The thought of the great artist's treason, the contempt with which Majeed Khan, despite his own undoubted gifts, had treated the tradition that had given him birth continued to enrage Ishaq.
'Why does Khan Sahib not favour us with a response ?' he went on, oblivious to his friends' attempts to restrain
407him. 'There are subjects, no matter how distanced he is today, on which Khan Sahib can illuminate our understanding. Who else has the background ? We have heard of Khan Sahib's illustrious father and grandfather.'
'Ishaq, I knew your father, and I knew your grandfather. They were men who understood the meaning of respect and discrimination.'
'They looked at the worn grooves on their fingernails without feeling dishonoured,' retorted Ishaq.
The people at the neighbouring tables had stopped talking, and were listening to the exchange between the younger and the older man. That Ishaq, baited himself, was now doing the baiting, attempting to hurt and humiliate Ustad Majeed Khan, was painful and obvious. The scene was horrible, but everyone seemed to be frozen into immobility.
Ustad Majeed Khan said slowly and passionlessly : 'But they, believe me, would have felt dishonoured if they had been alive to see their son flirting with the sister of an employer, whose body his bow helps sell.'
He looked at his watch and got up. He had another performance in ten minutes. Almost to himself and with the utmost simplicity and sincerity, he said, 'Music is not a cheap spectacle - not the entertainment of the brothel. It is \ikeprayer.'
Before Ishaq could respond he had started walking towards the door. Ishaq got up and almost lunged towards him. He was gripped by an uncontrollable spasm of pain and fury, and his two friends had to force him bodily down into his chair. Other people joined in, for Ishaq was well-liked, and had to be prevented from doing further damage.
'Ishaq Bhai, enough's been said.'
'Listen, Ishaq, one must swallow it - whatever our elders say, however bitter.'
'Don't ruin yourself. Think of your brothers. If he talks to the Director Sahib '
'Ishaq Bhai, how many times have I told you to guard your tongue!'
408'Listen, you must apologize to him immediately.'
But Ishaq was almost incoherent :
'Never - never - I'll never apologize - on my father's grave - to that - to think, that such a man who insults the memory of his elders and mine - everyone creeps on all fours before him - yes, Khan Sahib, you can have a twenty-five-minute slot - yes, yes, Khan Sahib, you decide which raag you will sing - O God ! If Miya Tansen were alive he would have cried to hear him sing his raag today - 8 that God should have given him this gift -'
'Enough, enough, Ishaq ' said an old sitar player.
Ishaq turned towards him with tears of hurt and anger :
'Would you marry your son to his daughter? Or your daughter to his son ? Who is he that God is in his pocket ?
- he talks like a mullah about prayer and devotion - this man who spent half his youth in Tarbuz ka Bazaar -'
People began to turn away in pity and discomfort from Ishaq. Several of Ishaq's well-wishers left the canteen to try and pacify the insulted maestro, who was about to agitate the airwaves in his own great agitation.
'Khan Sahib, the boy didn't know what he was saying.'
Ustad Majeed Khan, who was almost at the door of the studio, said nothing.
'Khan Sahib, elders have always treated their youngers like children, with tolerance. You must not take what he said seriously. None of it is true.'
Ustad Majeed Khan looked at the intercéder and said: 'If a dog pisses on my achkan, do I become a tree ?'
The sitar player shook his head and said, 'I know it was the worst time he could have chosen - when you were about to perform, Ustad Sahib….'
But Ustad Majeed Khan went on to sing a Hindol of calm and surpassing beauty.
6.3
IT had been some days since Saeeda Bai had saved Maan from suicide, as he put it. Of course it was extremely
409unlikely - and his friend Firoz had told him so when he had complained to him of his lovelorn miseries - that that happy-go-lucky young man would have made any attempt even to cut himself while shaving in order to prove his passion for her. But Maan knew that Saeeda Bai, though hard-headed, was - at least to him - tender-hearted ; and although he knew she did not believe that he was in any danger from himself if she refused to make love to him, he also knew that she would take it as more than a merely flattering figure of speech. Everything is in the saying, and Maan, while saying that he could not go on in this harsh world without her, had been as soulful as it was possible for him to be. For a while all his past loves vanished from his heart. The dozen or more 'girls of good family' from Brahmpur whom he had been in love with and who in general had loved him in return, ceased to exist. Saeeda Bai - for that moment at least - became everything for him.
And after they had made love, she became more than everything for him. Like that other source of domestic strife, Saeeda Bai too made hungry where most she satisfied. Part of it was simply the delicious skill with which she made love. But even more than that it was her nakhra, the art of pretended hurt or disaffection that she had learnt from her mother and other courtesans in the early days in Tarbuz ka Bazaar. Saeeda Bai practised this with such curious restraint that it became infinitely more believable. One tear, one remark that implied - perhaps, only perhaps implied - that something he had said or done had caused her injury - and Maan's heart would go out to her. No matter what the cost to himself, he would protect her from the cruel, censorious world. For minutes at a time he would lean over her shoulder and kiss her neck, glancing every few moments at her face in the hope of seeing her mood lift. And when it did, and he saw that same bright, sad smile that had so captivated him when she sang at Holi at Prem Nivas, he would be seized by a frenzy of sexual desire. Saeeda Bai seemed to know this, and graced him with a smile only when she herself was in the mood to satisfy him.
410She had framed one of the paintings from the album of Ghalib's poems that Maan had given her. Although she had, as far as was possible, repaired the page that the Raja of Marh had ripped out of the volume, she had not dared to display that particular illustration for fear of exciting his further fury. What she had framed was 'A Persian Idyll', which showed a young woman dressed in pale orange, sitting near an arched doorway on a very pale orange rug, holding in her slender fingers a musical instrument resembling a sitar, and looking out of the archway into a mysterious garden. The woman's features were sharp and delicate, unlike Saeeda Bai's very attractive but unclassical, perhaps not even beautiful, face. And the instrument that the woman was holding - unlike Saeeda Bai's strong and responsive harmonium - was so finely tapered in the stylized illustration that it would have been entirely impossible to play it.
Maan did not care that the book might be considered damaged by having the painting thus plundered from its pages. He could not have been happier at this sign of Saeeda Bai's attachment to his gift. He lay in her bedroom and stared at the painting and was filled with a happiness as mysterious as the garden through the archway. Whether glowing with the immediate memory of her embraces or chewing contentedly at the delicate coconut-flavoured paan that she had just offered to him at the end of a small ornamented silver pin, it seemed to him that he himself had been led by her and her music and her affection into a paradisal garden, most insubstantial and yet most real.
'How unimaginable it is,' said Maan out loud rather dreamily, 'that our parents also must.have - just like us -'
This remark struck Saeeda Bai as being in somewhat poor taste. She did not at all wish her imagination to be transported to the domestic love-making of Mahesh Kapoor - or anyone else for that matter. She did not know who her own father was: her mother, Mohsina Bai, had claimed not to know. Besides, domesticity and its standard concerns were not objects of fond contemplation for her. She had been accused by Brahmpur gossip of destroying
411several settled marriages by casting her lurid nets around hapless men. She said a little sharply to Maan :
'It is good to live in a household like I do where one does not have to imagine such things.'
Maan looked a little chastened. Saeeda Bai, who was quite fond of him by now and knew that he usually blurted out the first thing that came into his head, tried to cheer him up by saying :
'But Dagh Sahib looks distressed. Would he have been happier to have been immaculately conceived ?'
'I think so,' said Maan. 'I sometimes think I would be happier without a father.'
'Oh ?' said Saeeda Bai, who had clearly not been expecting this.
'Oh, yes,' said Maan. 'I often feel that whatever I do my father looks upon with contempt. When I opened the cloth business in Banaras, Baoji told me it would be a complete failure. Now that I have made a go of it, he is taking the line that I should sit there every day of every month of every year of my life. Why should I ?'
Saeeda Bai did not say anything.
'And why should I marry ?' continued Maan, spreading his arms wide on the bed and touching Saeeda Bai's cheek with his left hand. 'Why ? Why ? Why ? Why ? Why ?'
'Because your father can get me to sing at your wedding,' said Saeeda Bai with a smile. 'And at the birth of your children. And at their mundan ceremony. And at their marriages, of course.' She was silent for a few seconds. 'But I won't be alive to do that,' she went on. 'In fact I sometimes wonder what you see in an old woman like me.'
Maan became very indignant. He raised his voice and said, 'Why do you say things like that? Do you do it just to get me annoyed ? No one ever meant much to me until I met you. That girl in Banaras whom I met twice under heavy escort is less than nothing to me - and everyone thinks I must marry her just because my father and mother say so.'
Saeeda Bai turned towards him and buried her face in
412.his arm. 'But you must get married,' she said. 'You cannot cause your parents so much pain.'
'I don't find her at all attractive,' said Maan angrily.
'That will merely take time,' advised Saeeda Bai.
'And I won't be able to visit you after I'm married,' said Maan.
'Oh ?' said Saeeda Bai in such a way that the question, rather than leading to a reply, implied the closure of the conversation.
6.4
AFTER a while they got up and moved to the other room. Saeeda Bai called for the parakeet, of whom she had become fond. Ishaq Khan brought in the cage, and a discussion ensued about when he would learn to speak. Saeeda Bai seemed to think that a couple of months would be sufficient, but Ishaq was doubtful. 'My grandfather had a parakeet who didn't speak for a whole year and then wouldn't stop talking for the rest of his life,' he said.
'I've never heard anything like that,' said Saeeda Bai dismissively. 'Anyway, why are you holding that cage in such a funny way ?'
'Oh, it's nothing really,' said Ishaq, setting the cage down on a table and rubbing his right wrist. 'Just a pain in my wrist.'
In fact it was very painful and had become worse during the previous few weeks.
'You seem to play well enough,' said Saeeda Bai, not very sympathetically.
'Saeeda Begum, what would I do if I didn't play ?'
'Oh, I don't know,' said Saeeda Bai, tickling the little parakeet's beak. 'There's probably nothing the matter with your hand. You don't have plans to go off for a wedding in the family, do you ? Or to leave town until your famous explosion at the radio station is forgotten ?'
If Ishaq was injured by this painful reference or these
413unjust suspicions, he did not show it. Saeeda Bai told him to fetch Motu Chand, and the three of them soon began to make music for Maan's pleasure. Ishaq bit his lower lip from time to time as his bow moved across the strings, but he said nothing.
Saeeda Bai sat on a Persian rug with her harmonium in front of her. Her head was covered with her sari, and she stroked the double string of pearls hanging around her neck with a finger of her left hand. Then, humming to herself, and moving her left hand onto the bellows of the harmonium, she began to play a few notes of Raag Pilu. After a little while, and as if undecided about her mood and the kind of song she wished to sing, she modulated to a few other raags.
'What would you like to hear ?' she asked Maan gently.
She had used a more intimate 'you' than she had ever used so far - 'turn' instead of 'aap'. Maan looked at her, smiling.
'Well ?' said Saeeda Bai, after a minute had gone by.
'Well, Saeeda Begum ?' said Maan.
'What do you want to hear?' Again she used turn instead of aap and sent Maan's world into a happy spin. A couplet he'd heard somewhere came to his mind :
