by David Miller
There are a few who say the smoke is dangerous because of carcinogenic chemicals used in the manufacture of shadows. Others argue that the shadow is a natural product and by its very nature chemically pure. They point to the advantages of the smoke: the beautifully coloured patterns in the clouds which serve as a reminder of the happiness to be obtained from a fully realized shadow. There may be some merit in this last argument, for on cloudy days the skies above our city are a wondrous sight, full of blues and vermilions and brilliant greens which pick out strange patterns and shapes in the clouds.
Others say that the clouds now contain the dreadful beauty of the apocalypse.
2.
The shadows are packaged in large, lavish boxes which are printed with abstract designs in many colours. The Bureau of Statistics reveals that the average householder spends 25 per cent of his income on these expensive goods and that this percentage increases as the income decreases.
There are those who say that the shadows are bad for people, promising an impossible happiness that can never be realized and thus detracting from the very real beauties of nature and life. But there are others who argue that the shadows have always been with us in one form or another and that the packaged shadow is necessary for mental health in an advanced technological society. There is, however, research to indicate that the high suicide rate in advanced countries is connected with the popularity of shadows and that there is a direct statistical correlation between shadow sales and suicide rates. This has been explained by those who hold that the shadows are merely mirrors to the soul and that the man who stares into a shadow box sees only himself, and what beauty he finds there is his own beauty and what despair he experiences is born of the poverty of his spirit.
3.
I visited my mother at Christmas. She lives alone with her dogs in a poor part of town. Knowing her weakness for shadows I brought her several of the more expensive varieties which she retired to examine in the privacy of the shadow room.
She stayed in the room for such a long time that I became worried and knocked on the door. She came out almost immediately. When I saw her face I knew the shadows had not been good ones.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but she kissed me quickly and began to tell me about a neighbour who had won the lottery.
I myself know, only too well, the disappointments of shadow boxes for I also have a weakness in that direction. For me it is something of a guilty secret, something that would not be approved of by my clever friends.
I saw J. in the street. She teaches at the university.
“Ah-hah,” she said knowingly, tapping the bulky parcel I had hidden under my coat. I know she will make capital of this discovery, a little piece of gossip to use at the dinner parties she is so fond of. Yet I suspect that she too has a weakness for shadows. She confessed as much to me some years ago during that strange misunderstanding she still likes to call “Our Affair”. It was she who hinted at the feeling of emptiness, that awful despair that comes when one has failed to grasp the shadow.
4.
My own father left home because of something he had seen in a box of shadows. It wasn’t an expensive box, either, quite the opposite — a little surprise my mother had bought with the money left over from her housekeeping. He opened it after dinner one Friday night and he was gone before I came down to breakfast on the Saturday. He left a note which my mother only showed me very recently. My father was not good with words and had trouble communicating what he had seen: “Words Cannot Express It What I feel Because of The Things I Saw In The Box Of Shadows You Bought Me.”
5.
My own feelings about the shadows are ambivalent, to say the least. For here I have manufactured one more: elusive, unsatisfactory, hinting at greater beauties and more profound mysteries that exist somewhere before the beginning and somewhere after the end.
THE TEACHER’S STORY
Gita Mehta
Gita Mehta (b.1943) is the author of Karma Cola, Raj and Snakes and Ladders, as well as a beguiling book of interlinked tales, A River Sutra. Married with one son, she divides her time between the USA, India and England.
Master Mohan was not a bitter man. Although he led an unhappy life his gentle nature disposed him to small acts of kindness; helping a stranger to dismount from a rickshaw, reaching into his pockets to find a boiled sweet for a child, and when he walked down the narrow streets leading to the avenue where he boarded the tram which took him to his music students, he was greeted warmly by the neighbours sitting on their tiny verandas to catch the breeze.
“Good evening, Master Mohan.”
“A late class, tonight?”
“Walk under the streetlights coming home, Master Mohan. These days one must be careful.”
Near the tram stop, the paanwallah smearing lime paste onto his paan leaves always shouted from inside his wooden stall,
“Master! Master! Let me give you a paan. A little betel leaf will help you through the pain of hearing your students sing.”
Even though it meant losing his place in the queue Master Mohan stopped to talk to the paanwallah and listen to his gossip of the comings and goings in the quarter. And so he was the first to learn the great Quawwali singers from Nizamuddin were coming to Calcutta.
“You should ask Mohammed-sahib to go with you. You are a teacher of music, he is a lover of poetry. And they are singing so nearby, in that mosque on the other side of the bazaar.”
“But my wife will not go even that far to hear –”
“Wives! Don’t talk to me of wives. I never take mine anywhere. Nothing destroys a man’s pleasure like a wife.”
Master Mohan knew the paanwallah was being kind. His wife’s contempt for him was no secret on their street. The small houses were built on top of each other and his wife never bothered to lower her voice. Everyone knew she had come from a wealthier family than his and could barely survive on the money he brought back from his music lessons.
“What sins did I commit in my last life that I should be yoked to this apology for a man. See how you are still called Master Mohan as if you were only ten years old. Gupta-sahib you should be called. But who respects you enough to make even that small effort!”
Her taunts re-opened a wound which might have healed if only Master Mohan’s wife had left him alone. The music teacher had acquired the name as a child singer when he had filled concert halls with admirers applauding the purity of his voice. His father, himself a music teacher, had saved every paisa from his earnings to spend on Master Mohan’s training, praying his son’s future would be secured with a recording contract.
But it takes a very long time for a poor music teacher to cultivate connections with the owners of recording studios. For four years Master Mohan’s father had pleaded for assistance from the wealthy families at whose houses his son sang on the occasion of a wedding or a birthday. For four years he had stood outside recording studios, muffling his coughs as tuberculosis ate away at his lungs, willing himself to stay alive until his son’s talent was recognised, urging the boy to practise for that first record which would surely astonish the world.
When the recording contract was finally offered, only weeks before the record was to be made, Master Mohan’s voice had broken.
Every day his wife reminded him how his voice had not mellowed in the years that followed. “Your family has the evil eye. Whatever you touch is cursed, whatever you are given you lose.”
Sometimes Master Mohan tried to escape his wife’s taunts by reminding himself of those four years of happiness that had preceded the moment when the golden bowl of his voice had shattered and with it his life. As her shrill insults went on and and on, drilling into his brain, he found himself only able to remember his father’s anguish that his son would have to abandon a great career as a singer, becoming just another music teacher like himself.
Master Mohan’s father had made one last effort to help his son by engaging him in marriage to the daughter of a rich village landowner who loved music. H
e had lived long enough to see the marriage performed but not long enough to celebrate the birth of his two grandchildren, or to witness the avarice of his daughter-in-law when her own father died and her brothers took the family wealth, leaving her dependent on Master Mohan’s earnings.
Prevented by pride from criticising her own family, Master Mohan’s wife had held her husband responsible for the treachery of her brothers, raising their children to believe it was only Master Mohan’s weakness and stupidity which had robbed them of the servants, the cars, the fancy clothes from foreign countries, which should have been their right.
“How can I ever forgive myself for burdening you with this sorry creature for a father? Come Babloo, come Dolly. Have some fruit. Let him make his own tea.”
With such exactitude had she perfected her cruelty that Master Mohan’s children despised their father’s music as they despised him, allying themselves with their mother’s neglect.
After giving music lessons all day Master Mohan was left to cook a meagre meal for himself, which he took up to the small roof terrace of the house to escape his household’s contempt. But he could not escape the blaring film music from the radio, or the loud noise of the gramophone echoing up the narrow stone stairwell leading to the terrace. It set him coughing, sometimes so loudly that his wife, or his daughter and son, would run up the stairs yelling at him to be quiet. Though he tried Master Mohan could not stop coughing. It was a nervous reaction to his family’s ability to silence the music he heard in his own head.
So when the paanwallah told him about the Quawwali singers Master Mohan found himself daydreaming on the tram. He had never heard the singers from Nizamuddin where Quawwali music had been born seven hundred years ago. But he knew Nizamuddin had been the fountain from which the poems and songs of the great Sufi mystics had flowed throughout India, and that even today its teachers still trained the finest Quawwali musicians in the country. He could not believe his good fortune – seven nights spent away from his wife and children listening to their music. And what is more, the music could be heard free.
On his way home that evening he stopped outside Mohammed-sahib’s house. Finding him on his veranda, Master Mohan asked shyly if he would be listening to the Quawwali singers.
“Only if you accompany me. I am a poor fool who never knows what he is hearing unless it is explained to him.”
So it was settled and the next week Master Mohan hardly heard his wife and children shouting at him as he cooked himself a simple meal, relishing the taste of it while they listened to their noisy film music.
“Make sure you do not wake up the whole house when you return!” his wife shouted behind him as he slipped into the street.
By the time Master Mohan and Mohammed-sahib reached the tent tethered to one side of the mosque the singing had begun and curious bazaar children crowded at the entrances.
Mohammed-sahib peered over their heads in disappointment. “We are too late. There is nowhere for us to sit.”
Master Mohan refused to give up so easily. He squeezed past the children to look for a vacant place in the tent filled with people listening in rapt attention to the passionate devotional music breaking in waves over their heads.
He felt a familiar excitement as he led his friend to a small gap between the rows of people crushed against each other on the floor. The fluorescent lights winking from the struts supporting the tent, the musty odour of the cotton carpets covering the ground brought back the concerts of his childhood, and a constriction inside himself began to loosen.
On the podium nine performers sat cross-legged in a semi-circle around a harmonium and a pair of tablas. An old sheikh from Nizamuddin sat to one side, his white beard disappearing into the loose robes flowing around him. Every now and then a spectator, moved by the music, handed the sheikh money which he received as an offering to God before placing it near the tabla drums sending their throbbing beat into the night.
The more the singers were carried away by their music the more Master Mohan felt the weight that burdened him lighten, as if the ecstasy of the song being relayed from one throat to another was lifting him into a long-forgotten ecstasy himself.
Twice Mohammed-sahib got up to place money at the sheikh’s feet. Master Mohan watched him stepping over crossed legs as he made his way to the stage, ashamed his own poverty prevented him from expressing gratitude to the singers for reviving emotions which he had thought dead.
After two hours Mohammed-sahib’s funds and patience were exhausted, and he went home. Gradually the tent began to empty until only a few beggar children remained, asleep on the cotton carpets. Master Mohan looked at his watch. It was three o’clock in the morning.
In front of Master Mohan a young woman holding the hand of a child suddenly approached the podium to whisper to the sheikh. The sheikh leaned across to the singers wiping perspiration from their foreheads.
The lead singer nodded wearily and the young woman pulled the child behind her up the stairs. The boy stumbled twice, struggling to recover his balance. Then he was on the podium, both hands stretched in front of him. Master Mohan realised the boy was blind as the woman pushed him down next to the singers.
The lead singer sang a verse. The other singers took up the chorus. The lead singer sang another verse, his arm extended to the boy who could not see him. The singers prodded him and the startled child entered the song two octaves above the others.
“I prostrate my head to the blade of Your sword.
O, the wonder of my submission.
O, the wonder of Your protection.”
It was a sound Master Mohan had only heard in his dreams.
“In the very spasm of death I see Your face.
O, the wonder of Your protection.
O, the wonder of my submission.”
Until this moment he had believed such purity of tone was something which could only be imagined but never realised by the human voice.
He crept forward until he was sitting by the young woman.
“Who is that child?” he asked.
The young woman turned a pleasant face pinched by worry to him. “My brother, Imrat. This is the first song my father taught Imrat – the song of the children of the Nizamuddin Quawwali.”
Tears glistened in the large eyes. Under the fluorescent lights Master Mohan thought they magnified her eyes into immense pearls. “Last year I brought Imrat with me to Calcutta to sell my embroidery. While we were here, terrible floods swept our village away. Our father, my husband, everybody was killed.”
Master Mohan glanced at the stage. The singers were already intoxicated by the power of their combined voices, unable to distinguish the singular voice of the child from all the other voices praising God.
“Do not reveal the Truth in a world where blasphemy prevails.
O wondrous Source of Mystery.
O Knower of Secrets.”
* * *
The woman covered her face with her hands. “I have been promised a job as a maidservant with a family who are leaving for the north of India but I cannot take my brother because he is blind. I hope the sheikh will take Imrat to Nizamuddin until I can earn enough to send for him.”
Master Mohan felt tears welling in his own eyes as he heard the high voice sing,
“I prostrate my head to the blade of Your sword
O, the wonder of Your guidance.
O, the wonder of my submission.”
The next evening Mohammed-sahib confessed, “I am not as musical as you, Master. God will forgive me for not accompanying you tonight.”
So Master Mohan went alone to hear the Quawwali singers. The young woman and the blind child were sitting under the podium, still there when the other spectators had gone.
He waited all evening, hoping to hear the child’s pure voice again but that night the boy did not join the singers on the stage. The following night and the next, Master Mohan was disappointed to see the young woman and her brother were not present at the Quawwali.
; On the fourth night Master Mohan found himself the last listener to leave the tent. As he hurried through the deserted alleys of the dark bazaar he heard someone calling behind him, “Sahib, wait. For the love of Allah, listen to us.”
He turned under the solitary street lamp at the end of the bazaar. The woman was pulling the child past the shuttered shops towards him.
“Please, sahib. The Quawwali singers are travelling around India. They cannot take my brother with them, and in two days I must start work or lose my job. You have a kind face, sahib. Can you keep Imrat? He is a willing worker. He will do the sweeping or chop your vegetables. Just feed him and give him a place to sleep until I can send for him.”
A drunk stumbled towards the street lamp. “What’s the woman’s price, pimp? Offer me a bargain. She won’t find another customer tonight.”
The woman shrank into the darkness clutching the child in her arms. “For the love of Allah, sahib. Help us. We have nowhere to turn.”
To his astonishment Master Mohan heard himself saying, “I am a music teacher. I will take your brother as my pupil. Now you must return to the safety of the mosque.”
The woman turned obediently into the dark alley. Master Mohan was grateful she could not see the expression on his face or she must surely have recognised his fear at the offer he had made.
At the entrance to the tent he said, “I will come tomorrow evening to fetch the child.”