Tentatively, Nirmalya began to sing; hitting the sa, but no more than murmuring the note, feeling foolish too, afraid, almost, of being thought mad. Like many other singers, he too, in an unthinking ritual, took off his wristwatch and placed it beside himself before he began, as if he were about to dive into water, or embark on a journey for which there must be some form of material evidence and record; the white dial, he noticed, sighing deeply from the pressure of some unspecified responsibility, said five past ten. He began with the Asavari composition Shyamji had sung for him once, which then, quickly bringing out the two-in-one, he’d taped, then run over in secret with the maternally nurturing Pyarelal, a sweet, melancholy piece. Outside his window, the sun was waning; a very different sun from the one he was used to. What sense, he asked himself, does it make to sing Asavari here? Yet he steeled himself, his voice much louder, magnified, in the deceptive late-morning hall-of-residence silence.
His tutor, a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket, grey-black hair combed back to announce a thinker’s forehead (his name was Dickinson, an elegant interlocutor who seemed, on principle, not to have produced anything of note), wanted to cure Nirmalya of his philosophical hunger. He responded to his intensity with a cup of tea and a tin of biscuits, never forgetting to round this off with the question that effectively stemmed the questions his student might have asked: ‘Sugar?’ He approached Nirmalya’s unspoken sense of civilisational crisis as a doctor might a hypochondriac’s ailment, wryly, warily, not wishing in any way to offend. ‘Existence is not the chief problem of philosophy,’ he said, tolerant, good-humoured, as if he were breaking news that had long gone stale, ‘language is. But of that, more later.’
* * *
EXPLORING THE epicentre of London, with its cinemas, Anne Summers lingerie shops, ghostly doner kebab outlets and overcrowded sandwich-purveying delicatessens, its windows displaying the slashed prices of electrical goods or silent constellations of wristwatches, its private sex shops with indigo-blue doors, he entered a narrow sunlit avenue called Charlotte Street. Here, utterly despondent, walking past grim buildings, he found himself face to face with a barber’s shop in a corner. ‘A haircut is long overdue,’ he thought; but hesitated, desolate, conscience-stricken, on the pavement. His hair, straight on the whole, a glimmering black, in which mysterious waves appeared as it descended the tide-mark of the collar, was precious to him. Yet, resolved to tackle the unpleasant but necessary ceremony head-on, he entered the shop, hung his deep-sea-fisherman’s anorak from a hook, and sat down upon a sofa beside two other obedient victims who were pretending to read. He was beckoned, finally, with a forefinger; and as the Italian smashed the white cloth against the air like a child’s magician, he, before removing his spectacles, checked his reflection sadly in the mirror. ‘Just a trim, please,’ he said, diffident, for a moment, that he must make this deeply felt plea in a language he had no proprietorial right to — and because he, and his whole being, were now in the barber’s hands. The barber paid no attention; unsmiling, as detached as a blind man, he flashed his scissors and ran the comb through Nirmalya’s hair as if stroking a musical instrument. Then, like one who knew exactly what he was doing, he chopped off a great deal of the hair, as its young owner sat helplessly still. The hair which Nirmalya had started growing after school, this emanation, no less peculiar than a halo, which he allowed to be touched by complicit hands only once in two and a half months, lay irrevocably on a dark floor in Charlotte Street.
Two weeks later, as if in penitence, and in a moment’s hurtling recklessness, he shaved his moustache and his goatee; the face he saw above the basin was completely ‘normal’, surprisingly pleasant-looking, almost certainly respectable. He felt a great relief, and an irrepressible desire to laugh — delighted to return to the human race, to all the ambitions and desires it decreed were valid, and which he, too, surreptitiously shared. His razed but gleaming cheeks protested at the slap and sting of Tabac.
* * *
‘THERE’S AN INVITATION, ji — from outside Bombay,’ said Sumati, adjusting the curve of her aanchal as she replaced the handset in its cradle. Shyamji was on the divan, his head propped on the palm of one hand, talking animatedly to a relative, an old man in white who sat on the carpet in a way that made it seem he could see all the way to the horizon. ‘From Dongri. Some bada officer posted there lagta hai — I think “Collector”-hi was what he said — his daughter is getting married. He said he’ll pay twenty thousand rupees and, arrey wa, first-class fare for you and Banwari and Pyareji. For you to sing, saheb, the night after the wedding for a small group of friends.’
Shyamji frowned more and more at Sumati’s unflagging cheer. Dongri was a nowhere place; but twenty thousand rupees!
‘He says he heard you sing in Khemkar saab’s house and is mad about your singing,’ she continued softly, caught in the vision of a time when she used to sit hunched in the background, face partially concealed by the aanchal, listening, her husband singing to a hall packed with government servants and businessmen, when Khemkar was no longer Chief Minister, but still a person of influence. She was very proud of her husband. Her indulgent, teasing adoration used to irritate the other relatives.
‘What did you tell him?’ he asked, half-listening to what she’d said. He used the familiar ‘tu’: married for more than twenty years, they were like a sister and a brother who’d almost approached an understanding about living with each other; half the time, they didn’t notice one another, except in fleeting glances of recognition, or with mild distaste and weariness. ‘Arrey, Suman, why didn’t you give me the phone?’ He only excavated her pet name to address her when he was close to exasperation.
‘Lo!’ she said with a gruff laugh, drawing back in wonder as the old visitor gaped open-mouthed. ‘You are the one who does not want to take phone calls, and now you are the one to change your mind without telling anyone else. Tell me, is that right?’ she asked, smiling, shifting her benign, blessed squint towards the old man. She was careful, while rebutting her husband, to use ‘aap’, investing it at once with respect and a mischievous reproachfulness.
‘I said you’d let him know tomorrow,’ she added, as she vanished into the bedroom.
He was silent for a short while, neither saying anything after her or to the old relative, taking determined refuge, instead, in one of his ever-returning reveries.
The idea of travelling to Dongri quickened him; three fingers forming a chord, D sharp, on the harmonium, he crooned a ghazal — what did people listen to these days but ghazals? He decided to tell Banwari the next day: a tiny bit of good news that he deliberately delayed passing on.
In the morning, though, he had an irregular heartbeat, and, coming out of the bathroom, fresh from the effort of evacuation, he felt dizzy. The cardiologist who was now seeing him (arranged for by a student, one of the many who comprised the inexhaustible drove of new learners), Dr Readymoney, paid him a visit (three hundred rupees he’d charge him at the end, Shyamji knew; there was no way out) and, with a fastidious, metronomic gaze, took his pulse. ‘Telephone hai?’ he asked, in that richly musical Parsi Hindi, which had Sumati swooning over him in haste and anxious nodding compliance. He made a terse, polite call to have the music teacher admitted into a private nursing home in Versova.