HE WAS CERTAINLY NOT the first teacher she’d had. He was the latest in a line that went back these fifteen years; he’d arrived to take his place at the head of the line, and to succeed his predecessors, roughly sixteen or seventeen months ago. She had interviewed him, of course, or conducted a little audition in the sitting room, during which she’d asked him, respectfully, to “sing something.” He had descended on the carpet self-consciously, between the glass table and the sofas, and enchanted her, humbly but melodiously, with a bhajan she couldn’t remember having heard before. She shook her head slowly from side to side to denote her acknowledgement of his prowess, and his ability to touch her, and because she hadn’t heard anyone sing quite so well in a long time; and yet it was an interview, at the end of which there was a silence; and then she said: “Wah! Very good!”

At first, she’d called him “Masterji” (which she still did at times), as she had all her former teachers. There was no formal, ceremonial seal on the relationship, as there is between guru and shishya; he was there to do his job, to be a teacher, and she to learn. Nevertheless, the relationship had its own definition. They’d grown dependent on each other; he, for the modicum of respect he received here (fit enough for a guru, even though he might be a mere purveyor of knowledge rather than a repository of it), and the by no means negligible amount he got paid; there were also the little ways in which Mr. Chatterjee helped him out, with his official contacts. As for Mrs. Chatterjee, she liked the tunes he set the bhajans to, and could also recognise the presence of accomplishment; and she was too tired to look for another teacher. She used to change teachers every three or four years, when they began to dominate her too much; or when they became irregular. But he was much younger than she, and she’d grown fond of him—he was very mild and had none of the offensive manners that gurus sometimes have; she’d come to call him “Masterji” less and less, and addressed him, increasingly, as “Mohanji” or “Mohan bhai.”

*   *   *

MR. CHATTERJEE CAME HOME at a quarter to seven, and called out to his wife, “Ruma!”

Later they had tea together in the balcony, facing Marine Drive and watching the sun set at seven-thirty, because it was late summer. Everywhere the glow of electricity became more apparent as the swathe of pink light permeating the clouds above the sea slowly disappeared; now darkness, and with it an artificial nocturnal light, was coming to this part of Bombay.