by Gita Mehta
Then my father sang the notes of the scale so I could hear him imitating the animals we had seen—the strutting of the peacock, the panic of a lost calf, the destructive antics of a goat, the sweeping flight of the heron, the nightingale nesting in a tree, the rearing of a horse, the power of an angry elephant—until the nature of the notes became second nature to me. He also sang the ragas in which each note predominated so that my uneducated ear became familiar with all the major ragas before I ever held in an instrument in my hands.
“There was no art until Shiva danced the Creation,” he said, explaining how melody was born. “Music lay asleep inside a motionless rhythm—deep as water, black as darkness, weightless as air. Then Shiva shook his drum. Everything started to tremble with the longing to exist. The universe erupted into being as Shiva danced. The six mighty ragas, the pillars of all music, were born from the expressions on Shiva’s face, and through their vibrations the universe was brought into existence.
“The melodies of these six ragas sustain the harmonies of living things. When they fuse together they become the beat of Shiva’s drum that brings the universe to destruction. But they are all male. And music can never be still, it can never be without desire. Life must create more life or become death. So each of the six ragas was given six wives, six raginis to teach them love. Their children are the putras, and in this way music lives and multiplies.”
Then my father said I must see the emotions through which ragas and raginis communicated with each other. “Each raga is related to a particular season, a time of day, an emotion. But emotion is the key that unlocks a raga’s soul.”
So, every day for a month, we went together to the dance academy to study Shiva’s dance of Creation. I watched girls my age struggle to convey emotions that they had never known but that were the basic moods of dance: Laughter, Wonder, Heroism, Anger, Grief, Pity, Love, Fear, Tranquility.
Sometimes I laughed at their inability to put sufficient gravity into their moods, and my father was displeased.
“Don’t treat the arts so lightly. They are Shiva’s gifts to mankind. If you choose to be a musician, you enter into a pact with Shiva himself. Remember, every note you play sends new music into the universe. You can never reclaim it.”
I thought my father was speaking to himself because I did not understand his meaning. But at last I was able to ask the question that had always been in my mind. “And where does all that music go?”
“It returns to the sound that is so all-encompassing it is silent, the sound we call the secret of the Gandharva Veda.”
“Have you ever heard it?”
“No, but every day I listen for it when I play. You must listen for it too. The Vedas say that by playing the veena with the correct rhythm, keeping its notes and its character intact, a man can hear that sound and attain salvation.”
Then my father took me to the small street of painters that stretched at one side of the town temple to watch the artists grinding their colors with stones. He was always searching for ways to make me understand the link between my music and the world, and while I peered over the artists’ shoulders he taught me which ragas they would be painting from the small pots of colors they were placing before their paper—sa was black, re was tawny, ga was gold, ma white, pa yellow, dha indigo, ni green.
That portrait of a man with black skin carrying in his hand a sharp-edged sword to slash through the clouds like lightning was Megh, the raga of rain. That man with flames around his head, riding a savage elephant to show fire’s power, was Deepak, the raga of heat. That girl fanning herself with a peacock’s feather as she drank from a goblet was Vaulika; that maiden lying in front of a hut on the grass with a garland in her hands was Desi; that girl talking to her deer as she took them home at evening was Todi.
By the time six months were over I could recite the moods that each raga created and its seasons, and identify them in the pictures I saw being painted in the street.
Still, an entire year passed before my father finally allowed me to take the veena across my knees.
I was so small the instrument stretched beyond both sides of my body and my crossed legs didn’t even touch the arm. My father instructed me to place both hands on the strings without making a sound.
“Always treat your instrument with humility. After all, what is a raga? Five notes, seven. If you add some halftones, maybe twelve. It is only a skeleton of melody. And the veena is only two gourds attached by a piece of wood and a handful of wires. But when they are united, and you create a composition from their union, it must speak the language of the soul. You see, a raga has its own soul. Without its soul, its rasa, a raga is only a dead thing.”
He warned me I must respect each note of music so that I could give it life. “Once there was a great musician who boasted all the time that he could play better than anyone else. One day the notes of the scale turned into seven nymphs and walked past as he was playing. Suddenly one nymph fell to the ground, dead. The musician was playing his instrument so violently that he strangled the note in his strings. He murdered the nymph with his pride.”
I started crying, fearing my father would somehow blame me for the nymph’s death. He only smiled at my distress and continued his story. “As the musician was staring in horror at the dead woman in front of him, a holy man passed by and asked if he could borrow the instrument. He played on it so sweetly he brought the notenymph back to life. That is how you must try to play.”
And then at last my father allowed me to pluck the primary scale from the strings of my veena. For half an hour he listened to me play as closely as if he were listening to a great musician before stopping me. “The first sound of creation was Om. Each vibration of Om created new sounds that led to the primary scale. Think of these seven notes as the Om of music. If you cannot play them correctly you will never be able to master a raga.”
I was only a child but my father wanted me to understand that music was the mathematics by which the universe could be comprehended. Morning after morning, month after month he made me play the sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni over and over again, one hand moving up and down the frets, the other plucking at the veena’s strings, until my fingers bled. He ignored my tears and forced me to continue practicing until the cushions of my fingertips developed calluses. But still he was not satisfied with the clarity of my notes.
If my mother had been more sympathetic I would have asked her then to end my music lessons. Unfortunately, my mother seldom spoke to me. My ugliness upset her. When other children stared at me, sniggering at my ugliness, my mother’s eyes filled with tears but she never comforted me or told me they were wrong.
Shamed by mother’s tears, I hid in the bathroom, examining myself in the mirror to see if my face was losing any of its coarseness. Each time I looked I saw only two features in the mushy flesh, this nose growing bigger as if trying to join this chin that drives forward like a fighter’s, tempting an opponent’s attack.
My father was oblivious to my ugliness. After listening to me practice on my veena he would play himself, making me learn the scales that formed the ragas. For two years these skeletons of melody were all I learned. My father would play some notes and ask me what he was playing. When I identified the raga he would recite a sacred saying peculiar it.
“A goddess presides over each of the ragas. If you truly meditate on a raga’s sacred teaching, its goddess will give you mastery over its melodies.”
I stared at him resentfully as he spoke, hating his nose and chin because they were exaggerated so cruelly on my own face. He was not a handsome man, but at least his features were in proportion to his face, and his naturally austere expression lent them distinction, I wanted him to give me a sacred saying, a goddess who would grant me beauty.
Perhaps I did my father an injustice. Through music he tried to free me of my own image so I could love beauty wherever it was to be found, even if it was not present in my mirror.
Then one day when I was eleven years old, my father gave me a picture
of a man with matted hair and snakes clasping his forehead above his three eyes.
“This is the raga you will learn. The Bhairav. Bhairav is another name for Shiva, meaning the Fire of Time.”
My hands trembled as I held the picture of the god, his body smeared with ashes, a drum and a trident in his hands. I had been under my father’s instruction for five years by now. At last my father felt I was capable of commencing the performance of a raga.
At that very moment my mother began to sit outside the music room as a jailer waits for a prisoner. I was not gifted enough for my mother to feel secure about my future. She had lived so long with genius that she could recognize it like a bazaar fruit seller recognizes a fine mango from a merely good one even though he has not grown it, and she believed that a woman without genius could be protected only by a husband in a harsh world designed for men.
When I finished my music lesson she forced me to endure teas with her friends and their sons. I could see the boys recoiling from my ugliness, but my mother’s resolve to see me safely married only hardened as, week after week, the teas progressed and no offers were made for my hand.
How can I describe my anguish in the years that followed, as I struggled to please my father inside the music room, and then outside the music room consoled my mother for my ugliness.
On one side was my father’s invitation to wander freely in the fields of music, where even a child like myself could fall on cushions of melody, run across bridges of notes, swing on the stretch of the veena’s strings, make garlands of different-colored notes to place before the goddesses of the ragas. But outside the room I saw my mother’s face creased with worry, my ugliness reflected in her eyes.
By now my body was beginning to show its maturity, changes that I could not overlook if only because the weight of the veena was too much against my budding breasts. With these changes in my physique had come a change in my emotional state. My senses felt everything too strongly. I no longer swam with the freedom of a dolphin through the caverns of my father’s music. I was too preoccupied with my own ugliness and my mother’s despair, my uncertain future looming before me as mysterious as the changes of my body.
Suddenly my father decided he no longer wanted to teach me. “You make too much music. A raga is not composed of notes. It is composed of the silence between the notes.”
Once I would have wept openly at my father’s words. Now I lowered my eyes so that he would not see my great shame. My pain attracted my father’s attention. Or perhaps it was my silence that made him relent.
“I will continue to teach you. But on one condition. They say the greatest gift a man can give is the gift of a daughter in marriage. If you insist on studying under me, you must be prepared to be a bride.”
It seemed to me that I could not escape the specter of marriage. Knowing no man would want me as a wife, I begged him to continue my musical education.
“Think carefully before you say yes,” my father warned. “Remember, if I teach you the raginis I will be giving you as wife to my gods, the gods of music. Such a contract cannot be broken. It will be a marriage sealed by Shiva himself.”
I humbly assured him I understood, and my father continued my education.
Now my father’s lessons lifted me into another universe.
He changed my instrument from the veena to the more pliant sitar, hearing in that softer instrument my yearning for beauty as he taught me the grace notes that distinguish the great musician from a student.
“Imagine a raga as a riverbed. The grace notes are the water of the river. It is written in the Raga-vivodha that a raga without grace notes is like a night without moonlight, a river without water, a creeper without flowers, a woman without a garment.”
He taught me the subtleties of tenderness, how to be supple before gravity, how to gentle anger, how to seduce and sigh and caress through my music.
“You must think of yourself as water washing over stone, shaping it with the relentless touch of your love. Think of yourself as silk that disguises its strength in softness. The force of your desire, the heat of your longing must melt the rigidity of the raga.”
My sensibilities became so refined under my father’s tutelage that when he recited to me the contemplations of differing raginis, I could immediately visualize them.
“Here is the contemplation for Lilavati. She is of sixteen summers, she wears ropes of pearls, she carries a lotus, and she speaks of love to her confidantes while she waits for her beloved.
“The lilting Madhu-madhavi has a golden complexion and is of incomparable beauty. She is seated laughing with her lover on a swing at springtime.
“The yearning Shyam-Gujari stands in a moonlit garden telling a peacock of her longing for her lover.
“Here is the contemplation of Bhairavi. The appointed hour of her tryst has passed and her lover has not appeared. She tears off her jewels and the flowers in her hair. She smears her body with ashes, grieving for the loss of her beloved.
“Here is the contemplation of Barari. Her robes are white, her hair is like monsoon clouds, her waist is narrow, her navel deep as a lake, her fragrance as sweet as a lotus. Butterflies follow her as she runs to her beloved.”
Just think what my study did to me, an adolescent girl who knew the stain of her ugliness would prevent any man from desiring her, and yet learning only how to express longing.
But I cannot say that mine was an unhappy life. I had already experienced one miracle when my father undertook my musical education. Now the second miracle happened.
It was evening, the time when my father played to the gods. None of us could disturb him but sometimes I passed near the room to listen.
This evening I stopped to look through the doorway of his music room, never having heard my father play this way before. To my surprise I saw a young man sitting below my father’s platform playing the veena. He was dressed as a supplicant, bare-footed, his torso naked except for the instrument resting against his bare shoulder. I stared in wonder at his slanting eyes, at his black hair falling softly to the strong line of his neck, at the muscled arm as his fingers moved across the frets of his instrument. He was so beautiful I shut my eyes against his power, thinking I had imagined him in my long training in desire. When I opened my eyes I still saw him, and it was as if ten thousand honeybees had stung my heart at once.
I don’t know how long I stood there, but finally the young man laid his instrument at my father’s feet.
“Will you accept me as a student?” he asked humbly.
My father did not bother to disguise his impatience. “Everyone knows I have never taken a pupil, except for my daughter.”
“Then let me live here, so I can listen to you play. I will serve your food or heat the water for your bath. I will perform the most menial tasks if only you permit me to be near you.”
“Are you so willing to do anything to be taught by me?”
“The more rigorous your terms, the happier I will be to accept them.”
“Music is not allied to pain. You will not be a better musician if you suffer more than other men.”
“Just tell me what you require of me and I will do it.”
“If I teach you, will you take my daughter as your wife?”
“Is that all? Willingly.”
My father lifted his hand to beckon me into the room, and the stranger turned. I saw the shock on the stranger’s face, as if he could not believe my father could sire such ugliness.
At that moment I wished my father dead. He did not see the stranger’s disbelief, and if he had my father would not have cared. Genius stands at a strange angle to the world of humans, careless of its own cruelty.
And what refinement of cruelty it was. Day after day my ugliness faced the stranger’s beauty as my father taught us.
Locked in my hatred of my father, I could not bring to my instrument that longing which I had perfected when there was no one there.
My awkward playing made the stranger’s music mor
e unforgiving, so that the notes of his raga had an iron hardness that forbid approach.
My father was enraged at his insensitivity. “The ragas are the architecture of emotion. Have you never known weakness or fear? Are you so stupid?”
I wept within myself for the stranger’s pain at my father’s harsh criticisms. But my father was relentless. “Any pedant can learn a raga’s melody. It is only a matter of practice. Music goes beyond technique. The Boddhistava broke every string of the veena, one by one, and still the raga continued, vibrating in the waters of human emotion.”
The stranger did not yet know his own genius, only his talent and his ambition, and my father eroded that ambition with ruthless skill.
“Your tastes are too cheap to play the great ragas. You are content to create mere pleasure. Didn’t your last teacher teach you the Upanishads:
“ ‘The better is one thing, the pleasant another.
Both aims may bind a man.
But the wise man chooses the better over the pleasant’?”
Then my father turned to me, his fury at my incompetence as great as his anger at the stranger’s lack of imagination.
“What are the two emotions that govern the two sexes in all music?”
“The heroic for the man. The erotic for the woman,” I whispered, fearful of drawing the stranger’s eyes to my face.
My father raised his hands in the air in front of him as if beseeching the gods. “What am I to do with these lumps of clay? From the outside they look like a man and a woman. Why are they not alive?”
We were betrothed, my father’s two students. And yet we never spoke to each other except in stilted greetings and farewells.
My father spoke for both of us, haranguing us to become more than we were, not allowing us to hide our shame from him or from each other.
Once he took the veena from the stranger’s shoulder when he was again displeased by the boy’s playing. “Do you know what this instrument is? Look at the curve of its neck. Its breasts, its slender arm. This is the expression of Shiva’s love. Can’t you imagine a woman? Or love?”