The Immortals Read Free

must practise this song, Mallika! And you have to get the pronunciation right!’
    Mallika Sengupta had been trying to get the pronunciation right. In every way she liked being in Bombay; but as a singer she’d been temporarily unmoored, and had to find her bearings, and explore avenues she’d once never thought of exploring. These avenues mainly comprised bhajans and ghazals, so popular in Bombay. She’d had to take a deep breath to get round to them, of course. She’d never taken Hindi songs seriously when growing up; even though she’d heard the Hindi songs of Saigal and Kananbala, they were film songs, there was a prejudice against them in her family. Now, more than thirty years later, she found herself faced with these languages; the onus was on her, in the daytime loneliness of her flat, to get her tongue round Hindi and Urdu vowels and consonants.
    Her metier was the Bengali song, the Tagore-song – naturally. Everything she said in Hindi, thus, sounded a bit like Bengali. But the Bengaliness of her voice – its rounded full-throatedness – is also what made her sound charming to her music teachers; they would prick up their ears and search for analogies: ‘You sing like Kanandevi,’ they’d say; or, ‘You sing like Geeta Dutt!’ Kanandevi had long turned to religion; Geeta Dutt had gone out of circulation prematurely; in the age of Lata, Mrs Sengupta’s voice was certainly different.
    Mrs Sengupta’s voice evoked a ‘golden age’. When people heard it in this drawing room, when they closed their eyes they couldn’t believe it, they felt they’d been transported, somehow, to an earlier, to a better time. Secretly, one or two of them might think the voice ‘old fashioned’; but it wasn’t at all; it was simply out of place in the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist was Lata’s voice, thin, small, and, to Mrs Sengupta’s ears, shrill. This was the reigning definition of a female singing voice. Mallika Sengupta’s voice’s moment had passed, at least for now, though neither she nor anyone else could be conscious of this fact; passed, unless it was rediscovered in the distant, as-yet unimaginable future, unless a change of taste were brought about by a future generation and it cared to remember Mallika Sengupta.
    Her beginnings were in a small town in North Bengal where her father had been an advocate. Her family had had social pretensions in the small town, but had swiftly fallen from grace after her father’s death when she was twelve. The family struggled; but the cultural pretensions survived, as did the talent and intelligence. Her own talent was least nurtured, because she was a girl. It was almost a lucky break that she met and married Apurva Sengupta.
    At first she’d refused him; she laughed now when she thought of it. She laughed; but at the time it had been no laughing matter. She was not in love, she thought; and, even as the daughter in a large family run only partly successfully by a widowed mother, she had this impractical desire – not only to be loved, but also to love the person she would marry. Then there was the matter that he was her brother’s friend at college, and that was how she thought of him; and the fact that although her family looked up to him, both for being a ‘nice boy’ and for belonging to a wealthy zamindari family, their odd cultural snobbery made them look down on his family, as not being cultured enough. But the tumult of Partition and Independence had made these histories and their nuances, her brothers’ prejudices, absurd and dreamlike; the landscape changed permanently; she wisely accepted his offer, largely because she respected him, but also because she decided, shrewdly, that life with him would allow her to pursue her singing. Here she was in Bombay now, with her husband, as if they’d come from nowhere, freshly created from morning dew, the future a clean slate.
    ‘John!’ she said.
    ‘Memsaab!’ he responded urgently, emerging into the drawing