Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  ‘True enough,’ he conceded, ‘for were you to count the multitudes of phantom maidens that crowd the mind of a poet, you would out-populate the harem of Suleiman!’ He breathed a verse into the air like a ring of hookah smoke: ‘Bahut raha hai kabhi lutf-e-yaar hum par bhi, guzar chuki hai yeh fasl-e-bahar hum par bhi.’ He turned on her a look of infinite pity and did not question further.

  She returned home and wrote more of the same:

  I remember that time when love began

  My heart was beside me, your secret was in my heart.

  The eyes of the beloved held both enchantment and wonder

  I beheld both things and the secret became known.

  The one whom I gave my heart to was formidable indeed,

  No wonder I suffered grief at his tyrant’s hands.

  Was my appeal a veiled one’s secret?

  Till today it did not emerge from my heart on to my lips.

  Do not ask me, ask only your own heart

  What was the origin and consequence of love.

  In the valley of love each one takes his own path.

  I had only my heart to console me.

  How many cruelties did he inflict on me, how many griefs,

  That beloved whose beneficence Janki took pride in.

  She wrote late into the nights in a sort of frenzy:

  I had not known the riotous to become a sacrifice,

  That my heart from my bosom shall move away.

  If the condition of love be visible to the eye

  Then my heart shall grow oblivious of self.

  Ever since he has taken my letter his address is not known.

  How could it be known that the letter-bearer shall grow forgetful?

  How should I believe that he shall stay indifferent to me?

  Shall my restless heart have no effect on his?

  The more poems Akbar Sahib read through the higher did his eyebrows climb up his forehead, but though he darted his sharp, ferret eyes at her, though he raked her face with his knowing expression, he held his tongue and said nothing.

  Finally one day, taking her courage in both hands, she asked him with seeming casualness: ‘Has Haq Sahib left the city?’

  ‘Why do you ask, Baiji?’

  ‘I do not see him here. Or . . . Or anywhere else.’

  ‘Meaning your own celebrated performances, Baiji? For which Haq Sahib turned heaven and earth upside down to arrange passes and invitations? Madam, Haq Sahib is very busy and somewhat caught up with a problem.’

  ‘What might that be, sir?

  ‘Haq Sahib is busy with the coming municipal elections,’ he answered, his face expressionless.

  She was puzzled. Her eyes mutely sought to know more.

  ‘Haq Sahib has been trying to move the collector sahib to relax a particular clause in our municipal laws regarding our election candidates, and to that end he has been canvassing around, gathering support in a signature campaign.’

  She had to know more without revealing excessive interest.

  ‘The collector sahib is known to me. Is there anything I can do to help Haq Sahib?’

  ‘Madam,’ said Akbar ironically, ‘there are matters of law that a song from a koel or a baiji like yourself cannot wish away. Haq Sahib keenly wants to contest the municipal elections but he is not technically a resident of the city.’

  She was still more puzzled. ‘Not a resident of Allahabad? I fail to understand.’

  ‘Haq Sahib owns no property in the city. He lives in Mehdauri village outside the city. He cannot contest these coming elections, not until he can establish his residency in the city. That is the clause he is striving to have revoked but I see no prospect of his succeeding.’

  She returned home, her mind in dire confusion. The question that kept her awake that night found resolution in the small hours of the morning, at the hour for the best riyaz or the hour when she believed that the light of one’s impending truth shone for a few seconds in the mind, and it required an urgent summons to her lawyer, Hashmat Ullah.

  When she consulted Hashmat Ullah as to which of her houses could be suitably gifted away to a deserving friend, the exasperation simmered in his eyes, though he kept his voice level.

  ‘Might I ask, madam, who this deserving friend is?’

  ‘We are discussing the house, not the friend, Hashmat Ullah Sahib.’

  ‘As your lawyer, it is well within my rights to ask, may I respectfully remind the sahiba?’

  ‘You are my lawyer, not my conscience keeper, Hashmat Ullah Sahib.’

  ‘Before your conscience I have my own to consider, madam. And I would be failing in my duty were I to give my professional consent to many of the rash compulsions of your oversensitive conscience.’

  She saw that he was adamantine in his insistence, and sighed.

  ‘There is someone who wishes to contest the municipal elections, Hashmat Ullah Sahib, and is disqualified from doing so simply because his house is a rented one.’

  A look of excruciating annoyance sprang upon his face. ‘May the liberty be forgiven, madam, but you need scarcely say more. The courts are places of much gossip and exchange and there is some such rumour afloat . . .’

  ‘You do astonish me, Hashmat Ullah Sahib,’ she said coldly. ‘This thought has entered my mind scarcely this morning and the city has already got wind of it! Are my thoughts as distantly audible as the sound of my voice is said to be, sir?’

  ‘Not the sound of your voice, madam, but the sound of gold mohurs ringing in your coffers. They have been known to have reached the ears of a certain unworthy gentleman of the city, yes, one who frequents your mehfils affecting to like the sound of your voice when all he can hear is that other sound which impresses, excuse my bluntness, far more than even your famous voice can do!’

  Despite his composure, she could tell that he was close to losing his temper. Speaking in the tones of a censorious father to a wayward and wanton daughter. It annoyed her, made her voice rise.

  ‘You strangely forget yourself, Hashmat Ullah Sahib.’ She snubbed him in the most faultlessly ornate Urdu at her command. ‘I have not shared my plan with you, but now, since you betray such astute prescience of my intentions even before I speak, let me discourage you from any further remonstrance. My mind is made up and yours has conveniently forgotten that the properties you protect are earned by the very sound of my voice that you rate less than what it encashes.’

  He was sullen, resigned before her wilful obstinacy. ‘I did not mean to insult you, madam.’

  ‘Then let us revert to the matter in hand and decide which of my houses it shall be. I expect you to have my papers ready and I shall sign them when they are prepared. Yes, and in the company of the gentleman whose signature shall also be needed.’

  With that she swept out of the chamber.

  And all of it done without so much as mentioning a name.

  That evening, she ordered her phaeton but when Samina asked where the coachman be directed to go she only said, ‘Mehdauri village,’ in a voice that discouraged any further inquiry. And when Samina made preparations to accompany her, as she always did, she said, ‘No, not today, Samina.’

  ‘Sahiba means to go alone?’ asked Samina in wonder.

  ‘Yes. Alone,’ said Janki and turned away from the light lest Samina notice her face.

  Months later, when they had been married and living most of the time in her own Sabzi Mandi house, married in the teeth of opposition from Manki and Hashmat Ullah and surprisingly even Akbar Sahib, the mist of that lit-up night refused to leave her senses, continued to waken that flush of disbelief.

  To the coachman she had said, ‘Drive to the river first, Ramzani. I need some fresh air.’ As if that were enough and the utterance of the destination used up all her remaining courage and left none to utter with decisive finality the name of the man she had chosen. And when they passed the river and she felt its cool breath upon her face, her shrinking brain broke into an involuntary prayer to it, her Ganga
still, invisible in the night but running alongside her like an inexorable fate, a proceeding karma. Like the invisible blood coursing in her veins. Circulating in an inevitable direction and continuum that was her life. When for it to stop or turn back could only be death.

  And when the firelight from the hearths of the riverside ascetics mingling with the glimmer of kerosene lanterns and the smoking oil beacons of squatting hawkers who lined the riverbank fell upon the dark hem of water, she felt a tremor pass into her throat as she told the coachman to stop at a footpath spread with silver, a fish stall, lit by a single earthen oil lamp. She made him turn the horses and head for Mehdauri and ask the way to Vakil Sahib Sheikh Abdul Haq’s house.

  She had chosen to call late, much after sundown, to avoid attention. She had refused to step down from the phaeton or to announce her identity. To the old family servant who opened the gate she had merely said: ‘Tell your master, a lady who has something important to tell him respecting the municipal elections is here.’ That had made it seem practical and regular in the servant’s curious eyes, in the coachman’s too.

  Why have you united your heart with mine after an age?

  Did he remember the past that he came again?

  The trapper took away the bulbul captive with him

  In the garden why did the trapper create this riot?

  I too have waited to see this sight,

  Why did Allah show such a sight to Moses on the mountain of Tur?

  Why did someone look this way with tender guilefulness?

  Why did he take aim at my heart?

  O Janki, I am trying hard, intently,

  But why he should have forgotten me, what is the reason?

  When she heard rapid steps on the paving stones and heard his cautious voice hushed to a perplexed undertone, asking ‘Who is it?’ she refrained from lifting her veil and kept her voice brisk and even.

  ‘It is I, Janki Bai Ilahabadi,’ she had said grandly, as she did at the close of her gramophone recordings. As though she were the empress of the city or the city itself, conferring a gracious visitation, granting a prize to one of its minor but favoured citizens.

  Even in the darkness she had seen him start.

  ‘Baiji,’ he had exclaimed, ‘is it really you?’

  ‘No.’ She had laughed, an arch, bemused laugh. ‘It isn’t me but someone resembling me . . .’

  Think of the consequences of the beginnings of love,

  O failed heart, reflect on this.

  The result of this enemy love is nought,

  If it occurs, then one is defamed for nothing.

  Oh, restless heart, so restless am I.

  What is to be the consequence of my beloved’s love, think.

  Who was it who brought on the swoon on Tur?

  Who was it or what, what is his name, think.

  O Janki, it is hard to escape with my life from him.

  Now the message of love has arrived, now think.

  ‘It isn’t me,’ she had said, ‘but someone resembling me. For can you imagine Janki driving up alone at nine in the night? And yet this is someone who answers to my name . . .’

  He had stepped close to the side of the phaeton. ‘My good fortune, whoever it is. I invite you to grace my threshold, Baiji. Will you not come?’

  ‘I invite you to grace the kutcherry tomorrow, Haq Sahib. Will you not come?’

  She signalled to the coachman to turn the horses round and click them on, calling over her shoulder her imperious command: ‘At eleven o’clock sharp, Haq Sahib. The kutcherry.’

  Without any transgression of mine why do you torment me?

  For God’s sake, tell me why?

  Did you ever have the kindness to ask how I was?

  Even my rivals grew amazed at your interest in me.

  If somewhere I met the Messiah I would ask

  Why I am not healed?

  Why are you angry when I complain of your cruelty

  That suddenly you grew aloof and apart?

  O Janki, people wrongly consider Allah a foe,

  Who knows why he was given this grand place!

  She made over the house in Hashmat Ullah’s stiff and sullen presence, signing her name in her impeccable Urdu calligraphy alongside Abdul Haq’s shaken masculine scrawl. It felt more like an outlandish nikah of destinies than a transfer of property.

  She drove him in the buggy to the address now entered in the municipal documents. It was not a new house and she apologized for its condition. It was old, scarred, unrepaired, ugly. Yet it was solid and large, and of course it was not to live in, merely to supply an address, as she spelt out.

  They stood beneath the peeling paint of its crumbling arches. My address, Baiji, is where yours is, he whispered, overcome. If you will allow me, he added in humble submission. Then she threw back her veil and turned her proud, scarred face to his gaze. He understood and hastened to add: A house is precious because of the way it makes us feel, the comfort and shelter it gives, not the way it looks to the eye. He respected—and honoured—the scars left by time and by trouble. He caressed the cracked wall, the fissured trellis and she came to him, saying: Do not look on me thus, Haq Sahib.

  That you should have come to me in the darkness of the night, like an angel of mercy . . . No, she whispered, I came in the dark that you may hear my voice alone, not see my uncomely form. I came on a moonless night lest you see how pitted my face is, more so than the moon herself. I am henceforth sightless, he whispered in reply. Lying in his arms, she chided him, playful: Oh, you are a lawyer, not a poet, sir. What argument stronger than love’s appeal? Milord, I charge you with the larceny of my soul. For shame, Vakil Sahib, you make of me both defendant and judge, and what may your fee be? This, he said, and she knew no more. Till, spent, she could summon breath enough to whisper: I plead that you adjourn this court indefinitely, milord, just so that I can go on arguing my case forever, before you. It is you who are my judge, my lady, he whispered. It is you who shall advance or adjourn . . .

  You are the killer, beloved, oh perdition!

  You behead me, oh perdition!

  Scores of offences are his, oh perdition!

  And here there is my lone endurance.

  The heart is being drawn that way,

  What is his power of attraction, oh perdition?

  He never comes this way even by chance, even after promising daily, oh perdition!

  In my heart there is the ache of love,

  And on my lips are sighs of agony, oh perdition!

  The songs of her riyaz put words to her desire. She knew exactly what it was to be taut as a bowstring ready to snap at a touch: ‘Mori angiya na chhuwo, karungi kapolan lal. Yeh angiya nahin, Janak dhanush si / Chhuwat tootey tatkaal . . .’ Touch not my bodice, else I shall smear thy cheek red. This is no mere bodice but King Janak’s bow. A touch can instantly snap its string . . . She closed her eyes and immersed herself in the overflowing excess of her imaginings. All shame cast aside, the conniving surrender: ‘Ab toh tihari ban aye, chhaliya. Bahiyaan pakad mukh malat gulalwa. Ab toh sang ki saheli door nikas gayi / Hum hi akeli dar pe aye . . .’ Now I am all yours, O prankster / Who grabs me by the arm and slathers my face red. My handmaidens have wandered afar. I alone have come to your door . . .

  Soon after their marriage, Abdul Haq moved in with her. And when, as a mark of her protest, her mother sent across an envelope containing rent for the house she occupied with Beni—the Johnstonganj kothi, another of Janki’s several houses—Janki sent it back, knotted in a garland of jasmines. For these days and nights were perfumed ones for her. She seemed to be inhabiting a dream and all those other faces that existed outside the circle of her lighted heart—Manki, Beni, Haq Sahib’s other family, his wife and two sons and large extended family—seemed altogether insubstantial. She was intoxicated by this groundswell of emotion. For some weeks at least.

  She couldn’t be sure when, in the flight of octaves that was her life for a brief interlude, the first false note appe
ared. She thought it was an error of the ear, a play of wrong acoustics or a lost beat. But it reappeared to shock and pain her and fell her in high flight like the shot that grounds a bird.

  Tonight he, whose beauty even the moon envies, has come to me.

  Tonight is the good consequence of the day’s love.

  The night of the full moon brought this trouble.

  Tonight his memory returned whose beauty the moon envies.

  Tormented in the night’s grief my heart says but this:

  Let us see how long this night’s dawn does not break.

  Perhaps my cries have no effect on him,

  Else why does he stay uninformed of me?

  Remembering his pearly teeth weep I, then

  My tears turn to pearls as they fall.

  If you do not keep your promise to come, beware,

  Because tonight I shall spend weeping, agonizing.

  When he forgot himself and rebuked her sharply for humming a thumri in bed, saying: ‘Stop, begum, you’ll waken the whole household!’ she felt her ecstasy fall away even as he bestrode her, even as he pierced her. It was a small thing, but she felt rebuffed, insulted, she who was used to being entreated to sing. She had begged her husband to come to her bed in complete darkness lest her old shame come between them. But silenced by his urgent voice, absorbed in its own grasping gratification, all she could register was an unsettling memory and squirm beneath his thrusts. She had no words save what she sang in her riyaz, suddenly an unshared, private matter: ‘Aisi chatur Brajnaar rang mein ho rahi babri / Ek man udat gulaal, sawa man kesar rori / Radhe pe chhirkat Shyam, Shyam par Radha gori / Radhe chali muskaat, Shyam ne bahiyaan marori . . .’ A saucy Braj maid giddy-washed, colour flying, a maund of vermilion, maund and a half’s saffron-cinnabar! Krishna splashes Radha, fair Radha drenches Krishna. But as she smiling moves he grabs and twists her arm! She grew cold at the memory.

  Janki’s mind had ever swarmed with fantasies of an ideal love. Fed on songs and stories of perfect partnerships in which marriage was one continuous companionship of musical converse. As that of the maverick Bande Ali Khan and his beloved Chunna. He nearing fifty, she barely eighteen, he a maestro of the veena, she a singer par excellence. For a brilliantly executed performance at the court of Jiyaji Rao Scindia he’d been asked to name his reward and he had asked for Chunna Bai, the court singer. The Scindia was astonished when the girl had immediately agreed. On their wedding night some village pranksters had hidden themselves on the roof of the nuptial chamber, planning to take a peek into scenes of what they expected to be interesting carnal intimacies between an ill-assorted pair, as unmatched in age as in their faiths. To their great surprise the bridal chamber was soon welling with music. The young bride sang all night, her elderly groom outdid himself on his veena until dawn broke. Unknown to the happy lovers, the peeping Toms had spent a tormented night cramped on a narrow ledge beneath the tiles, forced to listen to a night-long recital they had no stomach for. Years later when a Pune medicine man named Bapu Sahib Menhdale cured a chronic sore on Chunna’s head he’d asked for an unusual fee for the treatment—that Khan Sahib stay back in Pune and be available with his music whenever he was asked. A request that Bande Ali Khan granted. The idea that love between a man and a woman could be transmitted entirely in the currency of music, that a medical fee too could be paid in music, had fired Janki’s imagination for years. She had also nourished her soul on the songs of adoration composed by Roopmati, the Sarangpur prodigy, for her beloved, Baaz Bahadur, Sultan of Mandu. He had won her when he’d successfully figured out a puzzle of Khusrau’s for her. She was a Hindu, he a Muslim, and she knew him only as her Malik Baizeed, not as the sultan of Mandu. When the proposal for her hand arrived from the sultan she was forced to give her consent. They met, separated by a curtain, and she laid down her conditions: she would not convert to Islam, she wouldn’t observe purdah, she’d partner the sultan on his hunts and share his throne in court. She’d build a temple to Shiva in the inner court of her palace and have a canal dug that brought Narmada water to her, for she’d drink no other. He granted it all and when the curtain was drawn aside she was overjoyed to behold not a stranger but her own lover as the sultan. So went the legend. They made great music together, he on the rubab, she singing and dancing in ecstasy. The songs she wrote for her lover were songs that were part of Janki’s repertoire.