Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  The house, now theirs, was remodelled to their taste. To the three-storeyed structure were added stables, a gari-khana, dens for domestic animals, external bawarchi-khanas. The two main reception chambers for guests were her pride. One was designed in a modern style with a couch, beautiful easy chairs, tables, a silver bedstead, large mirrors, colourful pictures on the walls. The other had a floor arrangement with costly carpets, chandeliers and beautiful urns.

  When that first brocade outfit came round from the dressmaker’s, Janki in her new role of kotha-patroness, tried it on for the benefit of the excited girls in whom the recent changes had unleashed strange new flutters and fantasies. Naseeban’s marriage had left them all of a twitter for marriage, and a settled home was an enduring dream they played out in wishful thinking, in delusional temporary liaisons with a floating population of clients, in jest as with poor Beni and Subuhi, and in bitter parody. But then, coming close on the heels of one sensational episode was Janki’s meteoric rise to wealth and eminence, and this suddenly activated a possibility so far utterly unimaginable.

  They fawned on Janki, envied her, sought to draw her out, teased and complimented, turned sycophantic or satirical, striving to reinvent a relationship that had incarnated in a new and unfamiliar avatar.

  ‘Ai hai! Here’s Noor Jahan come again!’ cried Hasina as Janki tried a gracious, gliding gait in the silk gharara. Hasina bowed low in mock salutation and brought her fingertips to her brow in a slow, choreographed triple salaam.

  ‘Who’s this? Mallika-e-Hind?’ said Shaheen with a laugh. ‘Is she the Indian empress or the angrezi one, our Mallika Victoria, for sure. Except for the colour of her face!’

  They brought an armchair and made Janki sit on it in regal parody of Empress Victoria on the marble pediment at the Company Bagh, putting a stick in her hand and an orb of knitting wool in the other hand. Which Janki, playing along, used liberally to thwack the ones who came close, wielding the sceptre of kotha queen on deviant members, the room ringing with laughter. Naseeban’s parrot, Munne Mian, now Janki’s, perched on the arm of Janki’s chair, head cocked and eye bead sliding in devilish free play, as it tried to mimic the girls’ voices.

  Then one of them ran to Naseeban’s now-empty room and came back with one of Naseeban’s hookahs.

  ‘Here, Mallika,’ the girl laughed, ‘I’ve always thought Mallika Victoria’s appearance might improve with a hookah in her hand instead of that school-memsahib’s bottom-whacker stick! Take this, Jankiya, and let’s see you turn into our new Naseeban Bua!’

  Janki did. And did it again. Taking a deep drag, little realizing then that this hookah habit too was something that would endure.

  Like that voice in her head. It spoke up at odd times, when she had dozed off on long journeys, by buggy or by train. Or when she hovered between sleep and waking in the small hours. She had the sensation that her mind sang in ragas unknown to human voice, in notations impossible to chart, ragas shiningly coherent and familiar, that hung about her conscious mind for a while before fading, like itr from a garment. Sometimes there were even words, clear as day. They followed an ongoing and passionate monologue which was the inner argument circling the sum of her existence. They argued on behalf of the music that had laid siege to her life, and they argued on behalf of all those things that lay forfeited in the service of her art, and in the crossfire of claims were born many plaints, many challenging shades of questioning. This art, her captor, her saviour. To breathe free of its tyranny, to forget it for a week, a day. Not to cede so large a portion of my soul to it. For surely there were other summonings, hankerings of the body and the heart, that this austerity of art had peremptorily exiled. Draw away, oh steal away, Janki, flee this master that you serve, the voice transformed to an inner singing. Find that other life that hides its face and submerges itself in deepest dreaming. But what do you amount to, O Janki, in that unlit hour of flight? Your soul scatters in the night, knowing not where to turn. Trembling, I strike a match and hold it to the wick of a melody anew. My affrighted heart seeks its home, the song. For no other love does it know and no other home.

  The voice took on the lineaments of her questioning self, interrogating her song:

  I asked the black one on the mango bough

  Tell me why you sing, O koel.

  Looked she at me in amaze and said,

  ‘Sing? What’s that, sister?’

  ‘This thing you do,’ spake I.

  ‘What thing,’ asked she, ‘that I do?’

  ‘This flute you play in your honeyed throat.’

  ‘Sister, I know not what you mean,’ said she to me.

  ‘I live my life, that’s all I do.’

  ‘Alas, I envy you,’ says Janki to the bird.

  ‘To live is to sing, I wish ’twer so with me.

  I need something to live by, live for,

  And that’s why I must sing, know you my meaning?’

  ‘No,’ said the bird and I envied her more

  For her freedom from song

  Even while she sang.

  Janki awoke to a finished song spelling itself out in her mind. For a moment the miracle of it did not register. Was this a thumri, forgotten and babbling in her sleep? Then she realized it was not. Her mind had written its own thumri, broken free of its moorings in her waking life. As one cotton wick, nuzzling another, lights up two oil lamps, so did Janki’s music ignite amorphous words in her secret ear. She heard the words happen, quite without intimation, a smattering of clouded sensations coming together in startling configurations. Ghazals and thumris alighted on her mind like birds coming to rest on a branch, preparing to flare into flight. And then one nebulous dawn, she heard the diamond-hard refrain, every word clear-carved: ‘Naghma-sarai ke siwa kehti hai sher Janki / Ahle-kamal dekh lein uska hunar alag-alag.’

  It was a command more than a pronouncement for Janki. The dam burst and the floodwaters of verse washed over her days and nights.

  There was the inconvenience of holder and inkwell, especially on long journeys, as there is the inconvenience of the body and its obstructions. She tried to memorize the words that serendipitously waylaid her, she tried to set them to tune, so that she could hold on to them till she reached some place where they could be set down in pen and ink. Then Jallu Mian gifted her the strange implement of record-keeping that he had discovered lately, the Faber pencil! A slender stick of painted wood with a vein of graphite encased in its tunnel as is the wick in a candle. She took a childlike joy in its strokes, and the way it was sharpened to a point, as was the voice, intent upon a high note of the highest octave. And which, uptilted, like its sister, the candle, lit a trail of inspired song across the leaves of her notebook, setting the pages on fire:

  Do not abandon the desire to see me,

  If the heart craves life then do not give up the beloved’s door.

  The heart called out to him but he did not hear.

  Do not abandon me to loneliness for the sake of others.

  The joy of meeting can be enjoyed even in imagining.

  O, my grieving heart, hold that joy in yourself.

  God willing, he will come as the Messiah to heal me.

  O grieving heart, have faith in your cries.

  The cup-bearer of creation’s grand first gathering says this to me:

  Do not abandon the intoxication of the oneness of God.

  Give me pain, suffering, misery,

  O cruel one, do not abandon this old habit of yours.

  The heart declares: Do not give up love’s ‘khayal’,

  A good tune, a good rendering, do not abandon these.

  It is these things that have brought you renown,

  O Janki, do not abandon the love of the ghazal, the love of the couplet.

  It seemed to her that the pencil pierced its way through all those clenched denials of her proscribing heart, defying the censorships of practical wisdom, speaking what lay even beneath the crust of dreams, discovering conflicts of allegiance and shocking
her brain into unsettling and forbidding admissions, even as it fled into the safety of the known and the chosen. Her writing hand ranged from unknown lover to unknown God, through the terrain of real aloneness and conventional grief and found its nervous way back to the song that was her sanctuary:

  In temples and the kaaba I searched for him

  The desire to find him was so great.

  Who knows what’s to happen to my failed desires and hopes?

  The grief I have, none else has.

  If my destiny allows we shall meet.

  Why should I wander aimlessly, seeking him.

  What avails hankering in a brief life?

  Only grief comes from this hankering

  Ere this how many misfortunes have I known.

  But then, again, the same hankering returns.

  From experience of the world I know the intelligent do not hanker.

  This has no fruit, no result.

  So there is this hankering for my heart in you.

  O Janki, do not get involved at all.

  He looks like a flower, in truth he is thorny.

  All too often she found it slack and cheap and this enraged her and she threw it away and wrote again, inflecting each syllable as she would at her morning riyaz. And as her hand and brain grew accustomed to this new possession, as her fingers closed upon the pencil that held the reins of this stampeding stallion, mastering its power and instructing its speed, she embarked upon a story about a woman named Janki, a conquering creature she imagined into being out of the depths of her qualified memories and her self-authenticating cravings. This is how she described herself:

  In appearance of medium height with a well-proportioned face, large eyes, wheaten complexion, mild manners, with a sweet voice and a slightly swinging gait, the scars of knives on her wheaten face. But these scars, after the passage of time, have somewhat faded, though some remain. Yet her overall physiognomy isn’t much diminished. 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 . . . In hospitality and in soft-spokenness, it is generally observable that those people who are talented in some way are always deficient. Till today nobody has heard her speak ill of a contemporary artist or praise her own self. Whenever there is mention of a singer, she always speaks well of her and remembers her or him with good words. Whenever a cultured person comes, she rises to her feet to welcome him and makes him take a proper seat and remains standing as long as he does not sit. Paan, hookah, itr, elaichi, cigarettes, sherbet, etc. are offered. From those who come to hear her sing from great distances out of genuine shauq, she does not charge a fee. Free of cost, she entertains him for an hour or two. But the listeners pay her musicians something on leaving, which is their right, because they have no other way of earning money. Often when famous qawwals or excellent musicians or wandering performers arrive, it is difficult for them to leave without dining. On these festive celebrations, prominent citizens are also invited and as situation demands foreign visitors are also favoured with her hospitality.

  She built up her story of self, stroke by stroke, believed it and enacted it, her tales of victory, her tales of wealth:

  Where at the start of her career her mujra fees were Rs 15, it is said of her, who could say that a time would come when her local mujra fee would be Rs 150 and in the nearby cities it would be Rs 500 per day and at distant locations would be Rs 1000. So in recent years this is her usual fee for her mujra. Travelling expenses are extra and include several tickets for second-class travel and the rest for inter-class travel, and ten or twelve people usually accompany her. Her first contests were with famous courtesans at the house of Janab Rai Bahadur Lala Ram Charan Das Sahib who is one of Allahabad’s exceedingly select and wealthy raeeses, at a function related to one of his close relations, and the contest was with Vazeer Jan Karnal and Bi Bandi Patna. Then at several locations on numerous occasions, at Nasik with Sunder Moradabad, then at Calcutta, at the wedding of Babu Omkar Mull Seth Sahib’s son, with Gauhar Jaan and Mallika Agra, at Muzaffarpur with Zohra Bai, at Kanpur and Allahabad with Vidyadhari Benaras and Chanda Amrohiya. At Allahabad itself with Husna Benaras and at Khaga in Fatehpur with Laali Jaan Delhi, at Bahraich with Achchan Bai Lucknow. But in comparison with them all, her own fans and connoisseurs of music, if they did not rate her higher than her rivals, neither did they rate her less. Rather, they generally cast their vote in her favour . . .

  She wrote of rajas, maharajas, zamindars and raeeses. Of the Dashera festival at the palace of the raja of Bettiah where she sang ‘Hathwa laagat kumhailai ho rama, juhi ki kaliyan’, of the marriage of the son of Sir Sultan Ahmad, the famous Bar-at-Law of Patna with the daughter of the Nawab of Patna where she and Gauhar sang in that massive pandal, a veritable tent-township that had been created in a field for the elite of the city for the music that was performed from morning till night and then all through the night till the next morning! Of the marriage of the son of another wealthy lawyer of Patna, Kulwant Sahai Sahib, later a judge of the same high court and how the function was held in a field known as Guru Prasad’s Son’s Haata where she sang ‘Rum-jhum badarwa barse’ in Gaud Malhar. She wrote of Rani Dhandei of Jaunpur, her great friend, whose favourite was, incredibly, renderings of her sozkhwani. And how the connoisseurs used to say: ‘Janki Bai ke kantha-swara mein misri ki dalia ghuli hui hai.’ She wrote in a voice speaking to herself but also speaking to a future that she was confident would give her a place. This diary habit had come to stay. It lasted till well into the third quarter of her life, that delusional spell of ascendance that she lived through, in a permanent flush of gratification when her life had arched to its ultimate achievement, or so she believed, when her first record was played over a loudspeaker in Chowk Gangadas and a jostling horde of Ilahabadis converged on the scene, pouring into the square in wild abandon, till all you could see was a sea of heads more numerous than on the day of the Patharchatti and Pajawa Ram-dal processions. She wrote of her wealth, her resounding fame, her enlarging properties. Seventeen houses in the city, a village of the name of Mauza Khizrpur in Nawabganj Pargana, bought from the sarkar, a rest house near Rambagh railway station, designed with shops in front and a garden behind, a place of shelter, both dharmashala for Hindus and musafir-khana for Muslims built on land dearly bought and thoughtfully constructed. A bagh planted in her extensive Rasoolabad property. And to oversee it all the meek and pious Munshi Sayyad Ghulam Abbas Sahib, the highest- paid functionary in her ménage of twelve, whose duties included court-related jobs, pursuit of cases, collection of rent, management and development of her estates, maintenance of her several houses and also looking after the horses and cattle.

  For she had become one of the city’s wealthiest celebrities and she wrote of her acquisitions with matter-of-fact pride in her judgement and her affluence, using an officious third-person mode with engaging simplicity.

  She spoke of her triumphs and her trophies. The shields she won, a silver and a gold from the gramophone company, the silver one from the Raebareli exhibition and the gold ones from the Bharatpur Durbar, from Hyderabad, Sindh, from the Rana of Nepal. The watch she was gifted by Babu Omkar Mal Seth of Calcutta. The Allahabad Police Department loved her, for she sang at each Janmashtami at the Police Lines, not for the several gold shields that they gifted her several years running but for the thrill, unconfessed but interiorly known, of being the guest of honour of a government department to which that assailant from long ago, the one who’d ravaged her looks and her self-esteem, had belonged. From time to time she picked up what she perceived to be her soul-theme, her truth, choosing the right notes that fitted her mood of self-confirmation. Paragraphs of applause to fill the empty chambers of her heart.

  ‘A list of the places where she performed, the durbars to which she was invited, is difficult
to make . . . Wherever she went she proved herself,’ she declares with a grandiose flourish, innocent in its sweep. ‘It was hard for anyone to compete and get the better of her. Let everyone accept that she never met failure anywhere.’ It sounds just a semitone removed from the truth but it was all factually true. But still there was a missing note somewhere and she sought it. She sought it in music and in the noisy downpour of verse that filled her life. And at the conclusion of each spell of expression she knew what she had dared not approach. That poised, conventional, stylized poetry impostured the love she had never known, addressed a beloved who was imaginary and a faith she did not belong to, she a Hindu sweetmeat-seller’s daughter. But the thread of pain running through it was real, uttering a void that threatened to declare itself all too transparently to her denying will.

  But I have advanced her story far ahead of those times when she first started fashioning it for posterity. Let me revert to the days of her early verse and her reckless outpourings, uncontained by moderation or self-critical caution. Her audience applauded the powerful voice she sang her compositions in rather than the verse itself, though poets flocked to her soirées with verses of their own. There was Shah Aminuddin Sahib ‘Kaisar’, there was Mir Ali Ebad Sahib, there was ‘Neesan’ Sahib, and Maulvi Azizuddin Sahib ‘Afsar’ and Mir Akbar Heseen. And though Neesan and Afsar were not very frequent visitors, Kaisar Sahib, despite his advanced age, came often, leaning on his stick, and sat for hours, reciting his own verse and listening to hers. It was he who suggested to her that she meet Akbar Sahib Judge Ilahabadi and seek his opinion on her verse which needed, then more than ever before, a ‘murshid’ to mentor it and a mirror to reflect it.