There was a stir and flurry on the stairs and Jallu came rushing up to announce the arrival.
Gauhar’s first words, on entering the divan-khana, were: ‘A hookah. How very quaint. Yours?’
When Janki nodded, Gauhar moved impetuously forward to examine the object. ‘Now I know what to send you from Calcutta. I’ll send you the finest hookah with its pipe coiled round with silver. As dainty as a dancer’s hair braid. They’re made very close to my Chitpur villa.’
‘Welcome to Allahabad, Gauhar Sahiba,’ Janki greeted her guest. The guest swirled round and, advancing, put both her arms on Janki’s shoulders in a warm embrace.
‘I am not new to Allahabad,’ she said. ‘I came here earlier this year, incognito, all veiled and disguised.’
Janki was surprised. ‘Really? How so?’
Her guest seated herself on the central divan, raised her eyebrows playfully and said in a mysterious undertone, ‘I had unfinished business with this city.’
Her words invited inquiry but the formality of their association discouraged Janki from asking anything. Instead she signalled to Farida and Samina to bring in the sherbet and make preparations for the repast to follow.
It wasn’t Gauhar’s beauty but her tremendous class, her absolute exclusivity, that first struck you. She looked—and was—of indeterminate race. Dark hair, brown eyes, a European skin. No one could call her slender, yet she wasn’t plump either, though just beginning to fill out and overflow. Her hair was well pomaded and rippled and coiled into a chignon. Her dress too was uniquely indeterminate—a saree which created the impression of a gown. Red velvet with large panels of lace bunched just so, concealing here, promising there, revealing at a third place. A bare navel covered with the lacy gathers of an anchal. Even a hint of bare leg glimpsed through the saucy side-lace of her net saree. Was her underskirt side-slit and lace-panelled too?—Janki wondered. The jewels she wore were tasteful and obviously very expensive, crafted specially to go with her ensemble, their gold filigree repeating the pattern of the lace she wore. She took off her large, round sunglasses and Janki saw that her eyes were finely kohled and her eyelids gently gilded. Her cheekbones were softly touched with rouge and she wore lipstick. On her feet she wore velvet shoes with high heels. The room had filled with her overpowering cologne. Janki remembered the gossip that Gauhar fans swooned over, that the diva never wore the same clothes and jewels twice to any recording or performance, that she matched her clothes to suit the mood of the concert.
‘We of Allahabad are fortunate to have you with us,’ Janki said.
‘It is I who consider myself fortunate, my Janki,’ replied Gauhar gracefully. ‘It is so very kind of the citizens of Allahabad to confer this medal on me. I only wish,’ she sighed, ‘that Allahabad citizens had sent me a train like the maharaja of Datia did once. A special train of eleven coaches, exclusively for me.’
‘Eleven coaches! Who travelled in the other ten?’ asked Janki wonderingly.
‘Oh, my khidmatgars, barbers, my dhobis, maids, horses and syces. Of course, my musicians. But your Allahabadis aren’t royal in temperament—they might be bookish and political and talkative. I heard the whisper that went around when I mentioned the Datia hospitality—“Is she bringing a baraat?” I could tell them what’s often said of me: “Gauhar ke bina mehfil, jaise shauhar ke bina dulhan.” Indeed, a baraat, gentlemen, I might have said, but let that go.’
She had the most fluent eyebrows. Her voice was trained as much in speech as in song and it flowed in many registers. A perfectly finished artwork, flawlessly executed—that was Gauhar.
This was the first time Janki and Gauhar had spent so much time together. Gauhar ate and praised, took a tour of the house, met the musicians and the staff, chirped to the parrots and lowered her beauteous nose into the rosebushes on Janki’s terrace. Far from being haughty, she could be warm and personal when the mood took her. Vivacious, versatile, contrary, vain, sad and self-effacing—during the course of the day Janki saw many sides to her guest’s personality. They spoke of many things.
They spoke of other singers with whom they had performed. Malka Jaan of Chilbila, Badi Maina, Husna Bai of Benaras, Wazir Jaan, Suggan Bai, Mangu Bai. They gossiped about the beautiful Malka Jaan Agrewali’s affair with the much younger Faiyaz Khan. They laughed over Haddu Khan’s indignation when he went for his first gramophone recording. When the large bugle-shaped horns of the microphones were put before him he grew agitated that he was asked to sing for them. His rage was enduring. In later years his special ire was directed at the dog in the HMV emblem. La haula wa la kuwate!—he’d swear—What a way to compliment an artist! To offer him a portrait of what he is now become, a wretched cur in the leash of foreign machines! And the first time the recording was played back for him he was outraged that he was being mocked by the machine. This, he had fumed, is the jest of the devil! They get a mimic to mock me, may Allah smite him dead! I shall not endure it, sirs! He had hobbled out and it had taken six people to soothe him and make him stay.
‘Indeed,’ said Janki, ‘for maestros like him it is hard to squeeze the vastness of a raga into three minutes.’
‘Well, I managed, didn’t I?’ responded Gauhar.
‘You did more than managed. You excelled,’ said Janki.
They spoke of the great Calcutta soirées of Seth Dhulichand and Shyamlal Khatri. And the soirées at Lala Bisesar Das’s bagiya in Allahabad, at Chowk Gangadas, at the Rani Mandi Kothi, at Babu Radheshyam Kalwar’s haveli and the Pakki Haveli at Daraganj. But when Janki spoke of the time she had sung before the raja of Benaras and the laat sahib at the age of eight, Gauhar immediately spoke of the time when she was just ten and she and her mother Malka Jaan sang ‘Jab chhod chale Lucknow’ and ‘Babul mora naihar chhuto jaye’ before the exiled Wajid Ali Shah at Matia Burj. When Janki mentioned her teacher Hassu Khan, Gauhar promptly spoke of Bindadin Maharaj, the Bindadin Maharaj of Wajid Ali Shah’s glittering durbar who had taught her.
‘And, mind you, it was not the pupil that sought out the master but the other way around. It was he who approached my ammi with an offer to tutor me. I travelled to and fro between Calcutta and Lucknow for years to learn from him. What rigour, Janki. My guru practised just one gat—“Thig dha dhig dhig” continuously for three years. Twelve hours a day! And I did not have only one guru but several. Bamacharan Bhattacharya taught me Bengali songs, and Ramesh Chandra Das taught me keertans. There was Srijanbai for dhrupad-dhamar and even a certain Mrs De Silva for English songs.’
Janki noticed that Gauhar did not mention Kale Khan about whom there had been some gossip in music circles. There was something going on between her and Gauhar that made her uncomfortable. A fine edge of rivalry which in Gauhar appeared as condescension camouflaged as friendly advice.
‘English songs too!’ exclaimed Janki. ‘You sang it before the sahibs?’
‘I even recorded it,’ said Gauhar, smiling. ‘It went like this: “My love is a little bird that flies from tree to tree”.’
She sang it in a swinging lilt and Janki clapped and said: ‘Mash-e-Allah!’ Gauhar sang in many Indian languages but this came as a surprise and she was filled with admiration.
‘I’ve heard that a European conductor named Fredliss and his band played Raga Yaman and Poorvi before the viceroy in Baroda and also that Bade Nissar Hussain Khan sang “God Save the King” in Raga Hans Sarang before the Chhote Laat Sahib at Calcutta. For which the Chhote Laat Sahib gave him a huge silver watch and he now uses it to smash almond and walnut shells with! But you are no less. You are a true memsahib,’ said Janki.
‘Shouldn’t I be?’ responded Gauhar. ‘After my Benaras heartbreak I swore to be one.’
‘What happened in Benaras?’ asked Janki cautiously.
Gauhar settled herself comfortably against the satin pillows. ‘Ah, Benaras,’ she said, sighing. ‘I don’t know whether to love it or despise it. It makes you and breaks you. It threw fifty-six stabs at you, my poor Janki, but it hurled many t
imes that number of knife stabs on my young heart when that faithless Chaggan Rai chose his English-twittering wife above me, whom he had kept in love and in his care for three whole years! And me just seventeen years old! You should have seen him warbling English verse to me that he’d written: “Where have you gone, my beloved jaan, leaving my heart asunder?” Before his family found an English-chirping girl for him. So when the mood takes me I turn myself into Eileen Angelina Yeoward again, off and on. For I am English on one side from my Hemmings grandfather and Armenian on the other side from my father. Behold—Gauhar is many, many, many, many, many things!’ She sang out the last words like a refrain. Like the climax of a thumri, thought Janki.
‘It must be strange to change one’s name and identity,’ mused Janki.
‘Strange it is,’ replied Gauhar. ‘Not I alone but my mother as well. Names, faiths, cities—we changed them all. From Eileen Angelina I became Gauhar, the Jewel. A French admirer used to call me Jewel, Bijou. Madame Bijou, he began calling me. “Tu est une autre Madame B,” he used to tell me. What a rascal, Janki. I discovered that the first Madame B. was Madame Bovary, the second was Madame Butterfly . . . you know, the opera. And the book—by Gustave Flaubert, I said to him—“Merci bien, monsieur, then you leave out Madame Blavatsky!” That foxed him.’
Janki knew of none of this. Too dark to flush, too proud to pretend, she shook her head, saying, ‘No, Gauhar Sahiba, I haven’t heard of any of them.’
So Gauhar, the cosmopolitan, patiently explained to her what opera was and who Flaubert was (adding that she’d read Madame Bovary in its French original) and who Madame Blavatsky was.
‘Now in French your name would be Jean-Qui,’ said Gauhar with a comic flourish. ‘Or Jane-Who in English.’
‘Who is Jane?’ asked Janki, by now quite out of her depth.
‘Nobody. Just an English name. Often used for a plain woman. Plain Jane. Oh, not you, I didn’t mean you. But whatever does Janki mean?’
‘It’s one of Sitaji’s names,’ said Janki timidly.
Gauhar gave vent to a tinkling laugh. ‘Ah, the good wife!’ she quipped. ‘When you marry—if you do—your name shall be your certificate of wifely virtue, Sitaji.’
Janki bit her lip. For some reason unknown to her she held back the information that she was married and that her husband was presently at his other house.
But Gauhar was prattling on: ‘Personally, I don’t ever intend marrying. Shaadis are like the notorious pedas of Mathura—if you eat, you regret, if you don’t eat, you regret. I don’t marry my men. I make them pine for me.’
Then followed an intimate and cosy woman-to-woman outpouring of her roller-coaster love life. The raja of Khairagarh, old and dissolute, who had ceremonially undertaken her deflowering—‘Two months my keeper. My keeper, forsooth! As though I was a little tigress. I was too—let me assure you . . .’ The wealthy and love-struck zamindar of Behrampur, Nimai Sen, who took her out riding, introduced her to the races—as Amrit Keshav Naik, the love of her life, did later. ‘Such a man, Janki, you never saw! If I refused him a kiss he wept. If I had a headache he burnt banknotes to make a fire to make me a cup of tea—we were in a deserted dak-bungalow in the hills and the caretaker was away!’
Janki listened, awestruck. ‘Good marriage-worthy creature,’ she remarked, affecting a savvy, frivolous tone.
‘To be honest, I thought so too. If—and it’s always if with these men—he’d consented to actually marry me. But no, Baiji, not for him. Anything but and I mean anything. Gifts of gold, ivory, jewels. Me, I was overcome. I gave him my diamond nose stud as a mark of my devotion. We parted of course.’
‘Did you . . . Did you never meet him again?’ asked Janki, quite absorbed by this tale of Gauhar’s loves.
Gauhar looked at the ceiling, closed her eyes, breathed deep. ‘No. But some day when we are both old he’ll need me again.’
She laid a ringed, bangled hand on Janki’s sleeve. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘do you know what often goes on in my mind as I sing? My lips may be intoning the words of a thumri but my mind is busy, busy, busy. I imagine with such intensity that I often wonder if my thoughts travel to the ones I have loved and knock on the doors of their minds. Yes, even the ones no longer alive.’
The telegraph of inside gossip brought to Janki, some years later, that Gauhar had indeed rushed to Nimai Sen’s bedside as he lay dying but she reached too late. That on arriving she was handed the nose stud which she had once given him, for he had left instructions that it be returned to her when she came. To Janki it sounded like a Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay novel. But that was years after that memorable day that she and Gauhar spent together in her Allahabad kothi.
On that day Gauhar seemed possessed by the need to bare her heart and for a while they were not competing professionals but siblings and soulmates, despite the ambiguity of intimacy and alienness that defined their association.
Of Amrit Keshav Nayak she spoke with real pain. ‘The real love of my life. Him too I never married. There was no need to. We were one in voice and thought and soul. Every time he wrote a song and I set it to tune and sang it, it was a marriage greater than any other.’
‘So you might actually have married him?’
Gauhar looked away, eyes clouded. ‘Maybe, if he’d lived longer. Yes, I might have. Only thirty years old he was, cut down in his flower. Drink killed him. It killed the two people dearest to me, my mother Malka Jaan and Amrit. Yes, I might have married him. I would have . . .’ Her voice trailed away like a song left unfinished, like a string snapped, and Janki had not the heart to remind her of the Mathura peda. There was such sadness in her face that Janki realized, with a woman’s intelligence, that marriage was a sensitive issue with Gauhar for all her feisty bravado.
The bravado was back in a flash. ‘What folly if I had indeed married any of those creatures! My biological father was a knave and my foster father was a gentleman! My father married my mother and deserted her and my adopted father—who I thought was my real father—never married her but stood by her all his life.’
‘My father too. Deserted my mother, I mean,’ faltered Janki. It was hard for her to share such things but Gauhar’s candour invited some confessions.
Gauhar pulled herself upright on the divan. ‘Did he? That’s another thing we have in common. Why did he desert her?’
‘For the love of a woman,’ replied Janki.
‘Ah,’ breathed Gauhar. ‘My dearest Janki, lucky are you whose father left your mother for the love of another woman. Better that than the love of lucre such as my shameless Abbajaan has! Glad I am for my mother that she was rid of the gallant Robert William Yeoward, though it was a long time ago. Listen,’ said Gauhar, turning to face Janki dramatically, ‘I told you I had unfinished business in Allahabad. I came here on a secret mission just a few months back. I came here to track down my long-lost Abbajaan, dear Mr Yeoward.’
‘Here? In Allahabad?’
‘Right here. Come on, don’t look so surprised. He married my mother at the Holy Trinity Church. She was called Victoria Hemmings then, not Malka Jaan, you know. And I was baptized at the Methodist Episcopal Church when I was little Eileen Angelina. So Allahabad and I go back much further than Allahabad and you.’
‘Did you find him?’ asked Janki. The longer one talked to Gauhar the more eventful did her life seem.
‘I did. I really needed to find him. It’s this court-kutcherry business I’ve been embroiled in. With the bastard Bhaglu, who’s been little more than our servant, my mother’s and mine. Actually he’s the son of Ammi’s old maid. Lived on our scraps all his life. Now after Ammi’s death he has the gall to announce that everything I have belongs to him because he is my mother’s blood-begotten son and I, Gauhar, am a bastard! Allah rot his soul. So I swore to go in search of my biological father, who’d walked out on Ammi when I was a tiny child, and produce him in court. And I traced him here—in Allahabad.’
‘Whereabouts in Allahabad?’ Janki ventured.
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Gauhar shook her head. ‘That I can’t tell you. He lives near a certain sugar factory.’ Janki ran her mind over the various sugar factories she knew of but discreetly refrained from any further inquiry.
‘How pleased he must have been to find that the celebrated Gauhar Jaan is his daughter,’ Janki remarked.
Gauhar tossed her head disdainfully. ‘Very pleased indeed,’ she said, ‘especially when he asked me to pay him Rs 9000 for appearing in court and declaring that he was lawfully wedded to Ammi and that I was his legitimate, biological daughter! He said he would. With papers and all. If I paid him Rs 9000!’
‘Nine thousand!’
‘That’s nothing to me, understand. I spent Rs 1200 on my cat’s wedding and 20,000 when she had a litter and I threw a banquet that all Calcutta attended.’
‘Someone told me that the nawab of Junagarh spent Rs 2 lakh on the wedding of his dog. Maharajas were invited to the feast and portraits painted of all his dogs, all dressed in gold. And Abdul Karim Khan has a singing dog named Tipoo Mian who performs onstage. My own parrot, Munne Mian, can sing a thumri as well as any, I assure you!’
Requiem in Raga Janki Page 22
