But Apurva Sengupta hadn’t quite washed his hands of Shyamji; he was defeated, for the time being, by his soft-spoken intransigence. To not want to be admitted into a private hospital free of cost because his father had died there. . he couldn’t take it seriously; he would persuade Shyamji. But not now, there was no point in coercion; he’d put it off for a few days.
Pyarelal was concerned; at least, he looked more worried than Shyamji’s family did. Part of the reason was that he disagreed with the family he’d married into on everything; and this exhibition of concern was seen as a further instance of making trouble, of being negative and perverse in what was, on the whole, an optimistic, well-networked period for Shyam Lal, of — and this was the most characteristic Pyarelal-like vice — drawing attention to himself.
‘These fools!’ he complained to Nirmalya with the contempt of the clear-sighted. ‘They talk about movies and that minister’s son and this new hotel.’ Then, with a preoccupied, martyred look, he pushed at a bad tooth with his tongue.
After which, satisfied with his prodding, he added, his mood changing at once to exasperation and comedy:
‘He sings that song at the end of each programme. The boring Kabir bhajan: “At least see to it, lord,/ that when my life leaves my body,/ I have the name of Govind on my lips.” Do you know what Durgaji’ — referring to a relative, a fairly well-known singer of qawwalis — ‘calls it?’ He grinned; then was wracked immediately by a beedi-smoker’s cough; but he shook off the tremor that passed through his body in a businesslike way, as if it had happened to someone else, and resumed: ‘He calls it “Shyam’s national anthem”.’ He looked at Nirmalya, a look of irony and entreaty exchanged among partners with similar persuasions and agendas. ‘Arrey, tell him to stop singing it, baba’ — for he’d really had enough of the tearful paean.
Although, like everyone else, Pyarelal believed it was only a matter of time before his brother-in-law was better, he’d begun to feel a subterranean fear; was it an intuition of the end? It came to him in the middle of the tedious and demanding everyday, while scratching his stubble or nagging at a tooth, or boarding a BEST double-decker in the afternoon, standing at attention with a self-conscious jerk of the head if he didn’t get a seat, this unsettling intimation of the void. But it didn’t last long; Bombay said to him, as the bus lurched ahead: ‘Don’t be silly. Life goes on; it has always gone on.’ But then, when he’d finally found a seat, there might be a delay; the bus coming to a halt, the cars next to it frozen, their occupants’ elbows sticking resignedly out of the windows; impatient, grandiosely peremptory, always as if he were playing a part, he’d glance at his steel-banded wristwatch, shake his head; then — thank God! — the bus would begin to inch forward, and menacingly approach, then pass by, a roadside congregation of people, strangely, for the most part, focussed and silent; an accident, the windshield of the Fiat was smashed; this time, there was no intimation, no premonition, just the urge to return to, as soon as possible, the homeward-bound traffic, a quick averting of the eyes and the obligatory muttering of a prayer for no one — no one known, encountered, or imagined — another solitary, wondering shake of the head (again, as if an audience were looking), and the perspiration on the forehead drying as the bus picked up speed and a sea-breeze blustered in through the window. So Pyarelal, in his better moments humming a film tune that had been following him persistently all day, returned home.
* * *
THE SUITCASE had been packed: the deep, folded layer of winter clothes, a dark suit that Nirmalya had vowed never to wear, small and diminished inside the suitcase, but possessing, nevertheless, a buttoned-up authority even without a body inside it, trousers — including a couple of frayed, disintegrating corduroys that his mother had at first slyly neglected to put in, and which he’d had to bargain for, with the steely persuasiveness of a counsel and, finally, the relentlessness of a madman. Into the smaller suitcase went The Story of Philosophy, with its psychedelic borders in yellow and orange and blue, the strip of black along the bottom of the jacket, and the comforting, pain-numbing mantra of names on the back, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Santayana; it was a book he’d outgrown since he’d picked it up from a shelf in a bookshop three years ago, but he still needed it as a pacifier. The cheap, commercial binding that held together these great lives and speculations was falling apart; page one hundred and seventeen, from the chapter on Francis Bacon, which he’d glanced at and skipped, had dislodged itself in protest. Yet, armed with Will Durant, although he felt — had always felt, really — somewhat superior to him, to his success, to his solemn trust in Western civilisation, to his somewhat gauche devotion to his wife, proclaimed on the second page — armed with Will Durant, he still hoped to make the journey into the unknown and into deliverance.
He hadn’t finished discovering Bandra. It was here, as he circled the roads with their cottages, the courtyards swept and empty and the gardens overgrown with weeds and flowers, or came up against a stone cross or the warm wall of a church, it was here that his fierce world-denying self began to understand the pleasures of the earthly. Strange that he should embrace the earthly amidst so many signs of transcendence: the cross, the church. But this is what Bandra meant to him.
His father too, and his mother — how different they were in this location! They were the same as ever, of course; but he felt they were more his own now. The grey that had slowly appeared in his mother’s hair in the last few years was only visible if you looked hard at it; otherwise, she was changeless. But she liked the quaintness of these environs; ‘It reminds me of the town in which I grew up,’ she said, not elaborating.
When it rained here, you were aware not only of the rain, but of the other houses, the lane itself, the trees: the disappearing, panicky birdcall, the creak of a gate, loitering schoolboys breaking into a run. And, after the shower, the gulmohur blossoms would have fallen from branches on certain parts of the road with a particular exactness and economy, precise carpets of bright red only in those sections of the lane where the gulmohur trees stood, then, an hour later, becoming pink, then, after another hour, a soiled pink fading into the tarmac’s perennial, unsentimental grey. Inside, of course, the household duties of cooking, cleaning, changing bedsheets, were always unobstreperously unfolding. He was going to leave his parents quite tranquil in these surroundings; they seemed, temporarily, like long-standing citizens of these lanes; they appeared to feel no loss for the Bombay they’d left behind, and would never return to now except for a previously decided and pondered-upon part of the day.
The building his father had bought the flat in had risen, naturally, where a cottage had stood once; so, in a sense, they were a part of the change that was now coming to this lane, as were the others who’d bought flats in the building. Most of the Senguptas’ neighbours were Sindhis — toughened by hard work and migration, but also boisterous and benign with new money. Mr and Mrs Sengupta were on cordial terms with them; but, the moment they entered their own flat, their neighbours hardly existed, and their world, instead of closing in and becoming a microcosm, expanded idiosyncratically through the windows and balcony, embracing the old houses opposite, the lanes that ran parallel to theirs, and the invisible horizon. Nirmalya didn’t really mind the families who lived opposite or on the other floors; he liked them for their openness; he liked them better than the polished, cocky corporate types he’d grown up among. But he wasn’t always sure whether to be amused or affronted by their taste and their sense of display.