‘Shyamji, why don’t you sing classical more often? Why don’t you sing fewer ghazals and sing more at classical concerts?’ Shyamji was always unimpeachably polite. He now turned to study the Managing Director’s son’s face with curiosity, as if he were reminded again of the boy’s naivety.
‘Baba,’ he said (his tone was patient), ‘let me establish myself so that I don’t have to think of money any more. Then I can devote myself completely to art. You can’t sing classical on an empty stomach.’
Nirmalya had heard a version of this argument in college: that you must first satisfy your physical needs, of food, shelter, clothing, before you can satisfy your psychological ones — like culture. He wasn’t persuaded by his guru’s words. How did you know when you arrived at that point, when you were safe enough to turn exclusively and fearlessly to the arts? How, and for when, did you set the cut-off date? Nirmalya had never known want; and so he couldn’t understand those who said, or implied, they couldn’t do without what they already had.
* * *
HE WENT TO the balcony, considered the view: much-praised, much-prized — more valuable than any of the artefacts inside, it raised, in its daily, innocent rehearsal of daylight and sunset, the price of the apartment to what it was. La Terrasse, white and wide, was in the distance; as was the long strip of beach, like a thin ore of gold, tapering towards the Governor’s house.
When you looked straight down from the balcony at dusk, you could see the outlines of people on the edge of the land. Thacker Towers had begun to be repainted before the monsoons, and now work continued in bursts between rainy days. Bamboo scaffolding had been erected around the buildings: and sometimes, when Nirmalya was reading or listening to music in his room, he’d see a man, or men, appear just beyond the balcony, careless as sailors on the top of a mast, seemingly uninterested in his presence.
Word circulated that Mr Thacker hadn’t provided them with toilets — or maybe it hadn’t occurred to him that they’d need toilets. It was these men and their families who gathered below at dusk on the edge of land in the shadow of Thacker Towers.
Almost seventeen, he was leaving his father’s world behind — the sitting room behind him, its paintings, ashtrays, curios, vases, the study at the far end with its bound volumes, the dining room with the thick oval glass table, the four bedrooms. Since moving to Thacker Towers, he’d stopped feeling at home. Only the flies, which, in spite of the wire gauze, kept returning, amused him; he eyed the doomed one beadily and killed it heartlessly.
When he was a child, home was escape — from the terrifying terrain of nursery and school, of shiny alphabet charts with their motionless constellation of cats, balls, and vans; of a physical education of running and falling, and singing lessons when you stood like soldiers; and glancing every few minutes at the great hands on the white clock-face. But now, his father having assumed the mantle of the Managing Directorship, this flat in Thacker Towers, with all its furniture — the Himalayan peak of his father’s career and probably Nirmalya’s own material life — was strangely arid to come back to, like a place that could never be properly inhabited, lit by the sun at different points in the day, and by the electric lights heavy with crystals in the evening.
He seemed on the verge of discovering some new definition; he didn’t know what it was, but it set him apart, a bit cruelly, but also providentially; and it turned his latent lack of self-belief into a bristly superiority he carried about with him always. Even the servants noticed it.
As he began to shed the meanings he’d grown up with, he busily assigned new ones. He fell almost belligerently in love with an idea, to do with an immemorial sense of his country; and music was indispensable to it. The raga contained the land within it — its seasons, its times of day, its birdcall, its clouds and heat — it gave him an ideal, magical sense of the country; it was a fiction he fell in love with. Having subscribed to the fiction, everything else was a corruption or aberration: the Marine Drive, Thacker Towers, the company his father ran, tea at the Taj Mahal hotel — nothing was ‘true’ enough. Looking, soon after sunset, at the sky above La Terrasse and its neighbouring buildings — careful to deny the Marine Drive and the neon advertisements — he thought of raga Shree and how appropriate it was to this moment, only the latest, in history, in numberless such days’ endings — in some place that was both here, and not here, not in Cuffe Parade or Thacker Towers.
A vase catching the light; fresh flowers. Shalini must have come that day to trim the stalks. Teatime; a circle of ladies; one of them, wearing a dress, was English.
Gradually, a thought had begun to niggle in his mind: the ragas had no composer. Where did they come from; and why was no one bothered that the question didn’t have an answer? Indian music had no Bach, no Beethoven — why was that? Instinctively, privately, in a confused way, as he looked evening after evening out of the balcony, the notion of authorship came to him — a difficult thought, which he spent some time grappling with. It was the idea of the author, wasn’t it, that made one see a work of art as something original and originated, and as a piece of property, which gave it value; it was what made it possible to say, ‘It belongs to him,’ or ‘It’s his creation,’ or ‘He’s created a great work.’ And this sense of ownership and origination went into how a race saw itself through its artists. He realised, in a semi-articulate way, with a feeling of despair as well as an incongruous feeling of liberation, that this, though, was not the way to understand Indian music; the fact was a secret that dawned on him and which he had to keep to himself. He discussed it with no one; not with Shyamji, although he’d been tempted once or twice to explore the topic with Pyarelal, but had given up before he’d even started. In the meanwhile, as he read his beloved philosophers and poets, he encountered the celebration of genius everywhere — ‘So-and-so did it first’; ‘So-and-so did it best’ — and he acquiesced in it; but some part of him now, in light of the raga, began to resist it too. Only when rereading Yeats’s poem about Byzantium did he appear to find an acknowledgement in what he read of an art without an author, at least in certain lines and phrases: ‘Those images that yet/ Fresh images beget’ and ‘flames begotten of flame,/. . An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.’ What kind of image could that be, except an image whose author was unknown, and which seemed to have been born of, or authored by, art itself? The lines contained the mystery of what it meant to come into contact with a work of art whose provenance was hidden and, in the end, immaterial. It didn’t matter that you couldn’t put a signature to that ‘image’. Elsewhere, Yeats had called those images ‘Presences. . self-born mockers of man’s enterprise’; Nirmalya thought he grasped now what ‘self-born’ meant — it referred to those immemorial residues of culture that couldn’t be explained or circumscribed by authorship. It was as if they’d come from nowhere, as life and the planets had; and yet they were separate from Nature. Dimly, he saw that, though the raga was a human creation, it was, paradoxically, ‘self-born’.
The painting of the building was three-quarters complete. The men stood on the scaffolding, sometimes they clung to a pole and stretched to the left or to the right, they moved sideways, they squatted casually on a pole, their rags flapping, almost riding nothingness. They never looked through the glass at the tranquillity within; they were too busy, gossiping, shouting, laughing and showing their teeth (he could see the inside of a workman’s mouth, and wondered if he ever spat tobacco from such a great height), all the while at work on that platform. Nirmalya spied on them through the large window. ‘I couldn’t have done it, I couldn’t have done it,’ he told himself, ‘not if my life depended on it.’ One of them slipped, fell; Nirmalya heard about it later. He imagined the young man — they were all young — arms beating helplessly against the emptiness. Work went on.