Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  She might have sat down beside Haq Sahib’s senior wife, her sister-wife as she called her, and joined her voice to hers in a duet of anguish, except that for once she felt herself to be the lesser voice in this pageant of grief. She imagined herself stepping close, she imagined the song ceasing and her gentle question: Why did you stop? And the other answering, I cannot go on. Go on doing what, singing or living? Do you sing, she might have asked. No, I used to. Not any more. Not in the last few years. What did you sing?

  Lullabies, wedding songs, birth songs, songs of winnowing and pounding, songs of private prayer. I do not sing now. You do not sing now? Can it be because of Janki, this great, famous singer here, who took away your husband with her song? Have I become to her what Lakshmi Dubain was to my mother? Have I robbed her of her song and is this the only song now left to her by fate? And what will my penalty be, O God of Mausiqui?

  She stole away unnoticed, neither having spoken nor having been spoken to. She could not endure that raga of flaming grief and she hid her head in her headcloth and hurried out in stealth, in shame, in a sadness beyond voice or word.

  She remembered, to her mortification, the old story of how a vain Tansen sang before Goswamy Vitthalnath and sang his best, only to be gifted a thousand gold coins for his skill but in addition two cowries to indicate the utter uselessness of all that skill.

  Before the year was out Yaqoob, Haq Sahib’s younger son, was stricken with cholera and died too. Haq Sahib moved to Mehdauri where he stayed the whole of the following year. She offered to suspend her singing and accompany him but he discouraged her. He planned to go on hajj to Mecca with his senior wife, for what else was left to them both but the mercy of Allah, he said.

  ‘Then allow me to come with you to Mecca,’ she asked timidly.

  He shook his head. ‘That cannot be,’ he told her.

  ‘Am I less in faith, do you think?’ she demanded.

  ‘That is for Allah to decide, not me, begum,’ he said. ‘I go to beg pardon for my sins that brought on me this ruin. I go with her whom I wronged and whom Allah has thought fit to burden with further grief for no fault of her own but mine.’

  She began to experience some glimmer of understanding. ‘I share the blame, sir,’ she spoke in a small voice, ‘and I shall most humbly appeal to my sister-wife to be so kind as to allow me to accompany you.’

  His voice had risen. ‘Do so at your own peril,’ he rebutted. ‘I have not shared with you what people at Mehdauri say of you. Go and hear it with your own ears!’

  ‘Hear what, sir?’

  ‘Then listen: They say it’s you who has cast a blight on the family for why else did two grown sons die within a year?’

  He spoke in a cold, level voice but she found herself trembling.

  ‘And what do you say?’ She was aware that her voice shook as she spoke.

  He stayed silent.

  She felt herself growing hysterical. ‘And what do you say, Vakil Sahib?’ she demanded.

  He turned away, saying as he did so, ‘I do not know what to think, begum.’

  For several moments she stood rooted to the spot. Then she stepped up to him and said in the voice she used when she concluded her recordings, ‘Then I beg you, go. And may God grant you His forgiveness.’

  20

  A telegram brought her news of Manki’s passing. She was in Calcutta recording for Spottiswoode Clarke of GTL which had just released a special violet-coloured Gramophone Concert Record. It had on it the image of a ‘recording angel’ as its trademark. A naked angel, sitting reclined sideways across the centre of the disc, wings flaring, holding a plumed stylus. The records were priced at Rs 3 and 12 annas. She was at the mehfil hosted by GTL to celebrate its launch when the telegram arrived. She cancelled her remaining dates and caught the Calcutta Mail back to Mughalsarai. Accompanied by Samina and Jallu, she hired a buggy to Benaras. With a mind swarming with fuzzy thoughts, she drove down the old Barna ka Pul lanes, now considerably tidied and broadened, but shocking her at every turn with sights that had been held in deactivated memory all her life and now alarmingly awake, disturbing. A part of her was desperate to disown it all, never to set foot in the past. The other half tugged at her, exerting an irresistible compulsion to immerse herself in it and altogether reverse the years that had intervened.

  Beni sat on a mat in the empty room, the very walls of which started a shudder in her nerves. She sat on the mat opposite his, silent. The oil lamp burnt on the floor where Manki’s body had been laid before being carried to the pyre.

  After a long moment Beni spoke up in a strange voice. ‘She had her wish. It was Manikarnika Ghat for her.’

  She wept into her headcloth, blinded with pain. She could not bring herself to look upon the earthen urn of ashes that stood behind the burning lamp. She saw her brother gazing at her quietly.

  ‘Jiji,’ he said gently, ‘will you accompany me to the river to immerse her ashes? I was waiting for you.’

  Her throat choked at his kindness. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘To the sangam at Allahabad?’

  ‘She never wanted to return to Allahabad, Jiji,’ he said. ‘So why take her there now? Any of our Benaras ghats will be fine.’

  They went in the buggy she had hired for the day. They sat silent in the country boat, the urn between them. The river and its staired and parasolled banks swam before her eyes as she struggled to contain her sobs. When he asked her to lend a hand with the urn she shook her head. Suddenly the thought of Manki knocking the glass of water out of her hand had risen before her eyes. He tilted the urn. Together they watched its contents fall in a dusty downpour, rest afloat an instant on the rapid current before sinking, dissolving before their eyes. He had to take his ritual dip in the Ganga, followed by a visit to the ghat-side temple. She stood on the steps, striving to master her feelings. On the wall to the forecourt of the temple was a sign: Hindus Only. So she stayed out while he went in to pray and prostrate himself and circumambulate.

  Back at the house she summoned up the courage to ask him, ‘Is all well with you?’

  ‘As well as might be, Jiji,’ he answered.

  ‘Did she ever speak of me?’

  He shook his head. ‘She mentioned you once or twice. She had forgotten so much lately. She said: All my children have died of the pox, my Kashi, my Paraga, my Mahadei and my Jankiya. Only you were spared by the Devi for my old age, son.’

  ‘And father? Did she ever mention him?’

  ‘Him never—though she remembered Lakshmi Chachi often. Even that Parvati woman.’

  Janki hesitated, then managed to ask him what was uppermost in her mind: ‘Had she heard any of my records? Have you?’

  He was embarrassed. ‘How could we, Jiji? We never bought a gramophone.’

  ‘I shall send you one,’ she promised.

  He seemed to be searching for words. He brought them up with some difficulty. ‘I was never one for music, Jiji. Neither was Amma. It was only you who was different, so she got teachers for you. I wasn’t much good for anything. And now where’s the time to hear music? The shop takes up all my time.’

  She understood. More than he intended. Her heart went out to him. ‘Come back to Allahabad,’ she said. ‘There is nothing to keep you here.’

  ‘There is my shop.’ He was stubborn. ‘What will I do there, Jiji? Only fly kites maybe.’

  A shadow had passed over his face and it prompted her to frame her next question very carefully. ‘May I find a good girl for you?’

  With a flash of bitterness he retorted, ‘I married once, didn’t I, Jiji? You sang songs at my wedding, I seem to remember. I am no Mussalman to go a-marrying more than one.’

  ‘The girl you sort of married was one, sir. To wed her proper you’d have had to turn Mussalman.’ It was on the tip of her tongue to remind him of their father who had had two women in the house, even if married to just one.

  ‘That was a different time in our poor lives. As that old fox Naseeban told me there wasn’t maulvi or
pandit present at our marriage and thank God for that.’ His face flushed.

  ‘Suppose I find you another one like her.’

  ‘That’s impossible. There cannot be another one like her.’

  She fell silent. No songs came to her mind. Nothing in her entire thumri stock could ever measure up to this thing her brother carried. Her own prolifically articulated love life paled into inanity.

  ‘Do you have any idea where she is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can try to find out if you like.’

  ‘Let it be, Jiji,’ he said, and abruptly changed the subject. ‘I keep feeling the taste of Amma’s balushahis in my mouth,’ he said. ‘The feeling persists night and day.’

  When she left the following day she embraced him. Asked him to visit Allahabad as often as he could. Called him her ‘quvvat-e-baazu’, the strength of her arm. It was how she would refer to him when she wrote her Diwan-e-Janki, long after he was dead.

  By 1916 recordings could be done at Allahabad. Dillnutt and his team arrived on behalf of the new label that GTL had assumed—His Master’s Voice. All Janki’s older titles were reissued as ten-inch discs. It was the only positive thing in a lonely and depressing time and it lasted three years. Then the Jallianwala Bagh thunderclap unstrung Janki utterly. From the several vernacular papers she subscribed to she’d kept up with events in Punjab. Allahabad was buzzing with the Khilafat stir, Hindus and Muslims for once united on a common platform. The crowd fired on at Jallianwala Bagh had comprised both Sikhs and Muslims out to celebrate the Punjabi new year and unaware of curfew orders. But quite besides the horror of the massacre at the bagh, what filled her mind with agitation and a stubborn self-loathing was the detail that under Dyer’s orders it was Sikhs, Gurkhas, Baluchi and Rajput troops who had fired those 1650 rounds. They give us the orders and we obey them, she fumed, yes, even I. It never occurs to us to refuse. It did once, even if we lost. For a day a wild rumour had spread that in the Civil Lines crawling orders for Indians had been proclaimed but it died down as suddenly as it arose. When later she read that the English public had approved of Dyer’s action, that he had been awarded a purse of 26,000 pounds and a sword, her self-lacerating conscience instantly allied this circumstance to her own, the Delhi Durbar purse of 100 gold mohurs, the benighted gun number 254 that the ‘satanic government’ had bestowed on her. Never before had she approved Gandhi’s impassioned phrase more. When she read the resolution of the thirty-fourth session of the Indian National Congress and its dry and guarded welcome to the Prince of Wales’s forthcoming visit, she knew what to expect from her city. It happened exactly as she had thought, with doors closed and windows shuttered and streets deserted and a sullen stillness in the air.

  There was no peace for her so long as that velvet purse with the 100 gold mohurs lay packed in a trunk somewhere in her house. She wondered how best to utilize it. All over the city massive bonfires were devouring piles of European clothing as Non-cooperation caught on. From the Independent she learnt of the mammoth Holi bonfire planned in the lawns of Motilal Nehru’s bungalow. He had only recently returned from having presided over the thirty-fourth session of the Indian National Congress and she knew him as one who admired her singing and collected her records. A day before the big bonfire she wrapped the velvet purse containing the 100 gold mohurs in a kerchief’s breadth of khadi, along with the Coronation Song record, and placed a carefully worded letter with it, addressed to Motilal Nehru.

  My respectful salutations to Barrister Motilal Nehru Sahib,

  Enclosed is a small contribution for the august organization that you have the distinction of having recently presided over. It is the least that this ordinary citizen of Ilahabad can offer, more so since its acquisition from the hands of the King Emperor George V at the Delhi Durbar is in the present circumstances more a regret than an honour. Any useful purpose that it can serve in our common cause shall be so much more becoming to its value than a place in some meaningless corner in the vault of memory. I send, along with it, a record containing the song celebrating the Royal Coronation of 1911, sung by my friend Gauhar Jaan and myself. I earnestly submit that it be allowed to augment your auspicious Holi bonfire which shall bring singular peace and comfort to the heart of this humble singer,

  Janki Bai Ilahabadi

  Sayyad Sahib, her munshi, was dispatched with the packet. He returned in a couple of hours with a brief note:

  Madam Sahiba,

  It is my pleasure and honour to receive this valuable contribution. The gold mohurs shall go a long way in the service of our cause. The record, I much regret to confess, I cannot bring myself to consign to the flames. At the risk of giving offence to the sentiments of the sender, let me disclose that it has gone to enrich my already large collection of Madam Sahiba’s records, a fact that has brought indescribable pleasure to

  Yours sincerely

  Motilal Nehru

  She had no European clothes to burn and she didn’t quite fancy a khadi wardrobe. All the same she felt easier in her mind when she read of the quickening Non-cooperation Movement activating all around in the city.

  News of Akbar’s death shook her to her core. He had been ailing. They hadn’t met for a considerable while. Her recordings had kept her too busy for private visits and when she received news of his passing she felt orphaned, bereft beyond words. She sought his voice in her head, found it often. She kept up a conversation with him that nourished her soul. She imagined him tossing verses at her in which Death came as an Englishman and arrested him for travelling without a ticket. She didn’t know if it was a deranged auditory fantasy or a music beyond the ear. She seemed to be eavesdropping into another dimension. The condition passed in a few weeks.

  Two years went by before she invited Haq Sahib back, writing to him that she had a surprise gift for him. When he came she presented Abdul Aziz to him.

  ‘This,’ she said, ‘is Bachcha. Salaam your Abba, Bachcha.’

  Abdul Aziz did so, managing to lisp, ‘Assalaamoalaikum.’

  In his crisp little side-knotted Lucknavi achkan and churidar pajamas, his feet in little gold-worked velvet nagras and his well-oiled hair crowned with a tilted velvet cap and his eyes lined in kajal, he looked a tiny qawwali singer. She had embroidered his little satin waistcoat herself.

  Haq Sahib had aged visibly in two years. His eyes were listless, red-rimmed, and he had lost that upright debonair form that had cut a dash in black shervani and white Aligarh pajamas in the old days. He looked a spent man. Gone that proud lift of head, that shock of wavy, raven hair over his smooth forehead and the clean-carved curl of lip, the aristocratic chiselled nose. His features had coarsened. His moustache drooped, unkempt. He did not meet her eye but seemed to speak absently to himself. A man who had lost interest in himself.

  She told him, haltingly, how she had come to adopt Abdul Aziz. The night-long soirée in an Attarsuiya square when silver coins had lain heaped all around her on the paved platform beneath the old peepul tree where she sang. How the sight of that mound of silver had filled her with despair and she had prayed: ‘Do not mock me with more wealth, O Lord, for what use is all this to me now? Or send me someone to serve with this.’ She had donated it all to the khankhwa of the Bahadurganj daira of the Sufi saint Sheikh Muhibullah Shah, gone personally to deliver it and visited the little khankhwa alongside the shrine, when her eyes had fallen on a thin little child sitting hunched on the hempen rug, struggling with his chalk and slate, and had learnt from the sajjadanasheen of the daira that he was one of the khankhwa’s littlest orphans.

  ‘See him now, Vakil Sahib,’ she had said, smiling fondly. ‘Plump as a little tomcat and as mischievous as can be. Put him in a satin kurta and velvet coatee, place a velvet cap aslant on his head and put a dholak in his hands and he’ll look a real qawwal bachcha at Hazrat Nizamuddin’s tomb. That’s why I call him Bachcha.’

  She hesitated an instant, caught Haq Sahib’s reluctant eye and added: ‘Allah answered my prayer, Vakil Sah
ib, as quick as lightning. My faith is restored in God if not in man. I share Allah’s gift with you and offer him to you, to us. This is the child of our old age. The child my womb could never give you. To make up for those other children that were taken away . . .’

  A momentary pang sparked in his eye but died. Something like annoyance stirred in his face. He said nothing. Later he took to staying longer in the Sabzi Mandi house, sometimes bringing things for the child, which gladdened her. Once he took the boy to Mehdauri.

  ‘An auntie gave me imartis and laddoos to eat,’ the child told Janki on his return. He’d come back with a pair of kites, a wooden top, a yo-yo.

  So Abdul Aziz spun his top, unrolled and rolled his yo-yo, ran chasing the chickens outside the hen coop with little shrieks of excitement. It warmed Janki’s heart to see him marching up and down the terrace with the oversized kite, and after a few futile attempts Haq Sahib laid down his hookah, slowly hoisted his portly form out of his armchair and strolled across the terrace to the child. Janki saw him take the kite string from Bachcha’s hand, spin out the wooden reel and give Bachcha instructions. She saw Bachcha skip across the terrace with the kite, position himself on the tips of his toes, holding aloft the kite, then with a jump and a squeal of joy let throw the kite into the air. It fought the wind, flapped and sped away into the air as the reel spun and Haq Sahib loosed out yards and yards of string. Behind her chik she felt her eyes moisten as the memory of another kite flier assailed her mind. And at the spectacle of the listless, oldening man who’d lost all engagement with life, now resolutely rekindling his interest in it for her sake. It left her gratified by the promise of a future and the possibility of more kindness towards one another, she and her husband.