Free The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri Page A

always confronted the visitor. When Nirmalya first heard about Tutu from his mother – ‘They say he was a bright boy, very talented’ – he was seven years old himself, and he took a careful second look at the photograph for reasons of his own. He felt a moment of dread; could he die like that, suddenly? The boy in the picture was smiling into the distance; Nirmalya looked to his mother, busy talking to Nayana Neogi, a tea-tray before them, for reassurance. But they were in some other world, on the hallucinatory plane of repetitive, everyday existence. What was death – a sort of permanent blankness? He often wondered what would happen if he fell asleep and didn’t wake up again. He’d once had a dream in which he died, and woken up with a sense of foreboding, a deep sense of being metamorphosed. In the dream, he was playing with a friend, Puneet – this small, chuckling boy had since failed his exams and lost a year, and stayed back in the same class; they’d stopped being as close as they used to – Puneet and he were soldiers, possibly American Marines, and they were trying to capture what was either a ship or a submarine. In the gun battle on the green submarine, Nirmalya – and this happened not long before he awoke; the light was already in the curtains – was shot. Puneet couldn’t help him; and, at that moment, when Nirmalya was dying, he thought, ‘This is a dream’; he woke up. But that feeling of draining away, where dying had mingled with the dream’s fading into daylight – he found that difficult to shrug off as he put on his socks for school, while John the bearer loomed over him.
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    T HE COMPANY Mr Sengupta worked in grew. So they decided to move office again. This time it was a stupendous, time-taking affair; moving from Nariman Point to a tall new upstart building on Cuffe Parade – one of a throng that had appeared where there had been nothing before. At the same time, the Senguptas moved to a huge five-bedroom apartment on the top storey of another one of the new buildings; and, in what seemed a logical but nevertheless breathtaking culmination of his career so far, he took over the company from Philip Dyer. A large laminated black-and-white picture on wood, of Dyer sitting at his chairman’s desk, his sideburns flamboyant and prominent, signed in a stylish black scrawl, ‘To Apurva and family, Philip’, as if a gift of some part of himself, even a replica, was to always preside benignly over their lives, was removed a few weeks later from the position it had occupied in the Senguptas’ bedroom for three years (where it used to be noted silently by Dyer during parties) and put inside a drawer. No comment was made, or necessary. The company was still partly foreign-owned; but it was, in effect, the end of the last vestiges of the British age.
    There was some tension at this time with Dyer – Dyer, who loved Bombay, who loved ‘India’, that mythical composite of colour and smell and anonymous human beings and daylight, who loved being attended to by everyone from peons to businessmen, who, it was said, loved his brief flings with starlets and secretaries, who believed he had in some ways nurtured Apurva Sengupta. The last farewell parties were slightly awkward affairs, full of enforced shoulder-huggings and the sudden, unpredictable moist eye – because people found that emotion could surprise them when they least expected it. (The main bit of gossip at this time was the golden hair that had recently appeared, like a burst of energy, above Dyer’s forehead. ‘It’s not a toupee,’ whispered a director’s wife to Mallika Sengupta at a party. ‘Apparently he had a transplant.’ There was Dyer, not far from her, gesticulating and displaying the painfully acquired new hair.) Now he was displeased and melancholy at the idea of having to pack his bags after all these decades and leave for London, for ‘home’, with the semi-alcoholic Julia. His children, recently out of