The Immortals Read Free Page A

room, a duster in one hand. Everything for him was a form of theatre.
    ‘Please remove the harmonium. Is baba’s food ready – the mutton stew?’ The smell of the stew had drifted into the hall. She was now waiting for her son to arrive.
    ‘Yes memsaab baba stew ready!’ exclaimed John in English; then stooped toward the harmonium.
    Motilalji and his brother-in-law had left twenty minutes ago; her attention was focussed on the boy returning from school. She’d feel an inward restlessness, as if at a job left undone, until he’d come back and eaten.
    The music was a constant trickle in her life, not allowed to disturb her routine; in fact, the routine went on, and now and then paused decorously to make time for the music, at which point it was consigned to someone else’s hands – John, or the cook; but it wasn’t allowed to stop. She never consented to losing her grip on it, to handing the reins to someone else, except temporarily.
    Nirmalya came in busily at twenty to one. He was seven years old. Immediately, food was served on a trolley in the air-conditioned bedroom. It was what he liked best; daal and rice and fried fish.
    Ten minutes after Motilalji had left, she’d had John shut the windows of the bedroom, in anticipation of her son’s arrival, and switch on the air conditioner. The temperature would be just right by the time he was here. Her mind kept going back to Motilalji’s little performance – you could call it nothing else – and the way his personality always exacerbated her. ‘She’s very proud,’ he’d said, or ‘she thinks very highly of herself,’ or words to that effect; and boasted the next moment, ‘Do you see how she holds that steady note? None of the others can do it!’ She was pleased by his praise, coming as it was from someone whose gift she respected; but she wasn’t certain how long she could cope with his personality.
    Now, with Nirmalya before her, dangling his legs from the divan, eating from the trolley, a different set of pleasures and anxieties replaced the previous one.
    ‘Do you like the fish? How was your day?’
    She always asked these or similar questions; but she also viewed him, always, with a mixture of excitement and foreboding. She felt he was special; more special than other children. If asked to explain herself, she probably couldn’t have done so; but, from the moment he was born, she’d held the belief with conviction. Nothing he’d done – at school or at home – had necessarily proved her right. In fact, the time he’d spent at school, until recently, had been miserable. This only strengthened her conviction – the teachers didn’t have the insight to understand him.
    He scraped the white fish and its black skin off the bone. He was bright and sunny – thoughts racing in his head – as he always was when he came back home; as if the reluctant boy of the morning had gone to never return.
    ‘I want to go and fetch Baba today!’ he said.
    ‘Yes, yes.’
    Mrs Sengupta saw this homecoming as an apogee of something; she didn’t quite know what. Next morning it would go bad again; there would be the usual waning of enthusiasm. She would have to cope with the transformation. It repeated itself on every weekday morning.
    Once or twice a week, a maulvi saheb came to the flat, a man who looked exactly like a ‘maulvi saheb’ should. He was an extremely polite man with hidden reserves of personality, a thin man with a small skull cap on his head and a beard.
    From the start, this had been a bad idea; but the maulvi saheb was such a patient man that he almost turned it into a good one. He taught her Urdu; slowly, patiently. She had no patience, but she was determined in the interests of her new life in Bombay; she must get her tongue around the words in the ghazals. ‘Not jim,’ he said. ‘Jeem.’
    In her notebook, she wrote aliph, be, and te. She forgot them the next time he came. ‘Oh maulvi saheb,’ she said, embarrassed but not unduly