Afternoon Raag (5 page)

The bathroom has a large square mirror like a window into which my father looks in the mornings. He wears floppy, unsmart pyjama trousers with buttons on the front which often remain inadvertently open, creating a dark, tiny fairytale entrance. After shaving, he splashes Old Spice on his cheeks, and the skin begins to glow with a faint green light. His hair started to grey when he was thirty, so he dyes it an unrealistic black, leaving one white plume smoking above his forehead. In the flat in Malabar Hill, where there was a bathtub, I used to hear him all my childhood rubbing the soles of his feet on it while bathing, making a sombre but musical sound as that of a double-bass.

In my childhood, too, my mother's enormous friend, Chitrakaki, would visit us in the afternoons. This was when we lived in a flat in a tall building overlooking the sea, the Marine Drive, and the horizon. Together they would nap, my mother's feet hidden by a cotton sheet, Chitrakaki, all two hundred pounds of her, inhabiting a loose, long gown and snoring and shuddering malarially in
her sleep, both of them suspended a hundred feet above the earth without knowing it. Beneath them the Arabian Sea rushed and the earth moved, while their heads rested on pillows so soft that they were like bodies of pure flesh without skeleton. Bai, the maidservant, while she sat on the floor, rubbed oil upon my mother's burning toes, and I, sitting beside her and looking over the edge of the bed, admired the trembling and lack of composure of Chitrakaki's body, as her stomach soared and climbed and then toppled over, her head, though it was perfectly still, seeming to move animatedly behind her stomach. If Bai and I smiled at each other and passed satirical comments between her snores, she would say, in a god-like voice, ‘I can hear everything.' She is now dead, though I remember her as before, waking from that sleep with my mother, and drinking tea, and avariciously cupping a spiced mixture or peanuts and thin crispy strands of gramflour that looked like screws or nails, and chewing upon it with an ostrich-like satisfaction in strange things. For, truly, both she and my mother loved this edible scrap, this tea-time assortment of spiced nuts and
bolts; sometimes, she would bring with her a box of chakli, a savoury that is hard and brown and runs round itself in gnarled, concentric circles, and is like a coral, or the body of a sea-horse. Once or twice, we even went to a South Indian cafe together, for Chitrakaki loved exploring the tastes of different regions. Here, we ate from polished Formica tables, and were served by dignified Tamil waiters who, dressed in an impeccable uniform, looked like the soldiers of an ancient army. These men emerged from hot, swinging kitchen doors with plates balanced upon their palms, and on the plates were huge ‘paper' dosas. These are large white cylinders made of rice paste; from a distance, they look like rolled-up rugs, and coming closer, they resemble ridiculous headdresses of vast importance; from table to table, the waiters bore them glumly, as if they were gifts.

When I think of food, I think of the cat-like way my mother disposes of fish-bones, and eats the head of the rohu fish, meticulously destroying its labyrinths. Here a silent contest ensues, as she chews and bites at it from all sides, till the head
disappears and the indigestible bones lie clean and polished on one corner of the plate. At dinner, our leftovers—chicken bones, ribs, the white comb-like tail of the pomfret, which is simple and symmetrical—we deposit upon her beggar's plate for her to chew and gnash and then blissfully spit out. My father, the most serious person at the table, uses, unexpectedly, a fork and a spoon to eat. He cannot begin till he has been served, and till that moment, remains sombre and paralysed. Once started, he floods his plate with daal, till it has made a yellow lake with white hillocks of rice upon its banks.

I
n the afternoon, Mohan, my music-teacher's brother, and Sohanlal, his brother-in-law, ring the doorbell. Ponchoo then silently brings out the tablas and tuning-hammer from the cupboard, and the big tabla, shaped like half a globe, he balances between one arm and his chin maternally; the smaller one he clutches lightly but firmly by the strong cords of bark along its sides. Mohan and Sohanlal take a long time settling down, talking in their own language, the latter chattering very fast, while Mohan, a man of few words, sits carefully on the sofa. It is easy to see that Mohan is related to my music-teacher, that he is his brother, because their faces are similar, especially the colour of their
skin, Mohan perhaps even a little darker than my music-teacher was. The timbre of Mohan's voice is also like my guru's, slightly husky, not loud or deep. Though he may not be aware of it, it is impossible for others not to see my guru come to life, in flashes, in Mohan's facial expressions, his turns of phrase, and his gestures. But Mohan is an unassuming man, while my guru, shorter and a little plump, was a showoff, doing astonishing feats with his voice and then chuckling gleefully at our admiration. Laughter is drawn out reluctantly from Mohan, who I think used to both hero-worship and self-effacingly humour his brother (he told me once he had turned to tabla-playing because there couldn't be two singers in a family, and that, when they were both learning the intricacies of vocal music from their father, he found his elder bother much too quick, much too clever to compete with), while my guru, especially when singing, would laugh happily after a difficult taan, and shake with mirth when he arrived at, after much deliberately drunken meandering, the sama, bringing a small, reluctant smile to his younger brother's lips. On
tapes on which I recorded my guru singing in my house, complex melodic leaps and falls performed by him can be heard punctuated by brief chuckles.

When a singer performs, it is the job of the accompanists to support him dutifully and unobtrusively. A cyclical rhythm-pattern—say, of sixteen beats—is played at an unchanging tempo on the tabla, and the song and its syllables are set to this pattern, so that one privileged word in the poem will coincide ineluctably with the first of the sixteen beats in the cycle. This first beat is called the sama, and much drama, apprehension, and triumph surround it. For the singer is allowed to, even expected to, adventurously embark on rhythmic voyages of his own, only to arrive, with sudden, instinctive, and logical grace, once more at the sama, taking the audience, who are keeping time, unawares. Once this is achieved, the logic seems at first a flash of genius, and then cunningly pre-meditated. While the pretence is kept up, and the singer's rhythm appears to have lost itself, the tabla-player, with emotionless sobriety, maintains the stern tempo and cycle, until the singer, like
an irresponsible but prodigious child, decides to dance in perfect steps back into it. Similarly, when a singer is executing his difficult melodic patterns, the harmonium-player must reproduce the notes without distracting him. The tabla and harmonium players behave like palanquin-bearers carrying a precious burden, or like solemn but indulgent guardians who walk a little distance behind a precocious child as it does astonishing things, seeing, with a corner of their eye, that it does not get hurt, or like deferential ministers clearing a path for their picturesque prince, or like anonymous and selfless spouses who give of themselves for the sake of a husband. Mohan, who plays the tabla with clarity and restraint, created the ground on which my guru constructed his music, and Sohanlal, attentively playing the harmonium, filled in the background. In the care of these two custodians, my guru sang and shone with his true worth.

C
hhaya and Maya would spend the morning sweeping and cleaning and collecting rubbish. Their mother, a towering, mild woman, cleaned the stairs; sometimes, her husband, that pudgy, well-behaved man in khaki shorts, stood in for her, loitering in the compound, decoratively wielding a jhadu. This small family, father, mother, and two daughters, was employed by the Building Society. What they did with the implements of their trade—bucket, rag, water, disinfectant, jhadu, broom—was a mystery. A combination of these things did not automatically add up to cleanliness. From eight to twelve, one or the other of the sisters, bucket in one hand, jhadu in the other, made an independent,
breezy tour of each flat in the seven-storeyed building.

Chhaya was the younger one, plump, extrovert, with dimples and protruding teeth. She did no work, but was on good terms with everyone. From time to time, my mother preached to her to study hard and educate herself at the municipal school she never seemed to attend. She was interested neither in work, nor in studies, nor in looking pretty. The things she was interested in were my mother's singing practice in the morning, and when I would get married. Her older sister, in contrast, was a sensitive, overweight, round-faced girl who was exceptionally dark; she suffered because of this, and worked silently, almost sullenly. She never smiled, even by mistake; she seemed to think it would make her look ridiculous. By remaining silent, she tried not to draw attention to herself, but her very uncomfortableness made one notice her. The few times I caught her eye, she did not look, but glowered, at me. Then, a few years later, after she had passed puberty, she lost weight and gained a figure. Small, dark, and round-faced, she looked
pretty when she smiled, a flash of perfect white teeth, something she began to do increasingly. She had obviously discovered that she was desirable to her husband, to whom she had been married, not long ago, when she turned fifteen, a young man in the family who ran a successful butcher's shop, whom Maya mentioned casually in the same breath with the quality of mutton at the shop. Chhaya, too, began to grow up; her churidars no longer stopped abruptly at her calves, but, elegantly, came all the way down to her ankles; and kaajal appeared around her eyes. But all this, I suspect, was her mother's and her sister's doing, and was as external to her as a frame to a painting, while Chhaya, till the last time I saw her, remained the same irresponsible and talkative girl I had known when she was nine.

The principal plaintiffs against the two sisters were the other servants. Each floor had a servants' bathroom on one side and a servants' toilet on the other; by accident the bathroom came to be on our side, while the toilet was on the side of our neighbours' flat. Our neighbour, a wealthy Sindhi widow, a simple, tall, hard lady, was specially
sensitive to the insult of the toilet's proximity to her flat, a flat which, with money her son sent from Dubai, had been turned into a small palace of mirrors and marble. This situation was aggravated by Chhaya and Maya, who always went about with the privileged air of outsiders, and paid no attention to the state of that toilet. The servants complained; and, from time to time, the Sindhi lady emerged to let the two sisters know what she thought of them, and then retreated into her palace. Never have I seen people to whom a scolding mattered less than Chhaya, Maya, and their mother; only Chhaya would pretend to argue, purely for the pleasure of it, while her mother's way of showing she harboured no hurt was to, on the next day, ask for an advance on her wages.

The widow lived in the flat with her two granddaughters. While she wore her widow's white sari with a strange pride, as if it conferred on her some special distinction, the two girls wore light, flowing dresses with elegant hems and collars and button-patterns. The girls bore no resemblance to their grandmother; their faces were soft and
creamy and showed signs of neither anxiety nor contentment, maturity nor innocence. They were living in that formless dream-world before marriage, where nothing was required of them but to look pretty and, in some subtle, not immediately obvious way, to prepare themselves for the future. I preferred the widow's hard masculinity. She was a bundle of insecurities, domineering and shy by turns, and, absented from her husband and son, a man and a woman in one. While her granddaughters watched American films on video all day, and spoke the little English they did with an American accent—a sign of both ignorance and confidence—the widow spoke no English at all; and this both put her at an imagined disadvantage and gave her a conscious uprightness of bearing in that building, where everyone was a master of Bombay English. Her face gave as little relief to the eye as the landscape of Sindh from which she came. One felt she would be leading exactly this life wherever she was, whether in her village or in New York. And yet in no way did she belong to the past.

Sometimes, in the afternoon, wearing a kurta
and pyjamas, I would walk down the lane and turn into the main road. The pleasure of taking a stroll in light, loose-fitting costume, without either drawing attention to myself or catching a chill, was a luxury never permitted to me in England. The sense of time on the main road, where Ambassadors passed by, and small, silent Marutis with spiteful ease, was different from that in the lane, where minutes and hours were connected to the conclusions and beginnings of phases of domestic routine. On the main road, which was only one among a family of such main roads that had joined hands to create Bombay—not the Bombay people lived in, but the one into which people emerged every day from their houses—there were cake-shops, video ‘parlours', ‘burger inns'. The names of these shops suggested the coming of age of a generation who were on breezy, unawed, and first-name terms with the English language. In the midst of all this, there was a bit of unexpected picturesque detail, an intrusion of rural India, in the magazine-stall, bamboo poles holding up a canopy of cloth, which sheltered a long sloping table whose entire surface
was covered with magazines, the newest of which hung from a jute string that had been tied from one pole to another. The hawker was not Maharashtrian, but a North Indian in vest and dhoti, and, judging by his looks (though I do not recall his sacred thread) quite probably a brahmin. If there had been a magazine-seller sub-caste, as there was a priest sub-caste, a landowner sub-caste, and a cook sub-caste, he would have belonged to it, so completely and immemorially did he seem to be in possession of the lineaments of his trade. In the evening, he lit a hurricane lamp to illuminate the magazine covers, though there was enough light coming from the air-conditioned cake-shops to brighten the rest of the road. The magazines were filled with speculations about politicians who looked a little like the magazine seller, but lacked his sense of time and place. Together, they composed an unending Hindu epic, torn apart by incest and strife and philosophy. While the political magazines were like minutely detailed family histories, there was another kind of magazine that spoke exclusively of individuals, and described a
happy secular life of evening parties and personalities that seemed as remote from government as the woodfire-lit lives of villagers. But, from time to time, the two kinds of magazine would merge into one another.