* * *
THE GURU COLLAPSED on the street, not far from his house, one afternoon, when he was on his way home. One moment he was squinting at the sun, and trying to avoid someone’s shoulder brushing past him, and the next moment, almost inadvertently, without quite realising it, he’d crumpled — bent and fallen over. A few passersby and loiterers ran towards him; he was familiar to them as the one who taught music, and from the window of whose ground-floor chawl they could sometimes hear singing. He wasn’t unconscious, but had had a temporary blackout; he kept saying, “Theek hai bhai, koi baat nahi, it’s all right, it’s fine,” as they helped him up, and one of the people, a sixteen-year-old boy who knew the way to his home, insisted on accompanying him, holding him by the arm during the slow progress homeward.
“Dadiji,” said the boy to Mohanji’s mother, who’d been unprepared for what greeted her, “Panditji fell down. He should rest for a while.” He sounded conciliatory, as if he didn’t want to alarm her.
“Haan, haan, rest; I’ve been telling him to rest,” said the mother, as Mohanji, saying, “Theek hai, beta,” to his companion, lay down on the divan and put one arm across his eyes.
His wife was not at home, nor were his two children; they’d gone to visit his wife’s father in another part of the city. This chawl was where he’d grown up, and where he’d also got married. His father, who was a teacher and singer himself (he’d died eleven years ago), had moved here thirty years ago, and they’d had no intention, or opportunity, to move out since. Gradually the house had come to be known in the chawl as “Panditji’s house.” It was here, when he was nine or ten years old, that his father had taught him kheyal and tappa and other forms of classical music.
* * *
“MOHANJI,” SAID MRS. CHATTERJEE, “what happened to you?” It wasn’t as if she’d been worried; it was just that she abhorred practising alone — she preferred him there when she sang.
“I don’t know what happened, behanji,” said the guru with a look of ingenuous puzzlement. “I fell ill.”
“I heard,” said Mrs. Chatterjee, nodding slightly. “Mrs. Raheja told me … she told me you fell down.” The guru looked discomfited, as if he’d been caught doing something inappropriate. At once, he looked somewhat triumphant.
“It might be low blood pressure.” She took him to her doctor — Dr. Dastur, a middle-aged physician. He saw his patients in a room on the second storey of a building in Marine Lines. Mrs. Chatterjee sat with Mohanji in a waiting room with three other patients, waiting to be called in. Half an hour later, when they went inside, Dr. Dastur greeted her with:
“Arrey Mrs. Chatterjee, how are you? How is your husband — his name is everywhere these days?”
“Dr. Dastur,” she said, “this is my music teacher. He sings beautifully.”
Dr. Dastur couldn’t remember having seen a music teacher at close quarters before. Not that he was uninterested in music — his daughter now played Chopin’s and Bach’s simpler compositions on the piano — but he himself was inordinately proud of the Indian classical tradition, which he knew as little about as most of his contemporaries.
“Masterji,” he said, bequeathing this title upon Mohanji in an impromptu way, “it’s a pleasure meeting you.”
* * *
DR. DASTUR PRESCRIBED HIM medication, but Mohanji didn’t take the pills with any regularity. Indeed, he had an antipathy towards pills, as if they were alive. Instead he kept a photograph of his spiritual guru — the “Baba”—close to him.
He kept his blackout from his other students. The ghazal was in boom: everyone wanted to sing songs about some imminent but unrealisable beloved. Mohanji, in keeping with this, taught Neha Kapur on the eleventh floor songs by Ghalib and more recent poets; almost every week, he, sitting at his harmonium, hummed under his breath and composed a tune.
Bhajans, too, had become big business of late; women wore their best saris and diamonds and went to the concert halls to listen to the new singers. And somehow, everyone felt that they, too, could sing, and be singers, and be famous. Even Mrs. Kapur had a dream that her voice be heard. And it took so little to achieve it — a bit of money could buy one an auditorium for a night, and a “show” could be held. Even the guru had come to believe in the simplicity of this rather uncomplicated faith.
Although he was keeping indifferent health, he’d begun to sing more and more at businessmen’s mehfils, and wedding parties; someone, moved by his singing, might come up to him in the middle of a song and shyly but passionately press a hundred-rupee note to his hand. Unaccounted-for money circulated in these gatherings; they were different from the parties in the corporate world, but, in a way, these people, always ostentatious with both money and emotion, seemed to care more for the music and, moved by the pathos of some memory, shook their heads from side to side as he sang his ghazals.
* * *
THESE MEHFILS lasted late into the night, and sometimes Mohanji and the members of his family who’d accompanied him would return home in a taxi at two or half past two in the morning. Late night, and the heat of the day would have gone, and they’d be sleepy and exhausted but still know they were a thousand rupees richer. By this time, the housewives who’d also heard him sing would be setting aside their large gold necklaces and yawning and going to bed.
This year, when the ghazal was in boom, had been a better year than most for the guru. He’d gone round from home to home, patiently teaching new songs to housewives about the wave of long hair and sudden gestures and sidelong glances, singing at small baithaks, or even bhajans at temples before Sindhi businessmen if they so demanded it. But this would leave him tired and moody when he visited Mrs. Chatterjee. She couldn’t decide whether he was unhappy for some personal reason, or because he still hadn’t made a name as some other singers had.
* * *
AS THE GURU’S HEALTH WORSENED, he began to sleep more and more of the time. Sometimes the phone might ring in his small room, and he might speak for a few moments to a student who was enquiring after where he was. When he made the effort to go into the city, he slept on the train, carried along by its rhythm; and sometimes Mrs. Chatterjee, finding him tired, would feel sorry for him and let him fall asleep after a lesson on one of the wicker sofas on the balcony, overlooking the Arabian Sea and the office buildings on Nariman Point. As he rested, she might be getting ready to go out, once her husband returned, for dinner. Now and again, she’d go to the verandah to check on the guru; she would put her hand on his forehead, shake her head well-meaningly, and say, “No fever.” She would glance towards the traffic on Marine Drive, because it was from that direction that her husband would be approaching.