They sat at the table on the far end on the right, not far from the platform on which the dancing would begin. There was already a sort of musical background as they sat down, a tinkling of wind-chimes. It might have been taped music, or cutlery being moved. A man dressed in waiter’s regalia handed them ornate menu cards, and the two sisters looked at the knife, spoon and fork set before them. Was this meant to be Thanjavur, that place that had burgeoned a thousand years ago, burgeoned and then died, as things do; were they meant to be transported to the splendour of the Cholas?
‘I’ll have saag paneer,’ said Laxmi Ratan Shukla at last with a note of diffident affirmation; confessing to a weakness but, equally, exercising his rights. For eating was part of this ritual of establishing his own domain of power in what was Mr Sengupta’s world. ‘Do you have butter naan?’ he asked the waiter. Tanjore. The dancing had begun. And it continued while they ate after the food was served. Nirmalya tried not to look at her over his shoulder, this woman who wove around the platform, as if unsure she might step over it on to the marble where the waiters were walking past; accompanying her, the tabaliya played looking straight at the eaters at the table, and the singer hunched over his harmonium, singing the stuti to Lord Krishna. No one looked at them; between the doors to the kitchen and the space in which the waiters plied and the guests were seated, they continued to sing and dance and play, as if they were as much a figment of the imagination as the episodes they were enacting from the mythology of the blue god.
‘Have some of this,’ said Priya to Nirmalya. She pushed the copper container of daal towards him. He liked the sisters. They were gently attentive. He nodded. But his father still had not had the gumption to broach the subject of the recording. They concentrated on eating; the food, disappointingly, was unremarkable — only the name of the restaurant, Tanjore, was ambrosial, and promised to transform its taste.
After about forty-five minutes, the dancer and her accompanists left the platform with a mixture of awkwardness and embarrassment; probably to eat where neither guest nor waiter could see them. They completely ceased to exist, and the wind-chimes again became audible; now, paradoxically, they were missed slightly, and Nirmalya caught his mother glancing at the platform, with its harmonium and the outspread sheet on which the singer had been sitting. Dessert arrived; kulfi, for everyone except Nirmalya. Laxmi Ratan Shukla, chipping at his with a spoon, remained unfathomable.
Someone waved at Mr Sengupta. A man from another company. Apurva Sengupta smiled and waved back. Then he returned to Shukla.
Would anything be achieved with Shukla? The man had his own goals; he was actually a perpetrator of bad taste. He had created Om Prakash Vrindavan — one didn’t know if that was his real name — a marketing success, a modern-day saint-poet, a faux Kabir with great lung power. Like the old saint-poets, he composed his own songs, and the last stanza had his signature in it; ‘Saith Vrindavan’, like ‘Saith Kabir’, or ‘Meera says’, and he’d hold the note for ‘Saith Vrindavan’ with his reed-like voice for a full minute. Nouveau riche society ladies trembled; they thought, This is what Kabir must have been like, or Surdas; and they were transported to antiquity without having to vacate the present, or giving up their taste for Hindi film songs.
‘The man is an affront to the bhajan,’ said Mallika Sengupta to her husband one day. She’d met him twice; once in a room above a hall in a house in Dadar, where singers had gathered to ‘warm up’ before a function. He was seated on a rug, wearing saffron as usual, in front of his harmonium, making his wife, a fair, extraordinarily tinselly woman, much younger than him, rehearse some lines in a bhajan with him. She was crooning them in the same thin voice, almost a metallic, machine-like whine, that millions of women had cultivated after Lata. A fan swung forgivingly overhead. She glanced at Mrs Sengupta without warmth; but Om Prakash Vrindavan interrupted the exercise to do a brief, humble namaskar.
Meanwhile, Laxmi Ratan Shukla had finished most of his kulfi; what remained had melted to a puddle in the base of his bowl.
At any bhajan sammelan, Om Prakash Vrindavan would be the star turn. There he would be, his eyes bulging, his long hair falling smoothly round his face, bent over the harmonium, the whites of his eyes visible during moments of rapture. He was singing the commercial success you could hear every day on the radio; ‘Meri chadar purani’ — ‘My old shawl’. ‘Saith Vrindavan,’ he sang, as the ladies glowed with spiritual light. He was clearly another Kabir; for Kabir, the weaver’s son, the shawl or covering, or any piece of cloth, was a symbol of the body — the way it must be woven and made, the ease with which it could be torn — and the work of the loom a symbol of the divine activity of creation, and the sound of the loom — jhini jhini jhini — of the humming of the universe. But Om Prakash Vrindavan’s ‘old shawl’? The thought of it made Mr Sengupta, sitting in his dark suit in the audience, wrinkle his nose in distaste.
‘What’s all this about his wrapper?’ he said to his wife. ‘The idea’s unpleasant.’
They were in a minority, though; the record had sold more than fifty thousand copies.
* * *
SHE KNEW she could have been famous; but she had opted for the life of a Managing Director’s wife. It wasn’t only because she’d wanted the easy way out; it was because she couldn’t deal with the likes of Shukla; the world was full of Shuklas. She hid behind Apurva Sengupta, almost physically.
And then she’d hear Lata on the radio, and feel a stab of irritation. Lata and Asha, Lata and Asha — the sisters’ high-pitched voices, almost indistinguishable from one another, everywhere. This wasn’t the India she’d grown up in; India had been transformed into an island, with only one radio station, and she had to listen to the same singers again and again.
Then she’d go to a sari exhibition, and contemplate a Baluchari, or buy a Kanjeevaram. She’d be lost for half an hour in the red and deep blues of the sari.
She knew, after all, she’d made the right decision. Look at Lata in her white sari, unmarried, living like a hermit in Prabhu Kunj. Mallika Sengupta didn’t want to be a hermit: she still loved life. At fifty-four, her husband having become Managing Director, she felt she’d just begun to discover existence; she’d accepted the benefits that came with her husband’s position without affectation, as if they had always been her due. And Asha, deserted by her husband; Asha Bhonsle, who fell in love with the music director dressed in white, O.P. Nayyar, who then tried to dominate all she did — this seemed to Mallika Sengupta like no life at all; it made her shudder. And to Mallika Sengupta, Lata was no goddess Saraswati, as her admirers claimed, but a lonely woman, too private, not close to anyone. She was glad of her husband, her son, the flat she renovated from time to time: it would be madness to exchange these things that so filled up her day for the fulfilment of some grand personal ambition — she had neither the courage nor the desire to do it.