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Authors: Amit Chaudhuri
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felt himself capable of understanding what it was saying; he almost confused translation with communication; the song had suddenly given to him what it had withheld so far. It penetrated him not through its verbal distinction, but its rapid series of pictures.
Are the hands that pray more beautiful than hands that wear ornaments? Although he himself had never prayed, the question didn’t seem merely rhetorical. He saw arms before him, a woman’s arms; not disconnected from the body, but the body nevertheless invisible; one set of arms sparkling with three or four bangles; the other set of arms bare. For some reason, the sight – the mental picture – of the bare arms calmed him.
From the sunken balcony he could see Bombay repeatedly; or as much of Bombay as he wanted to see. And the water, which disturbed him without his knowing it, and which, although it was everywhere, he could only look at from the corner of his eye. The sea was a negation of the city’s human energies.
Once or twice, in the years he spent at La Terrasse, he dreamt of the sea: this tame accessory, this add-on, to luxury apartments and hotel rooms. It had risen all the way from Elephanta island, like a huge tidal wave swelling from Trombay, in one dream; and the flat he lived in was no longer the flat he knew. From the balcony, he saw the sea approaching with awe and a feeling of doom. But the balcony had become the front rows of a movie theatre, and the flat itself was like the inside of a cinema; a cinema that was elegant and in business, but strangely empty. From the window of the theatre (whose spacious lounge reminded him of the interiors of the Eros or of the Regal), he looked at the gigantic tumult; and then, as if he wasn’t alone, he communicated his sense of dread to someone inside with a smile.
Next morning, he woke with a sense of the other world he’d visited still upon him, of having gone and returned from an elsewhere that was familiar, banal, and yet, unexpectedly, magnificently on the brink of destruction: he knew no one survived that flood. When he came out into the drawing room, his eyes smarted with the light. There it was like a drab mercantile fact; the clusters of low and tall buildings from Nana Chowk to the Fort to further away; behind them, like the humps of idle animals, the islands of Elephanta and Trombay. The sea was dull and shining. It was as if the world had exhausted itself, and taken refuge in a surreptitious normalcy. But he was heavy with knowledge.
* * *
W HEN S UMIT S EN visited Bombay from Calcutta, Apurva Sengupta arranged a recital for him and Mallika Sengupta in a hall in North Bombay. The so-called ‘expatriate’ Bengalis sent out a welcoming party, of course; they wanted to get involved, as they did when any luminary made their way to Bombay from Calcutta. They went to receive him at the station – a gentle, ordinary-looking, bespectacled man who hadn’t lost his air of small means and limitations; and his low-key modesty was more a sense of surprised, genuine gratitude at what luck had given him. He emerged from the Gitanjali Express crumpled, but impeccably dressed in the manner of a singer of Tagore songs, in white dhuti and kurta. He folded his hands in a namaskar when the expectant ‘expatriate’ Bengalis approached; if not with garlands, then at least with pleased, vindicated expressions.
Mr Sengupta had just been made Head of Finance. He was steadying himself after the congratulations; he was weary of the felicitatory food he’d eaten at parties – he felt full all the time. He wanted to get back to work, to the responsibilities that Philip Dyer had quickly divided between Mr Sengupta and himself. But at the same time, he wanted this performance to go well, both for Sumit Sen and for his own wife; it distracted him.
‘Call the newspapers,’ he said to his personal assistant, the large Das, who was always composed and silently efficacious. ‘You know that Sumit Sen is well
Are the hands that pray more beautiful than hands that wear ornaments? Although he himself had never prayed, the question didn’t seem merely rhetorical. He saw arms before him, a woman’s arms; not disconnected from the body, but the body nevertheless invisible; one set of arms sparkling with three or four bangles; the other set of arms bare. For some reason, the sight – the mental picture – of the bare arms calmed him.
From the sunken balcony he could see Bombay repeatedly; or as much of Bombay as he wanted to see. And the water, which disturbed him without his knowing it, and which, although it was everywhere, he could only look at from the corner of his eye. The sea was a negation of the city’s human energies.
Once or twice, in the years he spent at La Terrasse, he dreamt of the sea: this tame accessory, this add-on, to luxury apartments and hotel rooms. It had risen all the way from Elephanta island, like a huge tidal wave swelling from Trombay, in one dream; and the flat he lived in was no longer the flat he knew. From the balcony, he saw the sea approaching with awe and a feeling of doom. But the balcony had become the front rows of a movie theatre, and the flat itself was like the inside of a cinema; a cinema that was elegant and in business, but strangely empty. From the window of the theatre (whose spacious lounge reminded him of the interiors of the Eros or of the Regal), he looked at the gigantic tumult; and then, as if he wasn’t alone, he communicated his sense of dread to someone inside with a smile.
Next morning, he woke with a sense of the other world he’d visited still upon him, of having gone and returned from an elsewhere that was familiar, banal, and yet, unexpectedly, magnificently on the brink of destruction: he knew no one survived that flood. When he came out into the drawing room, his eyes smarted with the light. There it was like a drab mercantile fact; the clusters of low and tall buildings from Nana Chowk to the Fort to further away; behind them, like the humps of idle animals, the islands of Elephanta and Trombay. The sea was dull and shining. It was as if the world had exhausted itself, and taken refuge in a surreptitious normalcy. But he was heavy with knowledge.
* * *
W HEN S UMIT S EN visited Bombay from Calcutta, Apurva Sengupta arranged a recital for him and Mallika Sengupta in a hall in North Bombay. The so-called ‘expatriate’ Bengalis sent out a welcoming party, of course; they wanted to get involved, as they did when any luminary made their way to Bombay from Calcutta. They went to receive him at the station – a gentle, ordinary-looking, bespectacled man who hadn’t lost his air of small means and limitations; and his low-key modesty was more a sense of surprised, genuine gratitude at what luck had given him. He emerged from the Gitanjali Express crumpled, but impeccably dressed in the manner of a singer of Tagore songs, in white dhuti and kurta. He folded his hands in a namaskar when the expectant ‘expatriate’ Bengalis approached; if not with garlands, then at least with pleased, vindicated expressions.
Mr Sengupta had just been made Head of Finance. He was steadying himself after the congratulations; he was weary of the felicitatory food he’d eaten at parties – he felt full all the time. He wanted to get back to work, to the responsibilities that Philip Dyer had quickly divided between Mr Sengupta and himself. But at the same time, he wanted this performance to go well, both for Sumit Sen and for his own wife; it distracted him.
‘Call the newspapers,’ he said to his personal assistant, the large Das, who was always composed and silently efficacious. ‘You know that Sumit Sen is well
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