‘Pyareji!’
He came rushing toward him. He was short — a little more than five feet. In his loose pyjamas and white kurta, all movement. ‘Bhaiyya!’ he said. Shyamji had lain down on the divan and was no longer looking at him. ‘Please press my feet. They’re aching.’
Without a word, Pyarelal sat next to him on the divan and began massaging his calves with both hands. On the wall, a picture of the patriarch: Kishen Prasad. And next to it, a large print of the child Krishna on his knees. Shyamji sighed faintly; almost a sob of relief.
This strange exercise was persisted with for fifteen minutes — Pyarelal went about it as if he were used to it, and this was part of the strangeness. The older man kneading the younger one’s calves as if he were a supplicant or a younger relation. And this happening without embarrassment or self-consciousness on Shyamji’s part or apparent shame on Pyarelal’s. ‘Theek hai bhaiyya?’ said Pyarelal at last. ‘All right?’ ‘Bas,’ said Shyamji. ‘It’s better now.’
‘Must go now,’ said Pyarelal, getting up quickly. ‘Have to reach Sion by three o’clock.’ He spoke as rapidly as he did everything else. That’s why he’d stopped by — to replenish himself. He’d have been hungry otherwise on the bus journey. He ate quickly too; some leftover potatoes from the fridge and a couple of rotis from a metal container. On his way out, he confronted Ramesh, the four-year-old who was the youngest of the five children Motilalji had produced, between bouts of drunkenness and hours of imparting, half-heartedly, music training, seemingly without too much strain in the last fifteen years. ‘Pappi do,’ Pyarelal said, bending low, offering his face: long, with a slightly hooked nose, a thin moustache above the lip. The boy knew the face but didn’t kiss it.
Pyarelal had arrived in Bombay twelve years ago on a railway platform. And then he made straight for Ram Lal’s house, and, finding him there, touched his toes passionately, as if it were a reunion, rather than a first meeting. ‘I am a devotee of yours,’ proclaimed Pyarelal. ‘I heard you sing when you came to Mussoorie many years ago, and your voice has echoed in my ears ever since.’ For some reason, the great man took to him, despite Pyarelal’s alarming tendency towards hyperbole and his elusiveness; probably because he needed someone at the time. For Ram Lal, in spite of his great gifts, had not made an impact on Bombay; the appreciation of his gifts was left to a small circle of admirers. Outside of that circle, he was almost — not quite, but almost — a nobody, marked out in a crowd only by the seriousness of his demeanour, his noble forehead, his very reserve. Perhaps, at that time, he needed someone like Pyarelal in the house, and as part of his life.
Pyarelal played the harmonium; he played the tabla; he sang — he was a bits and pieces man: he seemed to do everything fairly well. But most of all he was a dancer: he used to teach kathak in Mussoorie.
One day, Ram Lal, as if he’d been mulling over a bright idea for a while, murmured, ‘Let us have him as our jamai. He is a good man.’ Shyamji and his younger brother Banwari were aghast; but Shyamji especially. Must his sister, the Tara he had loved since she was born, marry this vagabond? She was not beautiful; she was dark — did that mean she must be given to this itinerant? Even at the age of twenty-seven, his father still alive, Shyamji had realised that if Pyarelal entered the family he would end up becoming his responsibility, a millstone round his neck. But he couldn’t say as much to his father.
As they were eating, Motilalji said: ‘What did you think of her?’
Shyamji, putting a piece of roti in his mouth, said: ‘Of whom?’
‘That Bengali lady, bhai,’ said Motilalji, impatient. ‘Have you already forgotten her? Mallika.’
Shyamji flinched again at the familiar use of the first name. He didn’t like it. But it was, he knew, Motilalji’s way of dominating his pupil even in her absence; because she could replace him whenever she wished, and because he coveted her patronage as much as she needed him as a teacher, he must salvage his pride by dominating her — by using her first name, which she was too polite to object to — not only during the tuition, but also whenever she was mentioned in conversation; it was as if she had a power to hit back at him which had nothing to do with her, or her actual presence.
Equanimously, Shyamji said: ‘She seemed a good person.’
‘Yes, but these people want too much! After two lessons she says to me, “Motilalji, I have picked up this bhajan now, please give me another one.” I say to her — arrey, first learn to sing it properly!’
He had finished eating. He had very little appetite. In two long sips, he finished his glass of water. Although his wife’s cooking was renowned among friends and visitors, he’d become indifferent to it himself.
When Shyamji had first met Motilalji, he — Shyamji — was just eighteen years old. He was a bridegroom; he was getting married to Sumati, Motilalji’s sister. Sumati was just a few months younger than Shyamji. Sumati had a lovely face, and the same eyes as her elder brother, except that she had a squint; the squint was considered auspicious.
Directing the marriage, besides caste and community, was, of course, eugenics. Both the retired Ram Lal, with his piercing silence, and the doddering Kishan Prasad, Motilalji’s father, for whom death’s door was invitingly ajar, had realised that the meeting of the two families promised a gene pool that was full of potential for the musical lineage. In the exchanging of garlands between the bubbly, tomboyish girl and the accomplished young singer, in a way more feminine than his bride, lay the hope of creating a gene for the future.
Pandit Ram Lal’s marriage had been similarly arranged. By then he’d transformed from an irresponsible and slightly anxious sensation-seeker into a serious musician — or so it seemed. The dark, stocky woman whom he obediently married had a strong singing voice; a strong voice, period, which could be heard, when she was talking, from a distance. Her uncle on her mother’s side was the man — the famous music director — who had composed the tune for the film song ‘Chanda re ja re ja re’. ‘O go quickly, moon, take this message to my beloved,’ sang the young Lata. A simple imperishable tune; sometimes still played on the radio. The music director was now dead and all but forgotten.
* * *
TWO YEARS AFTER Apurva Sengupta’s company moved office to Nariman Point, the Senguptas themselves moved house. The building was a new one; overnight it strode on to the Malabar Hill skyline, overlooking the Kamala Nehru Park and the expanse of the Arabian Sea. Once there, it was difficult to imagine it hadn’t been there before.
Mallika and Apurva Sengupta went to see it one morning; the security guard’s cabin was in place already at the entrance, and then the car went up a slope before arriving at the plateau on which the building stood, with a neat strip of lawn on the left.
Heavily, they alighted from the car and encountered the marbled porch, and, in an opening in the wall on the left, a small, interior garden — soil, plants, leaves — whose changeless freedom from the vagaries of seasons would cease to surprise them in the coming years.
There was a double move. The Dyers moved to the seventeenth floor of Block A, a two-tier duplex apartment with an open aquarium on the lower level in which goldfish, orange flickers in the water, darted. The Senguptas moved to the tenth floor of Block D, a large three-bedroom flat. The building was called La Terrasse. It was not a Garden Apartments or a Sea Breeze, which it could have easily been. It was clearly meant to not only look, but to be different.