• Complain

Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals

Here you can read online Amit Chaudhuri - The Immortals full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2010, publisher: Picador USA, genre: Prose. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Amit Chaudhuri The Immortals
  • Book:
    The Immortals
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Picador USA
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2010
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Immortals: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Immortals" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Written in haunting, melodic prose, The Immortals tells the story or stories of Shyam, Mallika and Nirmalya: their relationships, their lives, their music. More than that, though, it is also the story of music itself, of music as art, and an exploration of its place in the modern world of money and commerce.

Amit Chaudhuri: author's other books


Who wrote The Immortals? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Immortals — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Immortals" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Amit Chaudhuri

The Immortals

For Rinka

The mortals become immortals; the immortals become mortals.

Heraclitus

Transformation

My days are pallid with the hard pummelling of work,

my nights are incandescent with waking dreams.

Arise from the clash of metals, O beautiful one, white fire-flame,

may the mass of matter become wind, the moon become woman,

may the flowers of the earth become the stars of the sky.

Arise, O sacred lotus, rise from the spirits stalk,

free the eternal in the unfading forgiveness of the moment,

make the momentary eternal.

May the body become mind, the mind become spirit, the spirit unite with death,

may death become body, spirit, mind.

Buddhadeva Bose (trans. from Bengali by Ketaki Kushari Dyson)

* * *

THE NOTES OF Bhimpalasi emerged from a corner of the room. Panditji was singing again, impatient, as if he were taking his mind off something else. But he grew quite immersed: the piece was exquisite and difficult. Hed composed it himself seven years ago.

From not far away came the sound of traffic; the roundabout, bewildering in its congestion. Bullocks and cars ground around it. The bulls looked mired in their element; the buses and dusty long-distance taxis were waiting to move. The car horns created an anxious music, discordant but not indifferent.

The Panditji wasnt there: hed died two years ago, after his third cardiac seizure. They had rushed him to Jaslok Hospital; on the way, in the car, hed had his second heart attack. He had died in Jaslok, to the utter disbelief of his relatives: they hadnt thought that hed been admitted to a hospital to die. Now, his presence, or his absence, persisted in the small seven-hundred-square-feet house. The singing had come from the tape recorder, from the tape the grandson had played accidentally, thinking it was a cassette of film songs.

Yeh to dadaji ke gaane hai, remarked the boy, recognising his grandfathers singing; was he surprised or disappointed? Next to him hung a portrait of his dadaji, enlarged from a photograph taken when he was fifty-seven. The face was an austere one, bespectacled, the oiled hair combed back. It was the face of by common consensus in the family a great man. The large forehead had been smeared with a tilak, as if someone had confused the portrait with a real person.

Already, the Panditji was becoming a sort of myth. It wasnt as if a large number of people knew him; but those who did divulged their knowledge with satisfaction. How well he sang Malkauns, for instance; how even Bade Ghulam Ali hesitated to sing Malkauns at a conference in Calcutta after Panditji had the previous day. How Panditji was a man of stark simplicity, despite his weakness for the occasional peg of whisky in the evening.

But it was certain that Panditji was proud, a man of prickly sensitivity. He had been a man silently aware of the protocol between student and teacher, organiser and performer, musician and musician. If slighted or rebuffed, he sealed off that part of the world that rebuffed him.

This severity had probably cost him. There was a story of how Lata Mangeshkar wanted a guru to train her in the finer points of classical music, and of how she had thought of him, Ram Lal, having heard his abilities as a teacher praised highly. You must call her, Panditji, said a well-wisher. She is waiting for your call. Panditji did not call. She should call me, he said. If she wants to learn from me, she will call me. The call did not come. In the meantime, Amir Khan telephoned her and said that he was at her disposal. Word spread quickly; Lata turned to the distinguished ustad; and Amir Khan became known as the man who had taught Lata Mangeshkar the subtler intricacies of classical music.

And yet, for all that, his reputation as a teacher had remained intact when he died; like something small and perfect, it had neither been subtracted from nor added to. People outside the family remembered him less and less; if asked Where did you learn that beautiful bandish? they might say in a tone of remembrance, Oh I had learnt that from Pandit Ram Lal, for people used to drift in and out of Panditjis life, and some became students for brief spells of time.

Shyamjis life was to be different. This was a simple determination, but it was not a conscious plan. Consciously, Panditjis life was the ideal life; when Shyamji mentioned it, it was as if he were speaking of a saint, and not of his father. That was all very well; but it was a life that could not be repeated.

Tonight was a night of upaas and jagran, an absurdity enforced ritually by the women. Shyamji succumbed meekly to being a witness. The abstention from food by the women, the singing of bhajans till dawn: these were necessary observances. Done repeatedly, they were meant to lead to betterment. Instead, they led to acidity, and a grogginess and lack of focus that lasted two days. But they were undertaken in light-hearted camaraderie.

The children and the men were fed. Then night came; and they began to sing the bhajans. The children had fallen asleep without any prompting, as usual, in the midst of the chatter, their eyes closed in the bright light of the tube-light. The low, droning singing began; not tuneless, because this was a family of musicians, but strangely soothing. Half-asleep, Shyamji watched his wife and his sister and, with them, an older daughter, Neha: they were about to lull him to sleep. Nisha, his youngest daughter, had desperately wanted to stay awake, and join the chorus; but she had fallen asleep at a quarter to eleven. His mother sat in a corner, in a plain white sari, with an absent look, yet entirely alert. Shyamji had a dream into which was woven the sound of the chorus; in which his father was also present, both as a living person and as a portrait, hanging in a reddish light. This dream, about the vicissitudes of Shyamjis life, continued for a long time, taking one shape, then another. When he woke briefly, it was dawn; the women had vanished: they must have gone to bed, probably after having taken a glass of milk to break the fast. The room was silent, except for the noises coming in from outside.

Late one evening the door must have been left ajar early evenings the doors were anyway wide open, to let in a continual trickle of visitors; people coming in and going out but late one evening when the door was ajar, the rat must have got in. No one had noticed. But it was Neha who saw it later that night, as she was stepping out of the bathroom. It had jumped out, and scooted behind the pots in the kitchen once again. Expectedly, Neha almost fainted. It was really a bandicoot; cats were scared of them. They ran down the gutters and, at night, scurried down the narrow passage that connected the houses of the colony. They had the aggressiveness and urgency of touts.

The children danced, half in fear and in excitement at an undefined peril. Shyamjis wife, never known to be particularly violent, had managed to chase it out with a jhadu; it darted through the kitchen window. Shyamji, not moving from the divan, was a picture of patience, and kept saying, as he did during most crises, Arrey bhai, pareshan mat hona, dont get agitated.

* * *

ON THE WAY TO the city in the mornings, hed stop at Peddar Road sometimes, at his wifes brothers place; going up a steep incline and entering a compound that was not visible from the main road. Here, they lived in a single-storey house not far from a posh girls school.

Hari om, he said as he entered. It was an old joke, this invocation to God, a part of Shyamjis fun mode: it meant he was hot, and that he was here, needing attention. Water, jijaji? asked the woman sitting near the doorstep; she had covered part of her face with her sari the moment he had stepped in. Shyamji nodded; then added affectionately: Cold. He lowered himself onto the mat and sighed.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Immortals»

Look at similar books to The Immortals. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Immortals»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Immortals and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.