I held out my hand, and Tej took out the gold wedding band. The jeweller in Abdullapur had made it to order weeks ago. As Tej put it on my finger, I made a vow to myself never to forget the expression in his eyes: it said, “Whatever happens, we are like no two other people. There are no two other people quite like us. Not now, or ever.”
7
Two days later we rolled and pitched along on a Himalaya Roadways bus that had a floppy gear shift and a driver with remarkable nerves. Local mountain villagers and city people from the plains, who had come on a pilgrimage, shared the space in an uneasy coexistence. The bus crawled like a confused centipede over the last mile of the hazardous road from Ghuntor, an outpost twenty miles behind us, and we came to an abrupt halt amidst billows of powdery red dust and the bleatings of a pair of baby goats belonging to one of the passengers up front.
Tej and I were on our honeymoon. AB and CD, legally joined and on our own at last. This was supposed to be Ranikaran, a retreat in the Himalayas famous for its hot springs and the Babaji, a holy man, who lived there. But there was no habitation in sight. The trip from Ambala had taken two days, first by train to Pathankot, and then by bus, in a circuitous route through the mountains. On the way, Tej wanted to show me Bhakra, where one of Asia’s biggest dams was going up.
“How would you like to live here?” he asked as we stood watching midget bulldozers, earthmovers, and tractors scurrying around hundreds of feet below.
He looked at me, perhaps expectantly, perhaps anxiously, a smile waiting to take hold, but not quite making it. I knew the question had not occurred to him, just at that moment, although he wanted to make it seem that way.
“Why not?” I said, taking a lungful of air. The landscape was hilly and rocky, with low, thorny shrubs shrouded in dust in spite of the rainy season. Here and there a pine tree struggled for life, its lower limbs having been amputated by villagers looking for firewood or building material. We stood holding hands and looking over the busy abyss. I tried out an image of Tej. He’s leading a team of electrical engineers by day; coming home to me at night to offer sitar serenades, hugs, and kisses. We’re pioneers. In the Wild East. Best of all, we’re by ourselves. What shall I have done all day? Stitched curtains? Swept and dusted? Played house?
“Why not?” I said again, honest and cautious at the same time. “Why do you ask?”
“Maybe I’ll try for a job here,” he said, still with the waiting look in his eyes. “They’re inviting applications. It’s what you’d like isn’t it? For me to get a job? I know how you feel.”
People were always knowing how I felt—Mama, Carol. Now Tej. “How do I feel?” I asked.
“You’d like it if I got a job so we could move away from Majra, from the family,” he said, letting go of my hand.
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t need to. It’s plain enough. But let me tell you one thing,” he said, keeping his tone light. “We couldn’t afford a servant, and you wouldn’t last a day keeping house on your own. You don’t even know how to light a stove.”
“If I had to, I could learn. Nobody ever lets me do anything in the kitchen. They treat me like a cretin.”
“They’re trying to spare you some drudgery, and you take it as an insult. Wah, Memsahibji!”
He knew and I knew that “they” meant Dilraj Kaur. Hers was the magic name to light a verbal fire between us, so we both backed off.
“You’ve got it partly right, and partly wrong, meri jaan,” I said. “I’d like you to get a job so you could make use of your degree. You didn’t need to spend two years in graduate school to run the farm for Pitaji.” This was a sentence I’d rehearsed enough times. It gave me a little thrill to have spoken it at last. But it came out sounding different from what I had imagined. I looked up at him to see how it had settled.
He didn’t say anything.
“And if you’re going to throw up those two years and all that slogging, why not sacrifice them to something you love?” I went on. “You hate farming and I know it.”
“How would you like being the wife of a musician, then?” he asked, seeing the direction I was going in.
Up to then, this had been the great unspoken topic between us. It had often enough flitted from him to me and back again, unverbalized and fluttery as the wings of a hummingbird. It had never allowed itself to be grabbed. Now here we were with nets, trying to get hold of the iridescent wings.
“I am a musician’s wife,” I said in answer to his question.
“You know what I mean.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“I don’t need to tell you there’s no money in it, to speak of,” he said. “And the traveling and all …”
“I know.”
“Musicians lead terrible lives,” he went on. “At the mercy of patrons, if they’re good; trying to find one, if they’re not.”
“I know that too.” I waited for him to continue.
“And then, you’ve got to perform whether you feel like it or not, when and where they decide. Shorten the performance to fit in a program while people in the audience sit and pick their teeth and scratch their arses.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Besides, you’re dealing with other musicians all the time. They don’t want to hear you, you know. If you’re good, they’re jealous. If you’re mediocre, they’re bored. They’re the worst bunch of backbiters in the world.”
“What are you telling me?” I asked.
“I’m saying … I can’t imagine doing anything else!” he exclaimed. “But I have to start—imagining something more practical.” His voice rose and fell like a musical phrase reaching some final resolution. “You know how the family feels about music,” he added flatly.
No one had ever said it, not in my hearing at any rate, but I could guess the views that that family of non-music lovers would have. Once in Berkeley, Tej had told me how his parents had encouraged him when he was a child with an overload of talent and how they had been proud to see him perform for friends at every opportunity. But when he reached college age, the sitar was something he was supposed to pack away, along with the model airplanes, electric trains, and air guns. It was as if real life had no place for operators of mechanical toys, players of sitars.
Although the idea of moving out of the tight world of Majra was not new to me, I’d been waiting for Tej to bring it up. That would give it a better chance. Now the prospect of him and me living our own lives, on whatever terms, and whatever that meant, presented itself as a delightful possibility that I was free to explore the rest of the journey to Ranikaran.
It had been Tej’s idea in the first place, this trip to Ranikaran. It had something to do with the death of his guru, Pandit Shankar Dayal. A promise he had made the dying musician; a vow taken. In any case, it was odd to have chosen an ashram to spend a honeymoon in, a place where flesh has to give way to the spirit, and abstinence from all kinds of earthly delights is the rule. But we were here to get the Babaji’s blessing before returning to Majra to begin our married life. And in truth, Ranikaran turned out to be no Shangri-La. There was no Ronald Colman in a mandarin suit meditating amidst trees that sprouted paper cherry blossoms prolific as popcorn in a theatre lobby. No Great High Lama.
In the first place, we arrived just before nightfall, dripping wet. We’d walked the last two miles from the bus stop in a rainstorm. The three Indian families on pilgrimage had all got down and vanished, invisible as forest deities, into the mountain scenery as soon as the bus came to a full stop. Unburdened by sitars, excess baggage and a certain naïveté, they had made it to the ashram ahead of the storm and were already settled in, while we floundered around, looking for the path, finally finding the way, and getting drenched in the process. An old Sikh priest in a pink turban met us at the ashram entrance, which was festive with fluttery, wet, multicolored flags festooned above the gateway. He led us downstairs to the river level onto a crowded veranda where everybody was drinking tea. It was be
ing served by a burly fellow. Marvelous smile. Build of a truck driver. Massive shoulders. Sinewy arms. He was tending a big brass kettle of boiling water set in a shallow pool of the hot springs lined with flat stones that had been artfully constructed to provide a perpetual stove.
We must have looked like watery ghosts when we arrived on the scene. The elderly couple from Madras, the Delhi businessman, his plump wife, and their two young boys, and the husband and wife from Bombay with their teenage daughter, all stopped what they were doing to take us in with a single shared look of surprise, amusement, and unconcealed curiosity.
At the same time, there were so many details to deal with, my eyes ached. Then, a word from Tej that made everybody laugh was enough to turn everything on again, to wind everybody up. The men came forward with introductions all round and all sorts of questions. How had we managed to make it through that storm? How had we got delayed in the first place? The women and children, lost in the unfamiliar sounds of my American English, crowded around looking puzzled and entranced. The hefty Sikh serving tea offered us big brass tumblers of the sweet, spicy decoction, fragrant with almond, poppyseed, and cardamom.
Tej held the ready-made audience transfixed with his embellished version of our trek through the rain. How it had taken us more than an hour and a half to cover the two miles. How we kept slipping on the wet stones on the narrow trail, nonexistent in places, and the Kumbh River swollen and angry below us. In the rain and the gathering darkness it had been one-step-at-a-time all the way. I found myself hanging onto his every word as though I were, like the rest, waiting to find out what was going to happen next.
“And of course the worst of it was, we didn’t know where we were going,” he said. He lapsed into Hindi with these last words and stopped long enough to take a swallow of tea. The old man in the pink turban made another appearance, this time to show us to the last remaining room. I wondered where the Babaji was.
The ashram itself was a rabbit warren of a place, hugging the steep banks of the river at a point where some hot springs boiled over. Except for the cement stairways, the building was a split-level improvisation made of packing box material not very expertly fastened together with nails and screws, strips of metal, and even twine. Cubicles were placed in no kind of order or symmetry. They’d just been added at various times with pragmatic abandon. Windows were larger-than-usual open spaces between the boards, and interior “doors” were ragged curtains under which people’s comings and goings could be observed.
The others who had come up on the bus with us, and whose names were now familiar to us—the Subramaniams, the Aggarwals, and the Malgaonkars—had added their own dash of chaos in the process of settling in. The place was all suitcases and boxes, brass water jugs, dripping saris, soggy socks, women with loosened hair flicked out to dry, puddles on the cement steps, towels, and bare feet. And everyone was talking at the same time. Tej said it was Tamil, some Delhi Hindi, some Marathi. The sounds ricocheted off the walls in a mad cacophony of liquid vowels and gutturals that refused to blend.
All the while, the hot springs steam-heated the building as they burbled beneath the rocks that the ashram was constructed upon. It was said that the Babaji’s own room was originally a cave, and that he spent the whole winter in that warm womb of a place, cosy and comfortable even after the snows began to fall in late October. Was he there now, I wondered.
Three hours later, after a change of clothes and settling in, Tej and I were beginning to come to ourselves once again. He sat tuning his sitar, and I decided to paint my toenails by the light of the kerosene lantern in our room in celebration of the occasion, the act a physical one, yet chaste enough. Warm waves of air blew in from the water at regular intervals through gaps in the wall, and from time to time a curious face—of a village child who had helped serve us dinner, or the two Aggarwal boys, or the teenage girl with the Malgaonkars—would dart from behind the curtain that served as a door. Pairs of bare feet could be seen beneath it, hurrying back and forth.
“I never saw so many things, so many people,” I declared, examining the first coat of nail polish for smudges.
“Umm,” Tej mumbled, looking up abstractedly from the instrument.
“So many things, so many people, in such a small space. Little rooms every which way, passageways, stairways, railings, bridges, cubicles, belongings—everywhere! It’s like an overcrowded, miniature golf course.”
“That’s no way to look at it,” he said. “What are you so worked up about? I hope you weren’t expecting a fancy hotel up here, or something.”
“I’m not worked up. It’s just that all these impressions are making themselves felt. Those women and children down there couldn’t take their eyes off me all day on the bus, nor could the men, for that matter. I feel like a complete sideshow all by myself, when all I’d like to do is sit down and be one with them. Don’t you see?”
“Look, you imagine a lot of stuff and want to take me along with it. If you’re crazy, I don’t have to be too,” Tej said. “It’s not part of the deal.”
Having made that pronouncement, he went back to the tuning of the sitar, fiddling with the frets, bending his ear to the strings, tightening one, loosening another, frowning, tense, in pain. All the while he kept his eyes on me and nodded from time to time, but with his ear to the strings, as preoccupied as it was possible to be.
“Instead, I feel hemmed in,” I went on, “as if everybody’s pushing and shoving, only we’re not going anywhere. There’s probably nowhere to go from here, except into the river.”
“Why don’t you have a look around before you rush to all these judgments,” he said in a loud voice, resting the sitar across his lap. He was sitting cross-legged on his spread-out bedroll on the slanting, wooden floor. “You’ll be able to see things more clearly tomorrow morning.”
Even as he spoke, one of the Delhi businessman’s little boys brushed aside the curtain long enough in passing to cast a bright, awestruck glance into the room.
“See what I mean?” I said, getting up. I felt like striking out for somewhere, but I didn’t know where. My voice must have come out louder than I knew, because an anxious voice from behind the curtain said, “Is everything all right?” It was Mr. Malgaonkar. His eyes, big with curiosity and alarm, were visible for a flash through a tear in the curtain.
“Fine, thank you,” Tej replied in a voice as normal as he could make it.
“Just wondered,” Mr. Malgaonkar said, and made his way back to his room. We could see him urging his reluctant wife and daughter from the scene.
“Well that’s settled, anyway,” I said.
“What’s settled? Nothing is ever settled,” Tej declared gloomily. “Nor is there any reason it should be.”
He picked up the sitar again and made a final effort to hone its tune to a fine point. Then he began the alap, the slow first movement of his favorite raga, “Megh Malhar,” one to be played in the monsoon season. It was a wistful utterance, tinged with regret, and it was as if in the plucking of the strings of the instrument Tej were communicating with a spirit that could understand him as no human being could. I felt left out. I sat down again to listen in spite of myself.
Several improvisations on the raga in the alap followed one another in great, soft sighs. This is our wedding night, I said to myself. It was something I had lost sight of, what with the long bus ride and all the traveling before that. It seemed as if I’d been on the road for months, with only a brief, intense stopover in Majra. Perhaps it was the struggle through the rain, the anticlimax of actually being here. Of all the times I had imagined my wedding night—great filmy abstractions—nothing like this had ever surfaced. Meanwhile, Tej’s fingers hovered over the same four notes of the raga, worrying them into a shimmer of sound.
Outside our room was the small bustle of people gathering around—footsteps on the cement stairs, creaking on the wooden floors. I got up and looked out. The Aggarwals and the Malgaonkars and their children were sitting crowded toget
her in the narrow hall. The elderly Subramaniams were standing at the door of their cubicle at the upper landing of the stairs. Enchanted. Tej moved into the second phase of the raga, increasing the tempo, composing now, melody after melody. And finally came the climax, a cascade of sound and rhythm at unbelievable speeds. An occasional “Wah-wah” was heard outside, registering approval, delight, surprise, as Tej, like a magician pulling several rabbits out of a hat, drew out unexpected variations from the instrument.
All rancor between us subsided with the final notes of the raga. Deep night had fallen. No stars, no moon. An overcast sky. There was a shuffle of feet outside in the passageway as the audience got up to leave. In the next cubicle the Delhi businessman and his family were settling down for the night.
“This isn’t what I expected, Meena,” we heard Mr. Aggarwal say.
“It’s not a proper ashram,” his wife declared. “Not like any we’ve visited before, I don’t think.”
“I wonder where the Babaji lives?” one of their boys said.
“He doesn’t seem to be anywhere around,” Mrs. Aggarwal said.
“It’s a funny place,” the other boy remarked sleepily.
Tej and I sat cross-legged on his bedroll facing each other, sharing a grin.
“It’s like no ashram I’ve ever seen,” the wife went on. “No priests, no Babaji, no reading from the scriptures. No discourses. This is supposed to be the abode of the gods, Shiva and Parvati. Dancing.”
“The cosmic dance,” her husband chanted in agreement.
“But it’s only the other visitors wandering about. As if on a holiday. Those Bombaywallas, and the South Indians.”
“The Sardarji with his memsahib. And then a sitar recital. Pukka rag—classical music—in the middle of the night,” Mr. Aggarwal said.
“I didn’t see anybody praying,” Mrs. Aggarwal said.
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