BUT THE GURU WASN’T always well. A mysterious stomach ulcer—it was an undiagnosed ailment, but he preferred to call it an “ulcer”—troubled him. It could remain inactive for days, then come back in a sharp spasm that would leave him listless for two days. To this end he’d gone with his mother and wife to a famous religious guru called, simply, Baba, and sat among a crowd of people to receive his benediction. When his turn came, he was asked only to touch Baba’s feet, and, as he did so, the Baba whispered a few words into his ear, words that he didn’t understand. But after this, Mohanji felt better, and the pain, though he hadn’t expected it would, seemed to go away.

When his behanji heard about this one day, she was properly contemptuous. “I don’t believe in baba-vaaba,” she said. The guru smiled, and looked uncomfortable and guilty; not because he’d been caught doing something silly, but because Mrs. Chatterjee could be so naively sacrilegious. It was as if she didn’t feel the need to believe in anything, and affluent though she might be, the guru was not certain of the wisdom of this. “If you have a problem, it should be looked at by a real doctor,” she went on. The guru nodded mournfully, seeing no reason to argue.

Of course, the problem was partly Mohanji’s own fault. As he went from flat to flat, he was frequently served “snacks” during the lesson, the junk food that people stored in their homes and dispensed with on such occasions. Sometimes the food could be quite heavy. Mohanji could never resist these, eating them while thinking, abstractedly, of some worry that beset him at home. This irregular consumption would leave him occasionally dyspeptic.

*   *   *

HE SUFFERED FROM tension as well, a tension from constantly having to lie to the ladies he taught—white lies, flattery—and from not having a choice in the matter. He had raised his fee recently, of course; he now charged a hundred rupees for lessons all around, pleading that a lot of the money went towards the taxi fare. In this matter, his “students” found him quietly inflexible. “I can’t teach for less,” he said simply. And because he was such an expert singer, his “students” couldn’t refuse him, although a hundred rupees a “sitting” was a lot for a guru; making him one of the highest-paid teachers doing the rounds. But they’d begun to wonder, now and again, what they were getting out of it themselves, and why their singing hadn’t improved noticeably, or why they—housewives—couldn’t also become singers with something of a reputation: it would be a bonus in the variegated mosaic of their lives.