‘Shyamji,’ Nirmalya said shyly when there was, at last, a pause in the proceedings, ‘I want to tape some new compositions.’ And he angled the Panasonic like an awkward object between himself and the harmonium.
‘Do you have Shankara?’ asked Shyamji, running his hands through his oiled hair, expansive and grand at this change of register from the common or garden ghazal he’d been teaching to the rarely-visited, flamboyant raga; and when the boy shook his head, he said almost with a kind of glee, ‘Theek hai, I’ll give you a composition in Shankara. But you’ll have to practise hard to get it right.’ And as an afterthought, ‘I’ll also give you Adana. You don’t have Adana, do you?’ Then, with a look of minor incredulity and puzzlement, as if he’d only just remembered, he asked with a child’s ingenuousness: ‘Baba, when are you leaving?’
‘On the twenty-eighth of next month,’ hummed Nirmalya, shy, holding back, always nervous, in company, of being listened to and noticed.
But Abhijit had, with a disarming matter-of-factness, switched off from the rather highbrow conversation about ragas and international travel, and was crooning a ghazal — not the one he’d just been learning; another one — in an undertone. He was obviously profligate with songs. He was respectfully uninterested in classical music; let the knowledgeable pursue knowledge; what he was after was, simply, melody and success. Someone had told him that his name itself, ‘Abhijit’, had the right sound and weight, the potential to be put into popular circulation; and he now had a quiet faith in his name, and said it undemonstratively but significantly when someone asked him what it was. Glancing once or twice in the direction of the teacher in his vest and the tongue-tied but clearly eager young man, whom he’d met in this flat a couple of times before, he noted with knowing amusement Nirmalya’s shabby clothes, already perfectly aware that Nirmalya was a ‘big officer’s son; Abhijit himself was, of course, always particular about the shirts he wore, and looked quite the hero. Nirmalya, though, was so unremarkably turned out and unprepossessing that it became impossible not to notice him. As he sat down on a chair Abhijit laughed and said:
‘Look how simply he dresses!’ and shook his head almost fondly — because Nirmalya was wearing a kurta that was torn near the pocket. It was a kurta Nirmalya felt comfortable in, for the last four or five years now he’d been inhabiting some of his clothes as if they were something between skin and makeshift private territory, so close was he to them that he became unaware of their fading materiality, they faded into him, almost — he was now in a kurta that he’d worn, as usual, too often.
Shyamji nodded briskly, and murmured, while positioning the tape recorder away from the bellows of the harmonium and before him, ‘Woh sant hai’ — invoking the old word, which was used of saints and poets and the mad or unworldly. Abhijit smiled; he had light cat-like eyes, and they gleamed in pleasure and in crystalline agreement. Shyamji wasn’t mocking Nirmalya; ‘Is the tape in place?’ he asked, almost woeful, looking up from the mysterious, stealthy window of the TDK cassette. He found Nirmalya odd, and his disdain of the whirl and glitter of the city a bit tiresome. He hadn’t been able to understand it. He couldn’t quite see why the boy had to make it a point to head in a direction quite different from the world he’d been fortunate enough to be born into; it was childishness, that’s what it was: once or twice, he’d wanted to say to him, Why, baba, aren’t your parents good enough for you? Isn’t what they gave you good enough? And to add in a tone of guidance and patience, Be happy, baba, that you’re blessed with what you have. But in the last two or three months, he’d become strangely indulgent towards the boy; and, though he hardly thought about it or spent time comprehending it, something about him moved Shyamji against his will. There had been a loosening within, a gradual breaking down of a barrier that had circumscribed, without Shyam Lal even knowing it, everything he’d done; and this change, this forgiving erosion, had expressed itself in his sudden urge to give to the boy whatever compositions he demanded so quietly but insistently, set to these magnificent, ever-returning ragas, ragas you thought you could do without for the time being, but which had a way of coming back to you, the compositions his father had once created and dazzled his listeners with, and which Shyamji imparted to his students with the utmost evasiveness and pusillanimity.
Eyes closed, his face young and tranquil, as it always was during these opening phrases, Shyamji began to sing Shankara into the small whorl of the microphone. Nirmalya and Abhijit sat, one on a chair and the other on a razai rug, and listened; the older student smiling, quite open to being moved and nudged by the unexpected incursion of the notes of a raga. Nirmalya frowned in concentration, as if he couldn’t hear properly, or as if he was trying seriously to shut out the sounds coming from the kitchen or the compound of Sagar Apartments. Of course, Shyamji had probably misunderstood him — just as Nirmalya had often misunderstood Shyamji, reverencing the artist with preconceived but urgent notions of what an artist’s life and behaviour must be like: he’d constructed and created his own Shyamji, and had been bemused and exacting when, again and again, the two Shyamjis had failed to come together. Similarly, it was possible Shyamji had misunderstood his young, politely obdurate student; had mistaken the tear above the pocket for a genuine sign of renunciation. Maybe, not having quite entered the world of the young in Malabar Hill and Altamount Road and Colaba (his own son’s world was noticeably different), he didn’t see that it was an affectation, a necessary phase that some of the children of the rich pass through. Or maybe he’d taken all those ambiguities into account recently and still decided that, in his eyes, Nirmalya was an unusual and uncharacteristic sort of young man.
* * *
‘WHAT CAN YOU DO with a man who won’t be treated?’
Mr Sengupta shook his head and smiled; in a post-retirement moment on Saturday morning, having a cup of tea with his wife in the small but spruce drawing room (the Sea Lounge was too far away these days to drive to every weekend), he was speaking (stirring the sugar in the mild infusion) as he always had, as the voice of sanity and reasonableness. And this was partly why Mrs Sengupta found in him such an anchor, an axis around which her universe turned; because sanity and reasonableness were binding, but were so hard to find.
In the Sea Lounge, they’d cover topics from the banal to the most worrying, as, one by one, portions of chilli cheese toast disappeared from the plate, and replenishments of Darjeeling tea were poured. Now, with the same lingering mixture of concern and aimlessness, they discussed how someone who had a problem and had been offered a solution to it could reject that solution so easily out of hand. What kind of a man was this, paralysed, at the end of the twentieth century, by the sort of absurd superstition they’d seen around them, and left behind, as children? Sipping their tea, they became momentarily silent, experiencing an obstinate knot of irritation and pity, while exhortatory birdcall and human voices burst into the drawing room from the balcony on the right.