‘Yes, I would love to. Will you join the Maharaj Kumar or ride with Uncle Rajendra?’
The entire mehfil was babbling away but Bahadur’s tense silence rang like an alarm in my head. I took off my belt and gave it to Leelawati.
‘We’ll bet His Highness, the Maharaj Kumar’s ruby and pearl belt. Does that sound fair to you?” Leelawati did not wish to dwell on what a close call it was.
The Shehzada put the necklace around Leelawati’s neck. ‘You’ve won this round anyway, Leelawati.’
As luck would have it, I wouldn’t have lost my belt.
‘The name’s Sajani Bai,’ the woman said after she had made herself comfortable in front of the pakhawaj player and the sarangiya. ‘Are names deceptive or do they reveal something vital about a person? Some people think I am every man’s Sajani, and beloved. Others think I am theirs and theirs alone. You are welcome to your opinions, my lords. For as you know, a woman is like a throne. However large she may be,’ she smiled and with a gesture of her hand pointed to her wide girth, ‘she may enjoy one man and one man only at any one point in time. So while I enjoin each one of you to take his pleasure from me, my pleasure is for the one who gave me the gift of life. Adaab, Maharaj Kumar, adaab Prince Bahadur, adaab Lakshman Simhaji and adaab, all you lovers of the arts. Since you would not come to see me in Awadh, I have had to come to see you.’
She placed the string drone in her lap and closed her eyes. Her fat fingers strummed the strings softly. The moment of truth. The alaap is the part of our classical music that I like best. It is an inward voyage, an odyssey into the unknown. You are alone, truly alone, in the cosmos, no pakhawaj and no sarangi, just your voice feeling its way. It is a wordless meditation, a rumination on matters that human thought cannot encompass. Anchored in the schema enunciated at the very start, you are free to explore the full range of the human condition. It is the quality of the probing and the freewheeling that exposes you and decides your worth as an artist.
It is men and women who consciously and fortuitously take an art-form in one direction or another. If I had been born in an earlier age when our classical music was taking shape, or if I could devote myself to it even today, I would enlarge the scope and emphasis of the alaap, and make it mandatory as the true test of the artist. For like all meditation, an alaap has the solitude and form of a prayer. It is a cathartic and purifying act. You are blessed, touched by the divine and made to partake of the sacred.
There is good reason why the seminal artists of earlier times kept the alaap short and switched to the easier pacing of the vilambit where the beat of the pakhawaj is your guide. They knew the limitations and fears of the majority of singers and instrumentalists. To plumb the depths, you must leave the safety of the shallows, the easy sentiment and the company of others. One’s own frailties, mediocrity, shortcomings and the fear of the abyss, one must dare them all.
There’s only one test for Sajani Bai today. Not so much a test for her as the hope of a lifeline for me. Will she cast a spell on me and draw me down into the wells of oblivion? Will she release me from the torment of this afternoon? Will she heal me? Will I be made whole again? She struck a deep, low, majestic note and held it for a long endless moment till it seemed to slip out of time, then almost imperceptibly shaded into another. She states the scheme of the raga in crystalline phraseology. Then she sets out on her own.
To speak of music is to speak of intangibles. To attempt to catch its essence in words is foolhardy and doomed. The images music conjures in my mind and on the screen between my eyeballs and eyelids are not of a coherent extended metaphor. They are dissonant and diverse but coalesce with a natural dynamic that has its own internal logic.
She lays out her palette, the range of colours she’ll be using. With measured strokes, both subtle and broad, she sketches in her themes and concerns though there is nothing sketchy about this. Her voice is still a rumble, brief glimpses of well-springs and fledgling currents that may or may not meet up. There’s a sylvan stretch, broad beams of slanting sunlight broken by a million leaves and bushes, which turn into a moody, brooding bottle-green forest. Mythical beasts prowl sinisterly in the jungle. Deep down, the waters are linking up. There’s a blinding vista of sky and V-formations of migratory birds in silent flight. A couple disengages and sinks down in a giddy glissando. Suddenly the voice is a full-fledged river, strong, wide but still unhurried. The water trips over dips and stones playfully, soon it’s accelerating and the rapids froth like hot wild horses. I open my eyes. Sajani Bai’s left hand is pressed against her left ear in search of an even purer note. The boneless fingers of her right hand undulate like fluid branches under water. Her eyes pass over my face unseeingly and withdraw into darkness. The piercing cry of a bird who’s lost its mate scars the air. My eyes close. A red’s on fire. I press my eyelids tight. The incandescent red trickles down my face. Her voice is leaping, speeding, rising high, ever so high, it arches upon itself like a curving wave and breaks in a trillion points. I release the pressure on my eyelids. Midnight blue is crisscrossed by jets of iridescent stardust. The lines sizzle and shift and race at breakneck velocities. They loop and link and skate and swing. Darting greens turn to raging sun flares to whistling purples to ruptured yellows. A white mist is coming in from the left corner of my eye. It rises swiftly. The underground river surfaces through it. It is in flood. I’m tossed and twisted, broken and bruised and reconfigured. My arms are as wide as the Gambhiree which I swallow entire.
Is it possible to make love to a disembodied voice?
I am washed ashore and am strangely at peace.
It is midnight when Sajani Bai winds up her concert. Leelawati is fast asleep with her head on my lap. I was not destined to keep the belt after all. Rajendra handed the purse of money to Sajani Bai. Adinathji picked up Leelawati and I walked over to Sajani Bai. I took off my belt and presented it to her. She touched my feet and said something. I had to bend to hear the words. ‘I sang for you today, Prince, just for you. If it will help you to forget, perhaps even cure you, I will sing again for you some other time. Don’t be alarmed, Maharaj Kumar, your face is not transparent, my mind is. You have the gift of genuine enjoyment. Don’t lose it.’
‘Two announcements. There are snacks and dinner downstairs in the shamiana, ladies and gentlemen. If you haven’t already had them, please do not insult our house, especially my mother, and refuse our hospitality. The other announcement will please you no end. There will be a surprise recital after an hour.’
I had not realized how hungry I was. Rajendra was right. The food was so good it fuelled my appetite further. Everybody was jovial and friendly and I was in great spirits. Rajendra had decided that Sajani Bai and I had a little delicate something going between us. Soon Bahadur had joined him and they did magnificent imitations of her voice, her ample bosom and at least fifty alternative versions of the indecent proposals Sajani Bai was supposed to have made to me. Each proposal was more outrageous and lewd than the previous one and almost everybody was doubled up. Without meaning to, we had formed a semicircle around the Shehzada and Rajendra. The only thing that worried me was that Bahadur was drinking steadily. He was looking for a refill when I tried to draw his attention to something else.
‘Aren’t you going to tell us what I said to Sajani Bai?’
Did I really believe they had been lubricious before? They were improvising wildly now but with such perfect timing, it was as if they had rehearsed their act for months. Where could the clandestine lovers meet? ‘The Victory Tower. On the very top floor. There will be no one there. The whole of Chittor will be at our feet and if we raise our hands, they’ll touch the sky. Well, mine will. Yours, I guess will come to my waist.’ There’s some problem about Sajani Bai squeezing into the entrance of the Tower. They resolve the quandary by making the lady edge in sideways. Not a very wise move. Madam is evenly distributed and is now lodged immovably at the entrance. A gang of prisoners is deployed to break down the wall to let the dear lady out. A chi
ld thinks that if the new central prop is removed the Tower will come down. His father smacks him. But the child is right. When Sajani Bai is finally able to make her exit, the great Tower begins to totter and wobble and comes crashing down. Fortunately the lovers escape unhurt.
‘Why didn’t I think of it?’ the Prince asks himself and his inamorata. ‘There is a solution to our problem. We’ll send the Minister for Home Affairs, none other than the stupendously voluminous Lakshman Simhaji, to war against our Rajput cousins and appropriate his bed. It alone will hold us both.’ ‘But Sire,’ Sajani Bai protests, ‘you and your cousins are the best of friends, you have recently even signed an eternal amity pact with them.’ ‘Little matter, I’m willing to sacrifice friend, foe and family for your sake, my Sajani.’ And so Lakshman Simhaji is dispatched instantly and unceremoniously. Finally, the two are alone and in bed. They are locked in a long, torrid embrace. Then something terrible happens. The bed breaks? You’ve got to be joking. It’s strong enough to hold two Sajanis. It’s just that Sajani Bai can hear the Prince but cannot locate him. Oh God, where could he have disappeared? She picks up her right arm and checks under it, then the left one: is he, the poor little darling, lost in her armpit? No sign of him. She picks up her petticoat.
It was at that delicate moment that the Queen Mother, my grandmother herself walked into the magic circle. She had a frown on her forehead and her lips were clenched tight. ‘Disgusting. Disgraceful. Is this how the younger generation entertains itself?’ Everybody freezes. No one dares look up. ‘Leaving the women out of the fun? What happens then, beta?’ She asks the Shehzada. ‘Does she find my Maharaj Kumar or not?’
It was time to go back to Deep Mahal.
We were all highly keyed up by now. There’s usually just one performer at Lakshman Simha’s Janmashtami party. What’s up today? Who, what, when, why, how? As bookie for the latter half of the evening, Rajendra, the shrewd so-and-so was raking it in. Jugglers, acrobats, performing hijras, bards, dancers, lion-tamers, wrestlers, you name it, the more unlikely the suggestion, the more people were willing to bet on it. And lo and behold, guess who turned up? In the right-hand corner here, ladies and gentlemen, what we have is none other than the seven hundred and odd pounder, the one and only Sajani Bai. There’s horror-stricken silence. Then everybody was crowding Rajendra Simha and yelling for his blood. I can’t wipe the smile off my face. The swine, the shameless rogue, what a ride he’s taken us all for. After all, he had merely said ‘surprise’. That didn’t rule out Sajani Bai.
But Sajani Bai had already begun her song. And suddenly there was absolute silence. It was about Dhola and Maru, our legendary star-crossed lovers. Maru has just seen Dhola for the first time and her friends are teasing her. We all know the folk song, we’ve heard it a million times but what Sajani Bai does with it is to give it her own twist, almost create it anew. We are just about to bask in her magnificent voice when there’s the sound of anklets and seven apsaras make their way through the sprawled and stunned menfolk. They start dancing. Catcalls, whistles, clapping, applause. Most of the girls are barely seventeen or eighteen, some are exquisite, others are shy and self-conscious, but every one of them is an apparition. Those of us who leave tomorrow morning, hell no, this very morning know that they are the stuff of wet dreams. We will ache and pine for them, both in our waking and sleeping hours. Oh God, to be young and lovely. I feel old. When the song comes to the refrain, all of us, the women’s section too, join in spontaneously and sing the chorus. It is impossible to sit still when a folk song from Rajasthan is being sung. We are all seasoned clappers and along with the pakhawaj, we give the beat. Song follows song and there’s a masti and khumar in the air. We are drunk and high with the songs, the women and the sheer joy of being alive.
They are all wearing chanderi ghagras and cholis of deep earth colours. Sheer chunnis cover their hair and are tucked in at the necks of the blouses. All are wearing silver jhumroos around their ankles. There’s one girl-woman here, the one in the dark snuff- coloured choli-ghagra who’s perhaps the shyest of them all. Is she the youngest? There’s no way of telling. What I or anybody else can tell for sure is that despite her bashfulness, she’s smitten with the Shehzada. She keeps looking down into the middle distance while stealing as many furtive glances at him as she can. The snuff of her clothes clashes provocatively with the peach of her complexion. No ordinary nautch girl, this. None of the other girls either.
The Shehzada has been imbibing steadily and has a beatific look on his face. He has, needless to say, noticed the girl’s inhibited – and hence all the more enticing – fascination with him. No explicit overture could be more persuasive or compelling.
‘What’s her name?’ Bahadur lurched a little unsteadily even as he sat in the namaaz position.
‘You are asking the wrong man, Prince. I’m just as ignorant as you are.’
‘Isn’t she something else?’
‘Who?’ I asked innocently.
‘Is there anybody else here but her?’
‘Seven of them, not to mention the love of my life, Sajani Bai.’
‘Yes sir, Sajani Bai’s the one for you,’ he laughed unsteadily. ‘That match, Your Highness, take my word for it, was made in heaven. But I say, would you happen to know who the girl in that, I don’t quite know how to describe the colour, in that lustrous brown, is?’
‘You mean the third girl from the left?’ I deliberately pointed to the wrong girl.
‘No, you fool, I said lustrous brown,’ he half-rose, stumbled, then stood up and directed his index finger waveringly. The girl was by now blushing furiously and looking at her big toe as if she had just discovered it. The blushing did her looks and face a world of good.
‘That’s not brown, lustrous or otherwise. It’s snuff.’
‘Do you think I give a damn whether it’s brown or snuff or violet for all I care. What is her name?’
‘Shhhh, softly Shehzada,’ I appealed to him, ‘come and sit down.’
‘Only if you will tell me her name.’
‘Please, Your Highness. Do come and sit with us.’ Everybody was enjoying his boisterousness. He had had that extra peg which makes people happy and repetitive. I thought it wise to get the Prince to bed now and signalled to Mangal to get a drink for him. He knew what I meant, but adding the shot of opium was going to be a little tricky with so many people wandering in and out. As luck would have it, Rajendra got one of his servants to fill the Prince’s glass.
‘Now you know who I’m talking about. What’s her name?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know, Shehzada.’
‘Don’t know the name of someone from your own house?’ He was not pleased with my answer.
‘Not mine, Prince, this is Lakshman Simhaji and Rajendra’s place.’
‘Oh, of course. Then I better ask Rajendra.’ He turned to Rajendra.
‘Sorry to disturb you, when you are having such a good time friend, that too in your own home, but would you be so kind as to tell me the name of the girl in the snuff-coloured dress?’
‘I don’t quite remember, Highness. It’s either Salma or Nikhat,’ Rajendra smiled and went back to the business of watching the girls dance.
‘Salma? Nikhat? Not a Hindu girl?’ Bahadur looked puzzled.
‘Why are you pursuing her so single-mindedly? Do you recognize her?’
‘Should I? Have I had my pleasure with her?
‘No, Sire, all the girls are virgins.’
‘Then why would I recognize her?’
For some reason my cousin found the question hilarious. ‘I don’t know, I thought you might have played with her when you were a child.’
‘Played with a Mewar girl, how’s that possible?’ The Shehzada was beginning to sound vexed. I was, I must confess, just as foxed as he was. ‘I’m afraid you are speaking in riddles, Rajendra Simha.’
‘She’s the daughter of the qazi of Ahmednagar. I imagined that you must have met her when you visited Ahmednagar as a child with yo
ur Father.’
‘Then what is she doing here?’
The singing had stopped. The girls were standing still, hugging each other. They looked frightened. There were drops of sweat on Salma or Nikhat’s upper lip. Her armpits were sweating with the exertion of dancing so long but she was shivering. Her doe-eyes darted all over the place. Though her hands held her companion’s arm tightly, she would have run all the way back to Ahmednagar if she could have got away from Deep Mahal. What was Rajendra up to? Did he know what he was saying? Why bring up Ahmednagar now? Then it dawned on me. I recalled his face when the Shehzada had told the story of the massacre of the Mewar forces and of Lakshman Simha’s debacle. Rajendra had planned today’s party with a single purpose in mind. He was going to have his vengeance by reminding Bahadur of the time we turned the tables on Gujarat, sacked Ahmednagar, destroyed their mosques, marauded their gold and silver and massacred thousands of their townspeople.
‘Rajendra, I urge you to come to your senses and stop talking nonsense.’
He ignored me.
‘Do you remember the time when the Mewar forces routed your Father’s armies and sacked Ahmednagar, Prince? It was a slaughter and the qazi fell too. But we are a chivalrous people. We brought the ladies and their daughters back with us and are now training them in a new profession. We hope they’ll give us pleasure, as they’ve done today and we’ll give them hefty recompense. We…’
He did not get around to finishing the sentence. Would that I had pulled out his tongue or kicked him in his face. That way at least my dear cousin Rajendra who took his father’s humiliation so much to heart would have fought by my side against Gujarat.
Bahadur leaned forward as if he was in pain. It was such a common old trick but I fell for it.
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