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ALONG WITH an invitation to join a discussion on the second coming of Christ by members of the New Church, a scribbled note on the back of a scrap of circular from Mr Dickinson, asking whether the time of the next tutorial could possibly be changed, a terse pamphlet, full of exclamation marks and a smudged picture of Winnie Mandela, exhorting the reader to become one of the many who no longer ate South African oranges, there was, in Nirmalya’s pigeonhole, an aerogramme, a silent traveller from India, its blue peering out from amidst the white and yellow. Surprisingly, it bore his father’s small, ornate handwriting. Despite directions provided to the recipient, the aerogramme always threatened to come apart in Nirmalya’s hands as he tore it open. Exhuming its contents like something that had been hidden in a magic box, he found a message written in a formal, somewhat stiff style, the style of a man who’d grown more used to officialese than to personal disclosure; but it masked deep emotion, the emotion of a father who’d successfully protected his son from the world, and wanted to continue to protect him. ‘Such things happen,’ he wrote. ‘Your Shyamji didn’t know where his best interests lay.’ He spoke of Shyamji as if he’d committed a minor transgression, something that could be forgiven and forgotten.
Shyamji was in a hurry, thought Nirmalya; as he read — ignored by students in the common room who hardly knew him, who were bending, congregating, spontaneously breaking away — he felt, for once, poised and centred in his aloneness, and his eyes filled with tears too fine and crystalline for anyone to have noticed, while, as ever, he sat in judgement upon his teacher. Taking a Tube from the Strand, numb, like everyone else on the train, but vivid with a secret grief that made him, in his own eyes, separate from the other commuters, and suddenly immune to the awkwardness of exile, he got off finally at Tottenham Court Road, and wandered, as he often did without rhyme or reason, among the crowds and theatres, but this time to clear his thoughts. He’d wanted too much too soon, he thought, as he upbraided his dead teacher for his impatient — even irresponsible — departure. What would Nirmalya, guruless, do now? And what was that ‘too much’? Certain of what it was, he didn’t — couldn’t — specify it to himself.
Three months later, he was in the lane off Pali Hill, relieved to be back home for the excess and heat of summer in this sloping, tapering neighbourhood. When Banwari and Pyarelal came to see him, he said, ‘The weather over there is so gloomy, I don’t feel like singing most of the time. I try to sing Purvi, and I think: what’s the point? Pyarelalji, the light isn’t right. Ekdum theek nahihai. Some days in London, evening doesn’t come, because it’s like evening from the morning onward.’ Pyarelal nodded vigorously, delighted, not because he understood exactly what Nirmalya meant, but because he expanded with pride while listening to him hold forth; Banwari seemed non-committal and suffused with responsibility, as if he were weighing, with exaggerated gravity, Nirmalya’s words.
Nirmalya was happy to see Banwari and Pyarelal, quickened as of old with a simple wonder at their reappearance. They were like friends; he’d never felt that tension with them that he had with Shyamji, where his feelings had been complicated, set on edge, by reverence and expectation. But he noticed that, despite their cheerfulness, they were oddly at a loss at their own juxtaposition, courteous elders of the bridegroom’s party where the bridegroom had gone missing, leaving them embarrassed and clearing their throats; Shyamji’s death had disoriented them — the intensely shy younger brother, and the garrulous, fidgety older man who’d married into the family and felt shackled to it ever since.
‘Baba looks nice with the haircut, doesn’t he?’ said Pyarelal, looking at Banwari, as if the thought had just dawned on him, as if Nirmalya were not present but a thing of the past, and they were reminiscing about him.
There was a faint smile on Banwari’s lips, suggesting matters concerning ‘baba’ were beyond the realm of mere truth and observation, as he agreed.
‘He used to talk about you a lot before he died,’ said his mother, as the young man strode about in his pyjamas in the sitting room with a cup of tea in his hand at ten thirty in the morning. He was still under the spell of jet lag, its early-morning startlements, its creeping heaviness. He’d woken up at dawn, looked for a while at the milky light outside the window, which had grown so beloved to him in his absence, and didn’t know when he’d fallen asleep again. ‘He told me, “Baba will make a mark in the world.” ’ Nirmalya, uncomfortable, uncertain of where to store this prophecy, listened to his mother repeat the dead man’s words as if they had a special mystery, a magic; as if they weren’t about him. Mallika Sengupta, leaning forward in a low chair in her housecoat (how she loved to sit with her son at breakfast!) was tearful; she’d become maudlin after moving to Pali Hill with her husband’s retirement.
The doorbell rang. The young servant opened the door, and a conversation of stops and starts, of monosyllables and broken sentences, could be heard taking place in an undertone; Mrs Sengupta, naturally curious, naturally suspicious, followed. ‘Achha?’ she could be heard exclaiming in disbelief; and then re-entered the sunlit perfection of the sitting room, as if she couldn’t keep the news from her son, displaying a mango in one hand, a faint stain like a shadow on one side of the skin. ‘This is from the tree in our compound,’ she said to Nirmalya, who was still immune to the taste of the fruit. ‘The watchman’ — the invisible interlocutor outside the door — ‘has given us a few’; more pleased than if it were a lottery draw.
‘He needn’t have died,’ said Nirmalya, shaking his head, chasing the thoughts that had been preoccupying him since she’d got up. ‘It was nothing but stupidity.’ He finished the tea. He saw Shyamji’s life, in the last few years, as a series of errors in judgement: choosing glamour over art, light music over classical, death over life. It wasn’t diabetes or even heart disease that had killed him; it wasn’t drink, or the hidden self-destructive impulse that finished other artists — Shyamji was a calm, reasonable man, who had no vices. It was wanting too much from life. ‘Why was he in such a hurry?’ he said irritably to Mrs Sengupta, as she stood there, solemnly listening, still delicately cupping the fruit. ‘Why couldn’t he wait?’
‘Didi, baba,’ said Pyarelal in an urgent, sheepish whisper, pretending to underplay the importance of his announcement, ‘my student Jayashree Nath — you’ve seen her, baba, in the Taj — will be dancing at the Little Theatre on the fifteenth. Please come. I want some samajhdaar, knowledgeable people in the audience. Baba is very samajhdaar — yes, absolutely!’