The Immortals Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘Bhaiyya!’ he said. Shyamji had lain down on the divan and was no longer looking at him. ‘Please press my feet. They’re aching.’
    Without a word, Pyarelal sat next to him on the divan and began massaging his calves with both hands. On the wall, a picture of the patriarch: Kishen Prasad. And next to it, a large print of the child Krishna on his knees. Shyamji sighed faintly; almost a sob of relief.
    This strange exercise was persisted with for fifteen minutes – Pyarelal went about it as if he were used to it, and this was part of the strangeness. The older man kneading the younger one’s calves as if he were a supplicant or a younger relation. And this happening without embarrassment or self-consciousness on Shyamji’s part or apparent shame on Pyarelal’s. ‘Theek hai bhaiyya?’ said Pyarelal at last. ‘All right?’ ‘Bas,’ said Shyamji. ‘It’s better now.’
    ‘Must go now,’ said Pyarelal, getting up quickly. ‘Have to reach Sion by three o’clock.’ He spoke as rapidly as he did everything else. That’s why he’d stopped by – to replenish himself. He’d have been hungry otherwise on the bus journey. He ate quickly too; some leftover potatoes from the fridge and a couple of rotis from a metal container. On his way out, he confronted Ramesh, the four-year-old who was the youngest of the five children Motilalji had produced, between bouts of drunkenness and hours of imparting, half-heartedly, music training, seemingly without too much strain in the last fifteen years. ‘Pappi do,’ Pyarelal said, bending low, offering his face: long, with a slightly hooked nose, a thin moustache above the lip. The boy knew the face but didn’t kiss it.
    Pyarelal had arrived in Bombay twelve years ago on a railway platform. And then he made straight for Ram Lal’s house, and, finding him there, touched his toes passionately, as if it were a reunion, rather than a first meeting. ‘I am a devotee of yours,’ proclaimed Pyarelal. ‘I heard you sing when you came to Mussoorie many years ago, and your voice has echoed in my ears ever since.’ For some reason, the great man took to him, despite Pyarelal’s alarming tendency towards hyperbole and his elusiveness; probably because he needed someone at the time. For Ram Lal, in spite of his great gifts, had not made an impact on Bombay; the appreciation of his gifts was left to a small circle of admirers. Outside of that circle, he was almost – not quite, but almost – a nobody, marked out in a crowd only by the seriousness of his demeanour, his noble forehead, his very reserve. Perhaps, at that time, he needed someone like Pyarelal in the house, and as part of his life.
    Pyarelal played the harmonium; he played the tabla; he sang – he was a bits and pieces man: he seemed to do everything fairly well. But most of all he was a dancer: he used to teach kathak in Mussoorie.
    One day, Ram Lal, as if he’d been mulling over a bright idea for a while, murmured, ‘Let us have him as our jamai. He is a good man.’ Shyamji and his younger brother Banwari were aghast; but Shyamji especially. Must his sister, the Tara he had loved since she was born, marry this vagabond? She was not beautiful; she was dark – did that mean she must be given to this itinerant? Even at the age of twenty-seven, his father still alive, Shyamji had realised that if Pyarelal entered the family he would end up becoming his responsibility, a millstone round his neck. But he couldn’t say as much to his father.
    As they were eating, Motilalji said: ‘What did you think of her?’
    Shyamji, putting a piece of roti in his mouth, said: ‘Of whom?’
    ‘That Bengali lady, bhai,’ said Motilalji, impatient. ‘Have you already forgotten her? Mallika.’
    Shyamji flinched again at the familiar use of the first name. He didn’t like it. But it was, he knew, Motilalji’s way of dominating his pupil even in her absence; because she could replace him whenever she wished, and because he