by Ellis Peters
‘Temporary headquarters. Down south, near Mehrauli, we’ve got a couple of villas for living quarters, but we shall only be there a few days, then we’re headed for Benares to do the Deer Park scenes at Sarnath, right where they happened. But this is where we keep our gear and do the office work.’
‘What is the film you’re making?’ Tossa asked curiously.
‘Didn’t Dorrie tell you? It’s an epic about the life of the Buddha. Time was when it would have been called: World, Farewell! or some such title. Nowadays we do these things straight, and simply call it The Buddha. After all, if you can have a film called The Bible you can have one called The Buddha, can’t you? That’s what the producer wants. But Ganesh Rao says the accent is on the man, and it ought really to be called Siddhartha. So my guess is, that’s what it’ll be called in the end.’
‘I’ve heard of the Buddha,’ Anjli said delicately, not committing herself to total ignorance, ‘but I don’t really know the story. Could you tell it to me?’
‘Ashok is the man you want, he’ll tell you everything you need to know. Give him a blast, Tom, he can’t have heard us come.’
Tom obliged. The fan-lighted door of the house opened promptly, and a small, slender man in close-fitting trousers and a grey achkan came dancing down the steps with a music-case tucked under his arm. His eyes were black and long-lashed, his smile aloof and courteous, and his colour palest bronze. Surprisingly the rest of his features, full, mobile lips, hooked nose and jutting cheek-bones, were so jagged that he looked like a head by Epstein, and a good one, at that.
He said: ‘Welcome to Delhi!’ in a soft, shy voice, and clambered nimbly into the minibus, where he dumped his music-case between his feet and clasped fine, broad-jointed hands across his stomach. The first two fingers of his left hand were scored at the tips with deep, stained grooves, many-times-healed and many-times-re-opened wounds, smeared with cream that glistened when the light caught it.
‘Meet Ashok Kabir,’ said Felder, ‘our musical director. You ask him nicely, Anjli, and he’ll play you some of his music for Siddhartha presently, when we get him warmed up. Ashok, the little lady wants you to tell her all about this film of ours.’
Anjli Kumar and Ashok Kabir looked at each other suddenly, attentively, at a range of about one foot, and in their own personal ways fell in love at first sight. Dominic, watching with sharpened senses, thought, good lord, I never dreamed it would be that easy. I needn’t have worried, I was just standing in for whoever it was going to be. Anjli saw the native, the initiate, the authority, whose grace was such that he was willing to share what he knew with whoever went to meet him in the right spirit. Ashok, the artist, and himself complete, saw the homing exile unaware of her wishes or her needs, a fragmented child unable to recognise her fractures, much less repair them. They looked at each other with wonder, interest and respect, and had nothing yet to say.
‘Now down Janpath, fast as you like,’ said Felder contentedly, ‘but take it easy where it crosses Rajpath – did I tell you that’s the King’s Way, you folks? Janpath is the Queen’s Way! – so they can get a look right along to the government buildings. You think you’ve seen something when you’ve seen the Mall, in London? Wait till you get a load of this! And then go round the back of the Lodi Park to Keen’s, and we’ll drop the bags off and sign in…’
Keen’s was an old-fashioned but English-run hotel, in an ancient white Indian house that turned a blank face to the street on all sides, and lived a full life about its internal courtyard and gardens, with a balcony for every room – every suite, if the truth be told – on its first and second floors, where the guests were housed. There was but one way in, masked by a tall green hedge; and inside, there was peace and almost silence, all street noises excluded. Room-boys dressed as rajas made off with the baggage, but they turned out to be one of the trimmings of every hotel, even the most modest, and were amiable enough at very low cost. The new arrivals lingered only long enough to stop feeling stunned, and to extract from their bags the coats which Felder insisted they would need in an hour or so. Then they were borne away to the two villas near Hauz Khas, on the most southerly fringe of the city, where a couple of trucks and a large saloon car had just unloaded the exhausted company from Mehrauli.
The din of voices was deafening but reassuring; who could feel inhibited or a stranger where the general babel made it possible to talk nonsense and not be brought to answer for it? And the array of faces, several of them still in make-up, baffled memory and withdrew names, making it necessary, after a while, to enquire discreetly about the dominant members of the collective; but that was taken for granted, and everyone answered cheerfully for himself. In a large, charming, rather bare room, with tall windows looking out on a neglected garden, they circulated and ate and drank, and in an unexpected fashion were at home. The girls – there seemed to be several girls – kept disappearing, and coming back with something freshly cooked. Everything was improvised, but everything worked. It might not be Indian – how could they judge? – but it was calming and reassuring and just what they needed.
Ashok Kabir sat cross-legged on a cushion, and cradled his sitar in his arms, its long, beautiful, polished body reclined upon his shoulder, the twenty moveable frets gleaming and quivering like nerves along its slender teak neck, the larger sounding gourd at the base of the throat nuzzling his heart. Six main strings, so they said, and nineteen sympathetic ones! And those strings were the reason why the fingers with which he controlled them were gashed deep, and never could be healed. And we think western music is a hard apprenticeship!
‘… so Prince Siddhartha was born to the King Suddhodana and his Queen Maya,’ said Ashok in his soft voice, ‘and all the auguries were auspicious, though a little puzzling. The wise men told the king that his son would certainly be a very great leader, there was only some doubt as to what kind. They said that if ever the prince was allowed to set eyes on an old man, a sick man, a dead man and a holy monk, then he would be the lord of a very great kingdom, but not of this world. And as the king preferred that his son should go on ruling after him in the normal and profitable way of this world, he took good care to bring up Siddhartha in a kind of benevolent imprisonment, surrounded by every kind of pleasant diversion, and excluded from him all sickness and ugliness and pain. And when he grew up they married him successfully to the most beautiful of all the noblewomen of the land…’
‘Thank you, darling!’ said Kamala sweetly, and bowed her acknowledgements with hands prayerfully pressed together and head inclined. She wore a white silk sari embroidered with green and silver thread, and looked rather like the Indian Miss World, only more so. She was, according to Felder, as clever as she was beautiful, and nearly as acquisitive, and it had cost plenty to get her to play the heroine.
‘… the sweet Yashodhara… with whom in any case he was already in love, and she with him…’
‘Naturally!’ murmured Kamala, with a glance at the statuesque figure and consciously splendid countenance of her lord Siddhartha, holding court on the other side of the room with a fresh lime soda in one hand. ‘Who could help it?’
They had seen that face on one of the outsize posters in Janpath or Irwin Road, early that evening. There was no mistaking it. Felder had translated the lettering of the name for them; Barindra Mitra, one of the popular demi-gods, for top-flight film stars in India are little less than deities. Barindra Mitra sat cross-legged on his couch as on a throne, all the more devastating in majesty because he was still in costume, swathed in short gold tunic and white silk robe, with one bronze shoulder naked, and on his head a tower-like crown studded with property jewels.
‘But the prince grew restive with being cooped up, and soon outgrew all his pleasure-gardens and palaces, and would go out into the city of Kapilavastu. And when he couldn’t dissuade him, the king sent out orders through the city that everyone who was sick or ugly or maimed or old should be kept out of the way for the occasion. All the same, when the prince drove through
the town with his faithful charioteer Channa, he was suddenly confronted by something he had never seen before in his life, and had never realised existed… an aged, senile decrepit, miserable relic of a man at the end of his span. Old Age in person!’
‘At your service!’ said the jaunty young man who was just handing round a tray of savoury patties. His arms and legs still bore the traces of the old man’s artful make-up, and he was still draped in picturesque rags, but he had shed the wig and beard, huddled shaggily at this moment in a corner of the long couch like a sleeping Yorkshire terrier, and his face, but for two painted patches of grained greyness on the cheeks, was in its smooth, high-coloured prime.
‘Naturally he asked whatever this creature could be, and if it was really a man at all, and whether it had been born so, or this was a visitation from the gods. And Channa had to tell him at last that what he saw was the common lot of all men at the end, that this poor wreck had once been as young and ardent as the prince himself, and that some day the prince himself would be as was this old man. And Siddhartha drove back to the palace terribly shaken. And that’s the scene they’ve been shooting in Mehrauli this afternoon.’
‘Mehrauli being only a village, properly speaking,’ said the director Ganesh Rao, in his immaculate and unaccented English, ‘but perhaps nearer to Kapilavastu than anything one could fake up in the city. And if you want an excitable but manageable crowd laid on in moments, it’s just the place.’
So that was why three of them were still so fresh from the cameras that they had not got rid of make-up and costumes yet. Old Age, Channa the charioteer, and Prince Siddhartha: Govind Das and Subhash Ghose, two professional Bengali character actors, and Barindra Mitra, the star. Anjli sat cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, squarely facing Ashok, and copying his pose to the last finger-curve of the relaxed hand that lay in his lap, the hand with the plectrum strapped to the index finger. She took her dark, disconcerting gaze from his face long enough to look round them all, and enjoy the attention she was getting as Dorette Lester’s little girl. Felder had been right, the film world is one the world over.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Ganesh Rao, digging thick, strong fingers into his thatch of black hair, ‘we’re going to finish the other two scenes there, the encounters with disease and death.’
‘So he did go again,’ Anjli said, and her grave eyes came back to Ashok’s face.
‘Twice, and he saw what really happens to men. And in the meantime Yashodhara had a son, but it was too late to deflect her husband, however much he loved them both. He saw that age and sickness and death were waiting for them, as well as for him, and that nobody had ever found a way of triumphing over these evils. So he named the child Rahula… that means a fetter, because the child bound him like a chain. And the prince rode out one more time, and he met an ascetic monk, who had forsaken the world for solitude, in search of the ultimate peace that no one knows. And after this Siddhartha brooded on the need to find this transcendent peace, this freedom from the wheel of recurring sufferings, not only for himself, not first for himself, but for his dearest, and after them for all men. And one night after the pleasures and entertainments of the palace were over, and all the court lay asleep, he got up in the small hours and looked at his sleeping wife and son, and went out from them silently in search of the way. The king had every gate guarded, being afraid of this, but all the guards slept, and all the gates opened of themselves to let Siddartha go free.’
‘Play some of the music,’ suggested Kamala, leaning over him from behind in a drift of pale silk and perfume. ‘Play my song, and then the theme of the departing, let Anjli hear how you can make a folk melody and a classical meditation out of the same notes. Do you know what is a raga, Anjli? They are the basic material for all our classical music, and there are thousands of them, the ragas, each for a special time and season, and a special mood, so that in a few rising and descending notes you have the mind’s first statement, the one thought out of which a work of art grows. Tell them, Ashok!’
Ashok explained with his fingers. The teak neck of the sitar leaned confidingly into his shoulder, his scarred fingers pressed the main strings, and with the plectrum he picked out a brief, rising phrase, and brought it sighing down again to dissolve where it had begun. A handful of notes tossed into the air and caught again. He repeated it slowly, to let them follow the sound, and then took it up in tentative chords and began to embroider. Not yet the form in which they had occasionally heard classical ragas, but turning the notes into a simple, folk melody, something even the western ear could accept readily and even memorise. Kamala took up the thread and began to sing wordlessly, in a sweet, forward, wailing voice, the gentle caterwauling of a deserted kitten.
‘But that’s something even we would find approachable,’ said Tossa, astonished. ‘I expected it to be much more difficult.’
‘It’s meant to be approachable, it must reach everybody in this form. If I do not hear it sung in the streets, once the film is shown, I shall be disappointed. And for that it must be grasped on the wing, it will be heard only once. It is the lullaby Yashodhara sings to Rahula after she discovers that her lord is gone. And this is how it will be heard at his going.’
This time the theme budded slowly, and began to uncurl in a meditative development. The plangent string tone of the sitar, no longer unfamiliar even in the West, swelled until from a curiously intimate and secret solo instrument it had become a full orchestra. Its sweetness and strangeness had a hypnotic effect, to which the nerves responded, and even though the expected acceleration did not come, or only in a strictly modified form, the usual mounting tension and excitement was present no less, drawing mind and senses taut in almost painful concentration. Some music lulls; this disturbed. And so it should, for it expressed the renunciation of the world and the assumption of the world’s burden in one symbolic act. They could almost see the solitary figure steal silently through the apartments of the palace, leaving the sleepers sleeping, and the gates one by one opening before him, until he bestowed his ornaments upon Channa, exchanged his rich garments for the plain yellow robe of a huntsman in the forest, cut off the princely knot of his hair, sent back in sorrow his charioteer and his white horse Kantaka, and walked forward alone into the darkness to do battle with life and death. And at the moment when he vanished the music died away in a shuddering sigh and broke off, unfinished.
Everyone stirred and drew breath, otherwise the silence lasted for a moment; then Anjli asked:
‘Do the ragas all have names?’
‘Yes, they have names. This is Raga Aheer Bhairab. It is a morning raga.’
‘And it has a special purpose? A special mood, Kamala said?’
‘It is to be played,’ said Ashok, stroking his still faintly vibrating strings, ‘in the early hours of the morning, when the guests are departing.’
Felder drove them back to Keen’s Hotel about nine o’clock in the evening, a little dazed, a little silent. Anjli was clutching the copy of The Life of the Buddha which Ashok had lent her. And again Felder had been quite right, they needed their coats; the air was sharp and very cold, the sky above crackling with stars.
‘Where is this place you’ve got to go? Rabindar Nagar? That’s one of the newish suburbs that are spreading out westwards, isn’t it? Will you find your way all right?’
‘I’ve got a town plan,’ said Dominic. ‘We’ll find it.’
‘I’d come with you, but we want to finish the Mehrauli shots tomorrow, and if we make it we’re off by air to Benares the next morning to do the Deer Park scenes. I don’t suppose you’ll have any trouble. But just in case you do need any help, give me a ring in the evening. You’ve got the villa number and the office, I’ll be one end or the other. Give me a ring anyhow. I’ll be glad to know how you get on.’
‘We’ll do that. And thanks for everything.’
III
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Rabindar Nagar was close to the western fringe of the town, completely cut off from any
view of New Delhi itself by the long, undulating brown hump of the Ridge. It was a suburb as yet only half-built, every house in it an individual undertaking and of individual and often surprising taste. This was not where the very rich would build, or the very fashionable; but there was plenty of money here, too, putting up those fanciful white villas and running those substantial cars. Here came the wealthy retired tradesman, the Sikh taxi proprietor who had plenty of transport at his disposal, and didn’t mind the long run from town, the small factory owner who couldn’t rise to a property in the tree-shaded, fashionable enclaves of the city itself, and the young artist of independent means who preferred detachment, possibly from the distractions of traffic and noise, probably from too autocratic parents. Whimsy could have its fling on a small and fairly economical scale here, and on a limited site. The houses sat cheek by jowl along the neat roadways, and between their rear compounds ran narrow lanes by which the hawkers and salesman reached the kitchen doors. The rusty iron baskets that shielded new trees bristled everywhere along the roadsides. The sounds, in the early morning, were a curious mixture of domestic and wild, of cars starting up, of the wavering trade calls of the ironing man and the fresh vegetable man along the rear courtyards, bidding for custom, and distant and eerie from the west the wail of jackals prowling the harsh brown land. The ironing man’s little cart, with its small charcoal brazier at one end, halted under back windows, women came bustling out with armfuls of laundry to be ironed, and the hot smell of the smoothed cotton and linen was as savoury on the air as bread. Schoolgirls came demurely out of front compound gates in their uniform shalwar and kameez, close-waisted tunic and wide trousers neatly fitted at the ankles, gauze scarf draped over the shoulders with ends floating behind. The bane of all tomboys, those scarves, the first thing to get discarded when they ran out to play hockey on the open patch of ground after school.
