The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri

simply emerging from the doctors’ building had bequeathed upon him another day. They had chicken sandwiches.
    Often, Mrs Sengupta would think back to that day in January in Calcutta, when Nirmalya was one and a half years old, and she, in Calcutta for two months, had been invited to judge a competition at a music school, where the children would be singing Tagore songs. Her co-judges were two distinguished singers, Sumita Mullick and Banani Ray, and, in a way, it was quite an honour to sit at the same panel as them.
    But they – Apurva and Mrs Sengupta – didn’t know what to do with the child; they decided, after a long discussion, to leave him in the car with the ayah. The competition continued longer than expected; it went on and on; one girl after another approached the microphone and sang Rabindranath’s lyrics with the utmost solemnity; and Mrs Sengupta sat ill-at-ease and restless with her co-judges. When they returned to the car, they found that, despite the windows being rolled up, there were mosquitoes inside. The child was howling and angry; he had been bitten. As if he were some sort of deity before which she must be contrite, Mrs Sengupta bent forward and picked him up from the ayah’s lap. ‘E Ram! E Ram!’ she said. A few days later, the child had a fever – it turned out to be the dengue, of which there was an epidemic in Calcutta at the time.
    Years later, she would return to that day in Calcutta; the competition, which had now receded into the background; her own neglect, as she saw it; and the dengue, which she could hardly believe had happened to her own child. She’d read that both dengue and rheumatic fever could damage the heart; and she wondered if she were responsible for her son’s condition. She could not bear to think it, but she couldn’t help thinking it. ‘No,’ said the specialist. ‘This is congenital; the defect was there from birth.’ Yet she couldn’t help thinking of the day of the competition.
    ‘Jumna, will everything be all right?’ By ‘everything’ she meant Nirmalya; Nirmalya was twelve years old. She sat on the sofa of the new flat, behind her a new mirror. She looked into the distance; there were tears inside her eyes.
    Jumna – who lived in a slum in Mahalaxmi – said: ‘Why do you think so much, memsaab? Don’t you see how well our baba is?’ Mallika Sengupta nodded tearfully. She envied Jumna, almost. She envied her her four healthy children. Vipul, Ramesh. Shankar, Asha. Four children who went to a municipal school. Would she, Mallika Sengupta, have changed places with Jumna? Perhaps not. But she would have liked to have had Jumna’s easy taking-for-granted, as Jumna bent low before the carpet, jhadu in hand, of her children. And she knew she couldn’t have it.
    ‘What do you think will happen?’
    And so Jumna had to lay down the jhadu and sit beside the centre table. Mrs Sengupta was a small statue of pain; Jumna must console her. For a long time they’d just sit together in silence. ‘Nothing will happen,’ Jumna said, as if she’d casually dismissed the powers-that-be. ‘Arrey, what can happen?’ Then, slowly, after an interval of brooding and staring into the distance, she’d get back to work.
    Jumna lived in the large sprawling slum in Mahalaxmi, not far from the Race Course. In spite of its size, it was invisible from the main road; it had to be arrived at by a couple of narrow by-lanes and gullies. The people at the Race Course and the members of the Willingdon Club probably didn’t know it was there. Once, Nirmalya and the driver had dropped her off on a road next to the Willingdon Club which had a large expanse of untended green on one side. She’d got out of the car, and Nirmalya didn’t know in exactly which direction she’d gone. The car had gone back up the road; and when Nirmalya turned back to look, Jumna was already gone, there was only the road and the expanse of overgrown green. But Nirmalya knew now that this – not