‘That was another matter and long years ago,’ she reacted. ‘I ask your opinion now.’
He chose his words carefully. ‘As to Haq Sahib, I do not have the pleasure of close association with him, save formally as your husband. But legally and pragmatically, so to speak, any adopted successor of yours might possibly be unwelcome to any husband of yours, irrespective of who you married. Especially if that successor has no emotional or blood claim upon his attachment. And especially in the light of your sizeable fortune. I speak only legally and pragmatically, begum sahiba.’
Her eyes widened as his meaning got across to her. It left her at a loss for words, challenging all her instincts of denial and whatever convictions she cherished of Haq Sahib’s credibility. Still, a deeper instinct prompted her next question: ‘So if Bachcha Sahib’s children—Allah grant him many!—were to fill my home . . . it would assure me a future other than the one I now foresee?’
‘Exactly,’ he answered.
‘I thank you, Hashmat Ullah Sahib.’ She rose to go. ‘And I shall reflect on what you have advised.’
‘But I have advised nothing,’ he saw her to the door, ‘except that you have a care about yourself and your fortune.’
‘For that matter, you are there to protect that, are you not my lawyer?’ She strove to end the meeting on a light note but failed, so heavy did the matter now rest upon her mind.
Her first impulse was to send Bachcha away to an expensive boarding school, but he was too old for that and too poor in studies to be comfortable anywhere. He could of course be married—he was over sixteen—but she did not think the time was ripe for that yet. Besides, who would give his daughter to a cannabis addict, even if that addict was to inherit the great fortune of the legendary Janki Bai Ilahabadi? The best course of action was to get him de-addicted first and married subsequently, and for that she had to ensure that all allowances to him were cut off. She got the English doctor at the Bailey Hospital to treat him. She confined him to the house and patiently bore his tantrums when his angry bouts led to smashed glass and violent attacks. She had to suspend her riyaz for days and the effects were present in her performances though only she noticed how stale and uninspired the notes sounded in her highly self-critical ears now. But getting Bachcha normal had become a soul mission for her, a desperate cause that would decide whether her life had been at all worthwhile. She prayed, fasted, sought fakirs for charms and talismans for Bachcha, gave away large sums in charity. And in about a year’s time it seemed that life had resumed its sanity and Bachcha could be trusted out alone once more.
More, she had by now dismissed her misgivings about Haq Sahib as unworthy suspicions that left her feeling guilty and mean, and had welcomed Haq Sahib back with as great a display of wifely affection as ever before, more so if possible.
‘I am of the age when the phases of the moon and the phases of the womb madden a woman’s mind, Vakil Sahib,’ she told him. ‘Bear with me, as you have admirably done.’
‘I am here to serve your every whim, madam,’ he had said with an ironic little smirk.
So once again they picked up the life they had put aside, and strove to make light of the allegations and the injuries, the suspicions and indignations that had driven a wedge between them, and like most married couples, they succeeded for a while.
Then misery struck again in the form of an urgent message from the Ramkrishna Mission in Benaras. Her brother, Beni Prasad, had died of jaundice. He had collapsed one day on the ghat and been taken to the mission by the sadhus. Crazed with panic, she rushed to Benaras. Neighbours at the Barna ka Pul house gave her such details as they knew. The monks had cared for him during the few hours of coma. A sadhu had lit his pyre. She bowed her head. It is just as well, she thought. His ashes had been immersed by the time the message had got to her. At the Barna ka Pul house she came across his pathetic belongings, among them a radio-engineering kit and a metal Meccano set. She wept over them and for this neglected brother of hers who might have had a better chance had she not lost herself to her own life and her music. She wished there was a grave, something palpable to lay her head on, but there was only the swollen river, stretching to the far horizon, the river that had carried away her mother’s ashes and now her Beni’s. She had an impulse to take a dip, immerse herself in its waters and draw in their subtle presence through the pores of her skin. She stepped into the stream, covered her head, drew in her breath and lowered herself. The water climbed around her, closed over her head. She heard its hum in her ears and she stayed submerged for as long as she could hold her breath. Which was quite long, for her lifetime of riyaz had taught her to control her breath for prolonged intervals at a time.
As she rose to the surface a curious sight met her eyes. On a boat some distance away a cluster of women were casting into the river what seemed to be tanpuras, to the chanting of mantras. She wiped the droplets from her smarting eyes and studied them. She asked a pilgrim what was going on. ‘Tawaifs,’ he told her. ‘They’re giving up the bad life.’
More he could not tell her. Nobody on the ghat seemed to have an idea. It was left for Janki to get in touch with her Benaras friends Vidyadhari and Husna Bai to find out. Both had taken to singing patriotic songs and bhajans in response to Gandhi’s call. But neither could explain Gandhi’s prim refusal to accept the money the tawaifs offered to the cause. In Calcutta, they told her, Gauhar had withheld half the amount she had promised to Gandhi because he had not kept his part of the deal that he attend one of her soirées, but Gauhar was Gauhar. What did she, Janki, have to offer the cause?—they asked.
As to performances, she replied, she now gave very few and never for sarkari organizers. As to singing bhajans, she had been singing bhajans all her life, along with the rest of her repertoire. As to the saucy, teasing music of shringar now called indecent by these staid custodians of public morality, she just did not agree and was ready to defy them. There was a precious legacy at risk of extinction.
That was her last trip to Benaras.
Bachcha was well behaved and quite accepting of the marriage that had been arranged for him.
A sweet little fourteen-year-old she was, the bride, the daughter of Sayyad Shamsuddin Rizvi, who was the neighbour of one of her accompanists. Petite, fey, with a quaintly teasing laugh in her eyes even when her face was demurely composed into an expression of meek obedience beneath her heavy, tinselled headcloth. She had a ripe-guava paleness of skin with the rosiness in winter that Allahabad guavas had.
Janki had insisted on extraordinary beauty. Fairness of complexion, symmetry of features, fineness of limbs, and this little girl fulfilled all her requirements. She had also desired a girl of small education, preferably just past primary school, for she had come to believe that education prepared a woman’s mind for misery. Hence this kittenish child, amusing, affectionate, a pleasure to have around, an enchanting playmate for her Bachcha.
But Bachcha seemed uninterested. He sat through the wedding ceremonies in oafish passivity, stolidly indifferent. She had seen him this way before and the shadow of an older panic waylaid her heart, but she set it aside as improbable.
The wedding was a glittering one, attended by dignitaries, British officials, lawyers, the city’s intellectuals, poets and singers. And though she did not personally sing, preferring to be the grande dame of the event, the mother of the groom, she had invited fellow performers to sing—from Calcutta, Patna, Indore, Atrauli, Benaras and Gwalior. To each guest she gave a monogrammed silver keepsake. The banquets were sumptuous and the festivities lasted five days. Cooks had been hired from Lucknow and Delhi. The sweets and paan had been ordered from Benaras and the mirasans, who sat singing wedding songs all round the clock, had been brought from Barabanki.
In the days that followed, the little bride’s presence was a delight to her. Every morning she circled the stone grindstone pounder round the girl’s head to cast out the evil eye and supervised the barbers’ wives as they smeared the bride’s limbs with honey,
sandalwood and turmeric and rubbed them with rose water and fresh milk and dried her long, glossy hair over a brazier in which smoked a dozen scented herbs. The gorgeous ensembles she’d had created for the girl by her own designers in Chowk Gangadas were her special triumph, for she had chosen the silks and the crepes and the muslins and also the gold and silver embroidery down to the very skeins and the patterns of the bead and pearl inlays in the elaborate panels of the dresses. As for jewellery, she had let her extravagance go wild. The most finely crafted girdles and looped and scalloped neckpieces, the daintiest nose rings, the most heavily embellished ear-danglers, forehead pendants and hair combs, wristlets and anklets had been chosen. She felt as she had done as a little girl herself in her forgotten Benaras childhood, dressing up her doll. She drew the greatest satisfaction in standing back to marvel at the enchanting work she had created. Sometimes in the delicate, porcelain-fine girl she saw herself as she might have liked to be but wasn’t. Sometimes it was the daughter after her own heart that she had always wanted. In her excitement over this toy-child that life had finally brought her, she quite forgot about Bachcha, who in his own way, was quite content with the change in his station, the fancy clothes he had received, the bagfuls of banknotes as gifts and the gold and silver coins as benedictions.
Then, one night, the little girl knocked shyly on her door and said: ‘Ammi Jaan, can I sleep in your room?’
She awoke and it took her a few moments to register the presence of the little figure who stood timidly at the foot of her grand four-poster.
‘Chandni Bitiya? What is it?’
‘I am scared, Ammi Jaan,’ whispered the little girl. ‘I don’t like to sleep alone, I have never slept alone in my Abba-Ammi’s home . . .’
‘Alone?’ She sat bolt upright in bed. ‘Where is Abdul Aziz Mian?’
‘I don’t know, Ammi Jaan,’ said the girl. ‘He goes out and comes back and I’m scared of . . . jinns and ghosts and snakes . . . and robbers and . . .’
‘He goes out?’ Bafflement seized her and a familiar dread. ‘Every night?’
The little girl hung her head.
‘Answer me, child.’
The little girl nodded, her face beginning to twist into tears.
‘What time does he get back?’
She would not say.
‘Before dawn?’ prompted Janki.
The child inclined her head in assent.
Janki took hold of the girl’s hands. ‘You have got to tell me everything, child. I beg you.’
The girl turned away her face. A tear rolled down her cheek and she lifted an arm to swipe it off.
‘Please,’ appealed Janki. ‘It is important. So important for him and for you.’
Still the girl said nothing, sniffling into her stole.
Janki saw she would have to put her own terrible suspicion into words, no matter how agonizing.
‘Bachcha Mian got a lot of money as nek, didn’t he? And so did you. Where is it?’
‘It is gone,’ the girl managed to bring out in a tiny, bewildered voice.
Janki felt the impact of the crushing knowledge before the knowledge struck. Her mind was in an uproar. The questions tumbled out without her conscious bidding, pursuing Bachcha’s nefarious trail.
‘Your jewellery? Is it all with you?’
‘Only the ruby set, Badi Ammi. And the gold belt . . .’
The blood pounded in Janki’s brain.
‘Why did you give it to him? What did he tell you?’
The girl looked frightened. Her eyes were by now dry and she stared at Janki in shocked understanding. ‘He . . . He said he would bring it all back. He said he was giving it for the country. So . . . So that the angrez people could be sent back.’
‘Oho!’ exclaimed Janki and the marvel of it struck her, that the dull Bachcha could be so foxy in his fabrications.
‘And you let go of your jewels out of love for your country or your love for your husband?’ she remarked acidly, before she realized the utter innocence of the humble recipient of this shaft, and she softened her voice and said in an altered tone, ‘I am sure you meant well, child, but in your place I would not have let go of my gold and jewels so easily. I would have fought and refused.’
‘I did too, at first, Ammi Jaan. But he gave me a paper from the Congress Party of Gandhiji and it said my jewels would come back to me when the angrez people had left the country . . .’
‘Bachcha Mian told you that?’
The child gulped and nodded.
‘And no doubt you believed him. Inquilab zindabad, eh? Bring me the paper—from Gandhiji’s Congress Party—and let me look at it.’
Bachcha’s ingenuity stupefied her. To think he had such gifts of invention and she had thought him slow of wit.
The girl returned from her room with a sheet of ruled paper and held it out to Janki. Janki felt the blood rise roaring to her brain, scalding every nerve. She snatched the paper from the girl’s hand and read out the scribbled words: ‘Khemchand Mishrilal and Sons. Jewellers and Pawnbrokers. 151 Sunehri Bazaar, Chowk, Ilahabad. Received one emerald set comprising three-string neckpiece, earrings and hair comb. Sixteen gold bangles, two kangan sets. One nose ring, forehead pendant, jhoomar . . . Child, I know you cannot read and I hate to break the truth to you but your Bachcha is no inquilabi freedom fighter but a vile cheat!’
The girl began to cry.
‘This is a pawnbroker’s ticket. To fund his vile cannabis!’
Then she saw the effect of her cruel disclosure and the shivering and sobbing that overtook the little girl who sank in a little huddle on the divan and hid her face in the bolster. Her heart went out to this little child of fourteen, a captive of a situation not of her making and beyond her understanding, and she cursed her own blind hopes of Bachcha’s reform and a transformed future. Leaning over, she took the child in her arms and let her sob till the spell passed and was followed by an unearthly stillness. It lasted so long that Janki thought the girl had fallen asleep, exhausted by her fit of grieving, and an overpowering compassion swept over her and she whispered in the girl’s ear, ‘I think I know where he is and first thing in the morning I am going to bring him back to you, if need be drag him back to you by the ears. And every one of your jewels that he has pawned. Trust me, child, and don’t grieve.’
Next morning she ordered her phaeton, sent for Jallu Mian to accompany her and drove first to Khemchand Mishrilal’s in Sunehri Bazaar and then to the Katra den where she knew Bachcha would be.
She recovered the jewellery and dragged back Bachcha, as she said she would, berating and abusing him all the way back.
‘Here is the inquilabi, the ganja-doped patriot!’ She pushed Bachcha ahead of her as the girl ran out into the courtyard. ‘That’s what you told your little wife, did you, my sahibzade? For shame! Yes, she showed me the paper, the guarantee from Gandhiji that promised the jewels and gold back when the firangees were chased back to Bartania! If you had applied yourself as intelligently to your lessons as you do to your lies you might have become a collector sahib, mian.’
Bachcha had turned threateningly to his bride. ‘You showed it to her?’ he hissed in a menacing undertone. The girl shrank. Janki read his thought and threatened him in return: ‘If you so much as lay a finger on this little bitiya you shall live to regret it.’
Bachcha glowered back. ‘What is it to you, if I thrash her or if I don’t . . .?’
This was a bit of blustering swagger to strike terror in the cowering girl’s heart and Janki’s head exploded in anger.
‘Ah, ah, this cur! He’ll steal his very mother’s shroud, he’ll steal the kajal off his bride’s eye to make a cowrie or two! I don’t trust you, you salt-betraying scum-worm, Allah knows which foul gutter you were spawned in!’ Rage inflamed her temples, serrated her vocal cords. She heard a hoarse voice grazing out abuse. A voice she did not recognize but which could be nobody else’s but her own. For a prolonged moment she knew only a break in the mind’s continuity, h
eard only that blinding uproar. When she awoke from that extended absence of self she saw that Bachcha had fallen on the floor beneath the thunderous impact of her own flailing arms, wielding the stick she had seized from Jallu, and realized that she had thrashed Bachcha black and blue, that she was still thrashing him, that dust and snot smeared his face and that Jallu was trying hard to restrain her maddened fit. She saw Bachcha gather himself up, run limping to the doorway and disappear into the garden. She saw the little girl sink trembling into a chair. She saw the servants clustered in a huddle around the courtyard. She stared in incomprehension at the stick she still held in her hands, at the tall brass tumbler of water Jallu was holding out to her, entreating: ‘Baiji, begum sahiba . . .’
He vanished, her Abdul Aziz, her Bachcha Mian, and vanished forever.
Initially she feigned apathy and steeled herself for the little girl’s sake. But Bachcha was neither in the den in Katra nor in any of the city’s other dope hideouts, nor anywhere else she could conceive of. A day passed, a week.
‘Let him go drown himself in the river!’ she snorted in reassurance to the girl. ‘Don’t eat out your heart. That one will come back like a cur when it’s time for his chapati scraps. He’ll come crawling back, be sure.’
But the girl’s anxiety was a reproach to her and her heart relented. What could this little fourteen-year-old know of the hardness of a woman’s heart when all its sap has dried? This tender vine, trusting its way up a stone column, must not be thwarted just yet.
‘Don’t fret, child,’ she said more gently as the days passed. ‘I know Bachcha Mian well. He’ll be back.’
Where in the middle of all this was there space for her music? In the strident commotion of her life, she felt her art being throttled. Weeks passed without riyaz and performances fell. She felt her former magic grow tired, she ceased to grow. She declined tempting and prestigious invitations because things more urgent demanded her attention. There were times she suspected it was now the hour to put aside her music, and an ache surpassing all the immediate sorrows of her circumstance overcame her mind. Poetry had turned scarce long ago, defeated. She fervently promised herself another season of life, a grace earned by effort, when the chance to be one with her music again might be granted her. But that chance was clearly to come later rather than sooner, if at all. Enforced abstinence was to be her trial, she told herself, patience to live without music till such time as the demands of life insisted. In that testing duration she was required to unlearn all she knew, lose what youth and application and skill had accomplished, degenerate in inverse maturing. In moments of despair she wondered if that second chance would come at all. With a shock she realized that middle age too was receding. She still wanted to sing the most excellent song of her life.
Requiem in Raga Janki Page 29