He looked a bit unkempt when he came out to meet the music teacher. He wore a faded kurta with his jeans. But the sandals he wore were expensive, bought from the Taj.
‘This is Nirmalya, my son,’ said Mrs Sengupta, smiling. Shyamji looked at him critically. He tried to reconcile the boy with the flat, the furniture, the background of the Arabian Sea.
‘Baba, listen to this song!’ said Shyamji to Nirmalya in a friendly, direct way just as the boy was thinking of going out; it was his second tuition. Shyamji sat alone before the harmonium, pressing the keys, immune to hurry. Behind him, a crow sat on the wide concrete balustrade of the sunken balcony. Reluctantly, Nirmalya lowered himself on the sofa; Shyamji, in his distracted but effective way, had recruited him into his audience.
And right from the beginning, he called Nirmalya ‘baba’, consigning him, albeit affectionately, to the ‘babalog’, the eternal children of the rich. ‘Listen to this song, didi! You will like it,’ he said to her with equal candour.
It was the first song he taught her. It was plain but attractive; she’d never heard of the poet — not one of the great names. He began to sing: ‘Hai aankh wo jo Ram ka darshan kiya kare.’
Those eyes are truly eyes that have seen the Lord.
The song was an admonitory one; he sang it in a low voice.
Futile are those mouths that remain busy in chatter.
Those lips are truly lips that utter the name of Hari.
Shyamji had set the words to a simple tune, a tune that, even for a beginner, would be easy to pick up. But there were embellishments in his singing that she carefully noted:
Jewelled bangles do not lend grace to those hands.
Those hands are truly hands that are joined in prayer to the Lord.
The song was not meant ironically; the words were not a message directed by Shyamji towards the three gold bangles — three of many — that Mrs Sengupta presently wore round her wrist. The song belonged to the realm of ideal possibility, some other world in which such notions were not only desirable but possible. But the song was just a song; and that world was not this world. Nirmalya, sipping a glass of water and listening, didn’t even understand all the words.
Mortal, that man wins immortal fame
Who sacrifices his life to the love of the Lord.
‘Ma, what does balidaan mean?’ asked Nirmalya a couple of days later. He was skulking behind her as she, after her bath, was dabbing her face and putting the finishing touches to herself before the dressing-table mirror.
She looked up absently.
‘Sacrifice,’ she said.
Nirmalya heard her sing the song again; and, for some reason, he was interested in finding out what the words meant. One or two of the words had caught his ear; he pieced the song together.
He wasn’t quite sure what to think of it. The tune was sugary; and its message so unequivocal that it couldn’t be taken quite seriously. And yet, although it was quite a crude song, its meaning startled him. It was as if — because it was only now that he’d put together what the words of the song meant — it was now that he felt himself capable of understanding what it was saying; he almost confused translation with communication; the song had suddenly given to him what it had withheld so far. It penetrated him not through its verbal distinction, but its rapid series of pictures.
Are the hands that pray more beautiful than hands that wear ornaments? Although he himself had never prayed, the question didn’t seem merely rhetorical. He saw arms before him, a woman’s arms; not disconnected from the body, but the body nevertheless invisible; one set of arms sparkling with three or four bangles; the other set of arms bare. For some reason, the sight — the mental picture — of the bare arms calmed him.
From the sunken balcony he could see Bombay repeatedly; or as much of Bombay as he wanted to see. And the water, which disturbed him without his knowing it, and which, although it was everywhere, he could only look at from the corner of his eye. The sea was a negation of the city’s human energies.
Once or twice, in the years he spent at La Terrasse, he dreamt of the sea: this tame accessory, this add-on, to luxury apartments and hotel rooms. It had risen all the way from Elephanta island, like a huge tidal wave swelling from Trombay, in one dream; and the flat he lived in was no longer the flat he knew. From the balcony, he saw the sea approaching with awe and a feeling of doom. But the balcony had become the front rows of a movie theatre, and the flat itself was like the inside of a cinema; a cinema that was elegant and in business, but strangely empty. From the window of the theatre (whose spacious lounge reminded him of the interiors of the Eros or of the Regal), he looked at the gigantic tumult; and then, as if he wasn’t alone, he communicated his sense of dread to someone inside with a smile.
Next morning, he woke with a sense of the other world he’d visited still upon him, of having gone and returned from an elsewhere that was familiar, banal, and yet, unexpectedly, magnificently on the brink of destruction: he knew no one survived that flood. When he came out into the drawing room, his eyes smarted with the light. There it was like a drab mercantile fact; the clusters of low and tall buildings from Nana Chowk to the Fort to further away; behind them, like the humps of idle animals, the islands of Elephanta and Trombay. The sea was dull and shining. It was as if the world had exhausted itself, and taken refuge in a surreptitious normalcy. But he was heavy with knowledge.
* * *
WHEN SUMIT SEN visited Bombay from Calcutta, Apurva Sengupta arranged a recital for him and Mallika Sengupta in a hall in North Bombay. The so-called ‘expatriate’ Bengalis sent out a welcoming party, of course; they wanted to get involved, as they did when any luminary made their way to Bombay from Calcutta. They went to receive him at the station — a gentle, ordinary-looking, bespectacled man who hadn’t lost his air of small means and limitations; and his low-key modesty was more a sense of surprised, genuine gratitude at what luck had given him. He emerged from the Gitanjali Express crumpled, but impeccably dressed in the manner of a singer of Tagore songs, in white dhuti and kurta. He folded his hands in a namaskar when the expectant ‘expatriate’ Bengalis approached; if not with garlands, then at least with pleased, vindicated expressions.
Mr Sengupta had just been made Head of Finance. He was steadying himself after the congratulations; he was weary of the felicitatory food he’d eaten at parties — he felt full all the time. He wanted to get back to work, to the responsibilities that Philip Dyer had quickly divided between Mr Sengupta and himself. But at the same time, he wanted this performance to go well, both for Sumit Sen and for his own wife; it distracted him.
‘Call the newspapers,’ he said to his personal assistant, the large Das, who was always composed and silently efficacious. ‘You know that Sumit Sen is well known in Calcutta.’
Mr Das nodded. ‘He is very well known,’ he agreed. And, leaving aside some of the day’s other work to do with letters and appointments and taxes, he began to make phone call after phone call.