For two days afterwards, he carried this experience of Lalit in the evening inside him like something undigested. Is anything possible in 1980? he asked himself. After a few days, he told Shyamji what Ali Akbar Khan had done. Shyamji shook his head.
‘How could he do that?’ he said, very grave. ‘It cannot be done.’
But Nirmalya could see from the exaggerated solemnity of Shyamji’s expression that his mind was elsewhere.
* * *
NIRMALYA, unobtrusively but firmly rejecting his father’s Mercedes, stood at a bus stop with The Story of Philosophy in his hand. He didn’t know where he was going. Sometimes he’d go to the college to attend a lecture; to meet a few friends. Sometimes, as if there was an invisible ban on him, he’d just hang about one of the entrances, or roam the environs thoughtfully. If the Mercedes came to pick him up, he ignored it; sometimes it followed him, twenty paces behind him, discreet, trying absurdly to merge with the background, while he walked on, apparently nonchalant, in his khadi kurta and churidar, past peanut vendors and hurrying peons, at one with Mahatma Gandhi Road’s disorganised street-life.
He sat in a bus, reading The Story of Philosophy; he had trouble subduing his long hair when the bus moved and the breeze came in through the window; he sometimes had to pin it down with one hand. But he read adamantly; and reread the chapter on Croce several times. The work of art precedes actual composition, Croce said; it must be realised in the artist’s head, in the brain, before he actually commits it to paper or to canvas. This seemed irrefutable from Nirmalya’s own experiences of trying to write poetry; that there was an ideal in his head that he tried his best to incarnate on the page. Meanwhile, people kept coming in and getting off, young Goan women in dresses, college students, Gujarati accountants, men who might be mechanics or drivers, chattering couples. When he arrived at his stop, he’d get off and walk to the tall building with the enormous flat.
‘He wants to learn from me? Shastriya sangeet?’ Shyamji didn’t seem particularly pleased; he was disoriented by the demand. There was puzzlement on his face. No one wanted to learn classical music from him; in fact, he had no disciple in classical music. His son, Sanjay, wanted to learn the guitar; they were going to procure one from Furtado’s. Shyamji’s wife wanted Sanjay to be a music arranger: ‘There’s money in music arrangement.’
‘Shastriya sangeet?’ said Shyamji, as if he’d not heard the term for years. That difficult continent — why would someone from this world want to tread it? The request only confirmed the boy’s oddity to him; most other young men and women in Thacker Towers and its neighbouring skyscrapers — he now had a sizeable clientele — wanted to learn ghazals; love songs in simple Urdu (they preferred simple to difficult Urdu) about wine, liaisons, grief. The older women, wives of diamond merchants and exporters, liked to sing bhajans, chanting the names of Radha and Krishna, slipping in and out of tune. And Shyamji had embraced these forms: not only because they’d pay the rent, and for his son’s and daughters’ weddings (when they came), but because they opened an avenue into the sort of life he wanted — to taste, to partake of. Shastriya sangeet had given him and his father little for the hours, the months, the years they’d put into it. He baulked at being reminded of the fact. These mildly touching songs were a form of currency; classical music — shastriya sangeet — a responsibility.
‘I’ll teach him,’ he said reluctantly, addressing Mrs Sengupta, and looked askance at the boy. ‘It will be difficult.’
‘Shyamji,’ said the boy — he called him ‘Shyamji’, not ‘guruji’ or ‘Panditji’; not because he didn’t respect him, but because something in him abhorred playing the role (submissive, adoring) of the true disciple — ‘Shyamji, why don’t you concentrate on singing shastriya sangeet? You’d be a great success — there aren’t many who can sing classical as well as you do.’
If Nirmalya hadn’t been Mr Sengupta’s son, Shyamji would have thought the question outrageous. He gazed at Nirmalya with forbearance. He frowned. He was bewildered by the question; he was also slightly amused.
‘These ghazals are — cheap,’ Nirmalya said, implacable in his spectacles and long hair. ‘And look at the way they sing bhajans these days! Bhajans used to be sung in the temple.’
Shyamji assumed an expression of seriousness. ‘All our music comes from the temple, baba,’ he said softly. He glanced at his watch, to check when Mrs Sengupta would come out of her room. ‘The ease with which I sing these taans,’ he confided — because he’d just given Nirmalya some vocal exercises — ‘comes from great labour. I used to practise until I spat blood from my throat.’ The Arabian Sea glittered outside. Leaning forward on the sofa, he shook his head in consternation at the tenacity he’d had in the past; this other, somewhat uncomfortable and raw self he’d been.
Among Shyamji’s students were a Sikh businessman’s daughter; a minister’s son; the wife of an Air India official; a young student who lived several miles beyond what they thought of as ‘Bombay’, in Ghatkopar; and Biswajeet, a young, tall Bengali from Calcutta, a ghazal artiste on the make. This group — there were other groups and other sittings — sat in a democratic circle round Shyamji twice a week in the Sikh businessman’s flat in Thacker Towers. The flat’s decor was innovative; the designer had taken his or her inspiration from hotels or restaurants; there was a predominance of red in the sitting room, and a couple of steps led to a raised level, beyond which intimate, sunken spaces had been created for sofas and tables.
But the session with Shyamji didn’t take place in the sitting room, which never seemed occupied by anyone, but in a small room. The Sikh’s daughter, Priya Gill, was a mixture of the sensuous and the studious; always dressed in a salwar kameez, almost unnaturally fair, frizzy hair drawn tight, myopic, glasses perched delicately on her nose. When she sang, you barely heard her; she whispered in her corner of the room. Shyamji didn’t point out to her that she wasn’t quite singing; he seemed to hear her perfectly. The minister’s son, dressed in a white kurta like the minister, looked like his father — except that the father, Baburao Khemkar, was fat; Raj Khemkar wasn’t. He seemed strangely removed from the configurations of destinies and interests — politicians’, people’s, the state’s — that forever attended his father’s life. Baburao’s picture was in the papers every day; his eyes widened into orbs when he laughed or became angry. Raj Khemkar sang with gusto; this, too, was strange, because those who sang ghazals erred on the side of delicacy and dreaminess. The gusto might be inherited from Baburao Khemkar.
The Air India official’s wife, Mrs Jaitley, had the most powerful voice in the group; but she had trouble hitting the high notes. She liked listening, most of all, to Shyamji when he sang softly; she’d close her eyes, shake her head from side to side. She’d go into a sort of samadhi. The young student who’d come all the way from Ghatkopar would, hunched, stare intensely at Shyamji, as if he’d never seen a man singing before. The Bengali ghazal singer, who wore colourful shirts, was the least weighed down by seriousness; never without a smile on his face.