by Manil Suri
It was Paji’s missives, however, that made me the most uncomfortable. The same precise handwriting, the cursive letters so neatly formed, the envelopes all white and creamy, not hinting at the dangers they could be concealing. Most of them turned out to be quite benign. In one, he simply asked after the new radiogram and fridge he had bought as promised. In another, he sent me the certificates I would need for college admission the following year. But soon to come was a letter from Paji which once more would have a profound effect on our lives.
chapter thirteen
DEV BEGAN HIS EFFORTS TO BREAK INTO SINGING FOR FILMS AS SOON AS we got to Bombay. He came armed with two pages of contacts’ addresses, compiled from musician friends in Delhi, and methodically started going down the list. None of these contacts had phones, and the residences were often in the outer, less developed suburbs like Malad and Borivili, so Dev had to take long train rides to get to them. Even when it became apparent that the purported connections to the film industry were quite nebulous, Dev persevered, determined to leave no name uninvestigated in his quest.
His search eventually led him to a squat green building only a few streets away, wedged between the Tardeo Medical Clinic and the distributor for A-1 potato chips. Famous Studios was where the songs and background score for many movies were recorded. A friend introduced him to the owner, who allowed Dev to spend his days in the lobby. But despite daily sightings of music directors like Jaikishan and S. D. Burman, and even the Mangeshkar sisters, fast becoming the empresses of the singing world, Dev remained undiscovered. “So close, and I didn’t know how to approach them,” he lamented to me in the evenings.
The only people who spoke to him were the musicians—maestros of the traditional tabla and sitar, but also percussionists and guitar players, who with audiences’ westernizing tastes were increasingly in demand. Sometimes they dropped by our flat after a recording. Bottles of fluorescent fruit-flavored liquor invariably materialized on these occasions, and I hid in the bedroom as the congregation got rowdier. Once the alcohol ran out, they staggered back towards the recording studio, to the speakeasy called “Auntie’s Place” in the alley next to the chip factory. Dev returned so intoxicated that I always wondered how he managed to find his way back home.
By September, more than half the money with which we had arrived was gone. Underneath Dev’s optimism I noticed a jittery desperation begin to form. His musician friends stopped coming around—he spent long evenings with them at Auntie’s instead. He knew his studio days were numbered, without a job we would not be able to go on.
That was when the letter from Paji arrived. He had addressed it, for the first time, to both of us—Dev’s name before mine. The contents were brief. One of the men in Paji’s qawwali circle was a good friend of Nawab Mohammed, the music director—the same one for whom a decade ago, Saigal had sung some of his best work. If Dev wanted, Paji could help arrange an appointment with him.
Dev folded up the letter and inserted it back into its envelope carefully. “Years from now, I want to be able to look back and read this letter again,” he said, touching it to his forehead as if it were something holy. He placed it among his prayer things, between the statue of Sai Baba and the picture of Lakshmi. “Your father never had a son, but I feel he has adopted me.”
NAWAB MOHAMMED LIVED in Bandra—not in the area which film stars had recently begun eyeing for their bungalows, but in the older, less trendy part of Pali Hill towards the church. Perhaps this reflected the fact that his heyday had passed—the golden period when producers lined up on the street in their Impalas to sign him up, when Saigal himself coronated him “the nawab of music directors,” a title Mohammed soon incorporated into his professional name. Long after the movies themselves had been forgotten, and Mohammed’s star had embarked on its irreversible decline, the songs he had composed for Saigal still scintillated over the airwaves, with a frequency that augured immortality. His name adorned a movie only once a year or two now, but it was still a name well recognized—the taxi driver at Bandra station knew exactly which house to take us to at its mention.
The evening before, I had accompanied Dev to the Babulnath temple to pray for his success. Chowpatty was just down the road, so we went there afterwards. “It’s finally going to happen,” Dev said, as we walked along the shore. “I can feel it in the air, feel it in myself.”
I stared at the serpentine contours marking the degrees of dampness in the sand. Crusts of foam swirled around our feet.
“Don’t think I don’t realize what a difficult journey it’s been. I’ll never forget the sacrifice you made—what Paji asked, what you agreed to give up for me.”
I looked up, astounded. Could I make Dev wilt by staring him in the eye? But he was done with the past—it was the future at which he was now gazing. “Can you make out that beige building—there, in the middle of Marine Drive? I think it’s called Keval Mahal. Right on the top floor—that’s where we’ll buy our flat.”
After dinner, though, Dev’s assurance began to crumble. “What if I can’t do it?” he said, his face drained of blood, a tremor in his neck. “What if the words get stuck? It’s been a year since I’ve competed, and it’s never meant so much.”
It occurred to me that I could demolish his confidence completely if I wanted. Here was an opportunity to convince Dev his pursuit was doomed, the city a waste of time. A chance to exploit his vulnerability and avenge my “sacrifice.” But it was only numbness I found searching inside myself, not an appetite for revenge. In any case, Bombay was where all our prospects lay now—there was no advantage in precipitating a return to Delhi. The only practical course of action was to build Dev’s spirit back up that night.
“You have the exact voice he needs to start crafting hits again after all these years. You’ll sing so well tomorrow that he’ll think Saigal himself has come back to life.”
Nawab Mohammed’s house was replete with all the trappings of wealth, or at least the ones used to depict it in Hindi films. Chandeliers glittered like ice sculptures from the ceiling, a double-banistered marble staircase swept majestically to an upper level, plush white rugs vied with extravagant Kashmiri carpets to adorn the floor, and on one wall hung an oil portrait of Mohammed posing heroically with his foot on the head of a dead tiger, as if he really was the nawab of some princely state. After waiting an appropriate amount of time for us to be impressed by our surroundings, a servant led us to a side room, where the Nawab reclined against a row of bolsters, sampling kebabs from a selection on a plate.
“I’m so glad you brought your wife along,” he told Dev as we sat against the bolsters along the facing wall. “Sawhney sahib himself made another trunk call to me last night from Delhi. I understand you want to sing.”
We sipped the rose sherbet the servant brought us, and took polite pieces of kebab from the plate at Mohammed’s urging. His body seemed puffy, and his face had a pallor to it, as if he was not getting out into sunlight enough. Near his foot was a harmonium and, in case the carpets and kebabs and tiger were not sufficient to underscore his Nawab title, a jewel-encrusted hookah.
“Such an amazing talent, to be able to bring forth beauty from one’s throat. And yet so rare to see it done well. I would have become a singer, believe me, had I half a voice. But I suppose people would say I’ve done my share to propitiate the gods of music.” He chuckled softly, as if agreeing with himself. Abruptly, he raised his head to look straight at Dev. “So sing. Let me hear this Delhi voice with which you’d like to intoxicate our city.”
I thought Dev would break into “Light the Fire,” but he surprised me. He sang “When the Heart Only Has Broken,” one of Saigal’s last songs. It was a particularly soulful rendition—for an instant, all that had happened over the past year was left behind as I allowed myself to be swept away by the emotion in his voice. Could I have misjudged him, I wondered, could I have failed to understand this person I was living with? To recognize the sadness that must imbue his heart, to appreciate the
pain that he, too, must be steeping in? I noticed that even the servant had padded back silently, and was listening from the doorway. Through it all, Nawab Mohammed leaned back with his eyes closed, his ring-studded fingers strumming through the air, as if plucking the strings of invisible instruments.
He seemed to enjoy the song so much that I thought he’d insist Dev perform his entire repertoire. But Dev had scarcely commenced the medley he had prepared when the Nawab opened his eyes and held up his hand. “Are they all Saigal songs?” he asked, with the air of a doctor convinced of a diagnosis, inquiring about lesser symptoms for form’s sake. “Let’s hear them some other time then.
“Do you know next year, it’ll be a full decade since Saigal passed away? January 18, 1947—that’s the day his drinking finally caught up with him. Even before his ashes were cool, people started saying the Nawab was finished without him. ‘He’ll never find anyone, poor man, who can sing like Saigal.’ But that wasn’t true. Everyone sang like Kundan Lal after his death, everyone wanted to be the next Saigal. Just listen to the first few songs recorded by Mukesh.
“But it’s not what the listening public wanted. No, people were tired of melancholy, they were sated with pain. They wanted to laugh now, laugh and love and live in this new country. It was not as if sadness had gone out of style—it just had to be sadness of a happier, more uplifting kind. Mukesh was shrewd enough to understand this—he switched in the first year itself. Rafi was even smarter—he never even tried going the Saigal way—his sadness was of the mendable type—it came from the heart, never the soul. And the public loved it—these citizens of the new republic, these free, optimistic people who had been promised a dream that was finally within reach. It’s just as well Saigal died in the same year the British left. If the drink hadn’t felled him, Independence would have.
“So why didn’t I change as well, you might ask? At first, it was pride. I was the Nawab, after all—hadn’t Saigal himself said that? If the public didn’t like what I was composing, it was the public’s fault—I was the arbiter of refinement, of taste. Of course, I realized eventually I was wrong. I jettisoned the people I had trained to sing like Saigal. I tried to woo Rafi and the other young upstarts. But it didn’t work. I wasn’t as adaptable as Mukesh. I simply wasn’t able to comply with the public’s taste. Composing things I didn’t believe in ripped into my core. I watched, helplessly, as Shankar-Jaikishan and all the other newcomers moved in. The industry sealed my fate by giving me a Filmfare lifetime achievement award at forty-eight.
“Since you’ve come to hear my opinion, here it is. Your voice isn’t perfect, but Saigal would have approved of it. With practice and some training, it might one day come close to his. But the world doesn’t need another Saigal, it already has enough songs by him. Which means my advice to you should be to learn to sing some other way. Perhaps like all the ditties that stir the teenage hearts of today. Except you’re going to remain true to yourself—you’re like me, not Mukesh. I can hear it in your voice, recognize it in your face. Go back to Delhi, is all I can say. Let your singing be a hobby to brighten your days. Give up this idea you have of singing for films. Neither you nor your wife deserves the heartbreak. It’s the best advice, the only advice I can give.”
Dev looked like he was in shock on the train ride back. I attempted to engage him in conversation, but he barely reacted. I tried feeling sorry for him, but the emotion that surged over everything else was relief—relief that Dev had finally had his fair chance, even if it hadn’t gone well. Now, perhaps, he would stop squandering his time at the recording studio. I had accepted that my future, for better or worse, would be with him. Perhaps there would be an opportunity now to sit down and plan it rationally.
At home, I thought Dev would cry, or drink, or do something sentimental like listen to his Saigal records. But he simply sat at the dining table and stared through the window at the darkening sky. Finally, he turned to me. “If people hated Saigal so much, why would he still be on the radio? Why would I have won the competition last year? Why would I even be in this flat in Bombay with your father’s blessings, and sitting next to his daughter?”
Something stirred in my mind. The trunk call that Mohammed Nawab had received the night before from Paji—could my father have had a hand in this? Could he have instructed the Nawab to be so thoroughly demoralizing that Dev would stop wasting his time?
“No, I don’t believe what that Nawab Mohammed claimed,” Dev said. “He’s just frustrated, that’s what it is. He tried to make it after Saigal, and couldn’t, so now he’s bitter at the world. He’d rather discourage everyone who comes to him than take the risk of having to see someone else succeed.”
A bottle of something green and illicit-looking had appeared on the table. “I’ll show him,” Dev said. “It takes more than a has-been like him to make me quit.” He poured out a shot of the liquid, paused, then filled the glass to the rim.
I NEVER DID FIND out whether my father had been behind the audition, pulling his puppet strings and interfering once again. But if Paji intended for his son-in-law to give up singing in the pursuit of a respectable job, it had the opposite effect. The desire to prove Nawab Mohammed wrong strengthened Dev’s resolve, gave him new tenacity. “I’ve convinced the owner of Famous to hire me as his new receptionist,” he announced, showing me the box of tandoori chicken from Sher-e-Punjab he’d bought to celebrate. “The salary’s quite pitiful, but now when the music directors walk in, they’ll have to talk to me. And being a studio employee, I won’t be so hesitant to approach the ones who might be able to help me.”
Dev’s strategy did yield some modest results. Under his badgering, a few of the music directors promised to have him audition. Roshan and Jaikishan actually came through on their word—though encouraging, neither gave him a song. Naushad hired him as an extra—sometimes as a chorus member, sometimes to sing a line or two in the background. His biggest success, one that received quite a bit of airtime, was a radio spot for Bournvita breakfast drink. Even Hema wrote that she had heard it in Delhi on the Vividh Bharati afternoon program.
As Dev became more of a fixture at the studio, music directors and film producers started relying increasingly on him. He was the one who knew whom to call to fix a microphone, the one to approach if the song needed the cry of an infant or the woof of a dog for a sound effect. He could arrange for a driver to go to Peddar Road when a Mangeshkar sister overslept, or get a battalion of violinists to be ready with their instruments on a day’s notice. Once, he managed to switch an entire evening’s schedule to Audio Labs, when a cat pawed its way into the utility box, shutting down the power and electrocuting itself. At first, he was happy to accept tips for these services, but gradually, as he became more indispensable, his name was added to the payroll. We could have been quite comfortably off, if Dev hadn’t become addicted to his after-work stops at Auntie’s Place. The cab fares alone (to get him home the few blocks in his drunken state) would have bought enough mutton to feed us all month.
One night, tired of waiting for Dev to show up drunk at the door, I decided to visit Auntie myself. I walked to the A-1 chip outlet, then entered the unlit alley next to it. The stench of garbage was so strong that I had to hold my dupatta over my face. It took some searching to detect the door built into the side of the A-1 building, stained as it was with countless streaks of paan. Inside, it was dark and smoky, with just enough light from the naked bulbs in wall sockets to make out the rickety tables. I saw only men there, sitting on benches at the tables, staring somberly into the liquid in their glasses. Dev sat alone on a stool at a bar at the back of the room. Behind him stood Auntie, her fingertips spread out on the counter, her multicolored dispensations glowing in rows behind her like bottles of orange and lemon squash.
The thing I noticed immediately was not the enormous vermilion bindi that covered half her forehead, but her hair. It had been dyed an emphatic black, both the tresses on her head and her eyebrows, though she had missed the eyelashes, which
were white and furry. The light from the bulbs gave her hair a sheen that made her look like someone with an aura—a devi, perhaps. She took my hand in hers as Dev, flustered by my presence, tried to introduce us. “You’re not here for what they all are—I’ll get you some lemonade,” she said.
That evening, I matched Dev glass for glass, as he poured the homemade brew from a bottle (pineapple, the label said) and I poured from a jug of lemonade. Auntie was very solicitous, behaving almost as if she were my real aunt. At one point, a man from one of the tables came and sat next to me. Dev was too far gone to care, but Auntie was there in a flash, yanking him out and depositing him back on his bench. “If they bother you, just let me know, Beti,” she said.
Finally, when Dev’s bottle was empty and we were at the door, Auntie pressed a one rupee coin into my palm. “For good luck, from your aunt.” She brushed her hand in blessing over my head.
At the main road, I gave the coin to a man begging outside the A-1 shop. To think she could buy me for a rupee. I vowed I would never go back.
In time, though, I came to accept the role Auntie played in Dev’s life. The nightly visits helped dull the keenness of his disappointment, blur the stark outlines of his lack of success. It wasn’t as if there had been a paucity of effort on his part. Within months of joining the studio, Dev had begun voice lessons, continuing them religiously for over a year and a half. Every Tuesday and Saturday morning, he took the suburban train all the way to Jogeshwari, where his guru had promised him an entirely new singing persona, one that would give not only Mukesh but also Rafi a run for his money. On other mornings, he waited patiently for his hangover to abate at home, so that he could practice an hour or two before going to work.