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coveted her patronage as much as she needed him as a teacher, he must salvage his pride by dominating her – by using her first name, which she was too polite to object to – not only during the tuition, but also whenever she was mentioned in conversation; it was as if she had a power to hit back at him which had nothing to do with her, or her actual presence.
    Equanimously, Shyamji said: ‘She seemed a good person.’
    ‘Yes, but these people want too much! After two lessons she says to me, “Motilalji, I have picked up this bhajan now, please give me another one.” I say to her – arrey, first learn to sing it properly!’
    He had finished eating. He had very little appetite. In two long sips, he finished his glass of water. Although his wife’s cooking was renowned among friends and visitors, he’d become indifferent to it himself.
    When Shyamji had first met Motilalji, he – Shyamji – was just eighteen years old. He was a bridegroom; he was getting married to Sumati, Motilalji’s sister. Sumati was just a few months younger than Shyamji. Sumati had a lovely face, and the same eyes as her elder brother, except that she had a squint; the squint was considered auspicious.
    Directing the marriage, besides caste and community, was, of course, eugenics. Both the retired Ram Lal, with his piercing silence, and the doddering Kishan Prasad, Motilalji’s father, for whom death’s door was invitingly ajar, had realised that the meeting of the two families promised a gene pool that was full of potential for the musical lineage. In the exchanging of garlands between the bubbly, tomboyish girl and the accomplished young singer, in a way more feminine than his bride, lay the hope of creating a gene for the future.
    Pandit Ram Lal’s marriage had been similarly arranged. By then he’d transformed from an irresponsible and slightly anxious sensation-seeker into a serious musician – or so it seemed. The dark, stocky woman whom he obediently married had a strong singing voice; a strong voice, period, which could be heard, when she was talking, from a distance. Her uncle on her mother’s side was the man – the famous music director – who had composed the tune for the film song ‘Chanda re ja re ja re’. ‘O go quickly, moon, take this message to my beloved,’ sang the young Lata. A simple imperishable tune; sometimes still played on the radio. The music director was now dead and all but forgotten.

 
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    T WO YEARS AFTER Apurva Sengupta’s company moved office to Nariman Point, the Senguptas themselves moved house. The building was a new one; overnight it strode on to the Malabar Hill skyline, overlooking the Kamala Nehru Park and the expanse of the Arabian Sea. Once there, it was difficult to imagine it hadn’t been there before.
    Mallika and Apurva Sengupta went to see it one morning; the security guard’s cabin was in place already at the entrance, and then the car went up a slope before arriving at the plateau on which the building stood, with a neat strip of lawn on the left.
    Heavily, they alighted from the car and encountered the marbled porch, and, in an opening in the wall on the left, a small, interior garden – soil, plants, leaves – whose changeless freedom from the vagaries of seasons would cease to surprise them in the coming years.
    There was a double move. The Dyers moved to the seventeenth floor of Block A, a two-tier duplex apartment with an open aquarium on the lower level in which goldfish, orange flickers in the water, darted. The Senguptas moved to the tenth floor of Block D, a large three-bedroom flat. The building was called La Terrasse. It was not a Garden Apartments or a Sea Breeze, which it could have easily been. It was clearly meant to not only look, but to be different.
    It was their flat – a childlike happiness gripped the Senguptas. And it wasn’t theirs; they saw it as a gift, a gift from life; they wandered, admiring, from room to room, Mrs Sengupta already