But Nirmalya felt bitter and unhappy at the idea of moving house, and wandered sullenly about the flat in La Terrasse as if he were looking for a hiding-place in which to secrete himself, in the hope that he wouldn’t be missed.
Looking back (and he was already in a retrospective mood), it seemed — although there was no reason to support this — that he was leaving behind a simpler time in his life, of pure white walls and spacious rooms, where even wealth was less ambivalent. It was as if — and his heart sensed this, not his mind — he was now to be caught up, if not as player then as bystander, in a story of ambition; he wasn’t sure whose — perhaps his own, but if not his entirely, then his parents’, or other people’s, or could it be even the city’s itself? The spell of La Terrasse was broken.
Had it only been his imagination? No, even the pigeons who alighted on the sloping concrete bannister of the balcony had succumbed to it; they were conscious of the evident hospitality of the drawing room. Sometimes one of the Senguptas would find one standing there, next to the sofa or on the edge of the carpet; or even seeming to investigate the immense catacomb-like wall-unit on the left, with its various compartments that held, among other things, the record player and speakers that blasted out, at certain times during those years, Nirmalya’s burgeoning pop and then rock collection. Innocently it stood there, as if listening for the music that was no longer coming; almost solicitious, but wary if you stopped to look at it, escaping, even before you clapped your hands to shoo it away, with a loud flap of wings, a sound that, long after, would be audible and present to Nirmalya’s ear.
Earlier, when Nirmalya was smaller, and the relationship between the Senguptas and the Dyers was still in its golden period, Mr Sengupta would cajole his son — sometimes command him — into visiting the Dyers, especially when their son Matthew came ‘home’ from England.
‘Matthew’s back,’ Dyer would say cheerily on the phone after a long conversation about more official things. ‘It would be absolutely lovely for him — and Tina of course — to see Nirmalya again.’
Matthew was a nice boy, full of crass jokes and good-natured energy: but a disappointment to his parents. And his parents, especially Philip Dyer, didn’t hide their disappointment from him. Dyer treated his son like a semi-literate. ‘Matthew’s spelling’s quite atrocious,’ he’d confided in Apurva Sengupta once, at the end of a discourse of gloomy opinions about Indira Gandhi’s nationalising fervour and trade union unrest.
And once, Nirmalya was with the older boy in the study, ensconced by books no one read, a stack of thick faintly shining magazines that Nirmalya wouldn’t ordinarily see anywhere else, Fortune, Life, and Penthouse, too, placed neatly on the glass table, signifying other universes that were always just round the corner for the Dyers, the room separated from the sitting room by its absence of natural light and a tinted glass door; Matthew was in the study, wolfing down ice cream from a plate, when his mother had said to him, ‘I don’t think the Murrays would be amused if they saw you eating that way!’ The Murrays; a couple in some suburb made mythic by power and distance — Paul Murray was a director in the ‘parent’ company in England, its headquarters in Surrey. Nirmalya, seeing Matthew peer up in hurt surprise from his plate, wondered why his own parents had never issued similar instructions to him. What made the Murrays so important to Matthew’s life?
But Matthew took parental chiding on the chin; he saw them as a source equally of meaningless strictures and endless pocket money; and he’d made a shrewd appraisal of their own shortcomings, and the sort of life, a life created for public consumption, they were leading in India. He himself had a vague longing for the ocean and the deep, to explore the humanless but crowded world underwater; it was only a germ of an idea, but it had already planted itself in his head.
He was only three years older than Nirmalya, but behaved as if he were much older. Part of his independence from people who were much cleverer than he, or who represented success and otherwise dominated him, like his parents, came from his sexual knowledge. He had many girlfriends, and the moral ambiguity of this fact gave him a sort of secret strength. ‘No girl over sixteen in Britain,’ he’d told Nirmalya one afternoon, like one who, after discussing several exciting possibilities, returns reluctantly to the sheer ordinariness of things, ‘is a virgin.’ This was in response to a stupid question; Nirmalya had asked him, ‘Do you sleep with your girlfriends?’ — for Matthew said he had two, one for weekdays and one for weekends. The reply, an incredible revelation, at first astonished Nirmalya into dumbness; but it also disturbed and excited him physically. Something extraordinary and unmentionable happened to girls in England when they reached sixteen; and the myopic Matthew, in every other way unremarkable, had been inured to it into a state of forgetfulness.
He was the first English boy Nirmalya properly knew. And, because he was English, he was somewhat exotic, as English books were — exotic not in an antique fairy-tale way, but with toffee and jam, mud and physical effluences. Matthew made Nirmalya blink with nervousness. When he was smaller, he’d been loud and unstoppable, like some volatile foreign toy that has a life of its own. Then Nirmalya grew used to the jack-in-the-box energy and wildness, and realised it was essentially harmless. On the whole, it had to be said that Matthew was the friendlier and more simple of the two.
At an early age, Nirmalya had entered Matthew’s room on the upper storey and discovered the treasures Philip Dyer had given his son despite being an exacting and sometimes unforgiving father. Among these was a small gramophone, of dimensions that made it look more like a projection of a fantasy than a real object — yet it was not a toy, but played, with precise functionality, Matthew’s limited but munificent record collection. Among these was a song, ‘Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud’, which Matthew put on the record-changer repeatedly, and which seemed to emerge from some hitherto unknown bog of English identity, and which Matthew sang along to in an insistent way, with a personal abandonment that made Nirmalya feel uneasy. But there were other wonders that filled him with longing during his brief sojourns in Matthew Dyer’s small room; films of the Tramp and Tarzan in bright square packages to be seen at some point on a projector; and thumb-sized toys you could lift in your palm, from which Nirmalya realised that England had the same red postboxes that Bombay had, and the same kind of red double-decker buses.
Matthew had friends in Bombay, rather shady and stupid-looking, but confident from being ‘experienced’; the sons of some of Philip Dyer’s business contacts who escorted Matthew to, and made him pay for, sunless bars and restaurants and discotheques — the Bombay that lay far beyond Nirmalya’s purview. He’d developed a taste for Hindi films in their company, for their embarrassing exuberance and their helpless bursting into song, their tearful but happy families and prodigious villains; for two and a half hours they gave Matthew something he found nowhere else. Now he nurtured an ambition his parents knew nothing about. ‘I’m going to produce and act in a Hindi film one day.’ Matthew said this with a smile to Nirmalya, but he was quite serious.
Tina, his sister, went to school in Bombay and was much younger than Nirmalya; eight years old, a child. But the feminine desires and demands that would shape her life had already woken in her, and, almost accidentally, their object was Nirmalya. ‘I want to marry Nirmalya,’ she’d said to her mother. To which Julia Dyer replied coldly: ‘Nirmalya only likes black girls.’ Candid and inquisitive about the mysterious remark, Tina had passed on the statement to Nirmalya: ‘Do you only like black girls, Nirmalya — my mother says you do?’ and Nirmalya was made speechless by the long passage of history newly written, and condensed into an observation that confused him, and barely managed to mumble something. Tina’s desires were genuine and intense, if still out of place at eight. To show her affection, she once lifted her dress in front of Nirmalya and pulled down her panties. Her sudden straightforward insights into Nirmalya sometimes exceeded others’, including his own. ‘I know why you come here,’ she’d said knowingly. ‘You want to see my mother’s mammas.’