Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  Janki saw her mother change, saw her dress the part she’d been assigned, oil and wave her hair into impossible forehead curls, powder her face and redden her lips, wear low-cut lace blouses with puffed sleeves and flashy sarees in shimmering colours and paste jewellery to deceive the discerning eye. Sometimes she dressed as Muslim women did, in long, loose pajamas and flowing shirts and wide swathes of shiny odhni draped around her head and shoulders. Janki was too young to grasp that her mother was costumed in an improbable optional self, mocking while avenging herself at the same time. She, the one rejected, the extra of the second place, the woman outgrown, had herself outgrown the garments of her class and identity and was proving herself a likely object of many men’s lusts. It was both love and hate of oneself, salvage of worth and sentence of worthlessness. All Janki saw was a transformation of manner, voice and gait, and she saw the door close many times a night behind her mother and her shifting concourse of anonymous men. There seemed to be nothing left of the mother she had known except an ironical remark or two about the slut Lakshmi and the wretch Shiv Balak. Then, even with her young baffled sense, Janki understood that her mother could never escape her memories or replace them with glaring substitutes of present and busy demand. For all our lives, she learnt, we’re dealing with our demons, contesting issues within, even when their contexts have passed and their actors departed. We fight on, desperately obsessed and alone, still examining old challenges to self, still arguing our case in captive obedience to old patterns. Janki wanted to tell her mother—let go of that woman and father as well—but she couldn’t say a word. Especially on the subject of Lakshmi, whom Manki had decided to remember bitterly as Janki’s favoured ally. For she still recalled, in great indignation, how Janki had remained silent and not recounted what she had seen. Were it not for your silence we’d still be there, making mithais respectably in our shop. Your father wouldn’t have gone and I wouldn’t be here, doing this, this! Now see the destruction you’ve brought on me—see it well! Manki’s every stance and posture threw this reproach in Janki’s face.

  But she overdid her animosity to suspicious limits. She kept Janki dressed in the shabbiest, filthiest clothes, throwing a fit when she saw her clad in a bright, clean borrowed outfit, making her change back instantly into her rags.

  ‘Know your place, you scaly-scabbed ugly thing!’ she shrieked. ‘A crow dressed in peacock finery?’

  To a client she explained Janki’s identity as her servant: ‘This dark-as-night horror whose face I have to look on first thing every morning, no wonder my days are blighted by misfortune, babuji.’

  And when she lit upon Janki singing in the kitchen—for Janki spent much of her time doing heavy-duty jobs in the clammy, dark kitchen and away from the brilliantly lit, carpeted and cushioned outer chambers of the haveli—she came up close and hissed: ‘Chup! Silent! At once! Before someone hears you! One line of song out of you and I’ll pull out your tongue, maati-mili!’

  All Janki understood was that a demon had possessed her mother and that she was working out an old revenge, a woman-for-woman thing, potent enough to undo even an umbilical tie. And she was only just tasting the hot revolt of a thirteen-year-old.

  ‘I will sing when I please!’ she hissed back. Then louder: ‘I WILL SING! Stop me if you can! Who are you to tell me to shut up? I taught YOU to sing. I taught you!’ Her voice had risen to a shriek and could be heard all the way down the corridor.

  Manki stepped up to her quickly, clamped a firm hand on her mouth and with her other hand held her in a tight cinch and pulled her away. All the way up the stairs, pulling, shoving, struggling to break loose from this witchlike mother who, true to her devilish transformation, had grown invincibly powerful.

  Manki dragged Janki into her chamber, flung her in and bolted the door from the outside.

  ‘Cool off now, spitfire!’ she called through the door. ‘Stay there till you learn to do as you’re told!’

  Janki heard her mother’s footsteps die away down the stairs. She howled her rage into the quilt and the musty-odorous coverlet. She stuffed the oil-fragrant pillow half into her mouth, biting it in a fury too hot to contain. She banged her head against the headboard of the bed. Then, when the bone-juddering hiccups had stopped, and the words of manic rage slowed to a stop in her head, Janki drifted into tired sleep.

  It may have been an hour or several. She was roused by a cautious tap on the door.

  ‘Open the door, Manki,’ called a low voice. ‘Ah, I see it is bolted from the outside . . .’

  It was dark. The lantern hadn’t been brought in. Someone entered the room. ‘But who locked you in, Manki, my life?’ he asked, concerned. ‘Does this ogress Naseeban lock in her girls, tell me? Tell me, please. I will kill her for this, I promise you. I’ll strangle her with my bare hands if she’s treated you ill, my Manki . . .’

  There was a thick slur in his voice. He was staggering drunk. But something in the way he called her his life, his love, made Janki’s heart beat loud in her ribcage. He took her into his protective embrace with fervour, stroked her head, murmured in her ear, melting her into trembling eagerness. The darkness was dense around them as he drew her down alongside his own body, sprawled across Manki’s bed, whispering her mother’s name: Manki, ah, Manki! He was well into the act when he noticed her flinching, her quick intake of breath and her gasp of pain. And much before the end he’d realized what there was to realize—that this wasn’t Manki, this was another one, and an untried virgin too. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t give up on this bounty he’d come to possess so miraculously, so unaccountably. He lunged deeper into her, holding her in an iron grip, his drink-sodden mouth heavy on hers, squelching in his own scum and her wet blood, until a shriek sounded outside the door and the shock of sudden lantern light broke into the room and for a second she felt herself violently jerked out of bed by arms that were insanely furious before she was blinded by the sharp crack of a slap that stung her face and made her reel and fall back on the floor in the middle of what sounded like an explosion of screaming, abusing, shrill cursing, and an inrush of vague forms and a babel of voices followed by the sudden stillness imposed by Naseeban Bua’s imperious presence.

  That night Manki begged to be let off. Janki lay quietly on the bed, Manki cross-legged on the floor. And the little oil lamp on the ledge burning too low to betray any expression on either of their faces. But even in that diffused half-light Janki could see how crushed Manki seemed, how defeated and unstrung, no demon. And when she spoke at last, it was in a very small voice.

  ‘Did he hurt you, my Jankiya?’

  ‘No,’ answered Janki, then, ‘Yes-yes . . .’ She turned and hid her face in the smelly musk of the pillow.

  ‘A beast, that one!’ spat out Manki.

  That wasn’t the impression Janki had come away with. Initially he’d been rather sweet, later he stopped being a person but only a sort of avalanche, bereft of self or choice. An immense weight that had thrashed, pounded, mangled, bruised and then, just as suddenly, become one with the night and the chaos. She wished, secretly, that she’d seen his face at the very least.

  ‘He thought I was you.’ Her words came flat, halting.

  For some reason that made Manki crumple up in tears. Shamble up to Janki’s bed and hide her face in the pillow under Janki’s tousled head.

  ‘That you were me! God forbid that you should ever be me, my Jankiya!’ Here was Manki smothering Janki with her sobs. ‘This is what I prayed should never, never happen, and it has!’ grieved Manki. ‘This is why I kept you away in the cooking-quarters. This is why I dressed you in old, ragged things! This is why I never let them forget how scarred you are.’ She ran her hand on Janki’s thin body. ‘Are you hurt, my daughter? Was he rough with you? Was he too . . . too large for you?’

  Janki caught her mother’s hand and brought it to her mouth. Carefully she did what she remembered doing as a child when Manki came in, hot and sweating after an afternoon of laddoo- or peda-moulding. She lick
ed the fingers one by one, savouring the memory of syrup and ghee and the scent of cardamom and rose.

  ‘Mithai-Amma,’ she said. Sweet mother. ‘Nanki meeth mai.’ Little, sweet mother.

  If there was a touch that could purify and heal, this was it. Manki had no words after that. But the next morning when Naseeban Bua expressed her anger at what had happened, saying sarcastically: ‘Mubarak on your daughter, Manki Bi. Henceforth she’s worth nothing to anyone. She might have been something, if only her nath-worth for a night. Now with her grindstone-pocked face she’s only a mouth to feed.’

  Then Manki bristled and drew herself up and retorted, most unlike her usual mild self: ‘May my offence be forgiven, Bua, but you little know what magic lies in my little one’s throat. Far from a mouth to feed, hers shall be the mouth that’ll feed your entire kotha!’

  Then, turning to her daughter, she commanded: ‘Sing, bitiya. Sing and show them. Sing.’

  And, as though mesmerized by the command in her mother’s charged voice, Janki sang and the room grew silent.

  For days afterwards Manki implored her various clients: ‘Babuji, this isn’t business but will you have the kindness to suggest some tutors for my daughter? She’s clever, take my word, babuji, and has a way with languages. And will you have the kindness to suggest some great ustad to groom her singing. I shall pay, babuji, whatever his fee.’

  Every biography of Janki Bai tells us that she’d been tutored exhaustively in Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi and English, there in the kotha itself. Tutors had been found, and found well. And who should teach her music but the great Hassu Khan himself.

  7

  If music was likened to the great rolling stream of the Ganga in the rains, Hassu told Janki, then the ragas might well be compared to the ghats, the landings our ancestors have built along its banks. Remember, water is always and ever water as the Ganga is always and ever itself, whether at the source or at the confluence or at the mouth. Still, Draupadi Ghat wasn’t the same as Balua Ghat and Balua Ghat wasn’t at all like the Saraswati Ghat. The river looked and felt different at each. Did she get what he was trying to explain? he asked. She looked uncertain. She was still new to the city of Allahabad and hardly went out and these were just names. Very well, Benaras then, he said. Did she remember the great Benaras ghats? Of course she did. Who didn’t know the character and scale of each one? Manikarnika with its soaring towers of flame, Dashashwamedh with its immense spectacle of trumpets and conchs and cymbals and its circling firelight, Harish Chandra with its crowds and bulls and parasols. Janki remembered them all. Good, said Hassu. Sur, or note, is like that quintessential element water that makes up the river. But where you enter that stream, at what time of day, in what state of self, how you experience the differential between water and light and the rippling reflections of the stars and the temple spires and the floating breath of the chants, the pang of the bells and the throb of the drums in the water, makes of one river a thousand. Also remember, just in case you haven’t noticed, sound too casts shadows and there are the souls of colours playing in the stream. The ragas are registers of being, taught Hassu, who loved discoursing. They are the river known in discrete tones of light and mind. You can step gently into the water, receiving its chill or stillness or turbulence, lowering yourself slowly into its depths and letting it circle around you. Then you let yourself sink and let it take possession of you, spreading your limbs athwart the upholding stream, swimming along its current. Then you drift your way through its aqueous lucence to its very floor until you become water, shining, pliant water, reflecting, as a glass does, as a diamond does, the sanctified light of its being, until the whole universe resonates in your head with this rendition of knowing. And do you know when this happens and why it happens? Because you have bathed in the primal element, Nada, the Divine Vibration. What falls on the ears, the sages said and our ustads taught us, is Baikhari. What vibrates in the brain is Madhyama. But that which surpasses these is called Pashyanti, the Soul of Sound, the Anahatnada, the Para-bak or Beyond Utterance, the Nada-Brahma that yogis and pirs and darveshes hear in the deepest trances.

  Hassu Khan’s musical lineage went back to the great Ghulam Rasool, the foremost khayal maestro of Nawabi Lucknow. His two celebrated disciples, the legendary brothers, Shakkar Khan and Makkhan Khan, after receiving intensive training in the Lucknavi style, travelled to Gwalior, which was to become the parent khayal gharana, giving rise to Kirana, Jaipur, Patiala, Agra and several other smaller ones. By some accounts, these family centres of music existed much earlier, from the time Aurangzeb banned music in Delhi. Then the musicians of Delhi, deprived of a calling, disbanded in large numbers and went seeking new homes and new patrons. They settled down in towns surrounding Delhi—in Gwalior, Agra, Ambeta, Sonepat, Atrauli and Kirana, places which gave their names to ancestral schools of music.

  ‘There is a story,’ said Hassu, ‘about the time the musicians of Delhi took out a juloos-e-janaza, a funeral procession, through the streets of Delhi when the emperor’s decree banning music was made public. When asked who it was who had passed on to the next world, they answered: Good sirs, it is music that is dead. It is music whose cortège we bear on our stooped shoulders. There is a story,’ continued Hassu, enjoying his pupil’s rapt attention, ‘that when the emperor heard of this, he wryly remarked: “Ah, to those that mourn, this do I say—my royal condolences, sirs, but do me this extra favour. Dig that grave deeper.” Thus did they bury music in Dilli but, mash-e-Allah, who can bind a stream or a vine? The stream shall find secret channels beneath the earth and emerge, a few paces or a kos or a mile away. The vine will spread its roots beneath the selfsame earth and thrust its shoots into the air and burst into flower when its season comes. Thus it was with music, daughter.’

  ‘But why did the emperor ban music? Who can hate music?’ Janki wondered aloud.

  ‘He did not hate music. He only pretended to,’ answered Hassu, ‘and he had personal reasons. Of that I shall speak later. Be you patient awhile. A shagird must cultivate the great grace of sabr, patience, when a teacher speaks and not interrupt.

  ‘So Shakkar Khan and Makkhan Khan journeyed to Gwalior. They were brothers but they soon fell out, as did their progeny. One of Makkhan Khan’s sons was Natthan Peer Baksha and this Natthan Peer Baksha was my Bade Baba Jaan, grandfather to us three, my revered elder brother, Haddu Khan, and my younger brother, Natthu Khan, our father being Qadir Baksh of hallowed memory. It was Natthan Khan Peer Baksh and Qadir Baksh, peace be upon their souls, who taught me all I know, unworthy as I am,’ said Hassu, touching his rosary to his eyes, dropping it into his loose shirt-neck again.

  ‘Fortunate was I to be vouchsafed such teachers. Ah, wash out your mouth with rose water before you utter their names! It is by destiny alone and the benevolence of God that great teachers are granted us. They never come cheap, either in money or in reverence. For they are the custodians of inherited compositions, ancestrally preserved skills that they will never, never impart to a stranger. Unless that stranger is worthy. Unless that ustad is noble.’

  Hassu stopped and let his eyes rest on Janki in a meaning manner. ‘In the old gharanas the real taalim, the precious teaching, was only for sons. The next best was for the sons-in-law, so that they could earn a living in music. What remained was for outsiders, those not of kin, those that hung around, anxious for crumbs from the master’s table.’

  ‘But wasn’t there anything for daughters?’ was Janki’s timid query.

  ‘How could there not be?’ Hassu laughed his throaty laugh. ‘Can anything be hid from you prying women? They will catch things from beyond a three-foot-wide stone wall, from behind a heavy shisham door. Sitting coyly behind their veils, their nimble brains will hear and memorize. Fanning at the hearth or pounding at the pestle or beating the clothes on the stone, they will try out what they have learnt. What knowledge can be hid from you women, bibi? Then they have such dire threats. Sing this for me or the fire shall not be lit and where will my lord-mae
stro-husband be without his meal? Sing that for me, or I shall mix sour mango in your sherbet and you shall croak through your riyaz and all your shagirds shall snigger. No, bibi, you women are the undoing of us all! To answer your question, daughter, the heritage passed from father to son and from son to grandson but the dower of daughters wasn’t small. Compositions, jealously preserved, were passed from family to family as wedding endowment. Or even pawned for years. But to return to what I was saying, there were few teachers who imparted their knowledge to outsiders—with noble exceptions like the illustrious Bairam Khan of Jaipur who taught even the children of weavers, such as were promising, but few others besides. In fact there are tales aplenty of the desperate ways in which disciples courted maestros for acceptance as pupils. The legendary Alauddin Khan, craving to be taught by Ustad Wazir Khan, court musician and resident music guru to the nawab of Rampur, was turned away every time he tried appealing to the teacher’s mercy. At last he was driven to throw himself before the nawab’s carriage in supplication and the nawab, touched, allowed him into the teacher’s circle of disciples. Still more remarkable is the case of one Imam Baksh of Farrukhabad, a pakhavaj drummer of great skill, who longed to train in tabla with the famous Haji Vilayat Ali of his city. Now Imam Baksh wasn’t at all sure of having his request granted were he to approach Haji Vilayat Ali. So he grew a beard and, donning worn and shabby clothes and a mien of the utmost submission, produced himself at Vilayat Ali’s household and begged to be taken in as a servant. The teacher asked: “And what can you do, fellow?” To which came the humble answer: “I can sweep floors, huzoor. I can go to the bazaar for the kitchen requirements. I can prepare the hookah. Anything you command, this lowly one shall willingly do.” He was taken in. For months he hung around the master, sweeping and dusting, scouring and washing, fetching and carrying, and all the time keeping his attention riveted on what the master was teaching his regular pupils. He’d go home every night, to his tiny house on the outskirts of the city, and practise hard. Then one day a guest arrived at Vilayat Ali’s home, a famous dhrupad singer. The guest’s eye fell on Imam Baksh, busy at his menial jobs, and he exclaimed: “Ah, I know this one. Many a time he has been my accompanist and we have made great music together.”