There was a pall on their lives, though: on the cocktail parties; the flat in Cuffe Parade, the Mercedes; the impulsive purchase of curios. It was the constant, nagging knowledge, like a secret, of their son’s health — he wasn’t unhealthy, or ill, but the murmur the doctor would hear in his chest every time he put a stethoscope to it, for whatever reason, a cough or the flu, was audible to Mallika Sengupta beneath all she did. It made her regret the name her mother had given him: ‘Nirmalya’; an offering to the gods. She had no intention of offering him to the gods; of letting them interfere with her life.
When he was a boy, she had a great terror of losing him. Each day she’d send him off to school, hair wet and combed, shirt tucked into laundered half-pants, tie knotted and dangling from the collar, as if she had the merest suspicion that he was on the verge of disappearing forever. She’d read a story recently, in a newspaper, about a kidnapping. These demons could spoil her morning, even when, later, a free spirit at large in the shops from Amarson’s in Breach Candy to Sahakari Bhandar in Churchgate, she, hair tied in a bun, wearing a light, printed sari, was buying knick-knacks across the counter.
The children who ran towards cars in traffic jams were part of her bad dreams in those days. Not just the lepers, whose noses and fingers were wearing away, disappearing inexorably like a bar of soap on a basin; nor the Red Cross volunteers, who came and rattled their tin hypnotically, as if it were a cymbal or tambourine; nor the grimy men in rags that opened on to bits of skin, who were neither maimed nor blind, only forlorn and nameless. It was the children. They knocked on her window with their knuckles and harangued her for change; one child might paw it absent-mindedly with the palm of the hand, as if this were a game and his mind partly elsewhere; another’s face might suddenly float into the square, singing, ‘Give, give, give, haven’t eaten’; she waved them away or gave them a coin. What she felt was not compassion; it was inescapable and personal, as if the voices were in her head, inside her life and memory, rather than outside. She was troubled by a recurring fear in her many automobile reveries — what if it were Nirmalya? Constantly, the face of the unknown child knocking petulantly changed, and became Nirmalya’s: she could do nothing about it. Among her many secret, absurd obsessions, this was one of the most acute: the snatching away from her, in a moment, of her son; the loss of her life as she knew it. The child, asking her again and again for the coin, was what she couldn’t keep out or deny, though she shooed him away with one hand; on the way back from school with Nirmalya, or to the hairdressers’, at Kemp’s Corner or Chowpatty, the same fear and pity repeated itself, inextricably linked, somehow, to Nirmalya’s childhood. Sometimes the light changed from red to orange before she could open her purse; the child was gone; he’d be there tomorrow.
He was now sixteen, this ‘offering to the gods’. He went about with The Story of Philosophy; he was reading about Santayana. The doctors had said there was ‘no need to touch him’ till he was forty.
Apurva Sengupta was a model of reasonableness; he deprecated his wife for being too emotional. He attended board meetings; flew to and from Delhi, wearing his dark suit and aimed towards the sky, and, later, towards home, in an Indian Airlines plane; he brought back home bits of company gossip, and, from the longer journeys, stubs of boarding cards and Parry’s lozenges which he presented to Nirmalya like a bribe. ‘There is nothing to worry about,’ he said to his wife.
But then he brought with him a yogi; an unbridled, wild-looking bearded man, tame for the moment, with a caste-mark on his forehead, bare-bodied except for a loincloth tucked up above his thighs; accompanied sheepishly by Mr Sengupta, radiant in his dark suit and tie. He brought the man to the flat in Thacker Towers — Arthur and Jumna speechless after retreating into the kitchen — to tell Nirmalya’s future.
Nirmalya felt both sympathy and a hint of contempt for his father’s unembarrassed lapse into this experiment, he suddenly realised he was not as calm, as immersed in company life and practicable solutions as he pretended he was. Nirmalya was impatient with the yogi; he was still too young, too newly romantic, to understand, in real life, the irrationalities of filial love. He remembered a line from a poem he’d had to learn in class, a poem he disliked, partly because a man with an Indian, or at least non-European name, had had the temerity to write something about the universal human condition in English called ‘Night of the Scorpion’. A child — an idea, almost, not a flesh-and-blood creature — had been bitten by a scorpion; the grown-ups were trying to save it from death. The poet says: ‘My father, rationalist, sceptic, tried every curse and blessing. .’ Ramachandra, the swotter, the cleverest boy in class, who sometimes fell asleep on his elbow during lessons from studying at night but was never pulled up by teachers who were nervous that they knew less than he did, had asked shrilly, ‘Miss, if the father was a sceptic and rationalist, why was he resorting to curses and blessings?’ as if he’d tripped the poet up. The others in the class only had a vague idea of what ‘sceptic’ and ‘rationalist’ meant. The question had occurred to Nirmalya too, but he already knew the answer. He thought Ramachandra was showing off.
The yogi consulted Mrs Sengupta first. He sat magisterially on the edge of the sofa, with Mallika Sengupta in his line of vision. He read the future not by looking at her palm, but staring at the screen of the forehead and then retreating into himself.
‘Sangeet,’ he exclaimed at last; his expression, which refused to register any awe at what he saw around him — paintings; the crystalline vases; even the plump, well-fed cushions on the sofa — held the slightest hint of surprise. ‘Music!’ Mrs Sengupta looked at her son and husband in both consternation and triumph; though much of the world was ignorant of her gift, this man, undeceived by her sari, her make-up, had discovered what she really was; her destiny, neglected by everyone, including herself, was clear to him.
Then Nirmalya, like something between a reluctant bride and a chastised pupil, was made to sit before him. The man still hadn’t moved from the edge of the sofa; red eyes narrowed, the bare back and torso upright. He furrowed his brow, counted on his fingers, some obscure calculus that he kept to himself.
‘Unhappiness,’ he said finally. ‘You are not happy.’
Nirmalya had been waiting for some other news; some prognosis of greatness, at least some glimmer of being singular. But, secretly, he was startled by what the man had said to him without any feeling except, it seemed, one of conviction. Yes, he was unhappy. But how had the man known? Was it an absurdly easy thing to say — would most people recognise unhappiness in themselves if they were told they were unhappy?
‘You will not be big director like father,’ continued the yogi, strangely dismissive now, as if he’d had enough of other people’s lives. ‘Small director.’
This, in spite of it being deflating, amused Nirmalya, the measuring of success in this odd vocabulary of directorship. Where had the yogi picked it up? In spite of the dark, brand-like impress of his appearance, which made you think he had stepped out of a storybook, he must have a very particular clientele.
Later, when he’d gone, they — father, mother, and son, each with different degrees of curiosity, awe, and irony — discussed how he might have known Mallika Sengupta was a singer. Were there any musical instruments in the sitting room — a tabla or a harmonium? No, the musical instruments were inside, in a room inaccessible to the yogi. It was an episode their rational minds could neither accept nor leave alone.
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