to do it again; he went on to the veranda to get some air and to survey the unfolding of the everyday. Weekly, now, long white envelopes began to arrive, with postage stamps that had, upon them, a ghostly impression of the head of the Queen of England.
The letter they’d been waiting for but not expecting crept in beneath the door one afternoon with aerogrammes and statements of interest rates: acceptance.
When Nirmalya had ripped open the envelope and excavated the letter, he read, with the same swimming eyes of the unhappy form-filler, the message in the neat, punctilious, by-now-familiar type: ‘I am pleased to say that. .’ He took it to his mother; she opened her mouth in astonishment and then read it out, in her naive, stumbling, insistent maternal accent, to her husband over the phone.
* * *
HE WENT WALKING around Pali Hill and the lanes of Bandra; in the afternoon, confronting dogs that lay curled up in self-contained, pilgrim-like repose in the middle of a road, or a tyre abandoned on one side without explanation; and in the evening, with the fruit bats hovering overhead. He was in a curious interim phase; unexpectedly leaving his childhood terrors and his adolescent anxieties behind, opening himself, for the first time, to the allure of the world — he was in a state of semi-retirement himself, secretive with his thoughts on books and music and this new locality, nothing to do for much of the time, as he waited to travel to King’s College. He had almost no friends — he’d gradually stopped seeing them, one by one — and he undertook his expeditions alone; his parents no longer questioned him about his irregular attendance at college. He was struck by everything here: the warm, loaf-like stones that made up the walls of the Christian schools; the pretty, tissue-paper-like bougainvillea (almost like something mass-produced by a greeting-card manufacturer) by the gates to the Goans’ bungalows causing him to stop, undecided, in confusion; at traffic junctions, as lines of cars negotiated transitions from Hill Road to Perry and other roads, sudden crosses rose up like sentinels behind the traffic lights; and churches sprang up between or in the corners of the interconnecting lanes. How different all this was from the Bombay he’d grown up in!
‘So you’re going to London,’ said Nayana Neogi, his parents’ friend, sitting in a large, loose smock in the small bright sitting room of the new flat. He felt more comfortable now, more at home, with his mother’s friends than with his own; he felt they could sense his transformation. ‘We’re so proud of you, Nirmalya.’ She leaned forward, this woman who was for years familiar to him, large, engrossed, looking for an ashtray.
Now that they were in this part of the city, his parents had begun to see the Neogis more regularly than before: they were a ten-minute drive away. Not only proximity, but the fact that retirement had restored a sort of parity, that to see Apurva Sengupta was to see an old friend, and not so much to visit a ‘big man’, had made things just a little easier; from the early days, when everyone and everything was full of promise, and Nayana’s husband a young gifted artist and Apurva a charming, beautiful ‘chhokra’ they were fond of, to the middle period, full of unresolved tensions and contradictions, when it seemed infinite opportunities opened up for the slightly less deserving and mysteriously closed for others, to now, when Nayana Neogi seemed more at peace in her oversized frame and with her superannuated bohemian days, happy with her various pets — so much time had been covered, and was represented, in this simple visit now that the friends lived within a few miles of each other: Khar and Bandra! It was in London, of course, they’d first met in the fifties, when Nayana’s husband, Prashanta, and Apurva Sengupta had been students, the former of commercial art, the latter beginning his articleship toward a degree in accountancy: there was that story of how Apurva had, by mistake, on the first night he’d spent at Prashanta’s ‘digs’, used — they had taken an instant liking to each other — the latter’s toothbrush. This outrageous act of presumption on young Apurva Sengupta’s part (for that was how it was seen by the doting Prashanta) had sealed their friendship for life; but the story of the toothbrush was just a little too old now, almost too pat and rounded, for Prashanta to use it to make a special claim on his friend; but he still recounted it; for him, it still had a kind of music. Over the years, they’d not so much grown apart as been divided by what constituted and defined success: the Senguptas suspected the Neogis secretly resented their ‘success’ only because they clung to one particular meaning of that word. The Neogis felt that Apurva Sengupta had sacrificed his freshness, his mischief, and become predictable in his life-devouring pursuit of conventional fulfilments. But now the Senguptas had moved to this part of the city, the subterranean debate about success had lost its urgency; and Mallika Sengupta had begun to visit, every other day, the rented ground-floor flat, two steps up to a wooden door on the left, where the Neogis continued to live, the black-and-white photograph of their dead, smiling son greeting you as you entered the bedroom, a menagerie of pets — a sleek, supercilious grey cat and, recently, a small family of Pekinese — moving constantly and confidently from kitchen to bedroom to hall, the coir chairs waiting to be occupied by visitors.