When Nirmalya reported the panty episode to his mother, as if he were relating the charming antics with which all eight-year-olds win over the world, she smiled, but was secretly furious. ‘Is this what working in a company means?’ she said to her husband that night. ‘Is your career so important that our son has to go to that house?’
From the Dyers the Senguptas ‘inherited’ a cook who made continental dishes, a tiny saintly man, a Malyali called Arthur. Arthur was not his real name. His real name was Thambi. He made chocolate cakes, pancakes, steak and kidney pie, stuffed peppers, fruit trifle, macaroni, Christmas pudding. He’d passed through a procession of European households where he’d minted and reproduced this food with an almost unknowing fidelity. Brought into the world in a village in Kerala, he seemed, oddly, to be born for this task. And, yet again, with this latest departure, he was momentarily marooned, momentarily unsure of who’d value his outlandish gift, but was appropriated immediately by the Senguptas before he had time to make up his mind — and the Senguptas would become the first Indian family to benefit from the skills he claimed to have acquired from those slightly exasperated English memsahibs.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, after the party, when John, and Jumna, his assistant, were still putting away, with stately, valedictory meticulousness, the piles of washed dishes, Nirmalya sneaked out for a walk around Thacker Towers. This part of Cuffe Parade had been ocean not very long ago; it was land that had been fairly recently reclaimed. Upon it had appeared Thacker Towers and its sister skyscrapers: a whole family of tall siblings that didn’t seem to know one another. And Snowman’s Ice Cream Parlour, where different-coloured flavours were frozen inside troughs, a shopping arcade, and the President Hotel with pennants fluttering.
Walking, he was aware of its newness, as if it were the edge of a young planet. It was a strip of land that had encroached on water. And, because of the encroachment, the water had become flat and grey, like macadam; there was hardly a wave in it. Mornings and evenings, it was, for a while, lacquered by light from a sun that rose and set without comment on this part of the universe. One or two gulls hovered in a puzzled way over the water, as if it were a road stretching to infinity, or at least to the other side of Bombay, where you could see La Terrasse among the buildings.
If you walked back down the reclaimed land, you came to the fringes of the old Colaba, with its palm trees and its walls on which sea breezes had left shadows, like bruises that had appeared not overnight, but over years. That was another world, where the sea had once ended; where they’d moved to was only a ten-minute walk away. He was intrigued by the the dead calm of the sea around Thacker Towers. This was not the sea he knew, whose waves had the habit of rising twenty or thirty feet during the monsoons and drenching the cars and buses on Marine Drive. Sometimes, as he stood at its edge, like a traveller newly arrived on a planet, it seemed to be an enormous shadow.
The door was half ajar when Shyamji first arrived at the apartment; so he didn’t have to ring the bell to enter. ‘Didi!’ he cried in his sweet high-pitched voice, and looked blankly at the long corridor on his right. ‘Mallika didi!’ He checked his reflection, when he saw it, in the large mirror above the telephone; he ran his fingers through his hair. Then he saw Nirmalya, in a khadi kurta and jeans, his goatee a shadow beneath the chin.
‘Baba,’ he said, ‘look at this apartment — it is wonderful!’
Mrs Sengupta, who was just coming down the corridor, said, with a playful approximation of a look of concern:
‘He doesn’t like it. He tells me he doesn’t want to live here.’
Shyamji appeared mildly scandalised. He looked closely at Nirmalya.
‘But why — why not?’
‘I think he liked the old flat — the one in La Terrasse: he liked that better; usko wohi pasand thha.’
Nirmalya looked uncomfortable and shy, as if everything his mother had said was a joke, and strangely despondent. But Shyamji nodded seriously, like one who was considering the virtues of a dead relative.
‘That flat was nice, certainly. But this one. .’ He was impressed with the little he’d seen of it; it was like a mahal — he’d encountered nothing on this scale before.
There were flies in the flat. This discovery — of a constant buzzing, a microscopic movement, involved in its own journeys, but coming in your way, challenging and distracting you without even knowing it — this unlooked-for companionship was exasperating. The flies buzzed against windowpanes and flew around your face. You spent a lot of time waving them away. Among other things, they qualified the grand rebuff to Dyer the flat had represented.
Mrs Sengupta, Nirmalya, even, occasionally, Apurva Sengupta — all attacked them briskly with fly swatters. But it was a losing battle. The flies bred and multiplied in Thacker Towers. And sometimes they sat on surfaces that couldn’t be attacked, like a figurine of the Buddha.
They put wire gauzes against the windows, delicate and dun-coloured. They did it on the advice of their friend Prashanta Neogi, who’d done the same to keep out mosquitoes from infesting his ground-floor flat in Khar; for that area was home to tanks of stagnant water. ‘It’s the only way to deal with it,’ Prashanta had said grimly, drink in hand. Gauze after gauze was put in wooden frames behind the windows in the Managing Director’s new flat.
‘Where do the flies come from?’ A question asked abruptly in the midst of other preoccupations, to do with music, the company, when the buzzing returned to their ears. Because even after the gauze frames, the flat was not flyless.
‘It’s that machhimar nagar,’ said Nirmalya, gesturing one morning, prophet-like, toward the sea. The promontory — the fisherman’s colony — that featureless strip of sand. Nirmalya had passed it several times on his louche and aimless walks. Bombay, as everyone had learnt in school, had once been seven fishing islands that had been presented by the Portuguese to the British as a part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry; ‘There was no-thing here then,’ the geography teacher had said, standing before the blackboard, enthralled and relieved for an instant by the sheer recentness of what sometimes seemed eternaclass="underline" the exercise books, children’s voices, chalk dust. ‘Only these fishermen.’ Walking down Cuffe Parade on his solitary explorations, Nirmalya saw the hull of an upturned boat on the sand. He saw the nets drying against the sun. He smelled the air.
It was from here that the flies had moved into Thacker Towers.
Now, paintings were hung in the drawing room. Two Jamini Roys, bought eleven years ago for almost nothing, and the B. Prabha — a terracotta village girl with elongated arms — had adorned the walls of the previous flat and were hung again here. The B. Prabha was newly emerging as a status symbol; a curious example of a painter whose stock wasn’t high among her peers, but whose work was looked upon with increasing tenderness by the affluent. The Senguptas, too, led to her pictures of smoky huts and indecisive village maidens by a gallery owner, viewed them with simple wonder; the painter herself was present, a gentle soul in a white sari with a green border, unsure of whether to maternally cherish or to broker her brood — the family of images — that surrounded her. When Mrs Sengupta praised a picture, she murmured, ‘Thank you,’ and when they asked her the price, she mentioned it — ‘Six thousand’ or ‘This one is five thousand’ — uninsistingly, with dignity, as if she was telling them its name. The Senguptas were as charmed by the artist as they were by the paintings.