Nirmalya went to see a movie on his own: Omen II. It was part of his deliberate cultivation of peculiarity; ‘What’s wrong with seeing a movie by myself?’ he said, not so much to others as, defiantly, to himself. Then he stood in a queue and bought one ticket, and climbed up the steps to the hall, liberated by his anonymity, but also feeling the sad undertow of aimlessness that was constantly part of his life. He gradually lost himself in the terror of the film; his heart, his errant heart, beat wildly. And Mallika Sengupta transferred the old sari into the plastic packet, and then put it behind the rear seat of the Ambassador. She was telling her husband about the journey by the local train, laughing at how simple things, things without special distinction or interest, became, for Nirmalya, the son they’d brought up with more than a god-like attention, and put into the best school — how simple things had begun to become for him portentous adventures. ‘He’s excited by what others would find boring, and bored by what they’d find exciting,’ she said. ‘It’s the way you brought him up. He has no idea of the “real world”,’ the father said, not entirely without pride or admonition. ‘I worry for him.’ She’d begun to defend herself, but was interrupted by a child at the traffic lights at Marine Drive crying to her to buy a small garland of mogra flowers.
‘No, no,’ she said, which encouraged the child into assuming a low-pitched whining tone, little more than a whisper: ‘Take it memsaab, take it memsaab.’
She gave in, as she always had ever since she’d discovered the mogra in Bombay. And it was always at this junction that the girl would appear, so that the nocturnal perfume had become associated for her with the traffic lights and the Talk of the Town. She would emboss it on her bun, where, in the dark, it would fit perfectly, like letters of an ancient typeface.
* * *
THE CITY HAD begun to glitter; even Pali Hill and Bandra, once cut off, a sanctuary for a different rhythm of life, places in which people lived who were half-hidden, small-scale, even Bandra and Pali Hill sparkled with money. Nirmalya’s rejection of the world of corporations he’d grown up in widened into a disgust with the booming city; weddings everywhere; cars in droves thronging at the entrance of some celebration; clusters of families with children shopping late into the evening.
A new shop called ‘Croissant’ had opened on Perry Road; and Nirmalya loved croissants. Walking past its gleaming door, blue and silver in the evening with light, he was tempted to go inside. But then he noticed a group of frenetic children — obviously the children of the labourers who were constructing a building behind the one he lived in: he’d seen the irrevocable, emergent skeleton of the building from the rear balcony of the flat, the labourers rhythmically at work in daytime. White dust rose habitually; he knew these were their children because of that dust, which they bore like signs on their hands and parts of their faces. They were in some excitement; one of them, an obdurate waif-like girl, had created a kind of hammock by lifting and holding the bottom of her dress in front of her, and this tiny hammock was crowded with breadcrust. Nirmalya had seen the children emerge from the shop; walk noisily down the steps; the others darted away from the girl but were reunited and ran around her in a chattering group, now and then scooping up bits of the crust. Nirmalya was amazed by their pleasure; he stood there, like an idiot, watching them, and taking in the radiance of Croissant from the corner of his eye. He watched as the children danced into the half-completed building off Perry Road, the girl still holding the end of her dress before her. Returning home, he wrote hurriedly in his notebook, shutting out a television that was within earshot, ‘When the children entered the building site, they became invisible, though I could hear them laughing. The building site, dark with the white dust the labourers had raised, was like the garden in “Burnt Norton”, where “the leaves were full of children,/ Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.” ’
‘Let’s go and have tea at the Leela Penta,’ said Mr Sengupta. Saturday morning, and strange parts of the city beckoned. The Leela was the new hotel, not only a new hotel but a new species of hotel, that had come up in the outskirts. Not like the Sun ’n’ Sand, with its respectable, palm-tree-infested charm, overlooking sunsets and quaint horseback rides on the beach, but an excuse, it seemed, for some people to pour money into a freshly built-up wilderness, where you’d least expect it. One morning, Shobha De had surprised them all by describing it as a paradise on the edge of civilisation in a full-page advertisement in the Sunday Times. This had made them suspicious; but also, naturally, curious.
‘What is this place? If Shobha De says it’s good, it must be rubbish,’ said Mrs Sengupta. And so they set out for tea at eleven thirty. Featureless, intimidating, promising Versova: wide avenues and thickets of tall buildings, even taller than Thacker Towers. This was the city’s newest suburb — and was this where, long ago, when Nirmalya was a boy and they used to visit the beach in Marve on certain weekends, was this where a connecting road used to run, with fields and marshes beyond, and with a low-roofed South Indian cafe doing surprisingly bustling business on the roadside, where Nirmalya, with his parents, on the long journey back towards home, had once eaten a dosa, agog with wonder at the black mustard-seed seasoning on the potatoes? So it seemed vaguely, as they went this way; that it had been somewhere here; though there was no evidence of it now.
They arrived, pennant-heralded, at the dun-coloured driveway to the hotel, and got out at the immense porch. A distant gust of chill air greeted them. The hotel, with its line of palm trees, had risen out of nowhere like something in a European fairy tale; it was surrounded largely by waste land. Mr Sengupta had a lost but cheerfully inquisitive air, like someone who’d been forced to take a long diversion and had stopped accidentally; and the doormen willingly cooperated in this little piece of theatre, and received him accordingly, calming him with smiles and bows as he entered. When they’d walked past the catafalque-like lobby, ignoring the small, glassy-looking men and women behind the reception, and settled into the understated but resplendent chairs in the coffee shop, burrowing finally into the heavy menus before them, running their eyes over varieties of Darjeeling tea and cake named and described in sloping letters, Nirmalya, who was looking out through the large sunlit glass windows into the brown tract of land outside, where, in the distance, a boy was squinting and squatting on the edge of a metal cylinder, said: ‘Baba, I don’t want to eat here.’
Apurva Sengupta looked again at his son in surprise, even wonder, as if he were reminded that the boy represented a puzzling, unforeseeable turn in their lives; he couldn’t help but laugh, almost with pleasure, as he used to when Nirmalya, as a baby, had first begun to exuberantly and insistently utter nonsense, and it had seemed so momentous to his parents. Then, too, he’d felt that fear mingled with joy, as if he’d never confronted anything comparable before.
‘Why, what’s the matter?’ he asked his son, without anger or condescension — just as he’d reasoned with him at different points in their lives, while cajoling him to go to school, for instance, or when leaning forward to the small unappeasable boy before he got on to a flight.