He was a charming man. A great part of his charm lay in his physique and his manner: his height, the way he stooped forward slightly, his sideburns — that narrow, perfect-shaped fleece of gold; all things that made the fact that he was balding almost irrelevant.
He gave the impression of listening to you very carefully, his blue eyes fixed over your shoulders, his eyebrows slightly raised in interest and concern, the deep alluring lines creasing his tanned forehead. Behind this manner, he was a dictator who left final and important decisions to no one else, and carried the company, like a personal possession he didn’t want to misplace, in his pocket. But he had been specially charming with Mr Sengupta: he gave him exactly what he wanted — a chauffeur-driven car, a flat, servants, a decent salary — so as to preclude permanently the possibility of Apurva Sengupta one day moving elsewhere. Mr Sengupta didn’t think of his being here as necessarily permanent; but he was beginning to become happy in the company. He suppressed his instinct that his boss was a type of extraordinary and somewhat disrespectable English adventurer: everyone knew it was largely Dyer who’d made the company the success it now was.
‘Well, A.B.,’ he said one afternoon, leaning over his desk (he’d begun the practice of referring to his colleagues by their initials, perhaps to conceal the fact that he had trouble getting their names right; he himself was known to them by his first name — Philip), ‘you know that, with poor Deb gone, there’s a vacancy.’ He smiled; lines appeared round his eyes. An expression almost like kindness; a moment’s deference to the death, but also a sensitivity to the window it had opened up. ‘I’ve thought about it, and I don’t want to advertise. I’ve been looking at your work, and I think you’re the right man for the job, don’t you?’
At these moments, in the air-conditioned isolation of his office, Mr Dyer’s style was pressing: he was a seducer. He was Mephistophelean; but he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in being Mephistopheles to everybody; and the alternative (which induced nervousness in those who’d seen it) was a blankness in the blue eyes.
‘If you say so, Philip,’ said Apurva Sengupta, outwardly still but quietly elated. He saw the window as well, open, the light shining. ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Good man! I’m very pleased.’
Dyer, people knew, cared for presentability and appearance as much as — or perhaps more than — he did for ability. He was an aesthete of executive appearance; he wanted decent-looking people in the upper echelons of the company. And this was part of the reason he had his eye on Apurva Sengupta from the beginning: he had the right kind of looks — a sort of measured elegance and modest style, an appearance, at once, of slightness and control, which convinced Dyer.
Parties too — this was part of the Senguptas’ gradual education — were important in the scheme of things; and Dyer’s tolerance for hot Indian food — another feature of his uniqueness, his charm, his slightly scandalous air — was high. When the Senguptas threw a party, he’d stand in a corner alone, perspiring, eating Mrs Sengupta’s fish preparations.
‘What are you making today?’ Mr Sengupta asked this tensely sometimes before a party. ‘Are you making that fish?’ It was Dyer, who seemed to have been weaned on curries, that Apurva Sengupta was thinking of. He cautiously sniffed the air in the flat. Pumpkin and coriander: the smell had filled the drawing room and barely arrived at the bedroom, as he stood there, still in his jacket. It soon occupied the entire flat.
Around this time, when Mr Sengupta was promoted, they decided to move office — all the way to that new reclamation on Marine Drive, that puny strip called Nariman Point. One evening, when this strip was still coming into existence, the boy and his parents had walked down it, past coconut and peanut vendors, towards where it petered out into hunched boulders and, further, the fury of the waves. Nirmalya discovered he was scared of the ocean. The sea here had an ancient energy, as it swirled round the finger extending into the water. On both sides, as mother, father, and son stood there for a moment, Nirmalya threatened by blasts of wind, couples moved dimly and mysteriously, unperturbed, as if inside a foyer in a large building. This — the phantasmagoria of roaring, maddened waves and darkness — was what stood behind, at least momentarily, the city they were becoming intimate with.
This area, which had been water not very long ago, became very quickly populated with towers and offices. The building the company moved to was called Udayan. The offices were on the sixteenth floor. One day, in the afternoon, when he’d gone again to pick up his father, Nirmalya stood before the building, separate among the other buildings, and measured it with his eyes. He felt thrilled by it, as if it were a sword that had, strangely, pierced him painlessly. ‘How tall it is!’ It was a significant moment in his own brief life — a grand, inward episode in the unfolding epic of his father’s employment. This time, the stream of employees emerging was somehow different, larger and more diffuse. It was full of people he didn’t recognise, small men in white shirts, women in saris, both going in and coming out, and then, in the midst of them, he’d spot, from the car, the suited, elegant figure of his father, shorter than Dyer but in his own way striking, then Dyer, and other known faces; his father and Mr Dyer seemed strangely untouched by the crowd around them; they were at ease but inviolable.
Here, the ethos was that of the busy daylight world of the city; at once indifferent and absorbed, focussed and reckless. Nirmalya quickly forgot Nariman Point as he’d first stood on it nervously at night, threatened by waves. And he had no reason to visit Tulsi Pipe Road, where the old office building had been, again.
‘She sings good, but pronunciation must improve.’ The person who said this was Laxmi Ratan Shukla, a stocky man whose thick bifocals made his eyes seem twice their size, and also indistinct. It seemed the whites of the eyes were melting behind the glasses. He spoke very softly, and hardly ever smiled. He was nondescript and boring, and this was a dimension of his dangerousness. ‘The words still sound like Bengali. See — “barsat” is sounding like “borsat”.’ He performed this parody of Mrs Sengupta’s Hindi pronunciation without malice or self-consciousness.
He was, of course, not dangerous at all; or he was as dangerous as he, or any human being, could be made dangerous by others. It depended on you. He was, really, a sort of bureaucrat, the head of HMV’s Light Music wing. But the problem was he was a bureaucrat who thought he was an artist — he composed tunes; he taught young women; he would have liked to create acolytes who said, ‘I was taught this song by Laxmi Ratan Shukla.’ Somehow, it hadn’t happened; but, secretly, he wanted to be more than just an office man.
He sat now with two luchis before him, and a cup of tea. Of course, he was unused to luchis; he pierced one with his finger; then he tore a piece and ate it. ‘She has stopped the maulvi saheb, that is okay,’ he said. ‘She can sing bhajan.’ He referred to her in the third person in her presence, as if she was a child of ten. But he spoke so softly that no one could accuse him of being impolite.
He somewhat despised Bengalis for their inability to speak Hindi, their timid forays into culture as they clung to middle-class propriety, their inability to let themselves go. Even Mrs Sengupta’s voice — it was a mistake on creation’s part to have given it to her; when he’d heard it, he’d thought it was beautiful and lost interest in it. He was bored by beauty and by artistic gifts; he wanted something else — but if asked, would have spoken in terms of beauty and art.