“Arrey Mrs. Chatterjee, how are you? How is your husband—his name is everywhere these days?”

“Dr. Dastur,” she said, “this is my music teacher. He sings beautifully.”

Dr. Dastur couldn’t remember having seen a music teacher at close quarters before. Not that he was uninterested in music—his daughter now played Chopin’s and Bach’s simpler compositions on the piano—but he himself was inordinately proud of the Indian classical tradition, which he knew as little about as most of his contemporaries.

“Masterji,” he said, bequeathing this title upon Mohanji in an impromptu way, “it’s a pleasure meeting you.”

*   *   *

DR. DASTUR PRESCRIBED HIM medication, but Mohanji didn’t take the pills with any regularity. Indeed, he had an antipathy towards pills, as if they were alive. Instead he kept a photograph of his spiritual guru—the “Baba”—close to him.

He kept his blackout from his other students. The ghazal was in boom: everyone wanted to sing songs about some imminent but unrealisable beloved. Mohanji, in keeping with this, taught Neha Kapur on the eleventh floor songs by Ghalib and more recent poets; almost every week, he, sitting at his harmonium, hummed under his breath and composed a tune.

Bhajans, too, had become big business of late; women wore their best saris and diamonds and went to the concert halls to listen to the new singers. And somehow, everyone felt that they, too, could sing, and be singers, and be famous. Even Mrs. Kapur had a dream that her voice be heard. And it took so little to achieve it—a bit of money could buy one an auditorium for a night, and a “show” could be held. Even the guru had come to believe in the simplicity of this rather uncomplicated faith.

Although he was keeping indifferent health, he’d begun to sing more and more at businessmen’s mehfils, and wedding parties; someone, moved by his singing, might come up to him in the middle of a song and shyly but passionately press a hundred-rupee note to his hand. Unaccounted-for money circulated in these gatherings; they were different from the parties in the corporate world, but, in a way, these people, always ostentatious with both money and emotion, seemed to care more for the music and, moved by the pathos of some memory, shook their heads from side to side as he sang his ghazals.

*   *   *

THESE MEHFILS lasted late into the night, and sometimes Mohanji and the members of his family who’d accompanied him would return home in a taxi at two or half past two in the morning. Late night, and the heat of the day would have gone, and they’d be sleepy and exhausted but still know they were a thousand rupees richer. By this time, the housewives who’d also heard him sing would be setting aside their large gold necklaces and yawning and going to bed.