by David Miller
Master Mohan could see the smirking expressions on the faces of the two men as they tried to ingratiate themselves with Imrat.
“To hear you sing will relieve the pain of his own heart, denied what he has most loved in this life.”
“If you sing well he will give you leaves from Tansen’s tamarind tree to make your voice as immortal as Tansen’s.”
Master Mohan knew these men had once learned music as Imrat was doing now, until poverty had reduced them to pandering to the vices and whims of wealthy men. Even as he despised them he was relieved that Imrat’s record would save him from such a life.
Now they turned their attention on Master Mohan.
“We have told the great sahib this boy has a voice which is heard only once in five hundred years.”
“The sahib is a man of influence, brother. Perhaps he can arrange to have the boy invited to the Calcutta Music Festival.”
The music teacher felt dizzy even imagining that his blind charge, who had been no better than a beggar only eight months ago, might be invited to sing in the company of India’s maestros. The great singing teachers always attended the festival. One might even offer to train Imrat’s pure voice, taking it to a perfection that had not been heard since Tansen himself sang before the Great Mogul. He nearly agreed but controlled himself enough to say again, “You must wait until the boy completes his recording.”
Fortunately he did not have to think long about the temptation offerred by the two men.
On the day he took Imrat back to the recording studio, the young woman was also present in the office, seated on an armchair opposite her brother’s desk.
“I played this record for the director of the radio station. He thinks Master Imrat has great promise, and must be taught by the best teachers available. A talent like his should not be exposed to the dust and germs in the park. There are empty rooms above one of our garages. He must live there.”
The woman put her arm around the boy. “Wouldn’t you like to stay with me? Your sister could work in my house and your teacher would come to see you every day.”
The boy nodded happily and she handed two copies of the record and an envelope of money to Master Mohan. “So it is settled. As soon as his sister reaches Calcutta they will both move into my house.”
Master Mohan took the records but left the envelope of money in the woman’s hand for Imrat’s sister.
“Are we to be given nothing for feeding and clothing this changeling you brought into our home?” Master Mohan’s wife screamed when she learned her husband had left the boy’s money with the studio owner. “What about the whole year we have kept him, restricting our own lives so he could become rich? Are your own children to receive nothing out of this, only blows and abuses?”
Her fury increased when Imrat’s record was released and proved immediately popular.
In the weeks that followed the record was played over and over again on the radio by enthusiastic programmers. While Imrat waited for his sister to send news of her arrival in Calcutta, Master Mohan was informed by the recording studio that Imrat’s record was disappearing from the record shops as fast as new copies could be printed.
Now his wife’s rage was inflamed by jealousy. She could hear Imrat’s record being played everywhere in the bazaars. Even the paanwallah had brought a gramophone to his stall, storing it behind the piles of wet leaves at his side. Each time a customer bought a paan the paanwallah cranked the machine and placed the record on the turntable, boasting, “I advised the music teacher to adopt the child. Even though he was only a blind beggar I was able to recognise the purity of his voice immediately.”
A week before Imrat’s sister was due to arrive in Calcutta, the music teacher’s wife learned from Mohammed-sahib that her husband had refused to let Imrat perform at the home of a great sahib.
“And he was offering the sum of five thousand rupees to listen to the blind boy.” Mohammed-sahib said in awe.
“Five thousand rupees!” Master Mohan’s wife shrieked. “He turned down five thousand rupees when his own children do not have enough to eat and nothing to wear! Where can I find those men?”
That night the music teacher helped Imrat into the house. To his distress he found his wife entertaining the two men who had come so often to the park.
She waved a sheaf of notes in Master Mohan’s face. “I have agreed the brat will sing before the sahib tonight. See, they have already paid me. Five thousand rupees will cover a little of what I have spent on this blind beggar over the last year.”
The music teacher tried to object but Imrat intruded on his arguments. “I am not tired, Master-sahib.”
“Waited on hand and foot by our entire household! Why should you be tired?” She grabbed the boy’s arm. “I’m coming myself to make sure you sing properly to pay for all the meals you have eaten at our table.”
The two men smiled victoriously at the music teacher. “Our rickshaws are waiting at the corner of the street.”
As they rode to the great sahib’s house Master Mohan felt tears on his cheeks. In a week Imrat would be gone, leaving him imprisoned again in his hateful household. He hugged Imrat to his chest, his sighs lost in the rasping breathing of the man straining between the wooden shafts of the rickshaw.
At the high iron gates of a mansion the rickshaws halted. A guard opened the gates and Master Mohan’s wife seized Imrat’s arm, pulling him roughly behind her as servants ushered them through a series of dimly lit chambers into a dark room empty of furniture.
Wooden shutters sealed the french doors on either side of the room, and large patches of paint peeled from the walls. The floor was covered by a Persian carpet which extended from the door to a raised platform. Above the platform two unused chandeliers hung from the ceiling, shrouded in muslin like corpses.
A man sat on the platform, his size exaggerated by the candles burning on either side of him. The musicians bowed to him obsequiously. The sahib ignored them. Still smiling the musicians climbed onto the platform where a harmonium and drums were placed in readiness for the concert.
“Come here, little Master,” the great sahib said. “I am told you have a voice such as India has not heard for hundreds of years.”
Master Mohan’s wife released her hold on the boy and the music teacher led him to the platform grateful that Imrat could not see this empty room with its sealed wooden shutters, and the shadows flickering on the peeling walls.
As he helped him up the stairs the music teacher whispered in Imrat’s ear, “Only sing the two songs from your record. Then we can go home.”
“Soon I will be with my sister again,” Imrat answered in a whisper as Master Mohan gently pushed him down in front of the two musicians. “Tonight I must thank Allah for his kindness.”
For a few minutes only the music of the harmonium echoed through the heavy shadows of the room and Master Mohan could feel his wife shifting restlessly from foot to foot at his side. Then Imrat’s clear voice pierced the darkness.
“I prostrate my head to Your drawn sword.
O, the wonder of Your kindness
O, the wonder of my submission.
“Do not reveal the Truth in a world where blasphemy prevails.
O wondrous Source of Mystery.
O Knower of Secrets.”
The boy’s sightless eyes seemed fixed on infinity and it seemed to Master Mohan that the candles in the shrouded chandeliers were leaping into flame, ignited by Imrat’s innocent devotion as he sang,
“In the very spasm of death I see Your face.
O, the wonder of my submission.
O, the wonder of Your protection.”
Listening to the purity of each note Master Mohan felt himself being lifted into another dimension, into the mystic raptures of the Sufis who were sometimes moved to dance by such music. For the first time he understood why the Sufis believed that once a man began to dance in the transport of his ecstasy the singers must continue until the man stopped dancing lest the sudden bre
aking of the dancer’s trance should kill him.
“The heat of Your presence
Blinds my eyes.
Blisters my skin.
Shrivels my flesh.”
The great sahib rose to his feet. Master Mohan wondered if the great sahib was about to dance as music poured out of that young throat which carried in it too great a knowledge of the world.
“The heat of Your presence
Blinds my eyes.
Blisters my skin.
“Do not turn in loathing from me.
O Beloved, can You not see
Only Love disfigures me.”
In the flickering light of the candles Master Mohan thought he saw something glint in the sahib’s hand. The musicians were smiling ingratiatingly, waiting for the great sahib to circle the boy’s head with money before flinging it to them. Now Master Mohan could not see Imrat, dwarfed by the shadow of the man standing in front of him as he sang again,
“I prostrate my head to Your drawn sword.
O, the wonder of Your kindness
O, the wonder of my submission.
“Do not reveal the Truth in a world where blasphemy prevails.
O wondrous Source of Mystery.
O Knower of Secrets.”
The great sahib turned around and Master Mohan thought he saw tears on his cheeks. “Such a voice is not human. What will happen to music if this is the standard by which God judges us?”
Imrat was not listening, intoxicated by the power issuing from his own throat.
“In the very spasm of death I see Your face.
O, the wonder of my submission.
O, the wonder of Your protection …”
Master Mohan could hear his wife cursing. He did not know his own screams echoed the blind boy’s as he screamed and screamed and screamed.
RADIO GANNET
Shena Mackay
Born in Edinburgh on D-Day, Shena Mackay (b.1944) grew up in Hampstead, Kent and lived much of her life in Surrey and south London before moving, in 2008, to Southampton. She first published a book aged seventeen, when her novellas Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger and Toddler on the Run were published in one volume. Her novels have won countless awards and, recently, Heligoland was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize. The Orchard on Fire was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1995. A selection of her stories was published as The Atmospheric Railway. She was once described as “the best writer in the world today.”
There were two sisters, Norma and Dolly, christened Dorothy, who lived in a seaside town. Norma and her husband, Eric, resided in a large detached house in Cliftonville Crescent, while Dolly’s caravan was berthed at the Ocean View Mobile Home Park, on the wrong side of the tracks of the miniature steam railway. Norma and Dolly’s elder brother, Walter, was the curator of the small Sponge Museum founded by their grandfather.
Eastcliff-on-Sea was a town divided. The prizewinning municipal gardens overlooked Sandy Bay where all the beach huts had been bought up by Londoners wanting traditional bucket-and-spade holidays, and as their offspring watched the Punch and Judy show while eating their organic ice cream, or played a sedate game of crazy golf, they could see the lights of the funfair winking across the tracks, and hear the shouts of less privileged children on the rides and smell their burgers, doughnuts and candyfloss drifting on the breeze from the ramshackle plaza that was Ocean View.
Norma had five children and fourteen grandchildren, thus ensuring that she had somebody to worry about at any given moment. One particularly hot summer night, she lay awake fretting at the news that a giant asteroid was on course to hit the earth sometime in the future. She groped for her bedside radio and switched it on low so as not to disturb Eric. Her finger slipped on the dial and out of the radio came the squawk of a gull, followed by a voice singing “All you hear is Radio Gannet, Radio gaga, Radio Gannet. Greetings, all you night owls, this is Radio Gannet taking you through the wee small hours with Joanne and The Streamliners and their ever-lovin’ ‘Frankfurter Sandwiches’.”
At the female DJ’s voice, Norma sat bolt upright, hyperventilating. Over the music came the spluttering of fat in a pan, and a muffled expletive. It was the indisputable sound of her sister Dolly having a fry-up. “Whatever happened to the good old British banger?” grumbled Dolly. “Answers on a postcard, please.”
Norma sat transfixed, picturing Dolly at the Baby Belling with her tail of grey-blonde hair hanging over her dressing gown, slipshod in downtrodden espadrilles, in that terrible caravan with its tangle of dead plants in rotting macramé potholders, Peruvian dream-catchers, etiolated things growing out of old margarine tubs, the encrusted saucers left out for hedgehogs by the door, the plastic gnomes bleached white by time. The budgie. The cat. The slugs.
She hadn’t seen her sister since their father’s funeral, when Dolly had grabbed the microphone from the vicar and launched into “Wind Beneath My Wings”. Dolly was dressed in frayed denim, cowgirl boots and a kiss-me-quick cowgirl hat.
In the morning Norma dismissed the radio programme as a bad dream. She was taking a brace of grandchildren to buy their new school shoes for the autumn term. It was one of those days when people tell each other that “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity”. In the shoeshop they were served by an apathetic girl with a film of sweat on her upper lip who showed little enthusiasm for measuring the children’s feet, gazing ahead as if watching a procession of Odor-Eaters marching into eternity. Music played in the background; a common family was creating havoc with the Barbie and Star Wars trainers. Norma looked fondly at her grandchildren. Their legs were the colour of downy, sun-kissed apricots in the sensible shoes she was insisting on. Suddenly, there it was again, the squawking gull, that idiotic jingle.
“This is Radio Gannet coming to you on – some kilohertz or other, I can never remember. Kilohertz – what’s that in old money, anyway? I blame the boffins in Brussels, myself. This one’s specially for you, all you metric martyrs out there: “Pennies from Heaven” – hang on, a road traffic report’s just coming in. It’s Mr Wilf Arnold ringing from the call box on the corner of Martello Street where a wheelie bin has overturned, shedding its load …”
As soon as she had paid for the shoes Norma hurried the children round to the Sponge Museum to consult her brother. Walter’s nose had grown porous with the passing years; it was an occupational hazard.
“Great Uncle Walter, have you ever thought of making the museum a bit more interactive? You need a hands-on approach if you’re going to compete in the modern world,” said Matilda.
“Yeah, like Sea World. With octopuses and killer whales and sharks. Everything in here’s dead,” agreed Sam.
“There’s far too much of this touchy-feely nonsense nowadays in my opinion,” said Walter. Norma nodded agreement, imagining herself in the wet embrace of an octopus.
“Go and improve your minds,” Walter told them. “And if you behave yourselves, you can choose a souvenir from the shop. How about a nice packet of Grow-Your-Own Loofah seeds?”
When they had slouched away, sniggering, Norma told Walter what she’d heard, recounting how Dolly had signed off, saying, “Keep those calls and e-mails coming, and as always, my thanks to Mr Tibbs, my producer.”
“Mr Tibbs? Isn’t that her cat?” said Walter.
“Exactly. She’s totally bonkers – remember the spectacle she made of herself at the funeral? I wouldn’t have said that Daddy was the wind beneath Dolly’s wings, would you, Walter?”
He considered. “Well, he did sponsor her for that bungee jump off the pier, and he made her that fairy dress with glittery wings for her birthday.”
“It was my birthday,” said Norma.
“Yes, I’m afraid our father always indulged Dolly,” admitted Walter.
“Well, look where it’s got him. I hardly think even Daddy would approve of her latest venture. We can only trust that nobody we know will tune into Radio Gannet.”
Walter’s Rotarian connectio
ns and Norma’s aspiration to serve as Eastcliff’s Lady Mayoress hung unspoken between them.
“Radio Gannet, eh? How appropriate.”
Walter remembered a plump little fairy flitting about the table at a children’s party, touching cakes and jellies with the silver star at the tip of her magic wand. Norma thought about her sister’s three helpings of tiramisu at her youngest son’s wedding. She’d turned that into a karaoke too. Then the sound that she and Walter had been half-listening out for, that of a display cabinet toppling, recalled them to the present.
“Where is this so-called radio station to be found?” asked Walter.
“Oh, at the wrong end of the dial. Where you get all those foreign and religious programmes.”
“But is she legal? I mean, do you think she’s got a licence to broadcast? It could well be that our dear sister is a pirate, in which case something can be done to put a stop to her little game. Leave Dolly Daydream to me, Norma.”
It was time for a weather check at Radio Gannet. “Let’s see what Joey the weather girl has in store for us this afternoon. Over to you at the Weather Centre, Joey.”
The Weather Centre was the budgerigar’s cage which hung in the open doorway with strips of seaweed trailing from its bars. Dry seaweed denoted a fine spell, while when it turned plump and moist, rain was in the offing.
“Pretty boy, pretty boy,” said Joey.
“Pretty dry – good news for all you holidaymakers, then. Uh oh,” Dolly stretched out to touch a ribbon of kelp and found it dripping. The caravan park was shrouded in grey drizzle. “Joey says better pop the brolly in the old beach bag, just in case.”
Joey was popular with the listeners. A recent beak problem had brought sackloads of cuttle-fish and millet from well-wishers, many of them students. “I’m only sending this ironically,” one of them had written. Dolly was flattered; she knew that students do everything ironically nowadays; watch kids’ TV, eat Pot Noodles; they even iron their jeans ironically. She placed her 78 of “Any Umbrellas” on the turntable, put her feet up and reached for the biscuit barrel.