Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  They’d be squatting before the twin clay hearths, one stirring the frothing milk in a large iron kadhai, the other bent over platters of sweetened chickpea in ghee, moulding small, perfectly round laddoos. Or Lakshmi might be circling the sieve over the cauldron, drizzling batter into its crackling sheet of oil, or dancing her pretty, smeared fingers in coils and whorls and scalloped ringlets which floated up to the surface as delicate, swimming imartis that she, Janki, gathered in the large mesh scoop and flung into baskets to drain. Lakshmi, dainty, companionable, neither elder sister nor aunt nor quite stepmother, always grew tense when he turned up. For he carried himself with all the swagger of the sarkari sipahi, in turban and puttees and coarse, noisy boots. He was handsome in a rakish way and he flirted and teased and set them giggling.

  ‘A seer of magadh laddoos,’ he’d demand, ‘and a chhatak of pedas. Though, he added with mischief in his eye, ‘I can’t say which one I actually prefer, the seer or the chhatak.’ He rolled his eyes from Lakshmi to Janki and back again.

  He’d grow gallant, maudlin, grandiose, poetic. He knew, he said, what gave such flavour to the burfis. Not the saffron, not the cardamom and pista, not the silver foil or the rose water. No, it was the touch of her hands.

  Her hands. Janki didn’t know which of them he aimed his sallies at. He looked straight at her because she was the one making up the palm-leaf basket and then handing it across. His massive hands closed over her small ones holding the basket.

  ‘How much?’ he asked.

  ‘Three pice,’ she murmured, very softly.

  ‘Cheap at three cowries,’ he declared, his eyes boring into her face. ‘But what syrup there is in her voice!’ he marvelled. ‘She might be a songstress or a sweet little koel. What are you, girl, koel or songstress?’

  ‘A parrot,’ snapped Lakshmi. ‘She loves eating chillies. Beware or you’ll find yourself eating chillies with her. Be off, will you!’

  He laughed. ‘Parrots that feed on chillies sing that much sweeter, lassie,’ he remarked. ‘Look,’ he said, turning to Janki, ‘let me feed you a laddoo for a change. Open your mouth, chilli-child.’

  It seemed to Janki that Lakshmi bristled in indignation. There was a faint smart in her voice as she retorted: ‘Is there nothing better for a sarkari sipahi to do than this foolery?’

  ‘Ah no,’ he answered, guffawing. ‘I’m only a sipahi part of the time and my sarkar isn’t there in Kulkatta but here.’

  Even Lakshmi couldn’t help relaxing. ‘God help the sarkar if they have louts like you in the force. Why did you become a sipahi, sir, if the jingling bangles of women find more favour with you than the handcuffs of your calling?’

  He looked deep into Janki’s eyes and said: ‘I became a sipahi so that I can come and arrest you some day, lady. Come, open your mouth, parrot-fairy.’

  It became quite the regular thing between them.

  The language they used was unlike the refined Urdu of Janki’s later years. This was the patois of the cobbled alleys, an earthy language of honey and sawdust that had the spice of the earthen hearth and the banter of the village well. The language spoken in the dark, winding lanes of Benaras, where sarees hung down three floors of trellised balconies to dry and the shadows were lit with the glitter of brocade embroidery or the goldsmiths’ firelight or the smoke-light of rain-slicked stone.

  They actually began looking forward to the sipahi’s visits. Each time he came he flirted, teased, called them the seer and the chhatak, and fed Janki a sweet. He grew bolder. He looked longingly at the milk-dough that Janki and Lakshmi kneaded and spoke softly: ‘What must it be like to squeeze that way? Bhagwan kasam, if I wasn’t a police-wallah I’d be a halwai.’ He was staring meaningly at Lakshmi’s breasts. She pulled her saree across them and smiled a mysterious smile and there passed through the air a sudden vibe that Janki sensed but didn’t quite understand. For Janki was eight, the vague shapes of fantasies just beginning to flutter. She wondered if this gallant sipahi would make a bride of her, as he joked. But no, he was a Brahmin. But, truth to tell, she wouldn’t mind ending up like Lakshmi in their home. A wife about the house but no marriage in anyone’s recall.

  Once her mother Manki came into the shop and chased Raghunandan away.

  ‘Who are you? What do you want here?’

  ‘Same as everyone else, malkin,’ he answered with easy impertinence. ‘Sweet things.’

  ‘Then take the stuff, pay up and be off!’

  ‘I wish I could,’ he leered and Manki stiffened in rage. A customer was a customer but Manki was a stern and bitter woman. She turned to look at Lakshmi with misgiving. Lakshmi, her saree-anchal pulled over her head, was working intently on the malpua batter.

  ‘Sahibji,’ said Manki, ‘you are a sarkari sipahi, true, but my husband Shiv Balak is a well-known wrestler. No doubt you know that. And he will not take kindly to sipahis doing lup-lup with the bahus and betis of his house.’

  Raghunandan went off smirking roguishly. He delivered his parting shot over his shoulder. ‘That’s your beti, bhauji, but who is that other one to you and to your wrestler man? You tell me, bhauji.’

  He didn’t wait. He turned a corner. But Manki stood stock-still. She turned and went back into the courtyard.

  He came again. Popped a scoop of rabri-malai into Janki’s mouth, making jokes about Shakkar Khan and Makkhan Khan, the famous qawwals of Lucknow and how they probably owed their skill to the sugar and butter they consumed. For this Raghunandan, sipahi though he was, knew somewhat of music and had been to the soirées of the local raeeses, the Shahs, the Rais, yes, even to the princely home of Bhartendu Harishchandra, that legendary man of letters. He dropped names. He had enchanting stories to tell about the magically lit-up boats on the Ganga’s waters at the Budhwa Mangal festival, about the festive tents, the flowers, the gleaming drapes, the big brass lamps. He offered to take Janki there if she wished to go to hear the fantastic singing. He made it all sound as though he’d been one of Benaras’s pleasure-loving merchant princes and not one of the sipahi guards hired to mind the gates. A sipahi has privileges that musicians can’t dream of, he told them. He could gain admittance into the havelis of the Shahs and the Rais as even the stellar Mauzuddin, that young prodigy, could not, when he started out. Had they heard of Mauzuddin, the thumri singer? They had. If only from their halwai fraternity. For Mauzuddin, that lightning flare of genius, was hailed by the sweet shops in the lanes of Benaras, the incense makers and flower sellers, and asked to sing, even when he was a small child. The halwais gave him their choicest confections in exchange for a song. He was a mere boy—and not an effeminate one either—no, rather noble looking, but he sang of the longings and aches of women, the horis and chaities of spring, the kajris of the monsoon, and he sang with eyes closed. Everyone said that a celestial power descended into his voice as he sang, for sure he was utterly unlearned in music and sang from instinct alone. Yet even he, Mauzuddin, couldn’t gain an entry into the Rais’ haveli and had to hide in a bush outside and sing as loud as his powerful lungs could manage, in the hope of attracting the attention of one of the Rai brothers. Which did happen presently. But all this only proved the superior standing of the sipahi, declared Raghunandan. Even if his only source of power derived from this uniform he wore, given by the British sarkar, a cohort of arse-wiping, pig-and-cow-eating firangees justly put in their place by the gadar. Whereas Mauzuddin’s power came from the Sayyad of Mausiqui himself, so they said.

  The Sayyad of Mausiqui. The holy soul of music. Words which stayed with Janki all through her life, quite like the jagged scars of the knife which this man was to inflict, this very Raghunandan Dubey, this lecher and possible paedophile, who courted her and told her stories and fed her sweets and once brought two little bottles of rose fragrance for them and a couple of jasmine garlands for their hair.

  When Manki saw the gifts she broke into screams of outrage, grabbed hold of Janki and dragged her across the old stone-paved courtyard, hauling her by her hair
. She snatched off the affected little rope of flowers and hurled the perfume bottle into the swilling drain. To Lakshmi she said nothing but her lip curled in contempt. The next day she took her seat beside Janki in the shop, imperiously minding the large earthen rabri bowl, and waited for Raghunandan to arrive.

  When he did, she challenged: ‘You bring your foul face here again, wretch! I marvel at your shamelessness!’

  ‘Not shamelessness but the pull of love, bhauji.’ He smiled his lazy smile and stood lounging against the mildewed wall.

  ‘I shall put your love under my pestle and make panjeeri of it to feed the curs of my lane!’

  ‘Oh, come, bhauji. Shout at me all you like. Your cursing doesn’t trick me a cowrie. You’re like that old crank of the Jhakkad khandaan who spits his paan down on people one minute, then scoops up his gold asharfis and rains them down the next. Come, abuse me all you like—your good-bad words don’t affect me. I’ll wait. Patiently.’ He cast his eyes on the two girls.

  Tears of fury prickled Manki’s eyes. ‘Go, send in your arzee for leave, sipahiya. Because you’re going to be laid up soon. I’ll ask him to break every bone in your body!’

  ‘Who, your Shiv Balak? First your heart, now my bones. Breaking is what he’s mastered, eh? Ah well, you should know.’

  Here Manki’s self-restraint gave way. She sprang to her feet, flung the nearest thing she could grab—the pot of white malpua batter. It caught him full in the face, broke, its clammy white slime crawling down his sneering face, blinding him momentarily.

  ‘Get out!’ shrieked Manki, now reaching for the bowl of scalding syrup. ‘If I see your vile face here I shall go sit on Kashi Vishvanath’s threshold and starve myself to death if the Lord does not take the skin off your buttocks!’

  He ducked, ignominious, to avoid the bowl. He looked ridiculous, his face a clayey mess with asymmetrical slits for eyes and even his lashes oozy white. But his words were still provoking as he staggered away and his voice was fiendish: ‘Oh, Shiv, Shiv, Shiv! That the Lord be summoned to skin my buttock when his own bull rump’s been left behind in Kedar, bhauji.’

  ‘Gutter-snipe!’ Manki shrilled after him, her voice cracking in rage.

  They closed the shop for a day.

  So there might have been many un-simple reasons behind his manic attack. Beyond the obvious one of being interrupted mid-thrust astride a woman, as one narrator of Janki’s story claims. Whatever happened as a consequence took on the vestments of a legend that clothed itself in a nickname: Chhappan Chhuri.

  One afternoon, happening to blunder into the shop, Janki was puzzled to find the heavy green doors closed to the alley outside and also to the courtyard within. She’d been napping in the upstairs room in the cool of the drenched khus screen, Manki gently waving the palm-leaf fan in fits and starts between spells of sleep and waking. The shop closed for two hours on summer afternoons because no customers ever appeared during that time.

  She found the carved panels of the door merely pulled close, not bolted. Drowsily she pushed it open and stopped short in puzzlement. In the half-light of the enclosed room, down on the floor, and between the row of earthen hobs and cooking vessels, she saw a huddle of grappling limbs. Heavy, muscled buttocks pumping atop the fair, splayed thighs of a woman, heaving and plunging, her ankles tensely locked in a tight clinch, her head thrashing from side to side, pinned down by the pulsing weight. Lakshmi’s saree was rucked up and Raghunandan’s khaki shirt was the only thing he wore, which emphasized the brute nakedness of it and the shocking shuffle of the action, which startled Janki into a loud gasp as the door groaned and banged to behind her. A sound that sealed her fate. Because with a mighty lunge Raghunandan hauled himself out of Lakshmi and swung round, inflamed, engorged, in full, furious tumescence. Like a bull in a rage. He bore down on Janki, picking up the burfi knife on the way. He thrust it into her again and again and again, continuing the charged rhythm of his thwarted thrusting. Breathing hard, eyes bloodshot, the knife mangling Janki’s flesh in a gale of gashes until she slumped, a ragged mop of bloody flesh until—and I wonder how I am saying this to a hall-ful of people, decorous old crone though I am—until a jet of exploding man-sap shot out of him and trickled down his thighs and he ceased his thrusting and looked down at its slow, gummy crawl in bafflement before he became aware of his hand which held the burfi knife.

  I don’t say it happened exactly this way. But three inconsistent accounts of the event, all mutually contradictory, leave room for the endless play of inference and intuition. At any rate this embraces all three official versions and accommodates them in a plausible configuration. Some accounts have it that Raghunandan Dubey was an earlier paramour of Lakshmi’s and the two were playing along all the time. Some state that Raghunandan was arrested and jailed. A third account holds that Lakshmi ran away with him some time after all this happened, vanishing into the narrow lanes and pilgrim crowds of the Benaras riverfront, the way she’d come. Manki screamed, tore her hair and beat her breast, rushed Janki’s limp, butchered body to the Mission Hospital, clasped the feet of the English doctor, wept before the maharani of Benaras who had once appreciated Janki’s singing, and passed out on the floor when the maharani said she would pay for Janki’s treatment. The maharani kept her word. And when years later Janki sang ‘Mo pe daar gayo sare rang ki gagar’, a popular hori in Raga Khambaj, the image of blood spouting in a drenching flood sometimes rose unbidden in the minds of feeling members of the mehfil who loved her music and knew her story.

  4

  People who knew Janki and her family confirm this last version, neighbours, disciples, old tawaifs, relations. Their names are now enough to conjure images of bleary old-timers vibrating with memories. Much like me. There is Mahesh Chandra Vyas and Sobrati Mian and Rambhajan and Rehmatullah Sahib. Bechoo Aheer, Lalman Bhant and Chhabile. The relatives of Janab Abdul Haq. Mirza Habibullah Beg of Sabzimandi. And Rajkumari, Kesbai, Saloni, Raziya and Savitri, all vintage Benaras tawaifs. It’s from their accounts that I gathered that Janki was born in the Barna ka Pul moholla in an aheer family, that her father’s name was Shiv Balak Ram and her mother’s name was Manki. But there was also a stepmother whom Janki called ‘chachi’, aunt. A convenient obfuscation, this ready use of a guileless category of family kinship to camouflage the illicit connection. This ‘stepmother’, who wasn’t actually married to the father, was a Brahmin and she was young and light-skinned and by all reports very personable. Unlike Janki or her mother, who were dusky and unremarkable. There were no children from this relationship so Manki’s children were Lakshmi’s too. Yes, that was her, Lakshmi. Janki’s own account, in her Diwan-e-Janki, mentions siblings. It’s clear from most accounts of her Benaras life that between Manki and Lakshmi there was a keen appropriation of loyalties at work, a complicated staking of claims. Because Lakshmi wasn’t just attractive and upper-class, she could read and write and she had some idea of music. She directed the ceremonial worship in the household, organized the hygiene and aesthetics of the home, tried to teach Manki recipes and rituals and lived up to her, and Janki’s father’s, image of being the upgrader of their family culture. I don’t think Manki bought any of this but Janki apparently did.

  How Lakshmi came to stay is sensational and owes its retrieval to the inherited gossip of neighbours and it has all the ingredients of a garish film script. You have the scene—the thickset wrestler out on a binge. He often went to fairs and wrestling matches, won money, got doped. It is the evening of Shivratri. He is walking along the Ganga bank. He’s a bit high on bhang, the kesariya booti. He hears a splash and realizes, to his horror, that someone has just leapt into the Ganga from a tall balcony. He is a riverman. He plunges into the water and rescues the person. He perceives that it is a pretty young woman, distraught, benumbed. And, knotted up in her saree-anchal, is the corpse of a babe three or four hours old—so the local lore-masters say. He brings her home. I don’t know whether it was the unusual circumstances or the lore-master’s manner of telling
the story that make its credibility open to scepticism. But this may be my own bias against the overly dramatic, for God knows, life can frequently upstage the extremest drama we can conceive. We have no way of knowing what really happened—all our sources are dead and there is only the vague contour of a residual rumour.

  When the heavy iron knocker-chain clanged on the old teak door neither Manki nor her children knew what husband and father had brought home from the fair. They’d heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hoofs on the cobblestone flags of the lane and they’d expected the tonga to trundle past their door, as so many did. But when the coachman and Shiv Balak carried in a drenched and raggedy woman, streaked in river scum, and laid her on a charpai in the courtyard, they gathered round, at a loss for words.

  ‘She was drowning,’ was Shiv Balak’s brusque report.

  Manki drew in her breath, then got to work with warm milk and turmeric. Spoonfuls of syrup that she coaxed the stranger to sip and rose water that she gently dabbed on the closed eyelids. For long she did not open her eyes and when she did it was to look on Shiv Balak in pure hate. ‘Go away,’ she hissed. She looked to her anchal and tears started up in her eyes. They slid out of the corners of her eyes and coursed down her temples, frail tears vanishing into sweetly draggled hair. They studied her face carefully. There were dark circles round her eyes, her kajal and roli had smudged her cheeks and forehead and in her grief she uttered low moans of pain. For a second she opened her pain-sodden eyes a second time and stared blankly at them, before rage convulsed her face and with an impatient jerk she tugged at the beads she wore round her neck, wrenching at them with fists clenched tight until the string cut a deep graze round her neck and Manki had to grab hold of her manic wrists that seemed to have acquired a life of their own, intent on sawing her throat right through. The string snapped and the beads spilt over.