Free The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri Page B

boarding school, were no longer in England; the son was somewhere near Dubai, working on an oil rig; the daughter was in her ancient residential boarding school. Philip Dyer, it seemed, had nothing to go back to.
    The Senguptas made the move, and he – Apurva – became the new Managing Director. It was around this time that Nirmalya entered into a phase – it was an odd change of mood, a prickliness, that had begun after his school exams – of being ostentatiously ill at ease with the world his father inhabited. Without saying as much, he sat in judgement upon it. He hated the new flat in Cuffe Parade. The first evening, when his parents were busy supervising the packers, he arrived late, and sat in the large drawing room among the semi-finished furniture, asking, ‘Why did we have to come here?’
    He had grown his hair long. It came to his shoulders. He hardly appeared to smile, and never shaved the straggly goatee.
    When his parents threw their first party in the new flat, and just before the first guests began to arrive, congratulating the Senguptas, he went out for a walk. ‘Where’s Nirmalya?’ his father asked, exasperated. No one knew.
    When he returned, no one asked him where he’d been. His father spotted him and escorted him to the non-executive chairman of the board who’d flown in the previous day from Delhi. Apurva Sengupta had an unnecessarily triumphant air, as if he’d caught a bird of marvellous plumage, and not the untidy boy he had next to him.
    ‘Here he is at last – managed to find him!’ he smiled, as if at a hugely funny joke.
    The chairman, a tall, fair septuagenarian with bushy eyebrows called Thakore, wasn’t impressed. He was a figurehead in the company, but a coveted emblem; and he knew it. His smile was a mixture of politeness and disdain.
    ‘We don’t get to see you these days!’
    Thakore was slightly threatened by the boy; he sensed a resistance. He wasn’t sure if he was getting the respect due to him. His remark was an exaggeration; he’d met the Senguptas’ son only once before.
    Nirmalya smiled, and, as ever at such moments, said nothing. The silence was infuriating to the chairman.
    ‘So what are you doing these days, young man? In college?’ Thakore looked at Nirmalya’s hair.
    ‘Junior college,’ murmured Nirmalya. He was in that zone in which he could pretend he was an undergraduate and no longer a schoolboy, in which he could study in college classrooms and ‘hang out’ in college corridors, without actually beginning his BA until two years later. As far as he was concerned, the important thing was he was not a schoolboy.
    ‘Let me get you a refill, JB,’ said Mr Sengupta, and put an arm around Thakore. The bushy-eyebrowed chairman was glad to be led away. Apurva Sengupta took him to the little bar on the far side of the drawing room. Before heading off to the bar, the chairman said (for he liked having the last word):
    ‘We must see more of you, my boy! We haven’t got to know each other.’
    Nirmalya went onto the balcony; the small crowd of two women and a man didn’t notice him, or pretended not to notice him, and made no effort to be nice to him, as people did because he was Mr Sengupta’s son. He looked out. It was the sea, of course, the same sea he’d seen for five years from La Terrasse; but he was looking at it from the other side, and it seemed different. In fact, he could see the faint phantom outline of La Terrasse among the different-sized buildings on that side. Darkness had translated the sea into near-invisibility. Ten days after the move, it was as if he were indifferently looking at a relic from his past.
    Before moving out of La Terrasse into Thacker Towers (that was the name of this sternly clone-like cluster of buildings) they’d gone scouting around the south side of the city for an appropriate flat for the new managing director: the two of them – Mr and Mrs Sengupta, accompanied by a guide delegated by the company, and