Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  I shall tell you my impressions of her. High cheekbones in a large, swarthy face, and a strong, wide Mongol nose. She has a carved, heavy-lidded look. She is hung with many silver chains, lockets and pendants. Massive, jewelled danglers weigh down her earlobes and the voluminous drapes of intricate design round her broad girth give her a look of solid abundance, asexual and commanding. A substantial woman of matronly presence. Someone who inspires awe rather than passion. But it may be argued that this portrait belongs to her later period and that it is unfaithful to her beauty as a young woman. Excuse me, even the ruined palace retains traces of royalty and an old woman some residual vestige of her youthful self, and in Janki I did not find any, only a powerful personality. Two lines of self-description clinch this impression: ‘In quick-wittedness, which is a necessary distinction in this profession, she is a complete adept. To any witty, bantering comment, she can penetrate its inner folds of meaning and with such frankness make rejoinder that she can amaze, making it seem as though her answer has been previously rehearsed.’ Janki would like to be remembered as a woman of compelling character. And this would indeed be borne out by the first paragraph of the introduction to her Diwan: ‘From ancient times it has been seen that people preserve personal diaries . . . and later the same records become storehouses of information for succeeding generations.’

  My strong suspicion is that the Janki Bai of this introduction is, partly at least, a fictional character in Janki’s own mind. As each of us is, to a great extent, in ours as we dream or imagine ourselves into being our ideal selves. A burfi knife won’t do as a weapon. It isn’t romantic enough, so it has to be a sword. A grand passion has to be the motive behind the assault, not the thwarted lust of a paramour of one’s father’s mistress. Janki in her Diwan was creating a life story, not recording one. That’s why the contemporary accounts of others differ so radically from hers.

  Of one thing, though, there can be no doubt. Janki may have been ‘nihayat badsoorat’, as one authority on her life candidly puts it, but music made an entrancing woman out of her. The instant she began singing the audience felt itself lifted on the crest of a sumptuous emotion that kept them afloat or capsized them at will.

  5

  In an Indian raga we are free to undo the design, retrace our course and weave another texture. The raga does not change, as the sea does not, no matter what altering shapes the waves take on. It’s the same with life. If something had happened differently, would the outcome have been different? I suspect that in the end we’d be exactly in the same interior location where we find ourselves now. But this is just an unexplained hunch. So I have honoured Janki’s account even as I remain unpersuaded by it, recounting what didn’t happen, a variant adopted by Janki as preferable to what did happen, a fabricated history alongside the relatively authentic one. She probably came to believe it was her truth and she endorsed and fostered it with ringing authenticity. We choose the stories that we inhabit. We are made up of what did not happen as much as what did. What we believe happened, what should have, what almost happened but stopped short and our flinching selves denied. Our fantastications, our edited, pruned and pared memories, our lies, yes, our comforting, sheltering distortions in which our realities take refuge. That was how it was with the history of the fifty-six stabs.

  But to come to what most surely did happen: when Manki burst into the shop and grasped the situation—Janki lying bloodied in a dead swoon, Lakshmi in a flap, clothes in disarray and bodice unbuttoned, and Raghunandan’s agitated step fleeing across the threshold, the door to the lane ajar, Manki had it figured out. Then Janki’s condition made her break into a scream and run, beating her breast and tearing her hair, and gather up her daughter, calling down the maledictions of the gods.

  But later. After the crowd had rushed in and the buggy came and the Mission Hospital reached somehow, and Janki attended to and a flustered Shiv Balak arrived on the scene. After the outcries and lamentations against the wretch, that son of Satan, that son of the pig, and the shudderings had died down. Then a cool, practical piecing together of the episode happened in Manki’s head. And Lakshmi all the while hovering cravenly around, overly anxious to please. And as Manki’s intent gaze began resting longer and longer on Lakshmi’s crestfallen face in challenge and contempt, Lakshmi shrank into herself, and both women knew who now held the whip and was restraining her hand by a supreme effort of will, biding her time. Increasingly, as the days passed, Lakshmi’s dainty hands, those hands made for painting ritual murals on walls or tinkling with glass bangles as she swirled the wooden whisk in the curd pot, those fragile hands now wrestled with grindstone and grinding- wheel and pestle and coconut husk and ash in mute appeasement of Manki’s cold retribution. Still Manki sat, stony-faced, only breaking her silence with a sigh and words addressed to Janki: ‘When will you sing again, my koel child? When shall I hear you speak?’

  Between Manki and Lakshmi reigned such a weighted silence, such static in the air. Manki held her captive numb in the snare of her compelling gaze, like the potent eyes of the python stun the creature it means to strangle. Her silent stare tightened its coils round Lakshmi’s throat, crushed the breath from her lungs, made her heart jump and her mouth go dry in panic. When the English doctor came to check up on Janki, lying sedated, all stitched and bandaged up, Manki’s eyes would fill and she would entreat him for a definite answer.

  ‘When will my Jankiya speak, Daktar Sahib?’

  The question sent a frisson through Lakshmi’s slight frame, left her face stricken and paralysed with dread. It made her fumble with vessels and jars, made her drop things. An issue hung in the air in a stillness stretched to cracking.

  Until one day Lakshmi rose speechlessly from her mat, went and knelt before Manki, stooped in abject shame, and clutched Manki’s feet.

  Manki’s face kindled. She drew her feet away, disdaining Lakshmi’s touch. Her voice was hard.

  ‘No need for all this nautanki. Don’t think I did it for your sake. I said what I did to save his face—that thankless wretch I’m married to.’

  For Manki had told Shiv Balak what she’d told the rest—that Raghunandan came after Janki and attacked her in vengeance, that Lakshmi heard, rushed and raised the alarm. It was an account she’d steadfastly maintained. Until the time approached for the stitches to be removed from Janki’s gashed and swollen face. Then Manki artlessly remarked: ‘Poor child! What she’s been through! At last now she can unburden her heart.’

  So when the last bandage had been removed and Janki looked feebly into the English doctor’s face and he asked her to smile again and again to test her face muscles, and the tears prickled her eyes each time she tried, the pain was so sharp, and the doctor said in his stilted English voice: ‘Bahut achchhe. Now speak, my dear. Kuchh bolkar dikhaaiye.’ Janki whispered, ‘Ji achchha,’ and Manki dabbed at her eyes with her saree-anchal and thanked Kashi Vishvanath Lord Shiva for his blessing—that very day Lakshmi vanished.

  No one saw her go. The gram lay half-ground on the grindstone. The fire had gone out in the hearth and her clothes were missing from the clothes line.

  In two well-spaced communications Manki broke the news to Shiv Balak.

  ‘Oh, Janki’s father, Bhagwan be praised, our Jankiya has spoken two words today!’

  He was in the act of ritually washing himself for the evening worship, cupping his hands for the water that she poured out of a large earthen pot in the courtyard and splashing his feet and arms and face before mopping up with his shoulder cloth. He’d only just come in and asked, as he always did, ‘O Lachhminiya, where be you, girl?’

  Today Manki’s hands shook and the brass lota she held tilted and sent a jet of water, all over Shiv Balak’s grey head. Then she repeated that Janki had spoken and that Lakshmi was not to be found.

  It wasn’t the shock of the water that made Shiv Balak gasp and freeze a moment before his flushed face unlocked and he stood stock still.

  ‘What did she say?’

&nb
sp; ‘She said “Ji achchha”,’ answered Manki.

  He knocked the brass lota out of Manki’s hand in a frantic fit.

  ‘Not her. The other one. Lachhminiya. What did she say?’ He was roaring now.

  Here Manki took a long moment to answer. She stepped up to where the brass pot had fallen jangling to the ground and lifted it, checking it carefully for dents before turning to confront him.

  ‘What do I care? Shame on you, you less-than-sane man! Your daughter has spoken for the first time in weeks, your daughter that might, but for the grace of Kashi Vishvanath, be dead and burnt at Manikarnika Ghat. She is alive and has spoken and you—you have thoughts only for your Brahmin whore!’

  But Shiv Balak paid no heed. He was in a daze. His voice shook: ‘The river . . . She said she’d go to the river again!’ He grew desperate, fearful.

  ‘She said many times she’d go to the railway line too. Or hang herself with her saree. I wish she’d gone and done it long ago! Drowned herself in the Ganga before casting her blight on my courtyard. I pray she’s really gone and lain down on the railway tracks! I’ll offer up a chunariya to the Devi, I will, yes, and hold a havan and serve prasad to the whole city, if she has!’

  Manki’s rant had risen to a shrill harangue. And Shiv Balak’s rage took a quick turn into panic. He seized his outdoor clothes, pulled on his long shirt and hurriedly knotted his dhoti round his waist. In a few moments he was out of the house, rushing down the lane in rapid strides. Manki sprang to the main door and shrieked after him in tearful fury: ‘Wait till my Jankiya can speak more! Wait till you hear what she has to tell you!’

  As it happened, Janki did not betray Lakshmi to Shiv Balak. She turned her face to the wall and acted as if she had no recollection of what had happened. Manki never forgave her for this. So it was Manki’s initial account that survived, supported first by Janki’s refusal to speak up, later by her willing adoption of the version. The truth was buried by Lakshmi’s disappearance and Janki’s silence. But of this later.

  Shiv Balak did not return that night. Nor the whole of the next day. He dragged his feet into the house late the next evening and made his way to the lone cot in the courtyard and sank into it.

  Manki towered over him. ‘Well?’ she wanted to know.

  He looked away.

  She was satisfied that Lakshmi hadn’t been traced. Then a closer look at his face filled her with consternation. His features were distorted in grief, his chin trembling, his eyes red. Tears streamed down his stubbled cheeks. The lines on his dusty forehead had deepened. There was such despair in his sagging state that Manki could not hold back her outrage.

  ‘For shame, man!’ she screamed in disgust. ‘Weeping like a child! Like a little lass leaving her father’s home and going to her sasural in a palki! Is this how a pahalwan finds himself? That lion of the wrestling pit? Have your wits died? Have you no sense? And all for a slut! All for a deceiving whore!’

  She pounced on him, shook him violently, hauled him to his feet and dragged him to Janki’s bedside in the inner room.

  ‘Jankiya,’ she commanded, ‘speak! Tell him what you saw. Tell him why that sipahiya attacked you. Don’t be ashamed. Speak the truth, bitiya.’

  But Janki turned away, sickened, and would not oblige.

  Manki was bitterly disappointed. ‘I don’t know if this muhjali has forgotten or her tongue has been struck dead in her mouth. That woman has worked her magic on this one as well, a curse on her! But I—I am not afraid of your magic spell–wali kept whore! I’m pretty sure she was there, the hussy, down there on the floor among the vats and bowls and pans, dancing the raas flat on her back with that whoremonger. Yes, exactly that and no less! Like a bitch in season! Jankiya surprised them at it. Saw everything. So he tried to kill her. To stop her tongue. But I have no fear. I shall shout the truth from my rooftop! Shiv Balak, the halwaiya, the great pahalwan of the akhara kept a fancy woman who was caught fucking with a two-cowrie rascal sipahi in Shiv Balak’s own shop! And here’s her fond lover boohooing like an abandoned bride in a fair! And what I still haven’t told you is that she’s raided my trunks and carried away all my gold, yes, the nine-tola waist-girdle, the earrings, the solid kangans, everything, and all the gold mohurs and money we kept in the big iron chest, that we’d saved up these many years!’

  There were sparks crackling in her voice. Her temples pulsed, her pupils snapped, crazed, in her bulging eyes. She was possessed. It was one of those less-listed items in the catalogue of grief, to see your man weep brokenly over the loss of another woman, to grow unstrung with mourning, and sit sagging before her. What comfort could she offer him, or herself?

  ‘Get up,’ she hectored. ‘Wash up! Eat! The evil has passed. Look to your daughter there, only just escaped dying from your slut’s tricks. Look to your other children and your shop. Get up and stop wallowing in your folly like a buffalo in a filthy pond!’

  But he neither washed nor ate. She heard him pace the terrace by night. Before the first temple gongs and conchs sounded in the morning sky and the first calls to prayer began in the minarets of Benaras’s mosques, she heard the heavy wooden door to the alley groan softly open. When she ran down the steep stone stairs and burst upon the dim courtyard, Shiv Balak was gone.

  If Janki had spoken, then or later, the account might have been different. But Janki chose not to, for reasons she knew best or did not know yet. What is significant is that old neighbours would carry the unwritten story forward, alongside and at odds with the official written record, the sordid and sorry human tale of Lakshmi and Raghunandan and Shiv Balak’s grief and Manki’s breaking, and the way she put herself together again and morphed into someone else. As Janki did too. Later Manki would accuse Janki of being partial to Lakshmi, of being under her spell, as Shiv Balak was. But by then Janki had chosen which account to adopt and that became her declared history.

  Shiv Balak never came back. For days Manki combed the ghats and bazaars, the wrestling pits and bhang joints, the temple courts and fairgrounds, the boatmen’s mooring stands and the empty, muddy stretches of riverbank, even the lanes of Hira Mandi where the prostitutes crowded, and the mutts where the holy men lived. She returned, miserable and bone-tired, to her house every night, to tend the convalescent Janki.

  On Parvati’s shoulder she rested her head and wept, and to Parvati she spoke of what the astrologers had told her, and what the parrot with the card, and what the wild-eyed augurs of the burning grounds. She discussed the forbidding cost of the rituals that guaranteed Shiv Balak’s return and the difficulty of arranging the bizarre and frightening black-magic items that the ash-covered, bloodshot-eyed ascetics on the cremation grounds asked for in order to look into the mists of time and say where Shiv Balak was, dead or alive, alone or with someone, sane or maddened.

  The mithai shop closed, Kashi, Paraga and Mahadei caught the pox that swept across the city and died. It was Parvati who arranged the litter-bearers and the obsequies because Manki by now was good for nothing. Janki caught it too but lived. A few pock scabs did not add further disfigurement to her already marked face. Still Manki wandered the ghats, jostling shaven widows and sages and street women and fierce stud bulls.

  It seemed to Janki in later years that this desperate, tireless search for someone gone away, someone lost in the crowd, turned into the theme song of her life. It was the one subject she wrote no ghazal on, set to no thumri tune, for no words or notations could render it. First her father searching, agonizing, for his lover, then her mother searching for her father. And she herself would live to share the same fate. Like Baiju for Gopal in the old music lore that Hassu Khan interlarded his teaching with.

  This Baiju, whose eminence in music had reached most of the royal courts in north India in the early sixteenth century, could get an emperor to withdraw his command to put a whole city to the sword. In 1535, the history books calculate. Humayun had just defeated Bahadurshah Gujarati and conquered Mandu and, as was the engaging practice with conquerors, th
e victory was followed by the dreaded decree of Qatleyam, genocide or kill-all. Blood ran down the lanes and squares, pooled in gutters, streamed into the river and soaked into the earth. Men, women and children, all were seized and slain. A horrific hubbub. Cries of agony and fear, shrieks, prayers for mercy, gut-wrenching howls filled the air, while the emperor, otherwise a mild man but here merely following a military custom, stood, sword raised, for the execution of his imperial orders to be completed. The story goes that Baiju, a Mathura Hindu and a celibate devotee of Krishna, sang a Persian verse that so charmed the emperor that he ordered the massacre instantly stopped. Baiju had been taken prisoner by a Mughal soldier, then recognized by one of Humayun’s Rajput braves and led to sing before the emperor. Which he did, melting the emperor’s heart. Humayun had gifted him a horse and fine clothes and offered him a position at his court, but Baiju, who belonged more to the other-world of temples and mystical longings, had no use for these things. The gifts he’d passed on to his Mughal captor, the court position he had politely declined.

  To such a one came the harrowing fate of wandering the earth, searching for a lost son. His music rusted, his feet grew sore and blistered. With matted locks, ragged clothes, overgrown beard and crazed with grief, Baiju turned into a mad fakir, sifting the ash of woods and fields and cities and villages, calling out his son’s name—‘Gopal! Gopal!’

  Naik Gopal was a boy he’d adopted, fed and clothed and trained to sing dhrupad and dhamar of a high order at the temples of Mathura. In some accounts Gopal was a son-in-law, married to an adopted daughter, Meera. Baiju lost his mind, combing the earth for his lost Gopal and his cry reached that other Gopal, that celestial one, Lord Krishna himself, one of whose names was Gopal too. And as he lay like a wasted and weary beggar at a wayside temple he overheard the conversation of two travellers, and from them he gathered that someone resembling Gopal was court musician to the maharaja of Jodhpur. In some accounts Kashmir—but as we know, legends enjoy the flexibility of having many optional versions. Baiju, baffled that one whose music was consecrated to God alone should have succumbed to the pomp and show of a court, managed to reach Jodhpur, mingled with the crowds and heard Gopal sing at a royal gathering. Then, unable to control himself, he rushed forward and threw himself on the ground before his son, crying: ‘Son! Gopal!’ Gopal refused to recognize him, breaking his heart. But, as the saying goes, in God’s world there are delays but never denials of justice, and events transpired to shame Gopal and vindicate Baiju in a wonderful way that has become one of the sublime stories in music lore.