A River Sutra (5 page)

'7prostrate my head to Your drawn sword. O, the wonder of Your kindness. O, the wonder of my submission

"In the very spasm of death I see Your face. 0, the wonder of Your protection. O, the wonder of my submission. "

The clarity of the voice, even through the hissing of the old record, is so extraordinary, each note hanging in the stillness like a drop of water, that it is some time before I decipher the savagery of the lyrics.

"Do not reveal the Truth in a world where blasphemy prevails.
0 wondrous Source of Mystery. 0, Knower of Secrets.

"I bare my neck to Your naked blade. 0, the wonder of Your guidance. O, the wonder of my submission. "

Seeing my reaction to the song, Tariq Mia laughs and removes the arm from the record. "Drink some tea, little brother. How can you say you have given up the world when you know so little of it?"

He places a fresh cup of tea by my side. For a moment he stands at the edge of the veranda watching the water flowing under the bridge. Then he turns back to me. "Let me tell you another story, little brother. Perhaps it will help you understand the ways of the human heart."

He walks back to the chess table and slowly lowers himself onto his cushion. "This tale begins two years ago during the festival that celebrates the anniversary of Amir Rumi's death. I am an old man and can no longer keep vigil with the ecstasies of our Quawwali singers. You know how they can continue all night—nine, ten singers at a time. When one tires the other takes the song, inebriating them all with his devotion until they become drunk with singing and no longer remember fatigue in their praise of God."

I nod in understanding. Tariq Mia often speaks to me about the ecstatic songs of the Sufis, which can even move their listeners to dance with religious rapture.

"But, as I say, I am an old man and too close to meeting God myself to exhaust what little energy remains to me in singing to him all night, so I was fast asleep in my bed, my dreams filled with the richness of the music, too tired to hear the knocking at my window. Also, it was not a loud banging, just an insistent tapping on the glass that must have been going on for some time before it finally woke me.

"I opened my eyes and saw a face peering at me through the glass. I reluctantly got out of my bed to open the window. A man was standing outside, dressed in a close-collared jacket and a white dhoti. His thin gray hair was receding from his forehead and heavy-rimmed spectacles magnified the frightened expression in his brown eyes as he apologized again and again for disturbing my rest.

' "It was some time before I was able to convince him to come inside. When at last he entered my room, I lit the lantern and poured him a glass of water, unable to understand why he was here. From his dress I could see he was not from this part of the country. Also, grief seemed to seep through his clothing although he was not weeping. I urged him to tell me what was troubling him.

" 'Your son? Have you lost your son in these hills?'
"He handed me a record, saying 'The boy always wanted to sing at the tomb of Amir Rumi.'
" 'How can I help you unless you tell me what has happened?'
" 'No one can help me. I am a murderer. But I must give the boy's music to Amir Rumi. Can you do this for me?'
"I took the record, assuring him I would see it was treasured as a valued offering to the saint's memory.
"He looked relieved and I could see the gentleness in his eyes. Thinking to ease the man's mind a little, I encouraged him to tell me about the crime of which he accused himself.
"Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, or the ecstasy of the singers pouring through the open window, which gave him the strength to speak. But once he began it was as if he could not halt himself."

Master Mohan was not a bitter man. Although he led an unhappy life, his gentle nature disposed him to small acts of kindness—helping a stranger to dismount from a rickshaw, reaching into his pockets to find a boiled sweet for a child—and when he walked down the narrow streets leading to the avenue where he boarded the tram that took him to his music students, he was greeted warmly by the neighbors sitting on their tiny verandas to catch the breeze.

"Good evening, Master Mohan."
"A late class tonight?"
"Walk under the streetlights coming home,

lime paste onto his paan leaves always shouted from inside his wooden stall, "Master! Master! Let me give you a paan. A little betel leaf will help you through the pain of hearing your students sing."

Even though it meant losing his place on the queue, Master Mohan stopped to talk to the paanwallah and listen to his gossip of the comings and goings in the quarter. And so he was the first to learn the great Quawwali singers from Nizamuddin were coming to Calcutta.

"You should ask Mohammed-sahib to go with you. You are a teacher of music, he is a lover of poetry. And they are singing so close, in that mosque on the other side of the bazaar."

"But my wife will not go even that far to hear—"
"Wives! Don't talk to me of wives. I never take mine anywhere. Nothing destroys a man's pleasure like a wife."
Master Mohan knew the paanwallah was being kind. His wife's contempt for him was no secret on their street. The small houses were built on top of each other, and his wife never bothered to lower her voice. Everyone knew she had come from a wealthier family than his and could barely survive on the money he brought back from his music lessons.
"What sins did I commit in my last life that I should be yoked to this apology for a man? See how you are still called Master Mohan as if you were only ten years old. Gupta-sahib you should be called. But who respects you enough to make even that small effort!"
Her taunts reopened a wound that might have healed if only Master Mohan's wife had left him alone. The music teacher had acquired the name as a child singer when he had filled concert halls with admirers applauding the purity of his voice. His father, himself a music teacher, had saved every paisa from his earnings to spend on Master Mohan's training, praying his son's future would be secured with a recording contract.
But it takes a very long time for a poor music teacher to cultivate connections with the owners of recording studios. For four years Master Mohan's father had pleaded for assistance from the wealthy families at whose houses his son sang on the occasion of a wedding or a birthday. For four years he had stood outside recording studios, muffling his coughs as tuberculosis ate away at his lungs, willing himself to stay alive until his son's talent was recognized, urging the boy to practice for that first record which would surely astonish the world.
When the recording contract was finally offered, only weeks before the record was to be made, Master Mohan's voice had broken.
Every day his wife reminded him how his voice had not mellowed in the years that followed. "Your family has the evil eye. Whatever you touch is cursed, whatever you are given you lose."
Sometimes Master Mohan tried to escape his wife's taunts by reminding himself of those four years of happiness that had preceded the moment when the golden bowl of his voice had shattered and with it his life. As her shrill insults went on and on, drilling into his brain, he found himself only able to remember his father's anguish that his son would have to abandon a great career as a singer, becoming just another music teacher like himself.
Master Mohan's father had made one last effort to help his son by engaging him in marriage to the daughter of a rich village landowner who loved music. He had lived long enough to see the marriage performed but not long enough to celebrate the birth of his two grandchildren, or to witness the avarice of his daughter-in-law when her own father died and her brothers took the family wealth, leaving her dependent on Master Mohan's earnings.
Prevented by pride from criticizing her family, Master Mohan's wife had held her husband responsible for the treachery of her brothers, raising their children to believe it was only Master Mohan's weakness and stupidity that had robbed them of the servants, the cars, the fancy clothes from foreign countries that should have been their right.
"How can I ever forgive myself for burdening you with this sorry creature for a father? Come, Babloo, come, Dolly. Have some fruit. Let him make his own tea."
With such exactitude had she perfected her cruelty that Master Mohan's children despised their father's music as they despised him, allying themselves with their mother's neglect.
After giving music lessons all day Master Mohan was left to cook a meager meal for himself, which he took up to the small roof terrace of the house to escape his household's contempt. But he could not escape the blaring film music from the radio, or the loud noise of the gramophone echoing up the narrow stone stairwell leading to the terrace. It set him coughing, sometimes so loudly that his wife, or his daughter and son, would run up the stairs yelling at him to be quiet. Though he tried Master Mohan could not stop coughing. It was a nervous reaction to his family's ability to silence the music he heard in his own head.
So when the paanwallah told him about the Quawwali singers, Master Mohan found himself daydreaming on the tram. He had never heard the singers from Nizamuddin where Quawwali music had been born seven hundred years ago. But he knew Nizamuddin had been the fountain from which the poems and songs of the great Sufi mystics had flowed throughout India, and that even today its teachers still trained the finest Quawwali musicians in the country. He could not believe his good fortune—seven nights spent away from his wife and children listening to their music. And what is more, the music could be heard free.
On his way home that evening he stopped outside Mohammed-sahib's house. Finding him on his veranda, Master Mohan asked shyly if he would be listening to the Quawwali singers.
"Only if you accompany me. I am a poor fool who never knows what he is hearing unless it is explained to him."
So it was settled, and the next week Master Mohan hardly heard his wife and children shouting at him as he cooked himself a simple meal, relishing the taste of it while they listened to their noisy film music.
"Make sure you do not wake up the whole house when you return!" his wife shouted behind him as he slipped into the street.
By the time Master Mohan and Mohammed-sahib reached the tent tethered to one side of the mosque, the singing had begun and curious bazaar children crowded at the entrances.
Mohammed-sahib peered over their heads in disappointment. "We are too late. There is nowhere for us to sit."
Master Mohan refused to give up so easily. He squeezed past the children to look for a vacant place in the tent filled with people listening in rapt attention to the passionate devotional music breaking in waves over their heads.
He felt a familiar excitement as he led his friend to a small gap between the rows of people crushed against each other on the floor. The fluorescent lights winking from the struts supporting the tent, the musty odor of the cotton carpets covering the ground brought back the concerts of his childhood, and a constriction inside himself began to loosen.
On the podium nine performers sat cross-legged in a semicircle around a harmonium and a pair of tablas. An old sheikh from Nizamuddin sat to one side, his white beard disappearing into the loose robes flowing around him. Every now and then a spectator, moved by the music, handed the sheikh money, which he received as an offering to God before placing it near the tabla drums sending their throbbing beat into the night.
The more the singers were carried away by their music, the more Master Mohan felt the weight that burdened him lighten, as if the ecstasy of the song being relayed from one throat to another was lifting him into a long-forgotten ecstasy himself.
Twice Mohammed-sahib got up to place money at the sheikh's feet. Master Mohan watched him stepping over crossed legs as he made his way to stage, ashamed his own poverty prevented him from expressing gratitude to the singers for reviving emotions that he had thought dead.
After two hours Mohammed-sahib's funds and patience were exhausted, and he went home. Gradually the tent began to empty until only a few beggar children remained, asleep on the cotton carpets. Master Mohan looked at his watch. It was three o'clock in the morning.
In front of Master Mohan a young woman holding the hand of a child suddenly approached the podium to whisper to the sheikh. The sheikh leaned across to the singers wiping perspiration from their foreheads.
The lead singer nodded wearily and the young woman pulled the child behind her up the stairs. The boy stumbled twice, struggling to recover his balance. Then he was on the podium, both hands stretched in front of him. Master Mohan realized the boy was blind as the woman pushed him down next to the singers.
The lead singer sang a verse. The other singers took up the chorus. The lead singer sang another verse, his arm extended to the boy who could not see him. The singers prodded him and the startled child entered the song two octaves above the others.

"I prostrate my head to the blade of Your sword.
0, the wonder of my submission. 0, the wonder of Your protection. "