In 1942, as the Japanese overran Burma and reached the borders of India, the people of Calcutta started evacuating the city. That was good news for Sahil, who was passing migrant to the city with not much cash to his name, struggling to find a decent place to live in. Calcutta, one of the most populous cities of the British Empire, had begun to look desolated. Wealthy landlords were happy to hand over their keys to tenants who were willing to stay put and take care of their properties. Malik found a place for an incredible rate and lived there like a king – till the bombs dropped.
Mitsubishi Ki-21s pounded parts of the cities, shattering buildings into smithereens. Sahil would rush to the terrace to watch the British fighter planes light up the sky like shooting stars. On rare occasions, they would catch a Japanese plane and an explosion would fill up the horizon. Calcutta was blacked out, from sunset to sunrise. Sahil hung out with a group of musicians – together, they would step out with their instruments, singing and playing music to lift people’s spirits, and forage for food. They played in neighbourhoods where zamindar’s houses had collapsed into heaps of rubble; they walked through streets full of haunted-looking people who had not slept in days; they played for anybody who cared to listen.
One such day, Sahil chanced upon a dead body that looked different than the other corpses he would have encountered on the pavements. Upon closer inspection, he discovered that it was a Japanese man, a soldier perhaps. Had he fallen from the sky, Sahil wondered, looking around to check if there was any smoke from some kind of wreckage. There was no sign of a plane crash. He was still puzzled, but the grumbling in his belly reminded him that he hadn’t eaten in a day. He checked the man’s pockets for food. Since there was nothing, he pried the dead man’s watch from his wrist. It didn’t work – the glass face had cracks and the time had stopped at 10:23 a.m. Sahil didn’t quite know why he had stolen it, but it would serve as a reminder of one of the darkest phases of his life – a memento that told him to survive at all costs. That was the last time he performed music on the streets.
But in Danpada, he belted song after song with gusto – tunes he had written in Urdu took on a Koli strut without missing a beat. The weather-beaten community of fishermen were treated to the best of the maestro’s compositions. Sahil then gestured for Meera to join in. His furious fingers pounded a holding tune, waiting for Meera to start. It was his way of initiating Meera into a session with him. For a moment, her mind raced back to the night Abhimanyu had set up the surprise performance at Bhairo’s sabha. The grimy streets of Danpada were a far cry from the splendour of the Orient Club and Malik’s bold commands quite the opposite of Abhimanyu’s gentle encouragement, but Meera’s sense of dread remained the same. However, she could not ignore Sahil’s infectious joie de vivre and joined him. Soon, a few more members of the orchestra who had come looking for Sahil joined the gathering as well. The sleepy village by the sea was suffused with voices, amateur and professional, along with rudimentary and sophisticated instruments, all coming together to reach a crescendo.
If the gathering at the koliwada proved that Sahil thrived in the hubbub of uproarious street music, the next morning showed Meera a different side to him. Unhappy with the arrangement, he had stripped down the orchestra by half – the producers had been footing the bill for a bunch of musicians who did not end up playing a single note for the soundtrack. This minimalist approach also meant that Meera’s voice would now have to carry the weight of his compositions. Buoyed by her experience of singing in Danpada, Meera finally came out of her shell and gave it her best shot. Years of waiting for the right stage did not hold her back or make her nervous; she was completely focused on the task at hand and felt that it was meant to be. They recorded the title song four times. Four times of hitting every note precisely and getting the right tone, exercising perfection to the point that if one were to play the four recordings back to back, it would have sounded like an LP on a loop.
But Sahil wasn’t impressed. Every time Meera sang the last note, he would look restless. After the fifth try, he threw away his notes and addressed the musicians.
‘Thank you everyone, we are done for the day. Meera, stay back,’ he said quietly.
The producers watching from across the glass went in to inquire about what was happening. Sahil curtly asked them to leave too. If their egos were bruised, it was hard to tell – anyone working with Sahil knew that he was going to have his way. Next, he turned to the technicians handling the controls on their soundboards.
‘Gentlemen, you as well. I’ll take it from here.’
Soon, Meera and Sahil were alone in the studio. She felt nervous and unsure. Was he going to yell at her and tell her that signing her for the film had been a mistake? She disliked the uncertainty, Sahil’s mercurial nature and his tendency to bully everybody into submission, but she couldn’t afford to lose her job. She took a deep breath and waited for him to speak.
‘Have you ever loved, Meera? So hard that it hurts?’
Meera was taken aback by his question and the hard tone of his voice. Where was this coming from, she wondered.
‘If you could point out where I am going wrong, I can work on it,’ she said, hoping Sahil would stick to the subject of her performance.
‘I am not here to give you constructive feedback. I want to know, have you ever waited for someone just to be told to go away? Have you felt your heart sink?’
Meera felt as though Sahil had punched her in the heart – his questions sent her mind back to that cold, dull day in New York, when Abhimanyu had broken the news to her that he couldn’t bring himself to defy his father; that they couldn’t have a future together. But she’d be damned if she let Sahil see that he had affected her.
‘I am not sure what that has to do with anything,’ she said, trying to sound as firm as she could.
‘It has everything to do with this,’ argued Sahil. ‘Imagine loving someone you know is beyond your reach.’ Meera was stunned upon hearing Sahil utter those words – it was awfully similar to her own experience with Abhimanyu. Until she realized he was talking about the movie. The ghost who longed for the man in the orchard – a longing that was doomed from the start. ‘Imagine her,’ he continued, walking across the Himalayas, ‘walking across from a different world, just to catch a glimpse of the man she loved so much. But he would be busy working the fields. And even when he was with her, he didn’t speak about love, or about her journey. Where she came from, how far she had travelled or whom she defied just to be with him? Instead, he was more interested in knowing if she was real or a figment of his imagination.’
‘Shaq ke ghero ko tum bada na kijiye, Apno ko tum paraya na kijiye;
Hum aaye hai dur se, Do ghadi humein bhi sun liya kijiye.’
‘We’ve been over this,’ Meera argued. She pointed out how she had shed her classical leanings and made adjustments in her approach to suit Sahil.
‘Contrary to what you think, Malik saab, I am human, I have lived. And I can feel emotions. Emotions I have tried to infuse into your songs.’
‘That’s the issue. The song is not about human feelings. You’re a ghost. You’re ether!’
They say that Sahil Malik was a mad poet who could breathe life into the dead and make them sing. Meera was but a mortal – one Sahil was determined to break in. And he did. They went on to record the song cold, without any of the background music. It had finally dawned upon her that Sahil wasn’t creating cinema. Together with Meera, he was creating poetry – about emotions, images, dreams and visions. According to critics, the movie was a remarkable transposition of poetry on screen. Its music transported them to hidden worlds where they forgot the about hunger, war and the nagging realities of life. It was music that was ingeniously created with painstaking precision.
One day, Sahil brought in a piece of cardboard, rolled it up and asked Meera to sing through it – the result was a haunting echo. When the echo was too much, he would moisten the cardboard. Soon, he wanted the same atmospheric quality in every
instrument. So, he stripped off parts of the soundproof sponge from the walls of the studio. When that was not enough, he went to the outskirts of Bombay to make 300 recordings of the wind blowing through the trees. Back at the studio, the 300 sounds were heard on six layered tracks to create a unique base for the songs of longing sung in the wilderness of the Himalayan orchards.
For more uplifting songs, he had Meera stay in a five-star hotel in Juhu to give her a marked change in mood. He did away with the orchestral setup and made the musicians play their instruments separately. One didn’t know what the other would play – Sahil did blind overdubs, and the music sounded strangely disjointed yet unimaginably fluid at the same time. Meera’s voice, however, remained the centrepiece of his compositions. Her beautiful vocals held everything together, never overpowering the arrangement or drowning out Sahil’s technical prowess. His mad methods led to even more delays. He had the whole crew booked in the same Juhu hotel as Meera, and so everyone had to follow the same schedule and were at his beck and call. Two adjacent rooms were joined to make a makeshift studio.
One night, he called Meera to the studio to brief her on the next session, and asked her to sing the mukhda of the track. It didn’t take much time for Meera to get it right as she was completely and utterly living in the dream world that Sahil had created. As she sang with her eyes closed, he walked over to her and held her face, just like the farmer had held the mysterious woman’s face, and dissimilar to how the protagonist held his lover when he realized the walnuts had been wiped clean off the ground.
Meera recoiled in shock when she found Sahil breathing down her neck. Before she knew it, his wiry hands proceeded to grab her waist. Malik pulled her close to his body with considerable force, and she could feel him harden against her. Meera couldn’t believe what was happening, but her shock was quickly replaced by anger. No man had ever dared to touch her that way; not even Abhimanyu, whom she had loved with all her heart. She tried to push Sahil away, but he tightened his grip around her.
‘Malik saab … Sahil!’
Hearing her shout his name like that made Sahil stop. Meera freed herself and took a few steps back, shaking. She felt tears prick her eyes, but there was not a chance that she would let him see the pain he had caused her. ‘Meera, what’s the problem?’ Sahil kept saying under his breath as he took a step towards her. Meera quickly took a step back and held her hand out to put some distance between them.
‘Malik saab, the problem is that you have no right to force yourself on me. If you take another step, I will scream this place down.’
‘There’s nobody here to hear you, Meera, but you misunderstand my intentions. I know there’s a connection between us, if you would just let me show you …’
‘This is not a dream, and I am not a ghost, Malik saab. I am telling you once and for all, there is nothing between us, and there never will be. Let me go now, or else …’
‘Or else what, Meera?’ Sahil bridged the gap between them in two quick steps, but failed to see Meera’s right hand come towards him at the same time. The sound of the slap rang through the empty studio. Meera pushed him aside with all her might and ran out of the room. She didn’t turn around to see if Sahil was behind her; she just wanted to get to her room as fast as her feet would take her.
Once she was safely inside, she let the tears flow freely. Anger had replaced her shock, and now a feeling of shame was threatening to overcome her. A thousand thoughts raced through her mind. Had she unwittingly led Sahil on, Meera wondered. No, no, she couldn’t have. Ever since she returned from New York, she’d devoted herself to her work. Sahil had intimidated her, and she had never seen him in a romantic light. There was no room in her heart for anybody else but … Meera shook her head. She hated Sahil for how he had made her feel – weak and helpless – and how it reminded her of her family’s devadasi lineage. She had vowed to never put herself in a compromising position, but there she was. That was the first time Sahil had made advances at her, but she knew it wouldn’t be the last. She spent the night agonizing over what to do next.
The next morning, Sahil went about his job as if nothing had happened. The musicians were back for the session, taking orders from him. Once again, the troupe waited for the singer to arrive. And they waited. Sahil’s eyes were locked on the entrance. Finally, Meera arrived, and he flashed a victorious smile at her. Ignoring him, she strode towards the microphone and proceeded to hit every note with precision.
Chapter 21
A year’s worth of newspapers take up a surprisingly small amount of space in a room. If stacked neatly enough, by date, spread across a 6x6 feet square space in a corner, the pile is just about waist-high. Then there’s the question of preservation. Enough camphor should do the trick. Having the stack close to a window to ensure a healthy dose of daily sunlight helps. That’s where Abhimanyu had stacked the newspapers. Papers he never dared to read. Every night was a mammoth struggle to keep himself from leafing through the pages when there was nothing else to do once insomnia set in. So, he resorted to drinking – heavily. He would raid the royal cellar and pick up the most exotic wine, whiskey, rum, anything he could lay his hands on, and bring them up to his quarters. Many a heartbroken men or women will tell you that solace is found at the bottom of a bottle, and Abhimanyu raced to reach it, all the while staring at his neat stack of papers. Most nights, two bottles of whatever he was drinking would suffice; oblivion was attainable. But still, there were some long nights when sleep would elude him till the first rays of sunlight started to spread over the tower of newspapers. The alcohol wasn’t working. He would feel the urge to get up and go for a walk. Perhaps a hike down the hill to the pond, or an early morning jog around Ranakpour city, anywhere really, as long as he stayed away from the papers.
He would get up and try his best to balance his body, once so agile and sinewy but battered and broken now. He was only in his thirties, but the alcohol abused had aged him – his bones were weak and his legs always felt wobbly. Left foot first, then right, then left again, the simple act of walking had turned into an ordeal; he felt his brain had become a little slow in sending signals to his feet. Then he realized he couldn’t really see his feet. The alcohol had taken a chokehold of his body, his abilities to such an extent that walking, reading, sleeping, the simplest of tasks were daunting. To hell with the walk, he would decide, and crash on the pile of papers instead. The tower rose steadily, as Penaru dutifully placed each day’s newspaper on the stack, lightly dusting it, and never asking why they went unread.
On one such day, Abhimanyu found himself on the floor of his bedroom, slumped against the wall, his chin wet with drool. Morning had broken some hours ago and he couldn’t recall how he’d left his bed and landed there. His body carried the memory of sleep but he wasn’t sure how long it had been. Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s morning in Ranakpour, somewhere in the world, it is the right time for a drink, he thought, half-amused that he still had it in him to think of something funny. A drink will make me feel better, he said aloud, lifting himself from the bedroom floor. Stumbling slightly from his hangover, his feet hit a bottle that lay on the floor. It was empty and three more bottles lay next to it. Abhimanyu groaned, and started looking for other bottles in the room. But none were to be found – he’d drunk every last drop of every bottle. Frustrated, he picked one of them and threw it across the wall. It didn’t break, there wasn’t enough force in his swing. The arm that once terrorized batsmen now couldn’t break a fifty-year-old glass bottle.
He contemplated going to cellar and pick up a new round but decided that the trek down was too arduous. He thought of calling for a sentry but that too was too much an effort. Walking around in circles inside his room, Abhimanyu looked at the papers again. Sighing, he ambled over and picked up the day’s edition.
INDIAN AIRLINES LAUNCHED, the headline on Ranakpour Times read, the article going on to list eight pre-Independence airlines that had been merged to create the national carrier – Deccan Airways,
Himalayan Aviation, Kalinga Airlines, Bharat Airways, Airways India and Air Services of India – Abhimanyu stopped reading. Reading had become a chore as well, due to the central scotomas he had developed in his right eye. A bright white blotch right in the center of his vision tarnished everything he saw. He fought a round blank of nothingness by corking his head on either side, and what he could see in the periphery of his right eye was tinged with a sepia tone. After blinking continuously, the white circle would contract for a fraction of second and grow again from the center, seemingly bigger than before. Abhimanyu blinked back tears and flipped through pages till he reached the sports section.
The domestic cricket scene looked promising. The league he had helped start had grown into a veritable circuit of fourteen states competing for the domestic trophy. Top performers from the league were a shoo-in for the international team. The amount of press the league itself received was astonishing; notable match-winning innings were finding their way to the front pages. One such innings, a century, that had drawn plaudits belonged to a familiar name – Ranjit Singh. The opening batsman was interviewed after winning the league; he’d had a stupendous season despite the added pressure of captaincy. Abhimanyu felt genuinely happy when he learned that Ranjit Singh of Songadh had been selected for the national side of the upcoming season; what was even more heartening to read was the presence of non-royals in the league. A railway employee, a former farmer; young men from the smallest villages of India to its biggest cities. Cricket had found its way on the streets of India and unearthed talent in the most unsuspecting of places. However, that pleasant feeling of seeing his plans play out soon faded. Abhimanyu couldn’t help but imagine what his own career would have turned out to be if not for the injury. A sinking feeling of what could have been began to overcome him once again.
The Prince and the Nightingale Page 14
