From the balcony in front, you could see the sea, Chowpatty beach, the Marine Drive stretching and curving to the right: all that mattered in Bombay was before you; you didn’t need to know any more of the city — you took that fickle, flickering, glittering view to be the city itself. The cars were small, busy, and toy-like. The view from the Dyers’ flat was the same, but more breathtaking and varied; the cars looked tinier, more numerous, and the white yachts floating on the sea without ever touching it moved with an impulse of their own.
At night, the lights came on in the Marine Drive, a great witch-like celebration of neon and fluorescence, and Mrs Sengupta cheerfully told her son Nirmalya, as he looked out over the stone bannister, that the row of lights glowing individually around the drive was called the ‘Queen’s Necklace’.
It was to this flat that Shyamji came one day. Mallika Sengupta had been looking for a new teacher. A series of teachers had come to the Cumballa Hill apartment, starting with Chandrashekhar, who used to arrive on a scooter three times a week, a nice man, not hugely accomplished, who worked in an office and gave tuitions in singing. He’d been teaching her as he taught everyone else, with cheerful, encouraging insincerity, till one day he actually listened to her and fell silent in consternation. ‘Your voice is truly lovely,’ he said at last; the voice was still ringing in his ear — but this lapse from teacherly propriety never occurred again.
Motilalji, in spite of his gifts, she ‘got rid of ’ after he twice came drunk to her lesson. Then there was the famous classical ustad Ghulam Mohammed, who was recommended to her for his immense knowledge; a thin man who wore steel spectacles, he reminded her for some reason of a master tailor — it wasn’t difficult to imagine him with a tape-measure around his neck. He taught her nothing, or no songs, at least, but kept giving her vocal exercises; intricate exercises that didn’t add up to anything, but which he named, with satisfaction, ‘designs’. ‘Look at this design,’ he said; this contributed further to his calm, focussed, tailor-like air. Then, at last, he gave her a song, a geet; ‘This is a new tuin,’ he said, and though he taught her the same song for two months, she both liked and was exasperated by his quaint version of the word ‘tune’ and his blithe, dilatory use of it — ‘Yeh mushkil tuin hai’, ‘It’s a difficult tuin’ etc. Learning from him was to be in the middle of an unending chapter.
There were others. Jairam, who was past his heyday, and was convinced his daughter would be another Lata; Inderjit, a small flamboyant man, whom, mistakenly, she’d called by name once, instead of ‘Inderjitji’, thus scaring him off possibly with ideas about her romantic interest in him — all these teachers had come and gone from her house. The last teacher who’d come to this new apartment was Dheeraj, a dark man with a pleasant singing voice, a crooner’s voice. He began to teach her new geets. He got her to sing a rather ‘filmi’, sentimental song on the radio, not really suited to her style and voice (love songs seldom were), but she sang it with seriousness, too much seriousness, almost: ‘My many-coloured dreams have all shattered/ Like a mirror.’ He had a problem with his marriage, though; it was breaking apart. One day he stopped coming. They heard he’d had a stroke. She waited to hear from him; he was untraceable; a month went by. Then, when she’d almost forgotten him, she saw him from her car on the road, looking absent, a stick in one hand.
‘Haven’t I seen you before?’ asked Mallika Sengupta. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen you before.’ Shyamji had been waiting for her, looking beyond the sunken balcony at the sea.
‘Didi,’ he said very courteously, ‘I once came with my wife’s brother, Motilalji. You were in a different flat, then.’
‘Of course,’ she said — the day returned to her — and she added, ‘I remember — he said something like, “She thinks no end of herself,” and you looked as if you wished you were somewhere else.’ And she was oddly stirred by the memory of his discomfiture.
That discomfiture fitted with his personality: he was one of the most soft-spoken and pointedly courteous teachers she’d had. Later, she’d hear that people called him ‘smooth’, even ‘slippery’. But her doubts were subsumed by the compassion she’d felt for him right from the beginning; ever since he’d called her, without really knowing her, ‘didi’ and made her an elder sister.
It was seven years since she’d seen him last — and not quite forgotten him. But by this time he was no longer the man who had hovered in the background behind Motilalji. He was becoming, according to unofficial information, one of Bombay’s most highly paid teachers; the well-to-do he charged eighty-five rupees per sitting; a huge sum. But they wanted him — among them corporate wives; devout traders and tax defaulters whose anxieties were oddly consoled by music; not to speak of young, ordinary middle-class students who lived in the suburbs and learnt from him in groups of five or six — they wanted him for his melodious voice and his virtuosity. Like the god after whom he’d been named, whose flute was a wand that drew the female cowherds to him, Shyamji’s uninsisting, mellifluous singing had drawn one student after another to him in South Bombay.
The boy was now fifteen years old. He’d just finished his school finals; he’d passed with a decent, but not brilliant, first class.
The older he got, and the higher his father rose in the company, the greater the friction that came to exist between him and the life to which he’d been raised. With an adolescent puritanism, he’d almost made it a point to boycott his parents’ parties, or to appear in them with a premeditated nonchalance, in a dishevelled state.
It was at this time that the boy ran into Shyamji, as he was flitting from the main door to his bedroom. Shyamji guessed he must be Mrs Sengupta’s son, but couldn’t be sure. The boy looked rather intense, bespectacled, a tender goatee — more like down — around his chin. Later, he asked Mrs Sengupta:
‘Didi, is that your son?’
Shyamji was genuinely interested. Because he believed the flat and the way of life inside it to be an inheritance, and he wanted to know who would inherit it. What he’d seen, in the person of this boy, he thought privately, was a bit odd.
‘Yes, that is my son,’ said Mrs Sengupta, brightening visibly, as if merely to become conscious of the fact again was to experience some form of satisfaction.
‘You have no other children, didi?’ he asked, softly, as if he were respectful of the ways of the well-to-do, but also very slightly concerned. He couldn’t comprehend the impulse to bring only one child into the world, but there were many things about people like Mrs Sengupta he couldn’t quite comprehend.
‘No,’ she said, and called, ‘Nirmalya, come here!’ But the boy was in his room and there was no response. ‘John,’ she said, ‘ask baba to come here.’
‘Nirmalya’: ‘an offering to the gods’ — they’d named him thus because he’d narrowly missed being a stillborn child; he’d been in a stupor in his mother’s womb — another two hours and he wouldn’t have lived. Even before his inception into the world, it seemed he was delegated a destiny.