12
So one day, after much consideration, she dressed and veiled herself and ordered the phaeton and the gariwan, wrapped the loose pages of her book of verse in a silk cloth, and went to call on Khan Bahadur Sayyad Akbar Hussain Sahib Judge Ilahabadi. She went like a European memsahib, with a visiting card and all, a little affectation of the angrezes that she had adopted for the style it conferred on her ceremonial arrivals. Unlike the European visiting cards she had seen, her own were ornate, with flowers and birds and musical instruments illuminated in the gilt embossed borders. She remained in the phaeton, mysterious behind her veil, with Samina fanning her gently and whispering over the tinsel-covered basket of rosy Ilahabad guavas that she carried.
Judge Sahib was in and would she drive to the veranda, murmured the chowkidar at the gate of Ishrat Manzil. At the veranda she was received by a court chaprasi dressed in long white tunic, cummerbund and turban, who salaamed and accepted, on a silver salver, the visiting card that she produced out of her English handbag. She was ushered into a moderate-sized chamber with book-lined walls, a number of well-tapestried sofas and armchairs and a central takht which dominated the room. Janki sat herself down on the sofa opposite and made Samina sit a little to the side on one of the armchairs. A court retainer appeared, bowed and drew open the curtain at the window. Then he hesitated and drew it close again. Guessing his disquiet, Janki covered her face with her headcloth in decorous modesty. He bowed and left.
In a few moments a tiny, half-stooped figure shuffled in at a shambling pace and, heading for the central takht, sat himself down on it. He had a lined and shrivelled face, like a dried-up raisin. In his hand he held her visiting card. His eyes flashed when he spoke and on his wrinkled face appeared an impish twitch as he ran his eyes up and down the card, turning it this way and that. His eyebrow lifted, his lip curled: ‘Janki Bai Ilahabadi,’ he read with a comic inflexion in his voice. ‘The koel-voiced songstress herself! To what do I owe the honour of this visit?’
‘I encroach upon your time, Judge Sahib, on the advice of Shah Aminuddin Sahib Kaisar.’
He seemed to be convulsed. With grief which subtly converted itself to laughter. ‘Ah, Kaisar!’ He shook his head in woe. ‘What new terror will he unleash on me? With friends like Kaisar, who needs enemies, and now do but consider this latest assault of his on my hapless head. A mujra miss sahib at the house of Akbar! Ill fame follows me everywhere, madam, but never this kind. And a mujra miss sahib with a visiting card, Allah be praised! She signs herself Janki Bai Ilahabadi and I sign myself Akbar Ilahabadi. Posterity is sure to get us mixed up, so Akbar the poet might be remembered as a nautch lady and Madam Janki might be remembered as a Judge Sahib!’
She was nonplussed, offended. Then she saw he was laughing in diabolical glee and grew bolder: ‘Your fame, Judge Sahib, is enough to drown out the sound of our drums and sarangis.’
‘It wanted but this, lady, I stand demolished. Let me lament my sorrows. One evening in Simla it was, where I was on holiday, an angrez came to call on me. What is your tareef, sir? I asked. To which he answered: They call me Auckland Colvin. I shook all over. Excellency, to what do I owe this grace and favour, that you should light up my humble hotel room with your presence? I am in a mood for verse, he said. My rapture knew no bounds. I flew to entertain him. I recited verse after verse, poured him goblet after goblet of wine. On my ninety-ninth verse when he was well in his cups, as the angrezes say, he raised his hand and said: Enough, sir poet. You are good and glad I am to have taken the advice of my khansama and come to your door but now I must sleep. It was a cold night and much too snowy for him to go back to Peterhoff so he went to sleep on the sofa in my suite. When morning came he awoke and asked: Where is she, the lady who sang to me last night? I humbly presented myself. No songstress, sir, I said, abashed, a mere poet. He rubbed his eyes. You mean, you are not Raunak Bai Ilahabadi? he asked, puzzled. No, sir, quoth I, I am only Akbar Ilahabadi. It seems Raunak Bai was staying in the same hotel. Do you mean to say you are not Auckland Colvin? I demanded to know. Auckland who? he asked, still more puzzled. You can judge for yourself, lady, my own trials. Even this elegant visiting card, this excellent paper herald, outshines the hoarse heralds of the courts where I ply my rude trade to earn my bread! For truly this dainty angrezi hazirnama is worthy of that infamous couplet I once tossed off: “Sheikhji ghar se na nikle aur yeh farma diya / Aap BA pass hain, banda Bibi pass hai.”
‘I should thank you, then, sir, that you did me the honour of emerging to receive me,’ said Janki drily, ‘if that is indeed your practice when a visiting card is sent in to you.’
‘Take no notice of me, madam, when I begin tossing around my verses. They swarm about me like locusts. As Amarulkaiss said, when I reach out to catch one, I find myself clutching two. A despicable habit. And do not think I scoff at your card but only at the way we are turned into gibbering monkeys aping the sahib and his ways: “Kya kahoon isko main bad-bakhtiyar nation ke siwa, / Usko aata nahin ab kuchh imitation ke siwa.”
‘Forgive me, Judge Sahib,’ she retorted. ‘Meaning no offence to you and may you not think me presumptuous but I beg you recall how Amir Khusrau first sought permission from Nizamuddin Aulia to be ushered into his presence. He made up two couplets in his mind that addressed Nizamuddin, saying: “You are such a king whose power can change even a pigeon on a cornice into a falcon. A poor beggar has come to your door. Do you allow him to enter or should he go back?” I beg you recall what Nizamuddin said to him. A little later a servant had appeared and recited two couplets written by Nizamuddin, which said: “In the arena of truth, if a true man stands, let him enter. But if the guest is nasamajh and nadaan, then let him return the way he came.” I assure you, sir, that I am neither nasamajh nor nadaan and a truer woman never stood before you. Were it possible for me to transmit my appeal for an audience in thought, and were it possible for you to convey your permission in like manner, sir, no angrezi card, no herald or town crier might be needed, but as it stands you must hear me and try me in your court with clemency, milord, considering that you and I are guilty of the same crime. Only you are seated in the judge’s lofty chair, holding my fate in your hands, while I stand trembling in the dock.’
He had quit his goblin mask and was attending to her words with gravity.
‘What crime be this, madam?’
‘I speak of poetry, sir.’
That seemed to provoke a violent reaction in him. Irritation suffused his face. ‘A poet, madam? A woman poet?’ There was a sting in his words. ‘No doubt you spend your private hours spilling tears and ink on the passing of beauty and of love. But I am mourning the passing of an entire civilization.’
‘And I, sir, am celebrating its kindling,’ she said softly.
‘Poetry is a long and arduous training,’ he said.
‘As music is, sir,’ she put in.
He resented being interrupted. ‘Hear me out, madam, before you commence your twitterings. Forty years of writing lie behind me. At nineteen years I was assigned a test—to compose 200 trial verses. At twenty-one I went to my first mushaira . . .’
‘By that age Ghalib had almost written an entire diwan,’ she murmured, to his greater annoyance. She resented his supercilious manner, his playful mockery, and had begun enjoying provoking him with tiny barbs of her own.
He glared at her. ‘What be your age, madam? No, it is from curiosity about the arts you practise, not any amorous inquiry, let me assure you.’
‘I am old in suffering, if not in years, sir.’
‘Tush, a woman’s cliché.’
‘By no means, sir. For every year in a man’s life, a woman knows full three years’ worth of living. Enough to learn the art of poetry, I make bold to say.’
He testily desired to know whether her verse was, like her card, in angrezi. And she could not resist teasing him with the meek confession that, yes, she knew angrezi too and wished she had written verse in it too. And she had studied Hindi, Persian and Urdu as
well. She said it in the abject manner of a criminal admitting to a long chain of serial crimes that he had committed and had now been cornered into confessing.
He swore under his breath. Then he drew up his tiny form in imperious majesty on the takht, as though he was about to pronounce sentence, and launched into a vigorous diatribe. ‘Jannat, they say, swarms with beauteous virgins, bibi. But do you know what jahannum must be to my imagination? Beauteous women—thousands of them—writing verse in English with—whatsitcalled, perdition take it?—ah, fountain pen—under rows of electric bulbs and getting their trash, their kambakht poetry printed in that sarkari rag, the Pioneer . . . “Kyon koi aaj hari ka naam japay? Kyon riyazat ka jeth sar pe tapay? Kaam wah hai jo ho governmenti. Naam wah hai jo Pioneer mein chhapay.” I am not against women getting some sort of education, no. But as I wrote somewhere: “Taalim ladkiyon ki zaroori to hai magar, khatoon-e-khana hon wah sabha ki pari na hon.”
‘I regret to say, Judge Sahib, I have not been brought up to be a lady of the house, a khatoon-e-khana, but only, to my shame, a pari of the gathering. But I do wish I had written in English,’ said Janki mischievously. ‘Maybe I should have sent it to the Pioneer and maybe Knox Sahib would have put in a word with Allen Sahib and that bright young whippersnapper—Kipting or Kipling—might have edited it . . .’
He was sarcastic. ‘No doubt,’ he pronounced. ‘But you are unlike other women. You are an exceptional lady, a mujra miss sahib. A free lady who performs for Knox Sahib and Allen Sahib and all these benighted sahibs. Unburdened by the cares of cooking and keeping house.
‘Khuda sent us these sahibs in their shining buggy
To deliver us from ignorance, widow-burning and thuggee.
So if your belly be empty and your shirt in tatters,
As long as Bartania rules, do you think it matters?’
By now she was incensed, charged up. She kept silent. She had uncovered her face and he noticed, with a witheringly critical glance, her kajal-lined eyes, her bright-red lips, the flash of her nose stud. A homely creature, grotesque with her made-up nautch-lady face, her pretensions to learning, her claims to writing poetry and her encroachments upon his valuable time. He lashed her with another stinging verse, designed to put her in her place:
‘Wah, her high-heeled shoes, her wristwatch, her bag,
A British mem is here, no Hindustani nag.
Put aside the paan box, pick up that lipstick,
No stick to smite a dog, but to plaster the mouth slick.’
She had had enough. She let him have it. ‘A woman and write verse, ah, a courtesan?’ she said bitterly. ‘Whoever thought of a mushaira for women?’ Then she tossed her impromptu verse in his face:
‘I stir no pot, no cradle rock.
No hearth do I tend, Judge Sahib, do not mock.
Allow me, sir, to write a verse or two,
Although my business is to sing and my trade to woo.
It’s all to be laid at the service of milords,
The ones who hold our destinies, the ones who wield the swords,
But for every song that for a man does languish,
Grant me some lines for my secret soul’s anguish.’
He seemed to be withholding judgement, his gnomish countenance weighing the question. There was a long pause. Then he said, very slowly, as in a courtroom, ‘Granted.’
She bowed her head and salaamed him. And produced from Samina’s custody her sheaf of verses tied in their silk cloth. She laid it before him on a table he drew up. He had weak eyes and he had gone suddenly very gruff, very crotchety. He called for his spectacles. The retainer appeared with them. He signalled for more lights to be switched on. He signalled for sherbet. He put on his glasses and asked for another light, muttering to himself: ‘Barkh ke lamp se ankhon ko bachaye Allah / Roshni aati hai aur noor chala jaata hai.’
Then he leant forward, squinting at the first verse on the first page:
Nala dile majzoon ka rasa ho nahin sakta, yeh kaam bajuz hukme Khuda ho nahin sakta,
Ulfat teri dil se mere ja hi nahin sakti, nakhoon se bhi gosht juda ho nahin sakta.
Hai khana-e-dil mazhare ansare ilahi—rutbe mein koi usse siwa ho nahin sakta,
Zahir mein alag dono hain batin mein mile hain, mashookh se ashiq to juda ho nahin sakta,
Uljha hai kisi kakule pencha mein mera dil, yeh murghe giraftar riha ho nahin sakta.
Ai Janki khaliq ki paristish hai badi cheez,
Patthar ka jo but hai wah Khuda ho nahin sakta.
He peered at the small letters of her Urdu calligraphy, shaking his head, frowning, before he said in a puzzled voice: ‘This is strangely familiar, bibi. Where have I heard these lines before?’
‘May the offence be forgiven, sir, but this stanza is modelled on one of your own. Permit me to remind you.’
She recited from memory:
‘Mazhab kabhi science ko sajda na karega,
Insan uray bhi to Khuda ho nahin sakte.
Azrah-e-ta-alluq koi jora kare rishta,
Angrez to native ke chacha ho nahin sakte.
Native nahin ho sakte jo gore to hain kya gham,
Gore bhi to bande se Khuda ho nahin sakte.
Hum hon jo collector to wah ho jaye commissioner,
Hum unse kabhi ohdaabra ho nahin sakte.’
‘Oh, ah, yes, I do remember it,’ he said, visibly mollified. ‘Did madam set it before her as she wrote? I’m afraid I make a very peculiar model.’
‘On the contrary, sir. Your verses are like kamrakh chutney that awakens the palate and sets it tingling. Unlike the sugary syrup of other poets that sticks to the throat.’
‘Ah, spoken like a woman at last!’ He smiled his goblin grimace, his eyes twinkling. ‘Only a woman would use this bawarchi-khana trope.’
‘If it please milord to think so, far be it from my intention to disabuse his mind.’ She smiled.
‘But you have, my lady, written a woman’s poem. Where mine dealt with religion and science, with the despair of defeating the angrez, you have turned the stanza on its head and written of love and God.’
‘You think much of the British, sir?’ she asked.
‘Think? I am their servant, bound hand and foot to their benighted sarkar till the day of qayamat! All I can do is write verses, more shame to me, madam!’
‘Laughter punctures the powerful, sir. You do well.’
But he was dressed in a shervani of fine British serge and his carpet slippers were covered with tweed. Her eyes rested wonderingly on them. He noticed her glance, divined her thought and felt compelled to explain: ‘My son, Syed Ishrat Mian brought these slippers for me when he returned from vilayat. I have to regard his feelings too, you understand. But look you, madam, at the carpet these slippers tread on. No firangee thing. The finest Kashmiri. At my lowly feet Bartania and Hind meet.’
‘And one walks all over the other,’ she remarked.
He seemed to like her riposte, for he broke into applause. ‘Wah, madam, that calls for a verse! Ah, here it is: The feet of sahibs cannot bear Hind’s taaseer / They wrap them in tweed for a carpet from Kashmir!’
It was her turn to applaud, though she found his verse silly. Then her eyes fell on the ticking clock on the wall, and she rose from her chair, apologizing profusely.
‘Judge Sahib has graciously conceded me more time than I deserved,’ she murmured. ‘I should be leaving now. Before going, I beg leave to consign my book of poems to his custody, with the humble hope that he may some time glance through its pages and, if possible, instruct me in their improvement . . .’
She was surprised that he readily agreed. But added a stern demand: ‘With pleasure, madam. But bear in mind that the British sarkar pays me a salary for the time I spend in its khidmat. I expect you to do the same.’
‘How so, sir?’
‘Give me a song, lady,’ he said. ‘That I too may boast an equal standing with Knox Sahib and Allen Sahib.’ He grinned his devilish grimace.
‘I shall do s
o, and more.’ She smiled. ‘I shall sing you one of my own compositions, something I have sung for no one.’
The song she sang was in Raga Malhar, a verse she had written recently:
‘Every mercy my Maula confers upon me,
Every blessing and thoughtful sign of reward,
I count it as I count the beads of my rosary,
Tremble and bow down at the feet of my Lord.
Lest for every single mercy from heaven’s amount
There is in hell an equal count
Of sorrows awaiting me, equal to my peace,
For such, it seems, are destiny’s fees,
The abacus of fate must be counted with care,
Give me only as much fortune as my heart can dare.’
He was silent as the song ended. Then he said, ‘My ustad, Waheed Ilahabadi, used to say that the two things a poem needs are sheereeni, sweetness, and sanjeedgi, gravity. This poem of yours, madam, has both and in ample measure.’
Someone had entered the room from the veranda. A tall, slender man of middle age, very personable in his black shervani. He stood beside the door till Akbar noticed him and signalled him to be seated but noiselessly, which the visitor did. By the time Janki’s eyes fell on him she was well into her song, and for a moment her voice shook in self-conscious uneasiness and her voice grew tense, introducing an added stir of emotion to her lines, which only served to lift her song to an elated pitch of utterance.
‘Well, Haq Sahib,’ Akbar greeted the visitor, ‘you see me engaged otherwise than you are accustomed.’ He uttered a croak of a laugh.
‘So far as I can see, pleasantly,’ said the visitor in a bemused but deferential voice.
‘I have been honoured to receive the famous Janki Bai Ilahabadi in my poor home, Haq Sahib,’ said Akbar, ‘and I am loathe to let her go.’
‘I do not wonder,’ said the visitor. ‘Never mind me, Judge Sahib. My business is not pressing and I can wait. If I may?’
Requiem in Raga Janki Page 15
