by Gita Mehta
An engine sounded in the distance as she sank slowly to the ground, leaning forward to look into the rapid current flowing below the cliff. I realized the police jeep was on its way to the bungalow and I was unsure what to do next. I watched the old lady anxiously, wondering if I should go to her assistance, but to my relief she pulled herself to her feet and made her way slowly up the road to Rudra.
The roar of the jeep’s engine was much closer. I unlocked the cupboard and unwrapped the rifles, lining them up in a row on the floor behind my desk. Then I stacked the cartridges next to the guns and sat down behind my desk to wait for the police.
A chain rattled as Mr. Chagla secured his bicycle to the fence outside the rest house. A moment later he entered my office, a mournful expression pulling his chubby features downward. “What a sad occurrence, sir. Simply a tragedy.”
“Let’s at least hear what the police have to say, Chagla.”
“Police! What is the use of police now, sir?” he asked in distress. “I met our visitor on the road. She’s going home because her daughter is dead.”
“Nonsense, Chagla. The daughter was here, in my office, only half an hour ago.”
“It can’t be, sir. The old lady said her daughter drowned escaping recapture.”
The police jeep braked to a halt at our gates. “Keep an armed guard at the gates!” the sergeant shouted to his men as he ran across the garden. “Someone round up the staff and ask them if any strangers have been seen in the vicinity.”
“What’s happening, sir? Why are the police—”
“Quickly, Chagla,” I interrupted. “Tell me what the old lady told you before the police join us.”
Mr. Chagla paced my office in agitation, moving from window to window to watch the policemen. “She said she saw her daughter drowning, sir. With her own eyes. Can you believe such a tragedy? These police, sir—”
“Did the old lady say anything else?” I urged.
He turned to me in exasperation. “Only that she was happy her daughter had died in the Narmada because she would be purified of all her sins. But why are the police . . . ”
Suddenly he saw the rifles on the floor behind my chair. He backed away in bewilderment. “What are you doing with these many weapons, sir?”
Before I could answer the door was flung open. The police inspector strode into my office, calling over his shoulder to the constable following him, “I want an inventory of the arms. Serial numbers, types of cartridge, any signs if they were stolen from an army depot.”
He pulled out a notebook and sat down, facing me across my desk. “Now, sahib, start from the beginning. Tell me everything you know.”
12
Sometimes when I think I am becoming too set in my ways I leave the familiar surroundings of my bungalow and spend a day in the temple town of Mahadeo.
I usually arrive in Mahadeo in the afternoon and go straight to the bazaars sprawling behind the stone temples overlooking the river.
When I was a bureaucrat I had no reason to enter a bazaar, since my wife saw to our household requirements and my own infrequent shopping expeditions only took me to air-conditioned stores. Now, as I walk through the streets observing the pleasure on the faces of bargaining customers and the cynicism of the shopkeepers, I am reminded how circumscribed my life has been.
I often lose my way while wandering through the warren of shops built so close together they appear to be almost a single building with balconied bridges crossing the narrow gaps above a man’s head. At this hour the shopkeepers are opening their establishments for the evening, and their only customers are farmers’ wives choosing glass bangles for their daughters or haggling over the price of a bar of soap with a film star’s face on the wrapping.
But at dusk the bazaar takes on the appearance of a fair as Mahadeo’s residents arrive to make their purchases. Strings of colored electric lights flicker from the overhead balconies. Children hold clouds of spun sugar to their mouths. Hawkers shout, shaven-headed priests push their way toward the temples on the riverbank, housewives argue, women squeeze wet henna in elaborate patterns onto the hands of giggling schoolgirls, young men slip furtively into shops selling country liquor, white-robed pilgrims hurry to complete their purchases for the evening devotions.
For generations the traders of Mahadeo have lived off the Narmada pilgrimage, measuring piety by gullibility, and it amuses me to watch them sitting cross-legged in shops lit by kerosene lanterns, providing the pilgrims with everything they need and convincing them to buy much they do not need: another box of the most expensive incense, more fragments of saffron-colored cloth, the most expensive of the auspicious gems. Surely, at least a dozen clay lamps to float on the river?
My fascination with the energies exploding inside the bazaar always delays me, and it is usually late by the time I reach the stone steps stretching the length of the thirty temples crowded one against the other on the riverbank.
These shallow steps, maybe twenty of them, lead from the forecourts of the temples down to the water and contain, like the bazaar, a whole world of human activity. Beggars and holy men. Priests instructing the devout on how to make their obeisance to the river. Horoscope readers and palmists. Vendors selling baskets of marigolds to be offered to the idols, or glass paintings of the gods as souvenirs. Women, after their ritual baths, drying their saris on stone steps still warm from the day’s heat. Pilgrims pouring oil into clay lamps to float on the river.
Above the steps the temples rise like a city, their forecourts crowded with families entering the sculpted stone arches to make their offerings to the idols, then ringing the temple bells when they reemerge, holding their children up to strike the clappers. While the clanging still resonates in the dark, the families descend to place sweets in front of the beggars and holy men sitting on the steps.
The diversity of the people provides me with a constant source of interest and I often fall into conversation with the pilgrims. Across the river the solitary lights of my bungalow shine like a lighthouse in the blackness of the jungles, inviting me to return and consider what I have learned.
I have found when I am talking to some stranger on these steps I discover things about the river that I never knew before.
For instance, once I was sitting behind a woman who was examining the lurid glass paintings of the gods displayed on a cloth before her while the vendor cajoled her to buy one.
I could not see her face, just the thick hair wound at the back of her slender neck and her elegant fingers holding each painting to the light. I was imagining the beauty of her face, when a child shoved her from behind and the picture dropped from her hand. She reached into her bag to pay for the shattered fragments. The irate seller, still shouting at the child, moved on to another customer.
Seeing the woman stoop to collect the glass fragments before some passerby cut his foot, I went to help her. She turned to thank me and I gasped, astonished that she should be so ugly when I had imagined her so beautiful. A large nose tilted across her almost masculine face to overshadow the thin lips lost in a chin that curved upward like a handle.
“People are always alarmed the first time they see me,” she said gently as she took the fragment from my hand.
I could have wept at my own cruelty. “No, no. It was not that at all. I cut my hand with a glass splinter.”
“Let me see.” She held my hand to the light as she had done the paintings. “There is no cut.”
In silence we continued to collect the glass fragments. When we had gathered them all, we put them into a newspaper blowing down the stairs. To my surprise she extracted a piece of glass from the newspaper and sat down on the step to study it. I sat down next to her. She handed the shard to me. It was a crude painting of a woman’s torso, the breasts painted in bright pink on an aquamarine background.
She seemed not to notice the vulgarity of the painting. “Can’t you see? It’s a picture of Shiva’s consort, the Goddess Parvati, who performed all those great penances until S
hiva returned her love. Don’t you think it is only proper that such great love should give birth to music?”
I must have looked perplexed because she said shyly, “Musicians believe that one morning after Shiva had made love to the Goddess all night—and a night in the lives of the gods is thirty thousand years of human time—Shiva rose from his bed and saw the Goddess still asleep. Her breasts were like perfect globes and her slender arm rested across them, her fragile bangles sliding up and down with each breath. Shiva was moved to such tenderness by the sight that he created an instrument to immortalize his wife’s immortal beauty—the first instrument of music, the veena.
“Look, the two globes that provide the veena’s resonance are the breasts of Parvati. The neck of the veena is her slender arm, the frets of the veena her glass bangles, and the music of the veena the expression of Shiva’s love.”
I studied the painted torso but could find no trace of beauty in it. She seemed to understand because she said, “Perhaps only genius can see beauty in what appears ugly. My father can. And he is called a genius.”
She lapsed into silence. Below us two pilgrims were standing waist high in the dark river, cupping water in their hands then letting it fall in a stream through their fingers as they chanted, “Om. Om. Om.”
The woman pointed at them. “My father recites that every morning before he plays his veena. First he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Then, when I think his lungs must burst if he does not exhale, he intones Om, his eyes closed, his body motionless so that only the vibration of his deep voice issues through his lips.
“As I child I thought I could see things in the room shaking with the vibration, although when I looked at them nothing moved. But sometimes I could hear the merest note from a string on his veena, a sound so fragile it disappeared into the air before I could hold it in my memory. Then he would open his eyes and say,
“ ‘Om is the three worlds.
Om is the three fires.
Om is the three gods.
Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva.’”
She smiled at me and we continued to listen to the bathers chanting. Suddenly she added, “It sounds like one note. But actually it is three and a half sounds. Can you hear them?”
I listened closely. All I heard was the single note being expelled by the bathers into the night.
“No, listen. It is created by the three separate actions of your body—when you open your lips, when you release your breath, when you close your lips. Try it.”
Still embarrassed by my own rudeness when I had first seen her face, I obediently opened my mouth and rounded my lips. I was astonished by the force with which the Om issued from my mouth. As she listened to me she recited,
“The first sound of Om is the manifest world.
The sound of waking consciousness.
The sound of gross experience.”
My lips were closed and I could feel the Om vibrating through my nostrils as she recited,
“The second sound of Om is the unmanifest world.
The sound of dreaming consciousness.
The sound of subtle experience.”
Now I felt my lungs bursting as I struggled to elongate the note beyond her recitation.
“The third sound of Om is the nonmanifest world.
The sound of dreamless sleep.
The sound of potential experience.”
There was no breath left in my lungs but I still felt my lips vibrating as I took a deep breath while she recited,
“The half-syllable of Om is silence.
The sound of the unmanifest world.
It is the ultimate goal
The incomparable target.”
She laughed when she saw me gasping for breath, and I thought she was trying to make a fool of me to avenge herself on my earlier tactlessness. Annoyed by her experiment, I asked crossly, “Why are you in Mahadeo, anyway?”
“I am on a pilgrimage.”
“You are not dressed as a pilgrim.”
“Oh, I am not making a religious pilgrimage. This is part of my musical education.”
“I thought musicians were supposed to practice, not walk around a river.”
“Most musicians do not have the misfortune of having a genius for a teacher.”
“And I suppose you are absolutely certain your teacher is a genius?”
“Oh, yes. He is the finest veena player in the world. Our house is always crowded with famous musicians, begging to be my father’s students. But he has only ever shared his knowledge twice. With myself . . .”
She fell silent and I watched her wrap the glass fragment in newspaper and place it carefully in her bag.
“And the other?” I asked, unable to restrain myself.
Her large eyes seemed to melt into an inner darkness as she observed sadly, “The other is the reason for my presence here.”
Intrigued, I asked her to explain her pilgrimage.
She shook her head. “It would make no sense unless you knew about my father.”
“Then tell me about him.”
13
The Musician’s Story
It is hard to be the child of genius.
Even when I was very small, not yet three years old, I was aware that my father dwelt in some other sphere as if he had struck a bargain with God that took him outside human boundaries.
No one stopped me when I lay on the floor outside his music room because I never made a sound as his fingers moved across the frets of his veena forming shapes in the air, a whole architecture of sound that I could walk through and around, so substantial when I listened that I believed it would last for a thousand years.
I always wondered as a child, where did such beauty go? Which audience of spirits sat waiting for the sounds to rearrange themselves into arches, vaults, balconies, spires, domes that they could inhabit? But I could not ask my father. He was surrounded by musicians, their silent applause flowing around him as impassable as deep water as they listened to his genius taking him toward some unknown dimension on the ladder of music that he was constructing so painstakingly with his veena.
Whenever I tried to approach my father, that sea of adulation closed like water over my head before I was able to reach the smiling figure glancing at me with indifferent interest as if I were a pi-dog puppy who had wandered into his music room. I don’t think it could be said of my father that he was sensitive to the presence of other human beings unless they intruded on his music, so he never noticed me. But he noticed my despair.
You see, despair is an emotion, and the emotions were like shoals of brilliant fish swimming through his melodies. Or colored gases floating through the ether in which his music dwelt.
To the entire household’s astonishment, when I was six years old my father, who had never accepted a student from all the great musicians who had begged to sit at his feet, stretched out his hand, making a bridge for me to cross the gulf of praise that separated us, and offered to teach me music.
My first music lesson extended for several months. In all that time I was not permitted to touch an instrument. I was not even permitted to sing the seven notes of the scale: the sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni that are the do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti of western music.
Instead my father made me sit next to him in the evenings as the birds were alighting on the trees.
“Listen,” he said in a voice so hushed it was as if he was praying. “Listen to the birds singing. Do you hear the half notes and microtones pouring from their throats? If I practiced for ten lifetimes I could not reproduce that careless waterfall of sound and sshh . . . listen closely.”
I tried to imitate him, bending forward in my chair. “Hear? How that song ended on a single note when the bird settled into the tree? The greatest ragas must end like that, leaving just one note’s vibrations on the air.”
I nodded in enthusiasm, hoping to please him, but he did not see me. “Do you know why birds sing at dawn and at sunset? Because of the changing light. Their songs are a spontaneou
s response to the beauty of the world. That is truly music.”
Then he told me that he would die happy if he were able to create such music five or ten times in a whole lifetime.
“Men are fools,” my father said as we walked in the jungles behind our house. “They think only humans respond to beauty. But a feeding deer will drop its food to listen to music, and a king cobra sway its hood in pleasure. Listen. Do you hear that peacock’s cry? It is the first note of the scale. Sa.”
Standing under the trees we waited to hear the peacocks cry again, and when they did my father’s voice echoed them and the peacocks fell silent, listening.
It seemed to me that we were wandering only for pleasure in the fields around our house or in the jungles. I did not realize my father was teaching me the seven notes of the scale as described in the classic texts.
But at sunset we waited until the cowherds were driving their cattle back to their villages and my father said, “Can you hear that calf calling its mother? It is the note—re.”
We watched my mother throwing vegetable peelings to the goats in our back field. “Hear the goats? If you sing ga three times, very quickly, it is the bleating of a goat.”
We waded into the paddy fields behind the herons. “Ma, the cry of the heron.”
At night, “Pa, the song of the nightingale.”
In the bazaar streets as we followed the horse carriages, “Dha— the neighing of a horse.”
And when the circus came to town, my father was excited at the opportunity of teaching me the last note of the scale. “Can you hear that ni—when the elephant trumpets?”