This year, when the ghazal was in boom, had been a better year than most for the guru. He’d gone round from home to home, patiently teaching new songs to housewives about the wave of long hair and sudden gestures and sidelong glances, singing at small baithaks, or even bhajans at temples before Sindhi businessmen if they so demanded it. But this would leave him tired and moody when he visited Mrs. Chatterjee. She couldn’t decide whether he was unhappy for some personal reason, or because he still hadn’t made a name as some other singers had.

*   *   *

AS THE GURU’S HEALTH WORSENED, he began to sleep more and more of the time. Sometimes the phone might ring in his small room, and he might speak for a few moments to a student who was enquiring after where he was. When he made the effort to go into the city, he slept on the train, carried along by its rhythm; and sometimes Mrs. Chatterjee, finding him tired, would feel sorry for him and let him fall asleep after a lesson on one of the wicker sofas on the balcony, overlooking the Arabian Sea and the office buildings on Nariman Point. As he rested, she might be getting ready to go out, once her husband returned, for dinner. Now and again, she’d go to the verandah to check on the guru; she would put her hand on his forehead, shake her head well-meaningly, and say, “No fever.” She would glance towards the traffic on Marine Drive, because it was from that direction that her husband would be approaching.

At such times, the guru was like a pet, or a child, left to himself and intermittently tended to. As Mrs. Chatterjee and her husband prepared to go out they would talk about him as if he were a child they were leaving behind. Occasionally, if he heard her humming a song he’d taught her as she went out, he’d open his eyes, smile slightly, and close them again.

E-Minor

E-Minor

E-Minor

This city keeps growing, reconfiguring

itself; I came to it three and a half decades ago—

Kipling wrote of it as daybreak, colour,

and palm trees, ayahs. We came from Calcutta,

then the greater city. My father found a job

in a British company whose head office, like us, moved to Bombay.

We were put up at the Taj. This hotel’s appearance

is the outcome of its architect’s mistake. Commissioned

to create a facsimile of the Taj, he made

its front entrance face the city, its rear the sea.

It should have been the other way round; the entrance

we use is actually the rear; the Taj,

turned inside out, faces the city, which turns

its back to it, and the sea, looking upon

its back, won’t recognise it. The architect’s long dead—only

in the afterlife of his fancy do replica and original