The Immortals (16 page)

‘That idiot is no help at all,’ Kartik Prasad would mutter when they were growing up. Where Hanuman Prasad picked up all those compositions from, and how he learnt to sing them, no one knew. He had been a general nuisance to the family. At night he would lie on his khatiya and look up at the sky. These days he was in the pay of the Bikaner maharaja, and performed in the Jodhpur maharaja’s court.

He spent a lot of his time smoking ganja from a chillum. Hanuman Prasad’s wife was long-suffering. She bore him two children. The first one they named Trilok; when the second one was born nine years later, they named him Ram Lal. It was during the birth of this child that the woman, who’d anyway been in poor health, died.

An emissary from the court would come to the village and say, ‘The maharaja wants you,’ and Hanuman Prasad would disappear for a few days. There was an amusing story about him. After a performance, the maharaja was full of admiration and asked him what he wanted in front of the sabha. Hanuman Prasad asked for some ganja. When Kartik Prasad heard about this, he was outraged. ‘You know we have an ailing mausi, who brought us up like a mother, and all you can ask for is ganja?’ He dealt him a couple of blows. The next time he performed in the court and was asked what reward he wanted, he took five rupees to buy medicine for his aunt. When Kartik Prasad heard of this, he hit him a few more times. ‘Five rupees?’ he shouted. ‘Is that all you could ask for?’ Hanuman Prasad was quite bewildered and angry. He began to realise nothing could satisfy his brother. He nursed a resentment inside.

He bided his time with his usual indifference to exigencies. When he was summoned to the court again, he said after his performance: ‘I would like a gun.’ ‘A gun?’ But they didn’t question him further; they presented him with a musket encased in wood. When he went home, and his brother asked him what he’d received from the maharaja, Hanuman Prasad said, ‘A gun.’ Kartik Prasad was flabbergasted; what did his brother mean? ‘You’ve made my life a misery. I’m going to kill you,’ said Hanuman Prasad, and displayed the musket. But he had no idea how to use it; in fact, it was doubtful if he’d seen a gun before. ‘Do you know what it’s for?’ said Kartik Prasad, and gave him a sharp smack on the head.

That gun lies with the local zamindar to this day.

He died suddenly; they found him dead in his bed, the chillum by his side. Ram Lal was a year old; Trilok, the older son, was ten.

It was Trilok who brought up Ram Lal. Ram Lal was a sickly but indefatigable boy; he had absolutely no understanding of the fact that his father was not alive, and that his mother had died a year ago. He ran about; played with marbles. Meanwhile, his older brother helped his uncle in the field, but never lost the interest in music that the nine years he’d been with his father had brought him. Ram Lal was reluctant to learn anything; nevertheless, Trilok sat and taught him some tunes, like raga Kedar and raga Vibhas. He noticed that although Ram Lal didn’t pay the slightest attention during these lessons, he picked up the ragas anyway, and could be heard humming them in the middle of some other activity.

The local zamindar rather liked Trilok’s singing. Someone had taken him when he was fifteen to the zamindar’s mansion and presented him there, saying, ‘Sir, listen to him. This is that ganja-addict Hanuman Prasad’s older son, and though he works on the field and never learnt from an ustad, you’ll find he has something of his father’s ability. Besides, he’s a very serious boy.’ And so Trilok, in his sweet, high voice, sang Maand, and, of course, the zamindar was charmed, and gradually, like an inert thing melting, his expression changed as he listened, and he shook his head, nostalgic with some secret yearning. When Trilok finished, he was silent while the boy sat with downcast eyes; then said finally: ‘Sing something else.’

Two years later, Trilok received a harmonium as a gift from the zamindar. It was a black, stout thing with knobs in the front, and bellows at the back which collapsed when you undid the clips on either side, but which had to be pulled constantly, tirelessly, by the dutiful, self-effacing left hand for the keys to burst into sound. And burst they did; it was like having a little band in the house. More and more, Trilok played while the boy Ram Lal sang, in a voice even more high-pitched than his brother’s, full-throated and careless, stopping between games or work to suddenly become an instrument that had no other thought or function.

Ram Lal had a fondness for histrionics; he came into his own when he was dancing or playing a part. Gradually, he became known in the villages for playing Majnu, thin, mercurial, a live wire of ardour, in the plangent tale of love and separation between his character and Laila. Still only twelve, he became a player in nautanki, travelling with a ragged theatre group and his brother, who lugged his harmonium around with him, guarding it only a little less scrupulously than he did his younger brother, as they went from village to village, gaping crowd to crowd.

The zamindar had a pain in his chest one day; and he was clutching it with his hand when he died. This left Trilok and Ram Lal more at the mercy of the nautanki group than they’d been before; but it also gave them greater freedom now to travel from village to impassioned nautanki performance in some other village in the evening, and back home again by dawn.

Late in the night after a performance, Trilok was trying to sleep not far from a fire, Ram Lal next to him, both of them covered from head to toe in blankets, and the older brother heard two men from the nautanki warming themselves by the fire speak in low voices:

‘Trilok is of no use to us. He’s a headache, always behaving like the father of the boy, as if no one else has a right to him. The majnu should be one of ours – he
is
one of ours.
We
are his family.’

‘That’s what I’ve been saying too.’

Then there was only the crackle of wood, and the protracted, drawn-out pleasure of one of the men clearing his throat and expectorating. Trilok did not stir; he lay still as a gunny bag.

‘When there is an opportunity we should . . . especially on one of the journeys back . . . fast, and quickly . . .’

‘Arrey bhaisaab I will do it.’

And one of the men began to sing in a low, cracked voice.

The story goes that Trilok took fright and fled with Ram Lal two days later to Delhi. And they wandered about until they put up at an ashram where Gosain Baba sang. Gosain Baba, long-haired saint, who’d given up worldly success in the royal courts to contemplate the deities he adored, Radha and Krishna.

And he loved the rains. What Malhars he composed! Sughrai Malhar, Adana Malhar . . . the oddest possible combinations.

In the morning, the ten-year-old sat listening to Gosain Baba. He became lost in the music; even his right leg, on which he leaned for an hour as he sat cross-legged, seemed, as awareness returned to him, to be elsewhere, he could not feel it, and it came back to him gradually with a discomfiting tingling sensation. Ram Lal sat still, between the fading of the raga Bhatiyar and his temporary disablement, until he was sure he could get up.

A new seriousness came upon the boy; Trilok had seldom seen him so solemn – not even did the mention of his dead parents or an illness make him as sad. Finally, the boy revealed to his brother the thought that was troubling him; he spoke with the obstinacy of a child who expects to be refused, and, to pre-empt disappointment, becomes glum and implacable:

‘Bhaiyya, I want to learn from Babaji.’

And Trilok, who was father and mother to the boy, was amused and surprised by this new desire for discipleship, and wondered how long it would possess Ram Lal.

Never one to procrastinate, he went to Gosain Baba and touched his feet, stirring the man from his sluggish spiritual reverie. Ram Lal skulked at the back, a fidgety miscreant.

‘Babaji, maharaj,’ stammered Trilok, ‘my brother Ram has a good singing voice and a great love of music. All these years he’s wasted singing nautanki songs, and now he’s ashamed of his ignorance. He wants to learn from you.’

‘But where is he?’ said Gosain Baba.

‘Come here ulloo!’ said Trilok to the figure standing a few feet away; and the boy, impertinent, at first didn’t listen, and then, at his brother’s urgent frown, thought it wise to obey.

‘I have seen him before,’ said Gosain Baba, looking at the thin boy tranquilly, with recognition. ‘What do you know?’ he said, addressing Ram Lal directly.

‘Very little,’ intervened Trilok. ‘In fact, he knows more dance than he does music.’

‘He will have to forget his dancing for now,’ said Gosain Baba.

For four years then, the story goes, the boy learnt from Gosain Baba. In that ashram, he practised the ragas endlessly, in a blind, joyous addiction to perfection and the sublime, often sitting down to sing when he shouldn’t, after the midday meal, for instance, leaving him with the dyspepsia that would bother him later in life. Already, he was beginning to take very ambitious taans; he created a storm, sudden pent-up torrents of notes, inside the small room.

From the ashram, Trilok and Ram Lal went back to Jaipur. The world was changing; nationalist slogans everywhere exhorting the sahib to leave. The brothers were oblivious. Soon after their return, they got married to two sisters.

Their father-in-law was an extraordinary man. He, Murli Prasad, had been the court dancer at the palace of the Maharaja of Nepal; his patron had showered him with gifts, jewellery mainly, which he wore and displayed with an indifferent contentment – chains, rings, gold bangles, elaborate earrings even, which dangled proudly from his pierced lobes. A large man with long greying hair, thickset, carrying off the jewellery with an instinctive delicacy. Among his wondrous prizes were the silver ghungroos that the maharaja had once given him, and which he occasionally tied round his ankles, and walked about, replete and musical.

Those ghungroos became Ram Lal’s. A bag of silver rupees from Murli Prasad’s underground vault was also given to him as the groom-price. All this with a dark, stocky twelve-year-old girl.

In a year, he was bored of the village and of Jaipur and wanted to return to Delhi. A new age was dawning there; huge meetings were being held; the British were leaving. He took a rented room and, without much thought, sold the ghungroos; then satisfied what for some time had been a secret urge – to float a theatre company. A band of ready and unthinkingly devoted disciples gravitated towards him; learnt singing from him, cooked for him, washed his clothes. The rented room doubled as a setting for their rehearsals. The company came to nothing.

In his, and his country’s, new-found state of unrest, teetering towards independence, he found a job at All India Radio; as supervisor. He wired his brother-in-law to bring his wife to Delhi; she, who wouldn’t look at him at first, soon became, to his wonder, talkative, with an endless number of things to say at any given point of time, as well as forceful and active in more ways than one. In Delhi, a year and a half after that reunion and discovery of one another, a child – a boy – was born to them; and he died almost immediately.

Then, after they had recovered from this first grief, and stopped puzzling over the early evidence of destiny and the hand of God, the young, bereaved mother, still hopeful, suggested: ‘Should we go to Bombay? Remember my uncle said there is always a place for us there.’

Her maternal uncle; who’d already made a name for himself as a music director in the film industry.

Ram Lal, nineteen, did not need much persuading. He was momentarily defeated; but he was hungry to make a fresh start.

The uncle, by wire, asked them to buy tickets to Victoria Terminus.

So began that lineage of music, sketchily. Bits of this story had come to Nirmalya at different points of time. Of how Ram Lal’s wife returned to Jaipur when she was with child, and there gave birth to Shyam. Then returned to Bombay with the little mewling infant, who had made her breasts sore, when he was three months old. Two years later, the younger brother Banwari was born, calmer and less importunate than the older child, as if he had accepted from the first the world for what it was. These details – of his teacher and his brother in their most unguarded moments, defenceless, before they became what they were – had, for Nirmalya, the significance of secrets and revelations, as of the birth of kings or holy men in the seemingly unremarkable age we live in. Who knew now, as they went teaching or playing from home to home, of their momentousness? But are not the great among us banal and mortal, even to themselves?

Three years ago, Shyamji began an annual function in his father’s memory; to pay respect to Ram Lal’s legacy, but also, without being wholly aware of doing so, to tame it, to rework it in terms amenable to him. Because his father’s world was not the world Shyamji now lived in; and how could the memorial, in all that it was, avoid reflecting that fact? It must enshrine the past; but it must belong to the present and the future. It was known as the Gandharva Sammelan; Ram Lal’s admirers had, towards the middle of his life, in an onrush of slightly belated, sentimental gratitude, given him the title ‘gandharva’. A gandharva is a heavenly singer – there are some singers whose voices are so melodious that they bring to existence, for their listeners, the fictive world of kinnars, gods, and apsaras, from which they seem to be briefly visiting us; and they’re identified as gandharvas. Their music brings to this world the message of that other one, to which they’ll eventually return. Shivputra Komkali, renamed Kumar Gandharva – ‘the boy gandharva’ – at the age of seven by a shankaracharya for his musical gift, was one such person. Ram Lal was another.