Afternoon Raag (10 page)

Strange place, Oxford, and strange discoveries
one makes within it! Strange students' rooms, with their own, always slightly unfamiliar, dimensions. During that time when I was undecided between Shehnaz and Mandira, hurting them both, being hurt by both, confused as I had never been, I lived on the ground floor of the graduate building, and Sharma lived in the room just above mine; we had a floor and a ceiling in common. From the beginning, Shehnaz and I tried in various ways, in kind and unkind, in rational and irrational ways, to shake off each other; but Oxford is such a lonely place, such a small place, so few its streets and its landmarks, that those who have felt some affection for each other come together again and again. When I went missing (and sometimes I was with Mandira), Shehnaz would wait for me to return in Sharma's room. Coming back, I would hear that Shehnaz had been looking for me; going to her college, I would not find her there. For long periods of our relationship, if one were to add all these moments, we kept ourselves absent or hidden from each other. On one occasion, I remember, I had been out for several hours; she had come
twice to my room and gone away. When she came for the third time, I was in Sharma's room, and we saw her from his window, coming down the road. As she rang the doorbell, entered, and then climbed up the stairs, Sharma said, ‘Quick, hide in the cupboard!'; it was something he himself loved doing, a bad but endearing habit, surprising me by stepping into my closet when I was not there, and then coming out and taking me unawares. Guided by him, without a will of my own, I was led inside, to stand there among Sharma's shirts and trousers as he opened his door and asked Shehnaz in. Silent, hidden, I watched through the crack between two doors, which gave me a surprisingly wide vision as Shehnaz, dressed in churidars and kurta, sat on the armchair and asked in a puzzled way, ‘What, is he out again?' and Sharma replied nonchalantly, ‘No, no, he is here, he is somewhere here.' And yet, I did not, like Sharma, have the courage to emerge.

S
ohanlal was born in a kingdom in Rajasthan and as a boy, he became a court dancer. There were times when he had to perform before the king, when his guru would take him and another boy to dance as Radha and Krishna at the court. When the dance was over, the audience would bow before the two children as if they were Radha and Krishna. That world, of gestures and wonder, existing in the wide, silent margins of the land, is gone now. All has been named and brought to consciousness, the colours, the words and their meanings, but Sohanlal is one of those few people who remember the darkness of what was there before, the old language and its life.

When we were alone, Sohanlal would show me the lanes of Brindaban, sitting on the floor with one leg crossed and the other knee raised, his bare feet visible but the rest of his legs covered by the white cotton cloth of his pyjamas, the upper part of his body in a silk kurta which descended and rested calmly upon his lap like a great handkerchief. His arm would be lifted at an angle that inclined towards his head. Brindaban appeared as he moved while singing the words in Avadhi that had been composed by Bindadeen Maharaj. Avadhi, an older version of Hindi, still spoken in the villages, is such a poetic language that its most common expressions can bring places and spirits before the eye, can stir love in the heart. Its discontinuous grammar and incomplete sentences are a product of the consciousness that existed before there was any difference between the past and present. When Sohanlal became Radha, his face would be turned away a little, in shyness and also in hurt at Krishna's transgressions, one eyebrow raised but the eyes averted. But when he was Krishna, he was the child Krishna, his lips smeared with curds and butter, or
dancing upon the serpent's head, or swaying very lightly to his own music. Often, women would seek out his mother to complain of his mischief, and many times, when he stopped their path as they walked towards the River Yamuna, they had no choice but to threaten him and plead with Yasodha. All his excuses and alibis were known to her, but by the time he returned it had become evening and her heart was filled with love. The lies he said to her at that moment she pretended to believe.

When I hear the raag Maand, I think of my guru and his brother and Sohanlal, for it bears the characteristics, the stamp, and the life of their region. Their faces, their language, the colour of their skin, the cotton clothes they wear, are set and have their meaning against the same landscape. Each raag was once a folk-melody, a regional air sung, with tiny variations, to different words, by members of a community of families before its notes were ordered and systematized into the melodic progression called a raag. But when a Rajasthani sings Maand, or a Punjabi sings Sindhi Bhairavi, he returns to his homeland, which for
him is a certain landscape influenced by seasons, a certain style of dressing and speaking, a web of interrelationships and festive occasions. Each region has its own grace-notes, its peculiar turns in singing, and there were some grace-notes I had to learn and relearn arduously which Sohanlal told me came naturally and without practice to the people of his land, from temple singers to young peasant boys. Maand was a raag which, when sung by my guru or Sohanlal, revealed its airy, skeletal frame, with holes and gaps in it, its unnameable, magical beginnings, and its spirit-like mobility in covering distances, in traversing scorched mountainsides, deserts, horizons, water, following back on the route of migrations that had led away from that country. The raags, woven together, are a history, a map, a calendar, of Northern India, they are territorial and temporal, they live and die with men, even though they seem to be timeless and exist outside them; they are evidence of the palimpsest-like texture of Northern India, with its many dyes and hues, its absence of written texts and its peculiar memory, so that no record of people like Sohanlal, or my guru
and guru's father, exists unequivocally, or without rhythm and music.

Each raag has its time of day, a cluster of hours called ‘prahar', or its season. Goud Sarang and Shudh Sarang are sung at midday, while Madhuvanti is sung in late afternoon verging on twilight, Purvi and Shree from dusk to early evening, and in late evening, Abhogi Kanhra. Midday brings the smell of ripening jackfruit, the buzz and gleam of bluebottle flies, the fragrance of mango blossoms which, Tagore said, opens the doorways to heaven. The notes sa re ma re ma pa of Shudh Sarang, with the sharp and yearning ascent of the second ma, its resolution in pancham, define the bright inactivity of midday, its ablutions and rest, the peace of a household. Twilight cools the veranda; midday's boundary of protective shade separating household from street, inside from outside, is dissolved; the sad, flat rishab in conjunction with the sharp madhyam and pancham, the notes of Shree related to each other by dancing swoops and curves, calm the mind during the withdrawal of light. No raag is so pure that it does not remind one of another raag,
that it is not, in some elementary way, a variation or version of a raag sung at some other time of day, or some other season. For instance, does not the heat and blaze of Shudh Sarang resemble, in its structure and shape, the watery gravity and plumbings of Megh? The seasons and hours have no absolute existence, but are defined by each other.

I
n the last and hottest days of summer, Bombay waited for the rains to arrive. The earth hardened into brown Deccan bedrock, the black rocks by the Arabian Sea were warm if one touched them, people pulled curtains across the windows in the afternoon; it was a time of stupefying heat when reeds and grass grew long and leaned against walls, mango and jackfruit ripened, and flame-red gulmohurs lit the trees. The first drops of rain were a spray that moistened the cloth of one's shirt. This was the time when letters and newspapers arrived partially wet, the wet paper became soft, the parts of the newspaper it had rained upon darkened
by a blue-grey shadow. For those who lived in houses like ours and owned a car, it was a season that brought relief; for the maidservants, sweepers, and part-time servants, who too, in a sense, ‘lived' in Bombay, it was a time of trials and miracles, when one side of their roof collapsed and another side of their house blew away.

In August, in the last quarter of the monsoons, there would be a gathering, in memory of my guru's father's spiritual teacher, in a small temple in old Bombay, a community extravaganza that began early in the evening and continued to the dawn of the next day, as, one by one, musicians came and performed their piece and received my guru's family's disorganized hospitality and then left, while that family, with its grandfathers, daughters-in-law, and children, stayed wide awake through the night. My mother and I were invited to sing as well, and we took this performance seriously. So we set out in our Ambassador, with the tanpura resting on the front seat, and went down the drizzly roads of North Bombay, past eating-houses, local railway stations, old cinema halls, in search of
the Ganesh temple at Matunga, which was our landmark. There, upon asking directions, the car turned into a lane, a shaded avenue of middle-class Marathi civility, where, in the houses, boys did their homework and young girls, their hair tied in a plait, studied harder than the boys and learned natya sangeet from their mothers, and, in the other room, the father-in-law, a widower, waited for dinner, while his son stood on the balcony in a vest and pyjamas. Through this lane we passed till noises were heard and lights were seen. All the family was there, in the courtyard adjoining the small temple, and already there was a singer performing inside, his voice heard and serenely ignored as it came through a loudspeaker. The women my guru's mother, his wife, Mohan's and Sohanlal's wives—sat together in a small room with no door, to enter which one had to take off one's sandals. Distant cousins, ne'er do well uncles in dhotis and turbans, irresponsible brothers-in-law who were fathers to several children, hung around in semi-joyous, semi-disgraced abeyance in the festive crowd, and were always available
when an extra cymbal player or tanpura player was needed. Family snobberies, hierarchies, bonds, made themselves felt from the powerful, segregated clan of elderly women to the excited children in shiny clothes. This was my guru's world, a little Rajasthani village in Bombay.

This community would rematerialize in much the same way at funerals and weddings, and at the airport on the two occasions when my guru went to England. Then the traveller abroad was blessed by the elders, and nearly everyone was given a chance to hug and garland him, from close to seldom-seen relatives who reappeared at such moments to display family love and solidarity. This solidarity, which was a form of dependency, for the poorer relatives used this as an opportunity to ask favours of those who, like my guru, were doing better for themselves, became evident again, in all its formal comedy and transient but sincere show of love, during my guru's illness. I was then in Oxford; my parents were preparing to sell that flat in the suburbs and leave Bombay for ever. My mother described it to me later; the
clan, enlarged now by concerned relatives who had come down from the villages for this special purpose, rallied around my guru and made every effort to hasten his death. Some of them came and stayed in his tiny flat; for them, it was a pilgrimage to see Bombay. A few years ago, my guru and his brother had sold their ‘chawl' in King's Circle, and, with government loans, bought two flats, one for each brother, in Versova and Andheri. This, for them, had been like a liberation from an old and stifling way of life. Once, when my mother went to visit my guru in Versova during his illness—a recently developed area, with new buildings and roads alternating with patches of marshy land—she found the creation of a great lunch in progress, the women chopping spinach and boiling milk in the kitchen, the relatives moving about in the tiny space of the ‘hall', careful not to step on the small shoals of children, the aroma of food spreading through the house, an anecdote being developed and an observation elaborated, while my guru lay on his side on the bed that was next to the front door, his head on the pillow, watching all this. In Bombay,
where property is sold at thousands of rupees per square foot, each inch of space is magnified; a hall is called a hall, a bedroom a bedroom, though none of these rooms may be larger in size than a kitchen. The laughing Rajasthani women wore bright chiffon saris, draped them over their heads, and kept a small part of their faces symbolically covered with the last remnant of a veil. In all that crowded commotion, medicines were given at the wrong time, or forgotten. The fabric of an ancient hospitality, irrelevant courtesies, meaningless gestures of goodwill, all-important in the creation of the decorum of that village-life—and they owned little else but that decorum—this was eternal, nonindividual, it would go on; and, already, my guru was an outsider to it, he was leaving it behind. After he died, this life, as expected, continued cheerfully, divided from death only by a thin, transparent border; my guru's wife saw him in her dreams; sometimes he reassured her that he was happy ‘over there'; at other times, he gave her sound financial advice: ‘Eat chutney and chappati but don't sell the flat.' Influential government servants whose
daughters or wives had been taught by my guru came forward to help his widow and children; helped her to set up a small, government retail shop that sold milk, peas, and meat. Then my guru stopped appearing in dreams.

T
he old Calcutta airport, a dignified colonial bungalow with potted plants, is gone, but the ‘new' domestic airport, now proxying as the international airport, stands and welcomes arriving passengers. Most of the travellers, coming or leaving, belong to Calcutta itself, Bengalis or Marwaris with children running from the bookshop at one end to the coffee-stall at the other. Outside, in the light, a crowd of boys and young men wait perpetually to greet the passengers as they emerge, to take their suitcases, to offer them taxis. You shoo them away; you try to ignore them; and then they have already forgotten you, they have found someone else, or are quarrelling playfully
with each other. But one or two of the younger ones will reappear at the car park and run with the car and see you off for the gift of a coin.