So here they were, standing in the corridor near the gate, in front of one of the Standard 9 classrooms, by the back door to the chemistry laboratory. The temperature had fallen, imperceptibly, gracefully, to 27 degrees, till the school itself seemed raised to a timeless stratosphere that was neither heaven nor earth, a place rained upon by coolness. The sun became tolerant, and suddenly sunlight was reflected in blinks and flashes, now here, now there, off hospital windows across the street that, earlier in the day, no one would have guessed even existed. Just outside the school walls, in the trees whose branches climbed prolifically over roofs and partitions, and ranged freely everywhere like a band of irrepressible trespassers, sparrows had begun to chirp all at once, loudly, excitedly, and perhaps informatively. Now that the school was empty, it seemed that the life around it had begun to imitate the intent, sometimes shy, play of the schoolchildren, with light bouncing and glancing off one hospital window to the next, chasing certain routes and eluding others, and the invisible birds shouting at one another at the top of their voices.
As if he were being rocked from side to side, and backward and forward, in a train compartment, Khusroo’s hips and torso shook, as, more frugally, did his legs. “On the shuffeling maadness,” he sang, “of loco-motive bryeath — da da da all-time loser’s hurtlin’ to his dyeath…” Melody was replaced by a menacing curl of the lips. All the time, Khusroo seemed to lean forward quickly and spectatorially, then immediately retreat backward with a mildly alarmed air; meanwhile, his arms, quite irrelevantly and encouragingly keeping time, appeared to treat these two ostensibly unconnected movements as part of a single motion, accompanying them with magical and peremptory snaps of the fingers. “You try, too,” said Khusroo. Gautam, sitting on the floor and looking up, pretended cunningly not to hear. Khusroo stopped and stamped his foot. “Gautam Bose, what am I doing here if you’re not going to get up and do something?” he said sternly. “Khusroo, I’ve just realised…,” mumbled the other. “Realised?” said Khusroo, enraged, as if it had been a particularly poorly chosen word. “You haven’t realised anything! Come on, get up.” Gautam obeyed, out of embarrassment; he lifted himself from his brooding inactivity with a giant, ostentatious effort. Then he stood with both his arms by his sides, like a boxer who doesn’t know what to do. Khusroo uttered unexpected soothing words: “It’s easy, Gautam, just loosen up.” But each part of Gautam’s body felt like a mechanism that had been jammed and rusted and made useless by shyness and sensitivity, and some miraculous lubricant, like forgetfulness, was now required. He remembered his parents, who, for about two months in the middle of their lives, used to put a 45 r.p.m. on the gramophone, and then, in broad daylight, amidst the drawing-room furniture, watched by Gautam looking past the twin peaks of his knees, sitting huddled on the sofa, try out their recently memorised dance steps. His mother, repeatedly adjusting the aanchal on her sari, and saying “Cha-cha-cha” under her breath, as she had no doubt been told to by her instructor, would dance with an expression of utter determination on her face. There were times when, on Gautam’s request, she did this when his father was not there, alone, in the drawing room, and the look of determination reappeared. Every Saturday evening, they would go to the first floor of an old mansion behind the Taj Mahal Hotel, where Mr. Sequiera conducted his dancing classes. Mr. Sequiera even advertised on the slides in cinema halls, illuminating this message: BE A SOCIAL SUCCESS: LEARN BALLROOM DANCING! For a while, thus, cha-cha-cha was mentioned in the house, and also that word that could have come straight from a fable: foxtrot. Then, after two months, almost overnight, his parents gave up dance and stopped playing those records and quite calmly took up other habits. Though it is said that children pass through “phases,” Gautam found that his parents probably passed through as many phases, if not more, than he did. They were always changing, developing, growing. For instance, when Gautam was eight, his mother would return from the hairdresser with her hair leavened into a full-grown bun, set and lacquered into a marble repose. Now, however, those accessories — hair net, false hair, lacquer spray — were lying in some drawer untouched, and his mother’s hair, on evenings out, had taken on another, less extreme, incarnation. His father, too, he remembered, once had two personable sideburns, which, one day, without explanation, had been reduced to a more modest size. There was nothing fixed, constant, or permanent about his parents.
Even as Gautam was summoning within himself the preparedness to set his body moving, without safety, without company, in mid-air as it were, there came a bang from not too far away, and then the sound of a muffled, amplified voice: “Check … one-two-three … check.” “Come on,” said Khusroo, losing interest in Gautam’s lonely fledgling efforts to translate into motion. “Let’s see what those chaps are doing. If you don’t mind,” he added, “we’ll continue later.” “No, no,” said Gautam. “No, let’s see what those chaps are doing.” They went down the corridor and turned right, and walked a little way to the first door to the hall. At the other end of the now empty hall, where only this morning they had stood distractedly with their hymnbooks, the stage was occupied by the Phantom Congregation, who were practising, in resounding fits and starts punctuated by gaps of silence and slouching, the songs that would set this hall and the bones and vertebrae of various eager neophytes vibrating next Saturday. Rahul Jagtiani, the lead singer, a tall, unextraordinary boy with spectacles and a moustache, was holding the mike with one hand casually, as if it were a perfectly mundane, everyday object, and talking to Keki Antia, the bassist, who, as he struck the strings on his guitar with his plectrum, produced fat, ponderous globules of sound. The other two were bent upon their instruments in introspective postures of study and absorption: the thin, spirit-like, demoniacally stubble-cheeked Freddy Billimoria, who leaned with a mixture of swooning pleasure and fatigue over his drums, now thudded, with a pedal at his foot, the great bass drum standing upright, and now, superfluously, hit the floating cymbal with a polished attenuated stick that seemed a fitting extension of his own skinniness, creating a marvellous sound that rippled outward, a reverberating whisper. And Rajat Kapoor, also splenetic and unpredictable, hit his guitar strings at times to release that loud electric bang that Khusroo and Gautam had heard from a distance, which they now understood to be a particular chord. Then he would rapidly turn one of the four knobs on the guitar’s incandescent flame-red box and prick his ears for a prophetic hum on the speaker. To Khusroo’s and Gautam’s awe, Rahul Jagtiani suddenly turned and exclaimed, “Hey — one-two-three,” and all those individual technological noises were gathered into a single united wave, and they began to sing “Smoke on the water, fire in the sky.” The combined voices of Antia, Jagtiani, and Billimoria could hardly be heard over Rajat Kapoor’s guitar, which had been, midway through the song, launched into the wayward kinks and corkscrew effect of the wa-wa mode. Khusroo and Gautam felt jolted by the scruff of their necks and shoulders, a cavity forming in their solar plexus, and they looked on speechless with wonder.