Manki persuaded the percussionists to give Beni lessons in tabla, dholak or pakhavaj, but Beni had no sense of rhythm. As for the sarangi, Beni’s fingers turned to thumbs in every skill save kite flying. Naseeban then suggested ironically that a young lad, an almost-man, should not sit and eat off the earnings of women. That rather than be an idle parasite he should serve the kotha in some capacity.
There were two possibilities open to Beni, to help with the household accounts, the takings, the cuts, the advances and the repayments that had to be zealously recorded. Or to be what she daintily called a gentleman usher, a word-of-mouth narrator of the girls’ beauty and gifts to prospective clients, in other words a pimp.
Beni had a shot at both. The girls of the kotha were graded in various professional categories, as Beni was instructed to bear in mind. There were the superior bais and jaans, the former being primarily singers and the latter being singers as well as dancers. There were the somewhat inferior mirasans, the lower-classed domnis and lowest in the ladder, the randis. There were those descended from senior performers and those who were, in Naseeban’s kotha, girls sold, abducted or abandoned, who could rise in the profession as they proved their talents. It was a strange and depressing thing to sit at the low floor-desk, dipping his holder into the inkwell and entering details into the large ruled ledger: Samiran Bano—five full sessions with Shri Gorakh Nath at Rs 2 per session plus three half-sessions with Janab Asghar Ali at Re 1 per session. Total Rs 13. Minus advance of Rs 2 and 8 annas. Total Rs 10 and 8 annas. Amount payable to Begum Naseeban Jahan—Rs 6 and 8 annas. Amount payable to Samiran Bano—Rs 4.
Hasina Bi—eight full sessions with Kunwar Roshan Singh at Rs 2 per session and three half-sessions at Re 1 per session with Shri Radhe Shyam and 4 mujras at Rs 4 per mujra. Total Rs 35. Minus advance of Rs 5—total Rs 30. Amount payable to Begum Naseeban Jahan—Rs 17. Amount payable to Hasina Bi—Rs 13. Manki Devi—six full sessions with Janab Mahbub Khan at Rs 2 per session, four half-sessions with Shri Jagdish Prasad at . . .
It is not to be wondered that Beni refused to be accounts-person for the kotha, fudging up the figures so abominably that he was relieved of his services.
His achievements as procurer and pimp were scarcely more successful. For a week or two he walked along the alley and down the broad street that the lane opened into, shadowing shifty-eyed men, murmuring: ‘Young, fresh-as-flower items, sir, skins white as milk, limbs supple as silk, voices like the koel in mango-flower times, anklet-tinkling feet showering silvery chimes. Visit our perfumed garden, sir, taste of beauty that shall madden, sir, songs that shall gladden, sir. Music, laughter, love are our affairs, sir. We guarantee satisfaction and freedom from cares, sir.’
He was so bad at this job that the other pimps, touting rival kothas, jeered at him: ‘Ho, hawker-boy! What have you there? Basketful of tits and clits at 2 annas apiece?’
It flayed poor Beni’s wincing soul raw. When it was time to go pimping next evening, he just lay in bed, feigning illness, and no one insisted. He went back to the only thing he was passionate about—flying kites. And after about six months, when the Makar-Sankranti kite-flying festival came, Beni’s kite soared higher than all others, slashing at competing upstarts, sawing away at the taut strings of veterans, circling swiftly out of the reach of chasing kites, floundering into tree-snares and terrace-tops, and winning Beni the handsome prize of Rs 50. It was enough to salvage all of Beni’s wilting self-esteem, quite enough to give him a swagger in his walk and a challenging glint to his eye. Triumphantly he returned to the kotha and laid Rs 49, 8 annas on Manki’s cracked old dresser. For 2 annas he bought a thick jasmine-braid garland, strode up to Shaheen Bano’s door, knocked on it, and when she appeared, drowsy from her much-needed rest, he held it out to her and said: ‘For you.’
She took it, baffled. Then understanding awoke in her seasoned eye and she broke into a sparkling giggle and rushed back into her room.
‘See here, Hasina! See what our Beni-boy has brought me!’
Behind the closed door he heard Hasina exclaim, and then the twinkling cascade of their combined laughter.
That laughter followed him everywhere he went in the kotha. It spread to the other girls, to the boys, the musicians, to Naseeban herself.
‘What, Beni-boy, nothing for us? You break our hearts, as Allah is our witness!’
‘Have a heart, my rajaji. What does Shaheen Apa have that we don’t, Sahib Bahadur? Would you like to check us out, say?’
‘Uf, this scent of jasmine, I’ll surely faint, sister! Where d’you think it’s coming from?’
‘Oh-ho, so it’s Shaheen you’ve set your sights on, my laat sahib. Ah, I might have known. But you’re a sly one, you are!’
Beni endured all. And begged a rupee from Manki and bought a cheap Kanta scent for Shaheen.
She took it coolly. Raised her fine arching eyebrows mock-seriously, unstoppered the bottle, sniffed at it and sprayed it all over Hasina, who stood laughing by. She thrust the empty vial back into Beni’s bashful hand.
‘There, now. Take that and be off!’
Beni mooned away and the kotha rocked with merriment. Then one day Shaheen strode angrily up to Manki and hissed: ‘Bua, keep your spoony son off me, will you! He’s getting on my nerves. I can’t stand the sight of him!’
Manki bristled. ‘Too good for him, are you, my hussy?’ she snapped.
‘Listen, Manki Bua,’ retorted Shaheen, ‘I’ve nothing against you or your son. He’s just a dimwit who’s got buttons for eyes. But you, surely you know what’s what?’
‘What?’ demanded Manki, incensed.
‘Between Hasina and me?’ said Shaheen in a furious whisper.
‘Of course,’ said Manki drily, turning away. ‘Yes, of course. Who doesn’t? Except maybe your precious clients. And suppose we let slip something here or a hint there? Whatever will Naseeban Bua have to say, I wonder.’
Shaheen’s defiance seemed to fall away. Her crestfallen face grew desperate, beseeching.
‘Manki Bua, I beg you, I clutch your feet. Don’t tell your son anything. Just keep him off me.’
‘How d’you suggest I do that? He’s a grown man. Shall I tell him you bathe in hog swill? That you are a viper-woman with poison fangs? No, girl, I’ll have to tell him the truth. That you and Hasina lock yourselves in together when the clients have left.’
‘Hush!’ whispered Shaheen. ‘Not so loud. Naseeban’ll hear!’
‘As if Naseeban doesn’t know.’
‘I swear to you she doesn’t!’
‘Then you don’t know Naseeban. She’s a wily one with more brains than a nursing she-fox that knows exactly what each cub is up to.’
‘Thanks very much indeed,’ spoke up Naseeban from behind the shade of a chik. ‘You do me great credit, Manki, my jaan, and you have my salaams. As for you, my little frolicsome filly, don’t for a moment imagine that I don’t know the kind of carriage that you and that Hasina draw together! God willing, some day I’ll have your au pair act up for the delectation of some perverse old nawab with outlandish tastes. But till that happens, my lasses, if a word of this gets out, if so much as a whisper reaches the clients, then, as God is my witness, I’ll take a strap to your dainty buttocks till not a cowrie-width’s skin is left! And you . . .’ Here Naseeban swirled her heavy gharara round and fixed her scorching eye on Manki. ‘Kindly explain to that wimp of a son of yours that no lovering goes on under this roof except by my grace and favour. Understand. Everything, everything is done for a price and there’s nothing left over for fooling. There’s bread to be earned.’
‘What to do, madam?’ stammered Manki. ‘The young are foolish and he’s of the age when . . .’
Naseeban shut her up with an imperious wave of the hand. ‘In that case I’ll have to put him to work again and I think I know how.’
The next morning Beni was called into Naseeban’s audience chamber where she sat, leaning back on her bolster in queenly amplitude, the long silver-tipped hook
ah pipe resting on her lips. She let the silk-tasselled pipe fall on her lap.
‘Be seated, mian,’ she commanded. ‘I have more work for you.’
He shuddered. He’d been a flop at Persian and Sanskrit and English, a flop at the sarangi and the tabla. He had failed as an accountant and as a pimp. Now he had failed in love. But Naseeban was a master psychologist. She couldn’t send either Shaheen or Hasina away though she’d long known about them. They were perfect actors and the clients loved them. They could feign the sighs, the agonies and raptures of young love with subtle and brilliant emoting and they were good songstresses and pleasing dancers and experts at witty wordplay and had a good memory for poetry too. And more, they were very young and had good, productive working years ahead. No, she couldn’t spare them and neither could she afford to allow this lovesick young lad to hang around them and find things out for himself, as he was bound to, sooner or later. He would have to be manoeuvred away and she knew how to do that.
‘My lord patang-baaz,’ she smiled, ‘my king of the kites, I want you to do me a favour. If you can teach the little Subuhi how to fly kites, I shall be greatly obliged to you.’
He stared. Subuhi was a chit of eleven or twelve, a new entrant to the kotha, and he’d taken no notice of her. But Naseeban spoke with a mysterious smile.
‘I have no doubt you’ll teach her well. Teach her on the terrace.’ She leant forward. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Then teach her to fly kites in bed.’
He took time for it to register.
‘You’ve taught boys to fly kites, haven’t you?’ said Naseeban, smiling softly. ‘Well, you haven’t ever taught a girl. Teach her to hold up the kite and toss it up in the air as you wheel out the string. Then let your hand close over hers as she clutches the string. Encircle her and breathe in the musk of her hair. Let the kite go but hold on to the girl. The rest I leave to your blood and hers.’ Naseeban softly put the hookah pipe back on her lips.
Beni was terrified as the full import of this assignment dawned on him. He was being asked to break in this fresh little girl, initiate her.
‘But why me?’ he stammered. ‘I mean, begum sahiba, that there are rich clients who’d gladly, I mean . . .’
Naseeban waved aside his feeble protest. ‘Not with this one. She’s moody. Cries all the time. Has to be force-fed. Is ready to kick and bite. She’ll slap her nath babu and send him flying back to his phaeton, believe me. And give my house a bad name. It might cost me goodwill built over years. No, mian. What we want is a gentle thawing. What we want,’ Naseeban smiled, malevolent, knowing, infinitely shrewd, ‘is good, old-fashioned love. The way you proved your instincts at understanding the language of love, lad, I knew you were wasted in any other kind of work. Go to her, boy. Teach her to fly kites.’
She put the hookah to her laughing lips and took a long, lazy drag. Beni left the room without a word.
None of Naseeban’s formulas proved effective on the terrace. Subuhi didn’t let Beni encircle her but shrugged off his guiding hand. She tore up the kite and burst into tears. It was Beni’s special kite, a beautiful flamingo and banana green, with a long ruffled tail. And seeing it in shreds, Beni burst into tears too. The thaw was anything but slow or gentle. But Subuhi hadn’t ever seen a young man burst into tears and he made such an unthreatening spectacle as he gulped and swiped his sleeve across his streaming eyes, that she relaxed in his presence, brought flour-jelly gum and strips of paper and needle and thread and sat on the terrace floor, trying to paste up the shreds.
‘There, now,’ she said, offering the patched and crumpled, criss-crossed-with-paper-tapes, salvaged kite.
‘It won’t fly,’ he said, sulky.
‘It will,’ she said in her child voice. ‘Try. Look. Hold the string—like this—wheel it out. I’ll hold it up. Like this. And let it go . . .’
Unconsciously she had encircled him and was breathing softly down his back. He smelt of sweat and camphor. And something else she could not place and she didn’t know it was desire.
She ran to the other end of the terrace, held up the kite, flung it into the air. It fluttered up, askew. He adjusted the string, tugged. No good at all. The battered kite took a crazy curve, came dashing down and lay on the terrace’s paving stones.
‘I told you it wouldn’t,’ he moaned.
‘I’ll get you another,’ she said.
But of course she couldn’t. She had no money of her own at all.
He smiled wanly. ‘Never mind,’ he said.
There was much laughter downstairs. Beni’s progress with Subuhi was a matter of keen and general interest.
‘What, Sahib Bahadur,’ tittered the girls, ‘we hear she’s left you with a ragged kite and a torn heart.’
‘No, she tried very hard to glue it up, we hear!’
‘How many stitches in your heart, laddie?’
They teased the little girl too, no better way to kindle romance.
Beni avoided her for a day or two, so heartbroken was he about his kite.
One day she beckoned to him from the room she shared with Samiran. ‘Won’t you teach me any more?’ she wanted to know.
‘There isn’t a kite,’ he said curtly.
‘Buy one,’ she insisted.
‘How?’ he wanted to know.
‘Take this.’ She held out a little jewelled hairpin. ‘It’s silver. Will buy a whole lot of kites for you.’
‘Who wants a whole lot?’
She smiled shyly. ‘I do.’
It was his turn to be startled at the idea of a woman courting him. He opened his eyes wide and flushed to the roots of his hair.
When a dozen kites arrived and some reels of string and paper bagfuls of powdered glass and bottles of glue, more merriment resulted down below.
‘Our Beni is planning to wed our Subuhi and set up a kite shop! What, Beni-boy, it’s hearth and home for our lad now, is it?’
No one recalled how the wedding joke started but it caught on fast. One evening Subuhi gashed her fingers on the razor-sharp kite string. She let out a little yelp and Beni rushed to help. The blood burbled out of three fingers and stained her white chikan dress. She brushed her hand on her white headcloth and stained it too. Then Beni tore off a length of cloth from one end of his linen kurta and proceeded to bind up the small hand, forgetting kite and kite-string and all else in the act. How the girls of the kotha pulled Subuhi’s leg.
‘Blood on your chunri and blood on your dress, girl? What’s he been doing to you, say?’
Subuhi wasn’t any longer the temperamental creature she’d been. She was pert and sprightly and quite transformed.
‘See what I do to him, see!’ she challenged.
Beni they plagued on his torn kurta.
‘Aha, there goes Majnu, tearing up his clothes for love of Laila!’ they teased.
Next day Beni appeared with a bottle of lal-dawa, the red medicine, Mercurochrome.
‘Has the wound healed?’ he wanted to know.
‘It hurts still,’ she said, extending her paw.
‘Let me dress it again. I’ve brought medicine.’
There was something in the way he undressed the hand, undraping the fingers of their swaddling bands, down to their naked, vulnerable paleness, that made her tingle. He smeared red Mercurochrome on. It stained her palm scarlet.
‘Like the mehndi ceremony, isn’t it, Beni?’ she asked shyly. ‘Like henna on a bride’s palm?’
He stiffened, tensely sopping up the extra trickles. She was provoked to mischief. Her hand shot up and left its red imprint on his cheek, then on the other cheek, then on his chest.
‘Holi hai!’ she said, giggling, hysterical. ‘Bura na mano, Holi hai! Don’t mind me, it’s Holi!’
In her practice chamber Janki sang out: ‘Aaj Braj mein ho rahi Hori’ in Raga Sohni. Following it up with ‘Mo pe daar gayo sare rang ki gagar’ in Raga Khambaj. Her sisterly teasing had confined itself to songs, and by the time Beni descended bashfully down the staircase and made a dash
for the bathhouse in the courtyard Janki’s rich contralto came resounding down the corridor. ‘Hori machi hai saiyaan ki nagariya’ in poignant Pilu.
The girls were in splits when they saw Subuhi’s red palms and his red-stained face.
‘Ah ha ha ha! Now the mehndi is over. It’s time for the baraat! Bring in the elephants-horses-palanquins! Bring on the fireworks and the flowers!’
Beni asked Manki’s and Naseeban’s permission to take Subuhi to the doll-mela. Manki hesitated but was overruled by Naseeban.
It was the day of the swing festival, high monsoon-time and the doll-battering fair. The monsoon sky, for days a dank pigeon-grey, had cleared and spilt runnels of foamy sun-drifts, crimson, primrose, saffron and violet. The August light fizzed, trees and bushes sizzling in a green blaze and the air polished as glass. Beni took Subuhi, veiled from head to foot, to the doll-pond fair.
It was a fair of the usual kind where you could buy bangles and trinkets and kitchenware and palm-leaf baskets. And special to the day was crunchy Bengal gram seasoned with tangy lime juice and spices, which Beni proudly bought for his girl and which she fell to, lifting her black veil expertly to one side. He bought her a palm-leaf bugle too as a joke and she promptly applied her pretty little lips to it and blew a trumpet blast into his ear, deafening him and making him jump. He bought her danglers and peanut candy and guided her to the doll pond where children had come with rag dolls and sticks. This centuries-old custom was one of the city’s folk eccentricities. Rag dolls were made out of sticks tied crosswise. Two outspread arms, two scissor legs, a scarecrow thing. A head fixed atop, a foolish rag face. Then dressed in a skirt and a top and headcloth, ready for meaningless martyrdom. She was flung into the pond, flat on her back, and a crowd of howling children, roaring with rage, fell upon her, battering and bashing her sorry body with sticks, disemboweling her with fearsome, bloodthirsty shrieks. The pond turned into a graveyard for mangled dolls. The pounding went on and on, the howling mob of boys swinging their sticks in the air and thrashing the doll to shreds as it lay, a pummelled, ragged mess in the muddy water. The girls, the sisters, stood back with bagfuls of Bengal gram for the valiant heroes. It was a terrifying and disturbing thing.
Requiem in Raga Janki Page 10