The Immortals Read Free Page B

concerned, ‘I’ve forgotten them.’ He was not so much stoic as calm; he was used to rich students paying him for the ritual of learning Urdu; though he wished he had more well-to-do students. Sometimes he wished he had more; sometimes, when he grew tired, he longed for serious students.
    Their business was conducted at this centre table, in this small area in the drawing room, where, you could say, many of her daytime pursuits – call them work, or hobbies – were confined. Here, too, tea came and interrupted them. He always accepted tea tentatively, with the fastidiousness a Victorian Englishwoman might have had. He was clearly thrown off-balance by the prospect of having tea with Mrs Sengupta; he didn’t know what relationship he should have to this interregnum, this moment, and to her during it: was he her equal, her co-tea-drinker, or still the ‘maulvi saheb’? She made it slightly easier for him by ignoring him completely as she finished her tea.
    Half her mind, of course, was on whether the furniture had been dusted, whether the decorations had been moved inadvertently from their shelves. Then she would find that her eyes were staring at ‘jeem’ and ‘che’.
    ‘Bas, maulvi saheb,’ she’d say, ‘enough today. I’ll see you again next week.’
    A large sofa with floral upholstery; a patterned carpet with a rectangular centre table whose pug marks showed if it moved slightly out of place; the two dignified armchairs on either side; the shelves on the wall-unit which had been bare and became quickly populated with miniatures and objects – urns, brass lamps – released from their expected uses; the momentarily listless curtains; the dining table glimmering in the distance – this, at least for now, was her house.
    Sometimes the boy, when he came home from school early, or on a holiday, would see the maulvi saheb and his mother, and approach them. He found the maulvi saheb uncommunicative. Yet he felt he might tell him something. He always felt that visitors from a clearly different background were his natural allies; that when they were pretending not to notice him, they were waiting for the right moment.
    ‘But why should I sing the ghazal?’ she asked herself one day. Would giving it up mean she had failed? But wasn’t her forte the bhajan, the devotional; isn’t that what they said? Then why was she struggling to sing these love songs? She’d never get them right, and, anyway, they were, in a sense, absolutely foreign to her; she’d never be able to enter their mood, their spirit. Once she realised this, it was as if a burden she’d carried without knowing it had gone. Overnight, the letters ‘aliph’ and ‘jeem’ began to disappear from her memory. She discontinued her lessons with ‘maulvi saheb’.
    That evening, they went out for dinner – the company secretary was visiting from Calcutta. Mr Deb was in a room at the old Taj; although it was still not the old Taj – the idea for the new Taj had been floated, but it had still not been built. The old Taj was alone, and had an inviolability about it.
    They went to the Crystal Room for dinner. It was good to see Mr Deb again; they ordered naan, palak chicken, daal. The boy was there too; he sometimes accompanied his parents on these occasions. They sat, talking about Calcutta, about the company, about Bombay. When food was served, the dim light almost concealed the colours on the plate; the yellow of the daal, the green of the palak. Yet, though they tore the naan with enthusiasm, they didn’t seem interested in the food. Only Mrs Sengupta said she liked the taste of the daal. Where Mr Deb was concerned, there was always, for them, a sense of waiting and watching. They were not conscious of this, though; but it was almost certain that once Mr Deb retired, Mr Sengupta would take his place. This, perhaps, gave these meetings an air of deferral, where a lot was said, but something couldn’t be.
    ‘Sir, the bill.’ The bill was