The form lay on Mr Sengupta’s table for two days, out of place among invitations from the Governor and chambers of commerce; he forgot about it. Then he spotted it, was, for an instant, in a state of blank irresolution, making the instant seem longer than it was, and buzzed for his secretary.
‘Tell Nair to do something about it,’ he said.
But this was not the only time or way in which Shyamji asked for the Senguptas’ indulgence, their support. Apurva Sengupta was, at once, patron and honorary elder. There was Shyamji’s family, after all; and the extended gaggle, all clamouring with various needs and desires. Sumati, his wife, who would say, ‘Didi, don’t forget my sari!’ Shyamji’s younger brother Banwari was shy; a near-ink-dark complexion and the buck teeth that marred his otherwise serious, pleasant face crippled him with shyness. Nevertheless, he too became less and less taciturn with the Senguptas — Mallika Sengupta let down her guard as he let down his — and, smiling, covering his mouth and the teeth instinctively, protectively, with one hand, asked for constant ‘advances’ on the tuition fee. He played the tabla solemnly with Mrs Sengupta; a master of his instrument, Banwari, but forced to subsist on the middle level, to recast himself as one of the many accompanists for ‘light’ music practice-sessions in the drawing room, lowering himself and his instruments on the carpet, his white kurta and pyjamas always photograph-spotless, making his dark skin seem warm and deep, like an ember. On the days he didn’t come, Shyamji’s brother-in-law, the restive, genie-like Pyarelal, came to play the tabla — Shyamji had seen to it, democratically, that the male members of his family, even the ones he didn’t like, had employment. After all, they all had mouths to feed. The sons still too young, too full of unrealistic, swaggering expectation, to work, the daughters mostly unmarried.
The women, wearing chiffon saris, with the ends of the saris covering their heads and part of their faces, like the residue of a veil, seemed too shy to meet the world. They were not in the least so. They were the engine behind their husbands.
Tara, Shyamji’s younger sister, sweet-smiling, for many years overweight despite her pious, ostentatious fasts, a small, gold nose-ring piercing one nostril, Tara, whom Ram Lal married off to that jack-of-all trades Pyarelal, was particularly demanding. She was always expecting something from her brother, even when she hadn’t said a word. Shyamji could sense it in her endearments, and in her sudden, dreamy grumblings addressed to no one. It was because of her, and because he loved her through the ties of blood and memory, that he’d taken on the responsibility of supporting the mendacious Pyarelal. And Tara, overweight and settling into life, knew it; for her brother, she reserved her most sugary smile.
Then the matriarch, Ram Lal’s widow, tiny, barrel-shaped in a white sari, daughter of the bejewelled man who’d once danced before the king of Nepal. Her unspoken edict to Shyamji: always look after your younger brother Banwari, and don’t ever forget our Tara.
And Sumati herself, Shyamji’s wife, slightly silly and airy-fairy but good-humoured, a little too proud, according to family members, that her husband was doing well.
Finally, Neeta, Banwari’s wife, fair, exceptionally pretty underneath the pallu of the sari that she pulled over one side of her face, except that her voice was almost rasping, and she argumentative. A pearl concealed from the world, discontent. She’d have felt she was too good for Banwari with his protruding teeth if he hadn’t been Ram Lal’s son.
The stage was set after the usual series of trials and errors, the pinning up of pennants by workmen that Shyamji would chance cheerily upon, the final raising of garlands; and now there were floral patterns around the piece of synthetic that said 3rd GANDHARVA SAMMELAN. Rajasthani families — neither entirely of Bombay, nor any more of the scoured landscape of desert and oasis-like villages they’d once come from — wandering busily about in the foyer where men smoked during intermission and boys devoured ice cream, everyone from old crones to children; anyone even distantly related to Shyamji was here. And Shyamji, bowing, joining his palms together in namaskar, gracious in receiving businessmen and their wives, the suited, deceptively modest corporate executives who reigned over companies, and their families. Delegating to his son the task of seating them in the second row or third row or fourth, or sometimes escorting them — for they looked distant and faintly undecided without an escort, these driven, nine-to-nine executives — himself. The occasional inspector-general of police walking in; or politician. A show of intimacy then taking place in the front aisle, the inspector-general hugging the musician and overcoming him momentarily while the wife looked on, smiling. Then anti-climactic murmurs as they were led to their seats.
All this was part of the constant enchantment, the enlargement of life and its prospects for the executives, the businessmen, Shyamji. The sammelan, whatever it achieved, was where these daily premonitions of well-being — that something good was about to happen, that mutual understanding promised mutual benefit — fortuitously came together. All who lived and worked in Bombay believed this as seriously as a dogma or superstition; the music that was to come, or anything else for that matter, was almost secondary to this belief. Ram Lal’s portrait, severe, predictably incongruous, was placed at an angle on the right, a garland strung round it. There was a lamp before it, which Shyamji lit on the first day of the sammelan. Another incongruous moment as he bent over the wick — not of introspection, but in which a memory had no time to come to the surface. It was a little like lighting a pyre, the pyre he had lit eleven years ago, an act of reverence and expiation. But now, after the banality of the intervening years and of the day itself, emotion had withered and little remained but the public gesture; Shyamji was distracted — distracted by the air-conditioned auditorium waiting behind him.
The first day was pure classical music and dance, starting with the younger artists’ emphatic throat-clearings and improvisatory tentativeness, then, later in the evening, evolving into the familiarity and unapologetic ease of the mature performers; the second day was devoted to ‘light’ music. People tided over the first day somehow; it was the second day they were interested in, because they’d sing themselves then — Shyamji’s disciples, from young struggling ghazal singers to businessmen’s wives, hot but bright in their saris, naked ears dressed provocatively in gold, whose husbands had put a full-page advertisement in the souvenir. Their relationship with music had begun embry-onically, in their prehistory as listeners; they’d hummed along in an undertone with the artists they loved best, or loudly, solitarily, to themselves; and then, at some point, they’d asked themselves the unimaginable, something that wouldn’t have occurred to them six months before, or which they didn’t have the courage to admit: ‘Can’t I be a singer? Can’t it be me?’ Why should they only listen; why shouldn’t they be listened to? Once the question was posed so shatteringly, the answer was simple; and led to its own joy, liberation, and trauma. And here, Shyamji, ironically, was to be not so much teacher as mediator; not only to satisfy the middle-class urge for music, but the relentless, childlike longing to become the musician (how simply the metamorphosis could be achieved!); to move to centre-stage, at least for fifteen minutes, where the traditional musician previously was.