Free The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri

died; Sumit Sen went back to Calcutta.
    He was dictating a letter to his secretary, afternoon sun making the office window radiant, when Mr Das, purposeful and unstoppable as a weapon in a military arsenal, entered and said with suppressed agitation (because this would surely increase his importance in Mr Sengupta’s eyes): ‘Abhay Deshpande called.’ Mr Sengupta looked up: ‘Yes?’ With unexplained triumph, Das said: ‘He wants Mrs Sengupta’s bio-data.’ Mr Sengupta furrowed his brows; he opened a drawer – fortunately a recent biographical note was at hand.
    Then, one day, Apurva Sengupta came back home with a paper in his hand. ‘Das gave me this,’ he said. ‘He’s very excited – Abhay Deshpande has written a review.’ He was beaming; he waved the Evening News . She smiled apprehensively; she went past the report on the Chief Minister’s transgressions on the first page, the light-eyed girl in the bathing suit on the third page, and kept turning the pages until she came to a headline hovering on the right-hand side, B ENGALI S ONGS C HARM B OMBAY. She didn’t know what to make of the small print, the first three paragraphs about Sumit Sen, beginning, ‘Sumit Sen is all the rage in Calcutta, and one can see why. He sang the songs of the Kaviguru, known to us here in Bombay only from the tunes stolen without any apologies by our music directors, with aplomb in his marvellous and mellifluous voice.’ The last two paragraphs concerned Mrs Sengupta: ‘She has a lovely, melodious voice, soaked in bhakti, and sang the songs of a lesser-known but no less talented composer, Atul Prosad, with command and ease. Many of the songs were set to bittersweet and emotive ragas like Desh and Kafi. Mallika ably brought out the pathos inherent in these ragas.’
    She closed the paper; her eyes sparkled; she wanted to believe the things he’d said. But Abhay Deshpande’s figure receded and receded; she could not grasp it or imagine it. ‘I thought he left before I started to sing,’ she said. She tried again to think of him, but the man eluded her. ‘Mr Das might have been wrong,’ she said. She paused, as at a minor conundrum. ‘Of course, he might have been right . . . What does he look like?’ she asked her husband. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him,’ said Apurva Sengupta as he took off his jacket. They decided what to feel – to be happy with the review; to think no more of it.

 
* * *
     
    P RASHANTA AND N AYANA Neogi still lived in the rented ground-floor flat with the dusty driveway in Khar. These, the Senguptas’ oldest friends in Bombay. But separated from them not only by distance – between the old world of Khar and the sea-facing tall buildings of Malabar Hill – but the different social worlds they now moved in. In fact, the Neogis didn’t ‘move’ at all; they stayed put, and people visited them – the same filmmakers and artists, both failed and successful.
    And although Khar was far away, the Senguptas sometimes visited on Saturdays; sat in the bedroom, the air-conditioner on, the bamboo chiks keeping out light, as the Neogis’ dogs either strutted about, or rested immovably on the floor, tranquil, breathing heaps of bone and hair. Mallika Sengupta appeared to ignore them, but gathered the hem of her sari silently; although she didn’t think this in so many words, these animals in the bedroom represented to her the hidden wildness of the Neogis’ lives. The dogs, on the other hand, truly ignored everyone, unless a fit of awareness possessed them.
    The Neogis had a son, Biswajit, six years older than Nirmalya; the other son, known now only by his pet name, ‘Tutu’, had died when he was seven years old of leukaemia. The Senguptas had never seen this boy; there was a picture of him in the bedroom, a vivid black-and-white close-up of his laughing face. The boy’s absence, and the presence of the photograph, haunted the casual cigarette-smoking skein of the Neogis’ lives, and