Baiju was saved by the powerful poetic licence of a five-hundred-year-old story but Manki had to work out her destiny—and Janki’s—all by herself. One evening Parvati said to her: ‘Enough, Mankiya! I can’t go on sitting silent, watching you wear yourself out like this.’
Parvati was large and broad as a banyan tree. She came all the way from her home in Chaitganj to buy sweets and savouries from Manki’s shop. Later they became shopping companions at the Budhwa Mangal fair. Together they compared prices, haggled, made scathing remarks about the worthlessness of the merchandise they’d secretly planned to buy, for the benefit of the stall keepers. They picked up bangles and iron skillets and ladles and tongs, tinsel-lengths for head scarves and candied musk melon seed for the children. As their acquaintance grew they went to temples together on holy days, shopped for fast and puja things, held up a saree length as a screen behind which the other changed into dry clothes after a Ganga dip, sang away entire nights at keertans and weddings and childbirths. Parvati knew scores of songs and was clever at the dholak. She was such a mine of energy. The greatest problem-solver that Manki had ever come across. She was the one who arranged for a buggy and coachman with admirable speed when Janki had to be rushed to hospital. She even knew how to read and write and had scribbled the desperate letter to the maharani of Benaras and pushed the holder-and-nib into Manki’s fingers and made her scrawl her unformed signature. And she had carried that SOS to the maharaja’s kothi and argued persuasively with the sentries at the lion gates and the women retainers at the staircase to the maharani’s chambers. And, on being granted an audience, she had thrown herself at the maharani’s feet and sobbed out poor Janki’s plight so feelingly that the maharani sent her back to the Mission Hospital with a note for Richardson, the English doctor, and a purse of money, and also promised to come in person to the hospital. Parvati carried back many assurances of support from the maharani to the mother of the child singer she’d heard once and liked.
Parvati was always amazing. She knew people everywhere, had answers for everything. And when Shiv Balak disappeared she flew to Manki’s assistance with an energy that was the marvel of all. When the Great Maata swept into the lanes and homes and laid waste large swathes of the city so that hundreds died of the pox, Parvati brought fronds of neem leaves and sat for hours waving them in the air near the sickbeds of Manki’s three children, fanning them gently, lifting brass tumblers of cooled neem water to their parched, whimpering lips, putting a finger to her lips when any loud voices spoke as they slept the fitful sleep of the delirious. For hours she sat, her lips moving in silent mantras to the Devi, until the fever broke and the first beads of sweat appeared.
And when Manki came back, haggard and deadbeat, after another long, useless trudge through the city’s labyrinths, Parvati rose and fetched buttermilk for her which she’d set in an earthen pot and placed in the way of the hot, searing summer winds in the doorway to cool.
‘What would I do without you?’ Manki often sighed and said. ‘You carry the name of the Devi and you are the Devi Ma herself come to cast her anchal over my face in my evil time.’
But Parvati shushed her up. No Devi, she said wryly. ‘The Devi could be far more merciful, but what mercy was it to take away three such angel children as Kashi and Paraga and Mahadei? How wasted their bodies were! How quickly they burnt upon the pyre. Ah, poor mother!’ Well could she understand the trials of a grieving mother, a single mother with a good-for-nothing vagabond for a husband who’d made the storm burst on the poor bowed head of his helpless wife! All this Parvati said when Manki tried to thank her.
As the days passed Parvati began gently counselling Manki as a well-meaning friend should.
‘He’s dead and gone for you. If I were you, I’d go light a lamp for him and hang up a pot of water from the nearest peepul tree. If I were you, I’d summon a priest and perform the death rites for his wicked soul. It must be wandering about without any peace. And it will still go after that woman, never you, poor Mankiya.’
Manki reacted. ‘Oh, don’t speak like that of him. My heart tells me he’ll surely come home. The palmist at Dashashwamedh Ghat read my palm and said: Sister, your suhaag shall survive.’
‘But with whom and where?’ Parvati was sceptical.
Manki winced. ‘The priest at Harish Chandra Ghat read my chart and said my man had gone westwards and is alive and well, and one day he’ll turn east again.’
‘Ha! He’s gone to vilayat then and one day he’ll go to Cheen!’ scoffed Parvati. ‘You are a believing fool.’
‘I have a big fear here,’ said Manki, indicating her chest. ‘I’m afraid he’ll come, open the trunk and find that the gold is still there. Ah, sister, I lied to him that she took it all away. And when he finds out, he’ll take the stick to me. How will I look him in the eye? I couldn’t save his children from the maata and I lied about Lachhminiya making off with the gold!’
‘Nonsense,’ said Parvati. ‘You saved your Jankiya’s life, and as for the ones the maata took, what d’you think he cares a fake cowrie for them? They’d as soon drown in the well, as far as he is concerned. As for the gold that’s bothering you, you’re free to hide it in my house. I’ll lock it up fast in my big sandook and you can take it back whenever you need it.’
So Manki, much relieved and grateful, tied up the nine-tola waist-girdle, the heavy wrist kangans and fine-wrought neckpieces and chains and earrings and pendants, the finger rings and toe rings, all in a tight knot in a quartered and thrice-folded cotton saree, and put the bundle in a clay curd pot and handed it to her friend to carry home with her, telling herself for the nth time what would she ever do without Parvati.
Then when Manki couldn’t go on running the kitchen on credit that the grocers and grain merchants now embarrassedly refused to continue giving, Parvati thought fit to do some plain-speaking.
‘How long are you going to sit on your chaukhat waiting for that fox’s grandson? Till you are bent double and have lost every tooth in your head?’
‘He’ll come back some day for sure,’ protested Manki feebly.
‘He’ll not, understand this and drink a glass of Ganga water on it!’
‘So what else can I do but wait? How long can I put my creditors off? I owe money to Bachau Mahajan and Bindeshwari the oilman and Ramji the milkman—oh, so many others too. Parvati, there was a time when milk flowed like water in my shop but who would think it now, to see my hovel?’
‘Sell it,’ suggested Parvati.
‘I can’t sell it or this house either. It’s in his name, not mine.’
‘What else can you sell then?’
‘All the shop’s cooking vessels are sold. Some of my belongings too—whatever I could sell. All except my gold which, thank Ishvar, is safe with you else who knows what I might have done? But Bachau and Bindeshwari might drive me to do something drastic—part with my gold or something—to pay these debts, and then where will I be, sister?’
‘No,’ said Parvati firmly. ‘A woman must never, never part with her gold. Don’t let anyone force you into such a thing. Gold is the Goddess Lakshmi.’
Manki’s face flinched. ‘Don’t utter that name.’
Parvati realized her mistake. ‘No matter,’ she said in soothing tones, ‘don’t give the goddess the curses of your heart. The goddess and that Lachhminiya are poles apart . . .’
‘But for that slut I might not have seen this evil day,’ muttered Manki. ‘Her shadow follows me everywhere, creeps into my every thought.’
‘It is an illness of the mind,’ said Parvati. ‘Leave it all behind you. Go elsewhere.’
‘Where can I go?’
‘Come with me then,’ Parvati finally spoke her mind. ‘I’ll take you to Ilahabad. I have many friends there. Benaras will drive you mad. I can see it coming. Besides it isn’t safe for your daughter.’
Manki looked at Parvati in wonder. ‘This house?’ she ventured timidly.
‘Lock it up. Leave in the middle of the night. N
o one will know. Least of all the ones you owe money to.’
Here Manki hesitated a moment, then asked, ‘And my gold, sister?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s safe with me. I’ll carry it along and return it to you when we reach Ilahabad.’
That’s how Janki left Benaras for Allahabad which was to become her home the rest of her living days. With Parvati and her mother and brother and some scanty belongings she travelled by boat to Allahabad, a hundred and thirty kilometres upriver.
6
Maybe she grew up with the belief that no one had ever desired her. Raghunandan had been that first and last illusion. Other women were objects of desire, never she. Only some men, fired by her awesome voice, grew inflamed with sudden lust, maybe a higher lust, if there was such a thing, as her defensive heart prompted. More likely it was a sudden thrum of nerves, the resonation of some other lust elsewhere or some unachievable imagining when a stirred man trembled to the thrill of achieved perfection and forgot the scarred bodiment of that voice. Sex was an act of self-forgetting, even at its most self-conscious, as for a tawaif it had to be, and it had its atavistic percussion and progression, its own alaap, gat, jod and jhala. Then, after the choreographed, climactic flourish, there was the bleared moment of return, the gathering up of the garment.
She usually tempered the shock of the moment by murmuring a thumri beneath her breath so that the poor client’s instant of reality wasn’t too abrupt. She usually turned away to spare him any glimpse of her face. As she grew older, sex grew less and disappeared, for she could afford to turn away clients with courtly quip or robust repartee.
In her memoirs she obfuscated the truth that she had indeed ‘practised’, until it became a blurred and doubtful matter, masterfully evaded. She relied on her reputation as the scarred woman to protect her story from posterity.
But it was Manki, just a few days into their Allahabad arrival, who had had to take the great plunge. For a long time Janki and she didn’t refer to what Manki’s ‘work’ was, even when the subject cropped up. As when Manki asked Janki to teach her some songs she’d learnt in Benaras. She needed to learn a few ‘of that kind’ as a professional requirement.
‘Some of them want a bit extra. A song or two sometimes. Makes them feel royal, I think. They even say they’ll pay a bit extra, which I can keep back from Naseeban Bua. But I don’t know any, except the songs we sang at keertans and festivals. I sang a banna and he . . . he said it was something the women in his family sang, his mother and sisters and bhabhis and wife and daughters and would I please stop it. He wanted another kind of song. Bitiya, is there some other kind more . . . more suitable to my kind of . . . work?’
Janki had turned to look into her mother’s face, shamed and confused. She taught her a thumri in Raga Bageshwari. Manki did not have a singing voice but she seemed enthralled by the experience. It seemed to take away the sting of her position. Frequently Janki heard her humming or singing that song under her breath as she went about her daytime chores. It was the only time she looked happy after all that had happened since they arrived in Allahabad—Parvati’s deception and disappearance and their finding themselves in this situation, in this old, crumbling, many-storeyed house in its dingy lane where sunlight never reached and the only thing that relieved the dank surroundings was the sound of overflowing music from the rows on rows of old stone tenements, the liquid sounds of sarangis and tanpuras, the brisk thump of tablas, the trilling ascent of practising female voices and the jingle of tintinnabulating anklet bells. From late morning onwards till evening there were intense rehearsals, then after sundown a lull for rest and a readying for the night, and a little before midnight the nightlife of the lane really got under way. It was like Hira Mandi, the balconies full, the gauzy girls in full twitter, the visiting gentry perfumed and pomaded, reclining against bolsters in the dance halls and Naseeban Bua, the Chaudharain, as the madam of the house was called, at her most benevolent and gracious, greeting the guests with queenly patronage, the discreet little cabins on the top floor in a state of continuously changing occupancy, and the paan, itr, cigarettes and liquor going round in the halls and chambers, and also poetry, giggling coquetry, and whispers and rustlings and creakings, and hawking and spitting into silver spittoons too. Gruff groans and sometimes a man’s drunken babble, sometimes a man’s muffled sob or a snore. Manki could never, never grasp how she found herself in the thick of it all.
Shiv Balak’s desertion, followed by Parvati’s craftiness, had affected Manki’s sanity for a while so that she took to her bed in a state of dire depression and Naseeban had to send for the house hakim, and the girls, scores of them it seemed to Janki’s baffled eyes (though there were only about two dozen in fact), took turns to bathe her head with rose water and rub her feet with oil in a sort of familiar empathy that indicated that this was a common and understood plight, something remembered well.
For Parvati was no friend of Naseeban’s, as the girls told Manki. For would a friend vanish just a day after, as Parvati had done? Surely she’d left an address, surely Naseeban knew more of her than she’d cared to reveal . . . No one could satisfy Manki’s endless, hysterical questionings. When Manki refused food and raved and went into fits, Naseeban herself ascended the stairs in all the majesty of her authority and sad wisdom to answer Manki’s fretful demands with experienced patience. No, she said gently, Parvati had left no gold ornaments with her, as she’d given Manki to believe. No, she said again, Parvati hadn’t indicated whether she would return for them, whether it was Benaras she was going to or some other city. And yes, this she revealed with the utmost delicacy, Parvati had charged a sizeable sum from her, Naseeban, for what Naseeban tactfully called board and lodging and protection under her roof. So you see, my poor sister, you paid her and I paid her too, she broke the news quietly while the girls stood around, quiet as mice.
Manki had shrunk into herself as the full knowledge of her plight dawned upon her mind. Still, she hoped she’d got it all wrong.
‘Did she pay our rent then?’ she asked. ‘How much?’
Naseeban looked at her in silent pity.
‘I can cook,’ said Manki earnestly, ‘I can sweep floors, do the wash, for what else can I do, Baiji? I am a mithai-wallah’s wife and I worked in the shop we had, me and my daughter.’
But Naseeban thought fit to overlook this assumption, this pitiful display of a woman clutching at a straw.
‘This house is yours to live in. You are welcome to join our household.’
Manki looked at her, wide-eyed. Naseeban returned her gaze with a level, unblinking gaze of her own.
‘I charge 4 annas in the rupaiya,’ she said calmly. ‘The rest you keep. I am known to offer the most generous rates in this trade, ask any of my girls here. The ones who join me don’t ever want to leave. Come on,’ she rose to her feet, looking Manki over, ‘you’re a fetching enough woman. There’s still the juice of youth in your limbs and a nice saltiness in your features, dark as you are. And the grief in your eyes has a certain melancholy lure. Study it, girl, learn to use it, this look of desolation that you wear. It tempts the kind client to tenderness and the unkind one to finer cruelties. You are a beautiful thing, though you’ve never known it yourself.’
It may have been that subtle tribute to Manki’s unsuspecting and starved self-esteem that made her stay. For Naseeban had a protective and kindly dignity, even at her shrewdest. It may have been the relative safety of the impending profession, compared with the imagined dangers of a life on her own, without means or shelter and two children with her. The most probable reason, humanly imaginable, was that Manki was soul-dead tired and had lost the fight and could only let herself drift, come what may. But Janki heard her last feeble bargainings.
‘Only me, Baiji. Not my daughter.’
To which Naseeban answered, with that great quietness of manner of which she was mistress.
‘That one, ah no, we shall see, poor marked creature, but time will tell . . .’
&nb
sp; So maybe it was that ‘poor, ugly, marked creature’ factor that Manki grabbed and inflated to the level of a tiresome refrain, and that injured Janki more than anything else before, coming as it did from a mother gone strange. For Manki did indeed morph into someone alien and bewildering. Manki herself scarcely knew herself. The first time, clad in the tinselly costume of her new occupation and as timidly, selectively unclad, in her performance of it, she was paralysed with terror and with her eyes clamped shut, she saw the locked door of her Benaras house, its three-linked chain and heavy padlock, and she saw Shiv Balak returned to that door and standing perplexed to find it locked and his family gone no one knew where. A shudder passed through her as she converted the thrusts of the stranger hoisted above her body into the blows of the hammer that laboured to smash the sturdy lock. Blow upon blow fell on the old Aligarh lock until a catch or cog in its complicated innards gave way and the chain, released from its hooked notch, fell, jangling against the old discoloured wood. He entered the darkened courtyard just as the client gave one last heave and splurged his hateful scum into her, but her gasp of sorrow was a clenched sob for Shiv Balak’s lonely return which the client took for orgasmic ecstasy. Later, putting the technique together, she learnt the trick of manoeuvring imagination into regions of old grief or recalled rage and found that the mind’s interjections could easily be confounded with the body’s reflexes, and no one was any the wiser.
Requiem in Raga Janki Page 6
