* * *
THE COMPANY Mr Sengupta worked in grew. So they decided to move office again. This time it was a stupendous, time-taking affair; moving from Nariman Point to a tall new upstart building on Cuffe Parade — one of a throng that had appeared where there had been nothing before. At the same time, the Senguptas moved to a huge five-bedroom apartment on the top storey of another one of the new buildings; and, in what seemed a logical but nevertheless breathtaking culmination of his career so far, he took over the company from Philip Dyer. A large laminated black-and-white picture on wood, of Dyer sitting at his chairman’s desk, his sideburns flamboyant and prominent, signed in a stylish black scrawl, ‘To Apurva and family, Philip’, as if a gift of some part of himself, even a replica, was to always preside benignly over their lives, was removed a few weeks later from the position it had occupied in the Senguptas’ bedroom for three years (where it used to be noted silently by Dyer during parties) and put inside a drawer. No comment was made, or necessary. The company was still partly foreign-owned; but it was, in effect, the end of the last vestiges of the British age.
There was some tension at this time with Dyer — Dyer, who loved Bombay, who loved ‘India’, that mythical composite of colour and smell and anonymous human beings and daylight, who loved being attended to by everyone from peons to businessmen, who, it was said, loved his brief flings with starlets and secretaries, who believed he had in some ways nurtured Apurva Sengupta. The last farewell parties were slightly awkward affairs, full of enforced shoulder-huggings and the sudden, unpredictable moist eye — because people found that emotion could surprise them when they least expected it. (The main bit of gossip at this time was the golden hair that had recently appeared, like a burst of energy, above Dyer’s forehead. ‘It’s not a toupee,’ whispered a director’s wife to Mallika Sengupta at a party. ‘Apparently he had a transplant.’ There was Dyer, not far from her, gesticulating and displaying the painfully acquired new hair.) Now he was displeased and melancholy at the idea of having to pack his bags after all these decades and leave for London, for ‘home’, with the semi-alcoholic Julia. His children, recently out of boarding school, were no longer in England; the son was somewhere near Dubai, working on an oil rig; the daughter was in her ancient residential boarding school. Philip Dyer, it seemed, had nothing to go back to.
The Senguptas made the move, and he — Apurva — became the new Managing Director. It was around this time that Nirmalya entered into a phase — it was an odd change of mood, a prickliness, that had begun after his school exams — of being ostentatiously ill at ease with the world his father inhabited. Without saying as much, he sat in judgement upon it. He hated the new flat in Cuffe Parade. The first evening, when his parents were busy supervising the packers, he arrived late, and sat in the large drawing room among the semi-finished furniture, asking, ‘Why did we have to come here?’
He had grown his hair long. It came to his shoulders. He hardly appeared to smile, and never shaved the straggly goatee.
When his parents threw their first party in the new flat, and just before the first guests began to arrive, congratulating the Senguptas, he went out for a walk. ‘Where’s Nirmalya?’ his father asked, exasperated. No one knew.
When he returned, no one asked him where he’d been. His father spotted him and escorted him to the non-executive chairman of the board who’d flown in the previous day from Delhi. Apurva Sengupta had an unnecessarily triumphant air, as if he’d caught a bird of marvellous plumage, and not the untidy boy he had next to him.
‘Here he is at last — managed to find him!’ he smiled, as if at a hugely funny joke.
The chairman, a tall, fair septuagenarian with bushy eyebrows called Thakore, wasn’t impressed. He was a figurehead in the company, but a coveted emblem; and he knew it. His smile was a mixture of politeness and disdain.
‘We don’t get to see you these days!’
Thakore was slightly threatened by the boy; he sensed a resistance. He wasn’t sure if he was getting the respect due to him. His remark was an exaggeration; he’d met the Senguptas’ son only once before.
Nirmalya smiled, and, as ever at such moments, said nothing. The silence was infuriating to the chairman.
‘So what are you doing these days, young man? In college?’ Thakore looked at Nirmalya’s hair.
‘Junior college,’ murmured Nirmalya. He was in that zone in which he could pretend he was an undergraduate and no longer a schoolboy, in which he could study in college classrooms and ‘hang out’ in college corridors, without actually beginning his BA until two years later. As far as he was concerned, the important thing was he was not a schoolboy.
‘Let me get you a refill, JB,’ said Mr Sengupta, and put an arm around Thakore. The bushy-eyebrowed chairman was glad to be led away. Apurva Sengupta took him to the little bar on the far side of the drawing room. Before heading off to the bar, the chairman said (for he liked having the last word):
‘We must see more of you, my boy! We haven’t got to know each other.’
Nirmalya went onto the balcony; the small crowd of two women and a man didn’t notice him, or pretended not to notice him, and made no effort to be nice to him, as people did because he was Mr Sengupta’s son. He looked out. It was the sea, of course, the same sea he’d seen for five years from La Terrasse; but he was looking at it from the other side, and it seemed different. In fact, he could see the faint phantom outline of La Terrasse among the different-sized buildings on that side. Darkness had translated the sea into near-invisibility. Ten days after the move, it was as if he were indifferently looking at a relic from his past.
Before moving out of La Terrasse into Thacker Towers (that was the name of this sternly clone-like cluster of buildings) they’d gone scouting around the south side of the city for an appropriate flat for the new managing director: the two of them — Mr and Mrs Sengupta, accompanied by a guide delegated by the company, and sometimes Nirmalya.
Dyer was not going to vacate his duplex flat in La Terrasse for Apurva Sengupta; he was going to sell it on behalf of the company — and probably pocket a cut; a parting present to himself before leaving. ‘Yes, that’s why he’s selling it,’ said Mrs Sengupta. This was a disappointment; they’d been looking forward to moving into the apartment on the seventeenth floor with the goldfish darting in the grey water; where, once the main door opened and you were inside, the staircase swiftly escaped upwards. ‘No matter, we’ll find a better place,’ said Apurva Sengupta, his face grim but reconciled to the sleight-of-hand by which the duplex flat had vanished. He began to search obdurately for a lavish apartment as a sort of rebuff to the departed Englishman.