Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  ‘Just as you say.’

  She was relieved. ‘God bless you, Hashmat Ullah Sahib. You are an answer to all my prayers. Where would I be without you?’

  ‘Exactly where you find yourself now, madam, but maybe a lot worse.’ His voice, she thought, was overly stinging, and felt confirmed in her suspicions and also deeply dejected.

  ‘Do you recall what you said to me when I once jested about standing beneath a canopy with you? You said, “Baiji thinks far too highly of herself and far too poorly of my intelligence, that she should imagine me capable of such complete folly.” I wish that you had thought highly enough of this foolish singing-woman and less highly of your own respectability and intelligence, Hashmat Ullah Sahib.’

  He turned away, his face strained. ‘I wish that had been so,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s a long time back, madam.’

  There was sadness between them. He saw her to the door, promising to work out the details of the Trust.

  When a week had gone by Feroza announced the visitor: ‘Sahib wants to meet you, begum sahiba.’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘He says he wishes to speak to you.’

  ‘Bar the door in his face, Feroza. Tell him I said I am not at home.’

  When Abdul Haq came striding indignantly in she reared up like a hooded cobra in full fury and ordered him out.

  ‘What ill grace is this, begum? Stop this nonsense immediately, I command you!’ he shouted.

  She towered up before him, sizzling. ‘Command, ah? A petty dependant dares use this word! Begone! Take your foul face out of my sight!’

  It could not have been better calculated to sting.

  ‘Your dependant?’ he shouted. ‘Heaven forbid I should ever have to live off the takings of a draggled old singing whore!’

  ‘No?’ she sneered. ‘No objection had you to the walls and roofs that sheltered you when you had none in this city to call your own, Haq Sahib. And as for being a tawaif, better to be an honourable tawaif than a niggling lawyer with nothing better on his mind than gutter-scum schemes on his little daughter-in-law’s bed!’

  He paled. He shot off a glance in Feroza’s direction. She was quick to seize it.

  ‘Your guiles are no secret, Haq Sahib. All the household is wise of it, more shame to me! And if you do not leave my house instantly I shall make sure that the entire city, yes, your courthouse circles, your municipality circles, everyone shall grow wise of it and your very family be ready to spit on your face!’

  He stood still a long while, then turned to go. She called after him: ‘It shall be better for both of us if your blighted shadow does not darken my door. Ever again. Not now and not when I am dead.’

  If he heard he made no sign of protest or rejoinder. She was still trembling when she heard the wheels of the tonga creak into motion outside and horses’ hoofs tattooing down the cobbled path and fade away. She sank shakily into an armchair and sat, gripping its armrests as though she feared she’d be thrown off.

  It was some time later that she summoned Chandni to the room. ‘I have thrown him out, bitiya,’ she said simply. ‘For all time. There is now just you and me, child.’

  Her persistent dream returned in a new rendition, a dream that had a new refrain, that chanted that in some people the soul too decayed, as the body did. That she was trying to stem that rot, lifting a potful of water, she, Radha at the panghat. And as she brings it away, balanced on her head, she hears a voice call: Stop! The assignment she was given was to separate the Ganga and the Yamuna from the clay pot and she finds herself sitting with a sieve, straining the water, which escaped continually through the mesh, mocking her efforts, while her mind chanted a song of its own mad making: ‘Sakhi-ri, main chali thi neer pachhore’. Where had she heard that before? She was singing ‘Sri Ram kripalu’, tears welling in her eyes. She was singing a naat, her voice choking with feeling. She dreamt she was on an oarless raft, drifting away from the Ganga bank and never quite managing to reach the Yamuna end, her raft reeling downstream instead and Hassu’s ringing voice breaking in: Don’t struggle. You’re on a mightier river, bibi. Give yourself up to it and don’t worry about the banks. With sudden, superlative lucidity her mind spoke up: How right he is. My two faiths are like two different ragas of the soul and I have learnt to sing them both and I am blest.

  It changed, the mad song of her mind. Till it was no longer a business of separating the water of two rivers, blue and white, but of sifting the dark waters of death from those of life, telling night from day and aversion from relief. Until it became a life-threatening wager between sickness and soundness, between her own body’s excretions and odours, her retchings and helpless incontinences and the drifting of her senses into the transparencies of ragas she had never known existed in the ether, in the oblivion over which Davidson brooded like a dour dignitary and little Chandni hung around, ever present on the fringes of consciousness, feeding her, sponging her, changing her garments, spooning medicine into her parched mouth.

  When she woke up in the Bailey Hospital days later Samina broke the news to her as gently as she could. Yes, it was the summer curse, the cholera, but by the grace of God and the diligence of Davidson Sahib, she had weathered the storm. But, such are Allah’s incomprehensible ways, the little Chandni, who had been by her side through the worst days, had also caught it and died.

  She was much too feeble to weather this storm. She turned her ragged old body to the wall and wept into her pillow for the sweet child of her oldening years, that brief lyric granted her heart by some capricious fate and as capriciously recalled just as the spent heart had known a prelude of ease. Chandni died while she, Janki, lay senseless on her hospital bed. She returned, days later, to a house so silent that no music could ever hope to fill it. What filled it now was the sound of hacking coughs. Longer than any taan could be, intricate lurchings of breath that squelched through the puddles of phlegm in her throat as her body let loose its many other voices.

  22

  Strings are metallic things. Fret and bellow are material. The gramophone record is shellac. The larynx is flesh. Moulded muscle, a distended loop of sore cell stuff battling a rasp, a scooping lung- grazing whoop and wheeze, and a drag and a haul of tortured breath. Interminably, till it brought up blood. This too one of the body’s mad harangues. Music isn’t the structure’s main function. In time the brute metal or wood or flesh shall up and rebel, declaring its dominance. Bande Ali Khan Sahib knew this rage when he lifted aloft his veena and flung it on the ground to smash into many pieces. You want to hear the sound of my veena? he shouted. Here is the sound. Hear it! The sound is not just what the instrument makes when the notes are contrived together in sweet concord but equally the jangle of dismemberment when the notes crash free. Such notes that never are tamed.

  One afternoon she called Mahesh Chand Vyas to her side. He had hovered around her sickbed, loyally tending her, running errands, fetching and carrying and reading out documents from the Trust’s files that Hashmat Ullah routinely sent for her perusal.

  ‘There’s something you owe me, Mahesh,’ she spoke with difficulty. ‘Though the music classes haven’t met for some time, still there’s some guru-offering pending, if you remember.’

  ‘Yes, Bai Sahiba?’ He looked apprehensive.

  ‘I want you to promise me that when I die Abdul Haq should not be allowed anywhere near me. Do what has to be done and do it as fast as you can.’ He knelt at her bedside, at a loss for words. She dragged out the words, sorry for this poor lad who had come to learn music and got himself such an assignment.

  She beckoned him closer. ‘This that I say to you is more important than any music that I might have taught you, had I time enough. There are three things to count on, boy. One’s own money, earned by one’s own labour. The energy of one’s own body, the strength of one’s arm. And trust in God’s grace. Write this down in your bandish book.’

  He strained to catch her words, and did. She seemed to have drifted off again.
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br />   There was in her delusions no chronology, just a gentle time shuffle. Lying, cough-racked, she was sure she had lifted her tanpura and wheezed and gasped her way through a raga for the fakir who waited patiently listening to her laboured breaths as she picked up her creaking riyaz for him. She knew him but couldn’t place him. There were notes she could not touch, new notes entirely outside any scale, and notes she had once commanded and now could not.

  Singing was a travail. She took a long drag of breath, produced a trail of tortuous syllables. It was like dredging out a tune buried deep in a silted riverbed. Such an exertion. Sweat beaded her forehead, her throat felt raw. Each syllable she sang tore at it, shard-sharp, before her voice snagged on a note and splintered in an explosive bout of coughing, spattering her headcloth with more blood. She would not give up. Her cracked voice strained, tantalized by new phrases of sonic truth that vibrated just beyond her capacities. Did one have to break out of this poor wrecked instrument to reach them? In her sleep she wondered who he was. Strayed father, strayed son, or old assailant who’d dealt the wounds? Or the Sayyad of Mausiqui come at last? In delusion they merged into one. She knew him but could not place him. ‘Hari bin morey kaun khabar le?’ Was he the swara-soul, the sakshi, all the faces of all her audiences fused into one? Or her own soul-face, worn, hung with beads, dressed in patched and faded rags, with calloused hands and dusty feet, such a mist settled on its face? Is this fakir my accompanist or rival, challenging me to sing, or a blind lover who has eyes that do not see my ugliness, my ruin? Instead he looks past my derelict being and into the depths of me and plucks some essential bit that has stayed untransformed, like a pebble on the bed of a changeable river or a crystal note beneath an uproar of music? My blindness too, for I look past his rags and his tree-bark face and I know him and cannot place him.

  Dreaming the raga in sleep. Not hearing it but living its onward flow in a music drowse. Scraps of crumbled phrases spelling themselves out in elemental successions, in essential inevitabilities. Until the mind jolts awake on a diamond-hard vein of stillness with a wisp of tune floating out of reach in the just- vacated silence. The interior diction of her life carried on in the language of her old songs as faces floated into her mind. At one time she thought she glimpsed Manki as her mind murmured: ‘Usase kuchh mera bhi zikare dile nashad rahe.’ Another time it was someone resembling Chandni and she heard her own voice sing: ‘Jui ka fulva hathva lagat.’ How it traps us. We long to sing another song but we end up singing the same one. All night the words of compositions keep revolving in the head. I sang because the song set me free, lifted me above my body and my limited life. Now my song has become my dungeon. And always that fakir outside my barred window—is he in my dream or am I in his? Is he singing me into being? I thought I’d created a raga and its name was Janki. Create is wrong. All I’d done was contrive the swaras in a certain disposition. An arrangement of units that gathered in a cumulus of self, a soul-code irreplaceable by any other and signifying I, me, Janki, this person here. What time of day would this raga belong to? ‘Jabki khamosh hui bulbul bustane husain.’ Sunset perhaps or the deepest night. But the way she felt an inward opening it could well be the Brahmamuhurta, the God-instant. Hari bin morey kaun khabar le? Am I a raga in his mind? Is this a swoon or have I drifted out of life and is that the singing of reality outside my window? ‘Dil sahabe aulad se insaaf talab hai.’

  My song now feels all wrong to me, its false notes jar. It’s the politics of the self invading, but do not judge my infirmity, I was not always thus and I called to my Maula and begged: ‘Take away this pain. It grows unbearable.’ Said my Lord to me: ‘And what shall you pay me, Janki, were I to relieve you of your pain?’ ‘Whatever my Master thinks fit.’ ‘So be it,’ said my Maula. ‘I take away your pain, but you must give me your song too.’ ‘Only let me sing my last.’ She half-raised herself to sing it.

  23

  What is it that dies? An intensified self, sharpened to its quintessential core, though to all the world insensate. The last moments of legendary singers might well call for a separate session of my storytelling but for the present be content with these few. When Bade Ghulam Ali Khan Sahib lay dying his mind was still engrossed in notes and scales. His last words, addressed to his son, were: ‘If you suppose the sound of the table fan is “sa”, the dog’s barking outside is the “re” and “ga” of Todi.’ When Abdul Karim Khan, travelling from Madras to Pondicherry, felt an uneasiness of the heart, he immediately got off the train at a deserted village station, asked his accompanists to tune their instruments, and seated on the railway platform of a tiny station, with his face to Mecca, he managed to produce a Darbari Kanhra in offering before he collapsed. When Mushtaq Hussain Khan sank dying in the arms of a disciple, his words, gasped with his last breath, were: ‘Lord, the touch of your grace made a singer of me. Forgive me my wrongs.’ Janki died on the 18 May 1934. She died alone. Her body lay, unattended, until news reached her pupil, Mahesh Chand Vyas, who rushed down, called the police, stood by through the formalities of the panchnama, after which, finding no other means of transport, he hastily hired a cart from construction-site labourers and conveyed her remains to the Kaladanda cemetery for a hurried burial. Thereby honouring the promise he had made to her. The Trust built a small monument over her grave later. But not before Abdul Haq had arrived to claim whatever cash and valuables fell to his share as husband of the deceased. It is part of the Janki Bai legend in the city of Allahabad that her vast wardrobe of costumes found its way to Benaras where her clothes were burnt for their silver and gold thread and four seers of gold and seven seers of silver extracted and claimed by Haq Sahib.

  There is another scrap of city lore that for a long time after her passing a fakir was daily sighted near her mazaar, standing motionless before the incense he had lit.

  Glossary and Notes

  Chapter 1

  Todi: a certain raga

  raees: an affluent or aristocratic person

  dhrupad: a genre of Hindustani classical music

  Sayyad of Mausiqui: the holy soul of music

  rasika: aficionado, connoisseur

  Chapter 2

  ‘Jamuna tat Shyam khelein Hori’: A famous song in the Hindustani classical tradition, describing the god Krishna splashing colour on his women companions during the festival of Holi on the bank of the river Yamuna.

  nazrana: a gift or offering, usually cash

  malkin: mistress

  nath babu: A man engaged, often by choosing the highest bidder, to ritually deflower a young girl who is to be initiated as a prostitute. A festive occasion in traditional brothels in former times called the ‘nath-uthrai’, or removal of the nose ring.

  divan-khana: sitting room

  alaap: the opening phase of a raga when the essential notes are sung or played

  ‘Maza le le rasiya nayi jhulni ka’: Enjoy the pleasures of the new swing, O sensuous one.

  iman: honour

  Shagun-Nek: auspicious welcome offering

  angrez laat sahib: British lord sahib

  kothi: mansion

  jamadar: junior rank khayal, dhrupad and tappa, not just the thumri

  kothri: tiny room

  shringar: the erotic essence in Indian aesthetics

  tasveer-khana: picture gallery

  khayal, dhrupad, tappa, thumri: genres of Hindustani classical music

  ganika: honoured courtesan

  gandharva: celestial being, less than divine but superior to humans and associated with music-making

  ragas and raginis: major and minor arrangements of notes in traditional patterns expressing moods and hours of the day

  apsara: celestial danseuse, often a temptress of ideal beauty

  Brahmamuhurta: divine hour before dawn

  riyaz: diligent practice

  Chapter 3

  seer and chhatak: units of weight measurement, now obsolete, a seer or ser being one-fourth of a kilogram. The seer was larger than a chhatak.

  b
hauji: colloquial term for brother’s sister

  qawwals: singers belonging to a particular genre of north Indian music

  chaitis, horis and kajris: songs sung during certain seasons. Light classical Hindustani music.

  gadar: the Uprising of 1857

  panjeeri: sweet, flavoured wheat powder, ritually distributed after Hindu worship

  arzee: application

  Kashi Vishvanath: one of Shiva’s names and the most important of Benaras’s temples

  ‘Mo pe daar gayo sare rang ki gagar’: He emptied the entire potful of colour on me. Traditional song referring to Krishna playing Holi with his cowgirl companions.

  Chapter 4

  moholla: locality

  aheer: an Indian sub-caste of cow herders and dairy farmers

  bhang: hemp, used as a psychotropic drug

  sandukchi: small trunk or chest

  payal: ankle chain

  kimkhwab: a rich fabric dupatta; stole or headcloth of fine cloth

  kutcha: built of earth

  mujra: originally meaning a respectful offering, a song, sometimes accompanied by dancing or histrionic gestures, sung by a courtesan

  nihayat badsoorat: extremely ugly

  Chapter 5

  nautanki: a form of folk theatre popular in Avadh

  chunariya: headcloth often ritually offered to the goddess

  havan: a ritual fire sacrifice

  sasural: husband’s homestead, in extended families the father-in-law’s home as well

  palki: palanquin

  pahalwan: wrestler, a powerfully built man

  muhjali: burnt-face

  raas: love dance, originally demonstrating the love play between Krishna and his women friends

  akhara: wrestling pit

  dhamar: a genre of Hindustani vocal music