Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  She handed the sealed envelope to Jallu Mian the following day and it was duly conveyed to the Mehdauri house. Then began the lengthy wait. It lasted another three weeks, following which one afternoon, quite without notice, a tonga drove up and Haq Sahib alighted. He made for the divan-khana and called for his hookah. She made a pretence of languor, though her heart was thumping in her bosom, and carried her own hookah in to him, before the servant could prepare his, and offered it to him with a deep bow, half in jest and half in joyous welcome.

  ‘You err, begum,’ he remarked wryly. ‘Mean you to tell me that in this brief separation you have forgotten which pipe is mine and which your own?’ There was a whimsical smile playing about his lips.

  ‘In this brief separation, sir, I have learnt to forget mine and thine,’ she quipped. ‘Besides, let this godforsaken pipe enjoy awhile what this man-forsaken woman, your wife, has long been bereft of, the touch of Your Highness’s lips . . .’

  He darted her a quick glance, for never had he known Janki to be so self-effacing, nor so forward in love. In the next few weeks Janki’s primary exercise was in the skill of self-reduction before her sensitive husband’s vulnerable ego. She learnt to make light of her performances, to stay silent about her earnings, to put aside her riyaz to attend to his tiniest needs. It was strange indeed, as she noticed, how his demands coincided with her hours of practice. She took to sending away the bawarchi and cooking meals for him as an ordinary wife would. She noticed how he seldom praised her efforts and she threw herself into this contest of wills, determined to extract his appreciation despite his reluctance or refusal. She asked how the biryani was and how the korma tasted and he said, offhand, all right. Until, like any wrought-up wife, she lost her temper or shed tears of rage and charged him with selfishness and cruelty, with withholding praise in order to spite and injure. What, more praise? he scoffed, half in indulgence and half in irony. Isn’t the thundering applause of emperors and raeeses enough for my begum, that she craves applause from this lowly lawyer?

  This lowly lawyer—the phrase was often on his lips now, too often. She knew his cases were dwindling, that touts were diverting his clients to other lawyers. She knew he had lost the municipal elections a second time. She suggested he accompany her to Calcutta for a season of recordings. He resisted. He could not afford to miss an active season at the court, there was money to be earned. Worry not, milord, she smiled, she would earn enough for two, no, for more, if necessary. After all, what was money for, if not for one’s family? She said it in meek offering, but he looked peeved, unaccountably offended. He accompanied her to Calcutta all the same. There he sat in the lounge of recording studios, fascinated by the recording process. For a while there was perfect, blissful harmony between them. She caught him humming her songs as he tapped a beat on the arm of his chair in their hotel on the Esplanade, and that for her was proof of their reconciliation, that his unconscious will should have memorized her songs to use as a counterpoint to his drifting thoughts. But there were times when he seemed absent, frowning. His mind was elsewhere, with his other family. He waited for letters which arrived rarely. And when they did they left him distraught, though he did not share their contents with her. Once he ventured to ask if money could be sent home to Allahabad, since medical bills had mounted and he had defaulted on maintenance money for a few weeks. She had exclaimed and chided and hastened to dispatch the money, but if she expected relief and gratitude from him she found only gruff rancour, and the only way to win back a smile or a word of approval from him was further self-abasement, which by now she had perfected quite as well as her other art, her music. From Calcutta she took him and her entire entourage to Darjeeling by the Sealdah Mail. The English Planters’ Association had invited her to sing for a princely payment. He did not attend her performance but spent the evening instead pacing the terrace outside their suite.

  Back in Allahabad he was required at his Mehdauri house for the month of Ramzan and Eid. Janki fasted and prayed all through Ramzan, arose before sunrise to eat her frugal meal and then ate only at sunset after the evening prayers. All soirées were cancelled for the month and the accompanists sent on a paid holiday. No true-born Muslim woman could have been as scrupulous as Janki in her practice of abstinence and charity. If her husband noticed, he made no comment. And then came Eid and she plucked up courage to go visit his Mehdauri house, uninvited but well received when she arrived.

  Aunts, sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews flocked around her in welcome, showed her their festival finery, their costumes and bangles and footwear, invited her to share in the cooking, to taste the flavours and to comment on the fit and fabrics. Nafisa, the pretty little niece who’d, on the earlier occasion, urged her to sing at the wedding, now teased her coyly about her widening girth. Fatima Aapa, the elderly aunt who had remarked upon her refusal to sing, requested her to help prepare something for the feast. And Ghazala, the middle sister-in-law, invited her to sit in the courtyard and help receive the women guests of the family. Janki gratefully joined in. But all through the evening she felt the absence of Haq Sahib’s senior wife and the unwell Yaqoob and dared not ask after them. There was an overloud merriment in this Eid, her instincts told her, something bright and compulsively cheerful to the point of being boisterous, as though it was all being enacted for her benefit. There was something opaque in their eyes and constant curious looks being darted across at Haq Sahib, when he entered the inner courtyard. Some secret was being collectively protected.

  The house swarmed with visitors, many already known to her and many to whom she was introduced, though she proudly kept her veil before the men. She kept up her famed repartee and riposte, her graceful courtly exchanges, she saw to it that their plates were refilled, that no one stayed unattended, old members reverently escorted to comfortable bolsters on the divans and their feet rested, young ones blest and complimented on their appearance and their Eidees given, old servants given their festival presents and the dishes on the dining sheets never allowed to fall empty. The evening was well advanced and the last of the guests had left when there broke out in the far quarters of the house a loud uproar. Doors banged, there was a loud crash as of crockery hurled across to smash against a wall and a sound of shrieking. In the central courtyard everyone froze and some sprang to their feet and rushed towards the gallery that connected the central courtyard with the enclosed west wing and the verandas and chambers beyond. The shrieking increased and a sort of whirlwind broke into their midst as a frenzied Yaqoob tore in, hurling abuse at the very top of his voice. In his hand he held a swinging lantern that he flailed around, tilting it crazily askew, making to take aim against the curtained doorway. Close on his heels raced three of the younger nephews, shouting, trying to seize the lantern, trying to stop his mad progress across the courtyard.

  ‘Ah, the jinns are on him again, Bhabhi,’ exclaimed Nadira, the youngest sister-in-law. ‘And what a day they have chosen!’

  ‘Alas for all Bhai Jaan’s prayers and charities at Ajmer! Seize him before he sets the house on fire!’

  Yaqoob’s eyes were bloodshot and his face streaming with tears as a riot of incoherent imprecations exploded upon his lips. The lads wrestled with him but, powered with manic energy, he flung them aside and dashed his head against the wall. The blood streamed down his cheek and the lantern fell in a crash of metal and glass and spilt kerosene that left a trail of fire snaking across the coir matting that covered the veranda floor. In the hue and cry, someone had the foresight to run towards the bathhouse and fetch buckets of water and the fire was put out while Yaqoob flung himself down on one of the divans, overpowered by the cousins, and burst into a loud animal howl.

  ‘Fetch Farzan Bhai, quick!’ was the general cry and someone Janki had never seen before, a tall, pale man, sped into their midst from the west quarters. In his hand he held a syringe. Behind him, stepping swiftly with a kerchief in her hand and a jug of water, was a slender, worn-faced woman.

  Yaqoob lay stoned upon
the divan late into the morning.

  ‘Do you know me?’ she had asked the boy when she saw his eyelids flutter open. She had lain awake all night on a charpai placed alongside the boy’s divan in the inner courtyard.

  ‘Yes, Baiji,’ he had muttered, keeping his eyes shut tight. His voice was tired and very low.

  ‘No, not Baiji. Say Chhoti Ammi.’

  He nodded, turning his head away from her on the rumpled pillow.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she whispered in his ear.

  ‘My head hurts,’ he moaned softly.

  ‘Come here,’ she sat on the side of his bed and took his heavy, tousled head on her ample lap. She began crooning a soft bhajan in a morning raga, a murmurous unfolding Lalit:

  ‘O my little lord Krishna,

  My armful-of-mischief,

  Will you not keep still a moment, pray?

  That I may behold your blue-lotus face,

  A moment, pray, just a moment, pray?’

  He had grown still and his breath came deep and regular. He wriggled his head more snugly into her lap and she ran her fingers through his tangled, sweaty hair. She added an impromptu verse of her own composition and sang on:

  ‘You have smashed the butter pots

  And finished the cream.

  Now, my little Lord Mischief,

  Tell me your bad dream.’

  He opened his eyes and looked long and quizzically at her.

  She crooned yet another song: ‘Hamare nabi aaj dulha bane . . .’ And noticed that he was listening intently. Then, at the second repetition of the verse he broke into a childlike smile which quickly turned into a gurgling laugh.

  ‘All night I did baa-baa-baa,’ he told her in a confiding voice. ‘I was a goat and Abba Jaan was going to slaughter me . . .’ Here he laughed and laughed and she laughed too, peal on peal, though she felt shaken at the boy’s violent delusion.

  Looking up, she noticed the slender woman she had seen the night before, standing under an archway, watching them. It was too dim to see her expression but Janki thought she felt a vibration of friendship, tentative and tenuous, come at her from that direction before the figure disappeared under the veranda’s arches.

  ‘Next time your head goes baa-baa-baa come to Chhoti Ammi and I shall sing you to laughter,’ she told the boy. A laughing raga, a mind-healing raga, that was what was needed for this raving child, and she resolved to spin one for him. It was what she owed this family, in recompense for her refusal to sing for them. No one had heard her that still morning except the boy and his mother but Janki felt that never in her scores of acclaimed performances had she experienced such meaning in what she did.

  She promised herself that she’d pay a visit to the shrine of Baba Tajuddin Shah Aulia in Nagpur, one of her special saints, to pray for this disturbed man-child. Abdul Karim Khan had told her of Tajuddin Baba after he had pursued him for days and caught up with him in a dense jungle. The baba had sought to shake him off, shouting, ‘Go away, don’t you follow me.’ But when Khan Sahib had persisted, the saint had stopped—on an extremely filthy patch of land—and demanded to know why he was being pursued, whether Khan Sahib wished to sing to him, and if so, he should sit down right there in that filthy ditch and sing a song in praise of God. Khan Sahib sang a famous verse of Kabir’s which overwhelmed the saint. When the song ended, the saint swayed in ecstatic agreement and gave him leave to go. But I have come to entreat the grace of your blessing, master, pleaded Khan Sahib. You are already in grace, you who possess a voice so mellow. Go, we shall meet again, said the baba. Khan Sahib had narrated how Tajuddin Baba had mysteriously vanished and when he himself arose from the filthy, wet ground on which he had sat he was amazed to behold that his own clothes had remained utterly unsmirched. At Nagpur Janki witnessed Khan Sahib singing for Tajuddin Baba his best-beloved song: ‘Hari ka bhed na paayo Rama! Kudrat teri rang-birangi, tu kudrat ka wali!’ She saw Tajuddin Baba rise to his feet, clap his hands and break into a dance, crying out in rapture: ‘It is all the sport of God! It is God at play in your voice!’ And she bowed her head and raised her moist eyes to heaven, content that she had found the song she had come looking for.

  19

  A week after Eid she returned to her Sabzi Mandi house, though Haq Sahib stayed on a while longer at Mehdauri. For her it was a hectic season of performances for she had deferred all programmes till after Ramzan and Eid.

  ‘I hear your singing quietened the jinns in my sahibzada’s head, begum,’ remarked Haq Sahib.

  ‘I wish my singing could quieten the jinns in yours, Vakil Sahib.’

  He was pleasant, amorous. He drew her to him and whispered in her hair, ‘You rouse the jinns in me, lady, if you but knew.’

  After a long time a night of love. She had advanced in skill and knew better how to receive and to give and how to keep time. Together their bodies made such music in unison that its impression lasted in their two minds a long time afterwards and made of their marriage a somewhat redeemed thing. Until the cycle of events ordained to break them apart overtook them, some months later, in the shape of an urgent summons from Mehdauri. Haq Sahib’s elder son, that responsible, mature firstborn, had died of heatstroke. The searing winds of June that howled and hissed, dust-freighted, around the streets and gardens and fields of the city, had struck the boy down in a dead swoon as he cycled down from the bazaar and no quantities of mango-pulp draughts and rubbings of feet and hands with mango juice could bring the raging fever down.

  Janki arrived, appalled, at Allahabad, only recently back from a singing tour of the Central Provinces. She had received the news by telegram at Orchha and had immediately cancelled all appointments and rushed back. She did not find Haq Sahib in Mehdauri at the house of mourning. She found him, instead, in her own Sabzi Mandi house, where, he curtly informed her, he had retreated to mourn once the burial was over.

  He sat in an armchair, eyes closed, tearless. For a moment she felt honoured that he had sought out her house to be able to weep. She seated herself on the mat at his feet and gave vent to her own tears. Tears did not come easily to her, especially those of mourning, but the thought of him shouldering the corpse of his elder son all the way down to the Kaladanda cemetery, while she, oblivious, sang songs of rejoicing at the Orchha durbar and his loneliness in that hour melted all her reserve and she wept in helpless commiseration, unable to reach out to him. But if she hoped her tears would release his, she was wrong. For he only opened his eyes and rested them tiredly on her heaving shoulders and then said: ‘Leave me, begum. I came here to find an empty house, not more weeping women.’

  She dried her tears, surprised at him. ‘Then have you not left my sister-wife to weep alone, Vakil Sahib? Your place is with her . . .’

  ‘Don’t pester me, woman!’ he cursed her. ‘Go to Mehdauri and take your place there, if you like. I only want to be alone. I beg you to allow me that at least.’

  Baffled, yet obscurely comprehending, she left the chamber to order the coachman to bring round the phaeton. All through the drive she marvelled at the hatred that had shone in his eyes. She was seasoned enough to know there was no such thing as lasting love. Only an accumulation of small kindnesses, many things built up into a semblance of anchorage, an intuiting and an answering of dire needs in an unstable equilibrium of compromises. There were safe areas of assured accord and a lengthening ladder of avoidances. There was above all the intense impulse to relieve aches guessed at, however small and unadmitted, in gestures however unremitting and unacknowledged. There was the making of memories together and the editing of all those paragraphs of life that were ill-written or overwritten in a co-authored work in progress called marriage. She knew she worked hard, too hard, to underscore all she saw as worthwhile and erase all she saw as discordant, for love too was a willed composition. What she failed to understand was the presence of an animosity in him when there was none in her and when she was sure she had given him no cause for it.

  In the house of mourning she encoun
tered what was a common sight. An exhausted stillness in which people lay around, asleep while others sat silent or spoke in signs and whispers lest they waken the ones lapsed in sleep after their first weeping had broken their strength. She sat herself down and gave herself up to prayer, undisturbed by the occasional sigh or sniffle or groan of grief that swept across the courtyard.

  She was roused from her prayer by a sound of muffled singing that blew in from the west quarters. That faint sound called her out of her trance and drew her to it and she followed where it led, across the threshold of that old hesitation that had prevented her from entering those forbidden galleries and chambers of the west quarters. The sound came from a bedchamber that led off the veranda. Pausing at the door she saw a woman sitting up in bed, her head against the headboard, one hand clutching the bedpost. Her eyes were closed tight, her head thrown back and swaying from side to side as she sang a dirge, a wailing strung along crumbled phrases of breath. A broken voice searching, calling out to the dead in dire denial, rising out of the pit of mortal captivity; groping, it clawed hoarsely at the dark in jerks of tear-choked retchings. She was lost in a rhythmic chanting, not of prayer but of accusation that climbed in a charged trembling, releasing a challenge in the air before it slumped and collapsed under the weight of its own grief. Thus it sang on, rising and lapsing, rising again, holding steady a long, lone plaint, falling spent. Janki stood stricken. What song was this, what raga of the beaten soul? In all her lifetime of riyaz, never had she encountered anything like this.