‘Pleurisy hoyechhe.’
Mr Sengupta was surprised by this unconscious — or was it quite deliberate — slip into Bengali. Dr Samaddar had never claimed any kinship with him; they’d both ignored the fact that they were Bengalis, and had, with one another, opted for the neutrality, the comforting even keel, of English. Now, in the presence of the man sitting on the bed and pushing the silver buttons into the buttonholes of his kurta, it was as if they were suddenly old friends, or something else — who knew? Apurva Sengupta had misgivings about what this meant.
‘If we put him in Jaslok’ — he gestured to the hospital towering silently on the other side of the road — ‘we could give him a few more months.’
Apurva Sengupta — unexercised; in the generally benign, reasonable mood he experienced when engaged in transactions with others who were as successful in their own fields as he was in his — didn’t understand what he meant by ‘a few more months’; but, because Dr Samaddar hadn’t broken any bad news to him, as he’d threatened to in the case of his own son, he didn’t ask for a clarification, and let it pass. In his mind, the doctor’s words were transformed to something like — ‘If we put him in Jaslok, we could make him better in a few months’ — or a similar sentence, one that he could understand perfectly and do business with. Shyamji had begun to look unhappy, though, as if Dr Samaddar were conspiring to force him to break some religious taboo, or to eat meat. He distrusted, fundamentally, allopathic medicine; distrusted it because, in the end, it saved very few, and because he had a hunch that its bases, like the lives of so many of the well-off, were irreligious; and you couldn’t be saved unless the means were, in some way, connected to the sacred, and the sacred itself wanted the continuance of your life and good health. He felt detached and impatient, but he sat on the chair, dignified, contained; he wanted to go home.
‘What about the cost?’ asked Apurva Sengupta.
‘I’m a consultant there, I’ll take care of it,’ muttered Dr Samaddar, as if he were worried his gesture might be mistaken for weakness.
Jaslok Hospital was where Pandit Ram Lal had been admitted twelve years ago, after he’d had two strokes, the second in the taxi in Mulund, groaning ‘He´ bhagwan’ like a saint, full of compassion and endurance even in his suffering, while younger, agitated incarnations of Pyarelal and Shyamji flanked him on either side; the third seizure occurred as he was being bundled into his room in Jaslok — this dark, teeming factory of the living and partially living, with the much-garlanded statue of Ganesh at the entrance, was associated forever for Shyamji with his father’s death. Whenever he went past it on Peddar Road, he averted his eyes; often, he wasn’t even aware of doing so. Ram Lal had died there, in one of those numberless rooms whose windows were opened very occasionally and hesitantly to let in the sound of the traffic, after a week.
‘Sengupta saab,’ Shyamji said in a couple of days, apologetic, but with the conviction of someone who’s finally opened a locked door, and seen something irrefutable, ‘I cannot go to that hospital.’
* * *
NEVERTHELESS, he continued teaching; the procession of students and petitioner-relatives entering through the open door a flat permeated with kitchen smells and telephone calls at 10 a.m. The bedsheet-wrapped divan in the sitting room in Sagar Apartments became the place where everyone converged, while the family and the flat orbited around the hour of instruction almost unaware of it. It was not so much a sick-bed as a place of instruction and recovery, the pillow an accessory to a moment of comfort, when Shyamji drew back, relieved, to lean against it. Sometimes, there was no harmonium at all; just singing, and the clapping of hands, as Shyamji, like a magician, brought his naked palms together, always urging the student, made meek but attentive by the very sound of the clapping, to keep abreast of the laya and not to stray from the time-signature. Sitting there in his vest and pyjamas, the laundered white cotton innocently tight against the dark skin, humming briefly to refresh his memory, talking rapidly to justify and explain a new composition, as smells of simmering plantain and cardamom and cinnamon bark dropped into hot oil merged with the kitchen smoke, he was still at the centre of things that constituted his world: news of the city and its changing constellation of politicians, gossip about his students’ careers, and the latest on the grapevine about rising property prices. A copy of the Navbharat Times lay often on the divan, momentarily neglected. On a small wooden table was a bottle of water, a glass (usually covered by a plastic coaster) freely leaving its faint ring-marks around it, and an economical clutter of pills. He was a marvellous layakar; it was an instinct and genius he’d inherited from the nervous, febrile Ram Lal, a master of the rhythmic permutations of classical music; and so the melee of the flat was always bright with the sound of clapping, and short-lived jubilation and finality. That active, irrepressible brain, running toward every avenue and neighbourhood and opportunity like a dealer with a new product, would compute, in quick succession, the syllables of a composition set to ektaal as well as the interest he’d earn from an investment he’d made a year ago, how much time it would take to pay back the money he’d borrowed recently from a businessman-devotee of the mother Amba, how much this flat would be worth after six months if property prices rose steadily, until, repositioning his pillow, sighing as if after a performance, he curled up on his side and closed his eyes for one hour in the strange, absolute nullity of the afternoon.
Life is a longing for betterment: in that sense, Shyamji was very much alive; he’d sold the second-hand Fiat, but he wanted another car now, one that wouldn’t stop and start in bursts and would lift him from his recent, expensive dependence on autos and taxis. But, even at home, suddenly drained of energy and interest, he sometimes lay on his side when teaching a young man who might have journeyed all the way from Marine Lines, the perspiration and heat of the city surrounding him like a nagging but, for the present, bygone impediment, Shyamji propped patiently on an elbow, studying the young arrival with concern, cheek resting against the palm of a hand. He managed to sing from this almost horizontal position, crushing the pillow with his elbow, and kept time by snapping his fingers; of course, Ram Lal’s stern portrait, which had moved from King’s Circle to Borivli to, now, the wall on the left, the same rose-backgrounded picture that was garlanded and placed at a respectful angle on the stage during the Gandharva Sammelans — the face in this portrait seemed unable to comprehend so much movement, all this recent burgeoning of possibility and material well-being, and the vaguely familiar figure of the sick man, and it seemed to have resigned itself to its location, where it was indispensable, but essentially unnoticed. ‘Theek hai, let’s go over it again,’ the recumbent Shyamji would sigh at last to the shy, obedient man sitting erect before him. Oddly, disconcertingly, he felt perfectly well when he sang, and this made him briefly doubt both his and everyone else’s judgement; something to do with the miracle of song and its pleasure, which, whatever the context, seemed to recognise neither age nor fatigue nor disease, but only its complete union with, and absolute necessity to, the world.
Nirmalya went to him one month before leaving for London, when he was in a state at once valedictory and dutiful and strangely distracted; he kept putting off appointments with Shyamji, but one morning set out without explanation in the Ambassador, a new, inarticulate driver at the wheel, Nirmalya placing, with a mixture of self-consciousness and ironic abandon, the Panasonic two-in-one beside him at the back. His mission was to tape some new compositions and ragas from his guru, to take them with him to the faraway but not entirely unfamiliar country he’d be flying to — something he could practise with for the next eight or nine months, after which he hoped to return home for his vacations. None of this was going to be necessarily spelt out to Shyamji; but clearly this was what was on Nirmalya’s mind. It had rained earlier; and the tyres made a minute grinding noise as the car entered the environs of Sagar Apartments, the not quite pukka driveway moist and red and dark, the rubble and bricks of nascent construction projects piled randomly in heaps on its borders. It was rumoured that Rajesh Khanna had booked a property in one of these forthcoming constructions; and though Rajesh Khanna was no longer the kurta-wearing, head-flicking, cherry-lipped beau he once used to be, this piece of unconfirmed information had still raised the esteem of Sagar Apartments in the eyes of Shyamji’s family and others. Walking into the flat, Nirmalya found Shyamji with a handsome young ghazal singer in a flowery shirt; he was called Abhijit, a man of some, but not great, talent, who was trying desperately to get a break as a playback singer in films.