Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  It was then that a thought struck her and she risked a joke with Gauhar again. ‘But now that the viceroy is going to move to Dilli, Bai Sahiba, how will you tease and provoke him with your six-horse carriage? You’ll have to do with a mere governor-in council.’

  Gauhar took it in good humour. ‘Believe me, Jaan-kee,’ she laughed confidently, ‘it is to flee Gauhar that the sarkar has shifted base to Dilli. Calcutta was getting too small for us both!’

  And so they parted on 16 December, on easier terms than before, joking till the last.

  ‘Don’t you think we should have received some sort of title too?’

  ‘Isn’t it enough that we’ve been invited to sing before the Presence? When it seems all the good and virtuous people in the country are up in arms against the likes of us, dancing–singing women?’

  ‘Well, in spite of all those petitions the sarkar has still called us.’

  ‘A title might have done us good.’

  ‘What title do you fancy, Bai Sahiba?’

  ‘I am no ordinary dancing–singing woman.’ Gauhar smiled archly. ‘I am the Queen Empress of the Durbar of Music. Gauhar-e-Taj-e-Mausiqui might do for me. Jewel in the Crown of Music. And you, my Jaan-kee, could be the Uncut Diamond of the Treasure Chamber.’

  ‘Most gracious of you, Bai Sahiba, but uncut for me is unfortunate, don’t you say?’

  ‘Ah, my apologies. And be sure to give your Akbar Sahib the bad news. Tell him that to telephones and electric lights and gramophones has been added the new horror he feared. Moving images on a screen! Now definitely here to stay. Someone told me it’s called Kinemacolor. Yes, I saw the Durbar being filmed. Who knows, I shall join the band. Be sure to bear these horrid tidings to your Akbar Ilahabadi. Ask him, from me, to write some of his awful verses. Blighting this new curse, this cinema, to hell!’

  She was still laughing as the car moved away.

  The King Emperor and his entourage went on to Calcutta and Janki returned, the following day to Allahabad, which now received her with slavish adulation.

  18

  War broke out in Europe in 1914 and the Allahabad papers were full of news about the Indian forces who had been shipped to France and Flanders. The 129th Baluchi Battalion fought in Ypres in Belgium, the 47th Sikhs of the Bhopal Infantry and the 20th and 21st Companies, the Sappers and Miners, fought savagely in the tiny French village of Neuve Chapelle in France. Festubert, Aubers Ridge, Givenchy had become matters of intense discussion on the pages of the Pioneer and also in the vernacular press like the Indian Herald. Janki pored over the news, her imagination fired by the depictions of fierce engagements with the Germans. Especially Givenchy where it was the Indians who had held tenaciously to German trenches in the most terrible conditions for thirty hours. The enemy had hit back by blowing up a line of mines before resorting to hand-to-hand combat. It was December 1914. By April there was a second Ypres, followed by Aubers Ridge and Festubert in May. In Allahabad native solidarity with Britain was staunch. A mammoth ticketed concert was organized at the Police Lines to raise the war fund and Janki Bai, the star of the event, happily donated the takings to Britain’s war effort, in acknowledgement for which the organizer, Babu Mahendra Prasad, the deputy collector, made a speech, expressing the gratitude of the British sarkar and presenting her with a certificate of thanks.

  Further commendation appeared in the form of a licensed gun, a double-barrelled, one-cartridge gun and a special security guard to escort her, this honour granted to her by K.N. Knox, Sahib Bahadur, the magistrate collector of Zila Allahabad. Janki accepted both offerings from the sarkar as she had accepted the distinction of singing before George V at the Delhi Durbar. She had come to take her favoured standing with the local representatives of the British sarkar without question.

  So when she received a sudden request from the district administration to perform at the Mayo Hall on a certain evening she readily consented to do so. The performance was as usual an extraordinary one, the hall packed with dignitaries, and Janki received the applause of the audience and the commendation of the organizers with a seasoned reserve. It was only the next morning that the Indian Herald broke the news that a far more important event had taken place in the city the very same day. The arrival of Annie Besant and her lecture at the Hardinge Theatre in Bahadurganj, attended by a mammoth crowd of students and citizens. The Herald rejoiced over the fact that every attempt had been made to prevent Mrs Besant from lecturing, that her earlier fixture at the Mayo Hall had been cancelled ‘due to unavoidable reasons’ by the district administration and that the event had nevertheless been a colossal success, Mrs Besant arriving in a trail of glory, her carriage drawn by hundreds of Allahabad University students, and her resounding appeal for Home Rule proving to be the trigger that catalysed the imagination of those already under the influence of the Indian National Congress.

  The news left Janki disturbed. She saw, or thought she saw, the significance of the gun and the guard. Was it possible that she was already being regarded as a collaborator by the Congress-wallahs? The darling of the sarkar, solicited and serenaded, a decoy of the district administration to draw away the crowds from a possible inciter? It was an unpleasant feeling. It made her take a voluntary break from her busy performance schedules and retire to the seclusion of a private existence for some time. In the form of a family visit to Haq Sahib’s other home at Mehdauri. To which she went as a visitor, a celebrity guest at a family wedding. A trophy wife whose arrival was awaited with breathless speculation and greeted with an awestruck riffle and stir in the courtyard. If earlier they had looked askance at her because of her calling, the glory of the exhibition performance and the greater glory of the Delhi Durbar had put it all to flight.

  They were present in full strength in the family drawing room, sons, brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces, old aunts and smoky elders, family retainers and hangers-on, when she alighted from her buggy and accompanied her husband in. They swarmed around her in slavish welcome, lavished compliments and approval, introduced themselves by their formal names and their family nicknames. The young ones salaamed and saluted, the old appraised and muttered words of stiff benediction. Such a flurry and bustle in the large household that Janki had difficulty placing who was who, which one a niece twice removed and which a cousin by marriage. The ones she looked out for were present, Haq Sahib’s two grown sons, who came forward and offered their respects to this new Chhoti Ammi with proper courtesy. But that other one she was secretly longing to meet, their Badi Ammi, Haq Sahib’s senior begum, was conspicuous by her absence. And when she timidly asked her husband where she, her senior co-wife, might have been, all she received were evasive answers.

  Nor did she set eyes on her in the days that followed, as the wedding festivities proceeded. It was a nephew’s wedding, made grand by his recently acquired government job and by the affluent family in Patna he was marrying into. Made grander still, she gathered, by her own celebrity presence. They called her Baji—middle sister—and she warmed to the sound of that endearment, until she realized that it wasn’t ‘Baji’ they said but ‘Baiji’, and it came to her with sudden dismay that in their eyes she was still and ever would be, the public singer, the nautch-mehfil professional, and always different, alien. No cosy middle sister or sister-in-law or aunt or niece-in-law, but always and ever the outsider, the outlandish import of their son or uncle or father.

  ‘Why do they not call me Dulhan or Ammi or Khala?’ she complained to her husband. ‘Aren’t they my family now? Why must I be Baiji to them?’

  ‘They are blinded by your stellar presence,’ he said, laughingly. ‘Give them a little time.’

  But he spoke to them and soon enough they tried to call her Dulhan or Ammi or Khala, but the names sounded awkward on their tongues and ever so often they fell into that involuntary ‘Baiji’ that sealed an irreconcilable distance between them. She tried not to mind and joined in the ceremonies, taking her place among the family women and girls and lady guests, sitting
in a circle round their dholaks and singing their saucy wedding songs. Little ditties of teasing coquetry and lustful innuendo and soft spitefulness. She loved those old songs, some centuries old, and she joined in with gusto, singing:

  ‘Oh brother mine, fetch your sword and your shield,

  ’Tis a bride to be won and a stream and a field,

  Bring collyrium for eyes and henna for palms,

  Semolina and milk and ten goodly rams.’

  ‘Oh sister, bring a steed for my evergreen prince,

  And a turban and jewelled saddle and reins,

  Fetch a drum and a flute and a song and a fife,

  My evergreen prince goes to bring back a wife!’

  Her voice rose, sterling and resonant, vibrating with indwelling power. This was her domain, this dimension of voice and verse. The song swelled on her lips, the walls of the chamber thrummed. All of a sudden she realized that she sang alone, that all the women had fallen silent. She too fell silent in mid-verse, conscious of having incomprehensibly transgressed some unstated courtyard code.

  Then one of the young nieces plucked up courage to say, ‘Baiji, won’t you give us some of your famous mujra songs. Please.’

  She might have thought it a compliment to her stature, but instead she experienced a peculiar mistrust in her own identity here. ‘Hush,’ she protested, affecting friendly annoyance. ‘I am your khala today, not your famous Baiji.’

  ‘Oh, we’re proud, so proud, Khala Jaan, that we are family now. Or who could have ever dreamt of having you sing at a wedding here?’

  ‘Yes, Dulhan, you have sung at the Delhi Durbar before the King Emperor. You really must sing at the wedding, when the baraat goes to Patna, and again at the walima. Allah be praised, you shall add such lustre to our feast!’

  It was coming at her from every side. ‘Listen, little girl,’ she turned with mock irritation to the importunate young niece. ‘Do any of you sing before the men?’

  ‘Oh, perdition take me, Baiji, how could I ever dare? Even if I knew how to sing!’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Janki in wry satisfaction. ‘You shall giggle behind your veil and keep to the inner courtyard. And you expect me to unveil and come before the men and, ye God, sing for their entertainment?’

  She could see that her argument left them baffled and she did not blame them. After all, singing at grand weddings before large assemblies was one of her occupations. So what accounted for this improbable inhibition?

  The only possible reason that occurred to an old aunt was scarcely utterable, but she uttered it.

  ‘You mean you will not sing for free?’

  The words left a stunned silence in the gathering. Janki turned the blaze of her outraged eyes on the crone.

  ‘I mean, Dadi Jaan that as a respectable daughter-in-law of this family, I shall not stoop to entertain anyone. Not here. Not among my own family. It’s the least that I can claim.’

  The old lady was visibly taken aback. ‘I did not mean to give offence, Bahu Begum,’ she murmured. ‘Everyone applauds your wonderful singing and now that you belong here, so does your singing . . .’

  ‘Please, Khala Jaan, don’t refuse us,’ pleaded another. ‘Mamu-jaan said you wouldn’t object. He even made a list of songs you’ve been famous for . . .’

  ‘He did, did he now?’ remarked Janki, incensed. ‘In that case, excuse me, I decline to attend this wedding.’ She rose to her feet and swept away to her room.

  Haq Sahib was irritated when she stormed in with her rage. ‘Must you be so melodramatic and touchy, begum? They meant no ill. They are proud to have you in the family and they want to show you off to the mehfil and the bride’s people. What’s so offensive about that? You bring izzat to the family.’

  ‘And what of my izzat?’ she demanded. ‘Does this family only regard me as a glittering Baiji, a nautch woman born to sing at weddings? Is there no thought of my honour? No respectability as a lady of the house?’

  ‘You are being unreasonable, begum,’ he cut her short. ‘And you put me in an awkward position. I promised on your behalf that you would perform your best mujra at the wedding and now your sulks have made things embarrassing.’

  ‘On my behalf, say you? On my behalf!’ It was the first time she had raised her voice with him. ‘Do you own my decisions, my voice itself, that you promise on my behalf? Who are you, sir, to do so without my consent?’

  His face was tight with fury. ‘Only your husband, madam,’ he hissed through his teeth.

  ‘You want me to be a mujra woman beneath your roof?’

  ‘Aren’t you exactly that?’

  ‘Not under your roof, milord, never under yours. I am a mujra singer only under my own roof and under those that honour me for myself.’

  ‘Then,’ said he, in cold fury. ‘Seek your own roof, begum, and abandon this one!’

  ‘I shall do so,’ she drew herself up. ‘And the sooner the better.’

  She summoned her sarkari gunman, had her trunks hoisted into a tonga, swung herself into another tonga and rode away, her first visit to her husband’s home concluding on this turbulent note.

  Haq Sahib stayed away for much longer than she expected. She received no note from him and sent none. She resolved not to call him back, nor betray any indication of feeling his absence. The courts closed for the summer and still there came no news from him. Three months had gone by before she began feeling uneasy at this protracted stalemate in her marriage. She wondered if she should venture to ask Akbar Sahib but decided against it. It would be unseemly for the haughty Janki Bai to betray anxieties of a private nature. Moreover Akbar Sahib had left for Mussoorie for the summer. By July, when the courts reopened, she decided that some overture was in order and so she sent Jallu Mian to Mehdauri with a sealed envelope which contained a brief message: ‘The fire caught in the kindling, destroying much. It has made me sing better than ever before. Thank you for this grief.’

  Jallu Mian returned with the note undelivered and the news that Haq Sahib, his senior begum and their younger son had gone to Ajmer Sharif for a fortnight.

  She affected withering disdain for Jallu Mian’s benefit. ‘Only to Ajmer Sharif? I thought he had gone on hajj to Mecca!’ She wondered what her accompanists and her domestics made of her marriage and this recent alienation.

  It soon became apparent that Jallu Mian knew more of Haq Sahib’s family situations than he let on. ‘Vakil Sahib has much on his mind, Baiji,’ he murmured. ‘His younger son, Yaqoob, is gravely ill.’

  The news took her by surprise. ‘What ails him, Jallu Mian?’ And why had her husband never shared this trouble with her? She was shamed and disappointed in her own capacity for empathy, her petty, vainglorious arrogance.

  Jallu Mian appeared to hesitate, then brought up the words carefully: ‘Yaqoob Mian suffers from an illness of the mind, Baiji. He is said to be quite beyond control when the fit is on him.’

  This was worse than anything she was prepared for.

  Now that he had opened up, Jallu Mian grew expansive. ‘Vakil Sahib has sought the treatment of British doctors, of hakims and fakirs across the length and breadth of India but all to no avail.’

  ‘But when I met the lad he seemed most well behaved, very sober and polite.’

  ‘He is so, Baiji, much of the time. But when the fit is on him he is like one possessed by jinns. Or so I have heard.’

  ‘How long has he been this way?’

  ‘I have heard from a very long time and Vakil Sahib’s senior begum sahiba devotes all her time to him, not even venturing out of their chambers.’

  That explained her conspicuous absence and Haq Sahib’s evasiveness. A rush of contrition and pity for the man she had married rose in her, along with bafflement at his reticence, and a sense of rueful self-reproach that she had never guessed at his real life beyond his illusory and superficial liaison with her. Trophy wife indeed, that was all she was, and his real marriage was elsewhere, where the pain was, the horror and the prayers. She could grandly g
ift away houses and flaunt her soaring virtuosity in song, but it was his deep silence of grief and worry that no song could penetrate that struck her with a humbling realization of her human worthlessness. With her he had gone to performances, banquets and celebrations at the homes of the rich and influential. With his other wife he went to Ajmer Sharif to pray for their deranged son.

  ‘Jallu Mian,’ she said in a small voice, ‘tomorrow you must carry another note and leave it at Haq Sahib’s Mehdauri house. With anyone there who can undertake to deliver it to Haq Sahib as soon as he returns from Ajmer.’

  ‘As you wish, Baiji,’ he said.

  This was no time for the affectation of poetry. What was needed here was a simple plea for forgiveness expressed in the most ordinary words. It was hard to be ordinary for one who had got used to being extraordinary. Harder to acknowledge the poverty of sympathy she had displayed alongside the flourish of affluence she had flaunted.

  It took her very long to frame a letter. At some crucial moment in its composition she had the strange feeling that this was the beginning of a further chapter of self, a riyaz in some other discipline that she was now called upon to practise. She wrote:

  My beloved and revered husband,

  It is with great humility and concern that I write this missive to you. I am grieved to learn of our son’s sad condition and have no words in which I may express my complete support of you and my honoured sister-wife in this great trouble. I hold it my own unworthiness that you have not thought fit to repose confidence of such a distressing matter as our son’s illness in me these many weeks and months of our intimate association, and I hasten to assure you that in matters of service to yourself and your family, now my family as well, you shall not find me wanting in any way, whether material assistance or personal care. I beg you to indicate to me whereof I may be of help. I implore you to excuse my thoughtless lapses and grant me the satisfaction of your presence again. And I appeal to your forbearance to allow me to offer my own ministrations to our disturbed son, at our Mehdauri home or here when next you and my honoured sister-wife feel the need for another devoted hand in the comfort and care of our son. I shall put aside all other assignments and present myself at your service, my honoured sister-wife’s and our beloved sons’, and I sign myself, herein, in utmost humility, Janki.