by Anita Desai
‘It’s Moyna’s wedding day,’ Bim told Jaya and Sarla as they met her in the porch, and at once they clasped her to their plain cotton bosoms, crying excitedly ‘Mubarak! Mubarak! And it’s Mulk’s guru’s birthday, too, you know,’ and then rushing away because it wasn’t the wedding that excited them—they tended now to brush aside weddings as so much fluff, rather unsightly and not at all necessary—it was really the unaccustomed noise and bustle in the old house, the return to old times and the hectic effect of music that made them fly and flap about, screaming at the servants to bring out more trays, more cushions and rugs, and greeting the guests who were pouring in at this late hour, all having dined fully and at leisure and now come out of the steamy city to the cool dark lawn in Old Delhi to listen to a little music under the dusty stars.
Bim and Baba lowered themselves onto a cotton rug spread over the prickly dry grass, close to the edge of the lawn where cannas, hibiscus and oleanders grappled together in a green combat for life. ‘Can you see, Baba?’ Bim murmured, tucking her feet under her sari, and he inclined his head a little and blinked worriedly. They could just make out, between the shoulders and over the heads in front of them, the wooden divan that had been carried out and placed in front of the dry fountain, spread with a white cloth, a Persian carpet and some coloured bolsters, and on which the musicians were already seated, having first been fed by the sisters, and were tuning their instruments with the absorption of grasshoppers or bees. The sounds, too, were insect-like and buzzed and chirruped and zoomed in the spotty dark of the lamplit garden, and the atmosphere was as busy and complicated as sitar strings.
The tanpura player had the rapt, wall-eyed stare of a madman or a fanatic. Tall and thin as a charred pole, his face was completely disfigured by pockmarks, huge black pits that seemed to carve up the whole of his face into grossly uneven surfaces, and one eye was quite blinded by smallpox. He did not need his eyes, however, and strummed the tanpura strings as if in a mesmerised state, his eyes gazing sightlessly into the dark. The tabla player, on the other hand, was as round and fat as a marrow, a little plump man who bounced on his buttocks with excitement, rolled his eyes at the audience as if to say ‘Just wait! See what’s coming—hold on!’ and then threw back his head and chortled in anticipation of their applause.
Mulk, who was one of the two star performers of the evening, sat cross-legged, jovial and at ease in the centre of the fiddling, drumming, waggling musicians, dressed in fresh white pyjamas and a sky-blue embroidered Lucknow shirt, passing round betel leaves on a silver tray to his accompanists and laughing at jokes flung at him from the audience with exaggerated enjoyment.
His brothers were sitting in the front row, relaxing against large, thick bolsters, with somewhat selfconscious looks of scepticism and indulgence on their faces as if they weren’t quite sure they could digest the huge and festive dinner they had just had. ‘Mulk-bhai, begin with a lullaby,’ one of them shouted loud enough for Bim and Baba at the back to hear. ‘First put us to sleep—then you can do what you like,’ and Mulk threw back his head and opened a mouth crimson with betel-juice to make a raucous pretence at laughter and good humour. An instrument loudly whined, then was stilled.
All the instruments were stilled. The drums ceased to tap, the tanpura to strum. Fingers steadied, held them still. Mulk, letting his chin sink down into the folds of his neck, appeared to be plunged in deep thought. Then he lifted one hand, the one with the opal ring that gleamed in a shaft of light from the lamp in the porch, raised his heavy triple chin, looked vaguely upwards at the dim stars, and then sang a tentative phrase in his rich, dark voice. He roved from note to note, searching for harmony, experimenting with sequences, till at last he found the right combination, the sequence that pleased him by its harmony. He sang it in a voice that resounded with the pride of discovery, rang out in triumph. Now all the instruments joined in, made confident by his success. The tabla rollicked with delight at the rhythm he had found for it, the tanpura skipped and hurried to keep up with him. Swaying their heads with approval, the musicians followed Mulk with perfect accord. He had launched their boat, now they were all in motion. Now they rose upon a crest, now they moved forward upon a wave of sound.
Bim, swaying slightly too with the melody that swelled about them, let her eyes rove over the audience that was scattered over the lawn, partly lit by the light that fell through the pillars of the veranda and partly shadowed by the nervous dancing shadows of the foliage so that they were like pierrot figures in a theatre. There were people only just coming up the drive, others milling restlessly about, settling on the cotton rugs only to rise again and move closer to friends, form new groups and then break up and shift again. Some fanned themselves with the palm-leaf fans they had brought along, either languidly or frenziedly as they forgot or recalled the heat. Others opened up their silver pan boxes and rolled themselves betel leaves or shared them with their families or friends. The quieter ones merely smoked cigarettes, each no more than a small pinpoint of flame in the darkness. Bim had just lit herself one when she had to draw in her feet and make room for a young couple who came and settled down before her with their small daughter in a crackling violet dress trimmed with silver and little gold rings in her ears. She peeped at Bim over a shoulder with great, kohl-rimmed eyes, then clutched her mother’s soft, powdered neck and hissed ‘Look, Ma, a woman is smoking!’ making Bim remove the cigarette from her mouth and smile. The child stared and stared till a packet of biscuits was opened for her and then she concentrated mouselike on them till she was patted to sleep on her mother’s lap by hands that jingled in time to the music with their load of glass bangles.
All this commotion, confusion and uproar might have drowned out Mulk’s song and yet it did not. It simply formed a part of the scene, like the lamps and the dark and the scent of night-flowering plants, a kind of crepitating tapestry through which Mulk’s song wound purposefully, never losing the thread but following a kind of clear, infallible instinct with his musicians to accompany him, and the purpose and the harmony and the melody of his song were a part of the tapestry too, the gold thread that traced a picture on the shimmering background, and no one minded if it was haphazard or arbitrary.
Mulk’s brothers were no longer lolling against the bolsters. They were sitting cross-legged and bolt upright, beating out the rhythm on their knees and swaying their heads to the melody and crying ‘Vah! Vah!’ loudly with pleasure and congratulation at every pleasant or unexpected piece of inspiration on Mulk’s part, or of intuitive accord and foresight on that of the accompanists. No one would ever have thought that they disapproved of their brother’s singing or grudged him what he spent on his musicians, for their delight and sympathy was obvious in every wag of their heads and slap of their hand on their knees. They were also a part of the tapestry, as much as the singer and the musicians forming that composed, absorbed group before them. Mulk’s song sung in that pleasant, resonant voice, bound them all together in a pattern, a picture as perfectly composed as a Moghul miniature of a garden scene by night, peopled with lovers, princes and musicians at play.
And there was still another element to this composition. Now the sisters were hurrying down the veranda steps, followed by men with great kettles and small, smoking braziers, and others with trays loaded with cups. As they busily set up a kind of open-air tea shop beside the cannas and the oleanders, Mulk’s song rose to a joyful climax, his voice swelling to its fullest strength and the tanpura and the tabla rising and expanding with it, so that they all arrived together at the peak from which they could do nothing but come rolling down, hilariously, into laughter, congratulation and joviality.
‘Tea, tea—come get your tea,’ Sarla and Jaya were calling, and the servants were bustling to pass the cups up and down the rows seated on the rugs. Bim chose to rise, stretching her cramped limbs, to go and fetch two cups. ‘Wonderful music, Jaya,’ she said as she bent to pick up the cups held beneath the spout of a great black kettle by a little grubby ser
vant boy. ‘What a voice Mulk still has—it’s wonderful,’ she said, but Jaya and Sarla, with sweat pouring down their faces and glittering on their foreheads, pumping their arms up and down at the elbows, only smiled worriedly and hardly seemed to hear. The time for them to hear and to think had not come yet. The tea was only a break for refreshment, for the chief part of the programme was still to follow and Mulk’s singing was not the star performance as Bim had imagined.
There was a shuffle taking place on the divan. While the accompanists were drinking their tea with loud, appreciative smacks and slurps, an aged little man in a crumpled dhoti and faded shirt, wearing a small black cap on his head, was being helped up onto the divan by the Misra brothers and settled onto the centre of it while the others shifted aside and made room for him with an air of both affection and respect.
‘Mulk’s guru,’ Sarla explained quickly as Bim moved away with two cups of tea in her hands. ‘Mulk has asked his guru to sing tonight.’
‘Ah,’ said Bim and all round her people were saying ‘Ahh’ with the same note of awe and expectation for the guru, once a famous singer, now lived in retirement and hardly ever appeared in public.
‘Mulk’s guru is going to sing now,’ Bim told Baba as she handed down a tea cup to him, slopping, and then carefully settled down beside him to stir and sip the scalding, sweet, milky tea. All round them there was a babble, a hubbub, as the audience prepared for the chief treat of the evening. On the divan too, there was a continuing stir and an atmosphere of both relaxation and mounting anticipation as the musicians exchanged jokes and compliments, sipped tea, chewed betel leaves, flexed their muscles, cleared their throats, tuned their instruments and prepared themselves.
Pleasure and confidence and well-being exuded from all of them, as if music were food and drink to them, a rich nourishment that they had imbibed and gave away generously to all—all except for the elderly guru whose face and little, wizened figure were so dried and aged, so brown and faded and wrinkled, that they could exude nothing at all except a kind of weary acquiescence. Mulk was chaffing him now, teasing him, but the old man, resting the palms of his hands on his knees and leaning forwards, did not smile or in any way respond. He seemed to be having trouble with his teeth which were false and did not fit.
Then he turned one palm upwards on his knee, and immediately Mulk and the accompanists fell silent. Out of that silence his ancient voice crept out and began to circle in the dark, a skeletal bird making its swoops and darts hesitantly, enquiringly. The accompanist followed at a little distance, discreetly, as if not to disturb him. Mulk sank into a listening pose, rapt, swaying his large head very, very gently.
Up on the veranda, on a large white bed, the old father had been lying, listening, quite mute. Now his heavy bulk seemed to stir for a shadow loomed up against the whitewashed wall and swayed like a monument that is crumbling.
Watching that pyramidal shadow that had risen in the night on hearing the old singer’s voice, Bim listened to the small, ancient voice, too, rough-edged and raw as if in pain. There was about that voice a tinge of snuff, of crimson betel spittle, of phlegm. Also of conflict, failure and disappointment. The contrast between Mulk’s voice and his was great: whereas Mulk’s voice had been almost like a child’s, so sweet and clear, or a young man’s full and ripe and with a touch of sweetness to it, the old man’s was sharp, even a little cracked, inclined to break, although not merely with age but with the bitterness of his experiences, the sadness and passion and frustration. All the storms and rages and pains of his life were in that voice, impinging on every song he chose to sing, giving the verses of love and romance a harsh edge that was mocking and disturbing. He sang like a man who had come, at the end of his journey, within sighting distance of death so that he already stood in its looming presence and measured the earth and his life on it by that great shadow. One day perhaps Mulk would also sing like this, if Mulk were to take the same journey his guru had. After all, they belonged to the same school and had the same style of singing and there was this similarity despite the gulf between them.
Listening to him, Bim was suddenly overcome with the memory of reading, in Raja’s well-thumbed copy of Eliot’s Four Quartets, the line:
‘Time the destroyer is time the preserver.’
Its meaning seemed to fall out of the dark sky and settle upon her like a cloak, or like a great pair of feathered wings. She huddled in its comfort, its solace. She saw before her eyes how one ancient school of music contained both Mulk, still an immature disciple, and his aged, exhausted guru with all the disillusionments and defeats of his long experience. With her inner eye she saw how her own house and its particular history linked and contained her as well as her whole family with all their separate histories and experiences—not binding them within some dead and airless cell but giving them the soil in which to send down their roots, and food to make them grow and spread, reach out to new experiences and new lives, but always drawing from the same soil, the same secret darkness. That soil contained all time, past and future, in it. It was dark with time, rich with time. It was where her deepest self lived, and the deepest selves of her sister and brothers and all those who shared that time with her.
Now the guru sang:
‘Your world is the world of fish and fowl. My world is the cry at dawn.’
Bim’s hand flew up to brush aside the grey hair at her face, and she leant excitedly towards Baba. ‘Iqbal’s,’ she whispered. ‘Raja’s favourite.’
Baba gave a single nod. His face was grave, like an image carved in stone, listening.
The old singer’s voice rose higher, in an upward spiral of passion and pain:
‘In your world I am subjected and constrained, but over my world You have dominion.’
‘Vah! Vah!’ someone called out in rapture—it might have been the old man listening alone on the veranda—and the singer lifted a shaking hand in acknowledgment.
About the Author
Anita Desai is the author of Fasting, Feasting, Baumgartner’s Bombay, Clear Light of Day, and Diamond Dust, among other works. Three of her books have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Desai was born and educated in India and now lives in the New York City area.
