Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

People came in and out of the courtyard during the recital, and, as Saeeda Bai’s eye caught a movement somewhere in the audience, she acknowledged the new guest with a gesture of her hand that broke the line of her self-accompaniment on the harmonium. But the mournful bowed strings of the sarangi were more than a sufficient shadow to her voice, and she often turned to the player with a look of appreciation for some particularly fine imitation or improvisation. Most of her attention, however, was devoted to young Hashim Durrani, who sat in the front row and blushed beetroot whenever she broke off singing to make some pointed remark or address some casual couplet towards him. Saeeda Bai was notorious for choosing a single person in the audience early in the evening and addressing all her songs to that one person — he would become for her the cruel one, the slayer, the hunter, the executioner and so on — the anchor, in fact, for her ghazals.

Saeeda Bai enjoyed most of all singing the ghazals of Mir and Ghalib, but she also had a taste for Vali Dakkani — and for Mast, whose poetry was not particularly distinguished, but who was a great local favourite because he had spent much of his unhappy life in Brahmpur, reciting many of his ghazals for the first time in the Barsaat Mahal for the culture-stricken Nawab of Brahmpur before his incompetent, bankrupt, and heirless kingdom was annexed by the British. So her first ghazal was one of Mast’s, and no sooner had the first phrase been sung than the enraptured audience burst into a roar of appreciation.

‘I do not stoop, yet find my collar torn. .’ she began, and half-closed her eyes.

‘I do not stoop, yet find my collar torn.

The thorns were here, beneath my feet, not there.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Justice Maheshwari helplessly, his head vibrating in ecstasy on his plump neck. Saeeda Bai continued:

‘Can I be blameless when no voice will blame

The hunter who has caught me in this snare?’

Here Saeeda Bai shot a half-melting, half-accusing look at the poor eighteen-year-old. He looked down immediately, and one of his friends nudged him and repeated delightedly, ‘Can you be blameless?’ which embarrassed him yet further.

Lata looked at the young fellow with sympathy, and at Saeeda Bai with fascination. How can she do this? she thought, admiring and slightly horrified — she’s just moulding their feelings like putty, and all those men can do is grin and groan! And Maan’s the worst of the lot! Lata liked more serious classical music as a rule. But now she — like her sister — found herself enjoying the ghazal too, and also — though it was strange to her — the transformed, romantic atmosphere of Prem Nivas. She was glad her mother was upstairs.

Meanwhile, Saeeda Bai, extending an arm to the guests, sang on:

‘The pious people shun the tavern door—

But I need courage to outstare their stare.’

‘Wah! wah!’ cried Imtiaz loudly from the back. Saeeda Bai graced him with a dazzling smile, then frowned as if startled. However, gathering herself together, she continued:

‘After a wakeful night outside that lane,

The breeze of morning stirs the scented air.

Interpretation’s Gate is closed and barred

But I go through and neither know nor care.’

‘And neither know nor care,’ was sung simultaneously by twenty voices.

Saeeda Bai rewarded their enthusiasm with a tilt of her head. But the unorthodoxy of this couplet was outdone by that of the next:

‘I kneel within the Kaaba of my heart

And to my idol raise my face in prayer.’

The audience sighed and groaned; her voice almost broke at the word ‘prayer’; one would have had to be an unfeeling idol oneself to have disapproved.

‘Though blinded by the sun I see, O Mast,

The moonlight of the face, the clouds of hair.’

Maan was so affected by Saeeda Bai’s recitation of this final couplet that he raised his arms helplessly towards her. Saeeda Bai coughed to clear her throat, and looked at him enigmatically. Maan felt hot and shivery all over, and was speechless for a while, but drummed a tabla beat on the head of one of his rustic nephews, aged seven.

‘What will you listen to next, Maheshji?’ Saeeda Bai asked his father. ‘What a grand audience you always provide in your house. And so knowledgeable that I sometimes feel myself redundant. I need only sing two words and you gentlemen complete the rest of the ghazal.’

There were cries of ‘No, no!’, ‘What are you saying?’ and ‘We are your mere shadows, Saeeda Begum!’

‘I know that it is not because of my voice but through your grace — and that of the one above—’ she added, ‘that I am here tonight. I see your son is as appreciative of my poor efforts as you have been for many years. Such things must run in the blood. Your father, may he rest in peace, was full of kindness to my mother. And now I am the recipient of your graciousness.’

‘Who has graced whom?’ responded Mahesh Kapoor gallantly.

Lata looked at him in some surprise. Maan caught her eye and winked — and Lata could not help smiling back. Now that he was a relative, she felt much easier with him. Her mind flashed back to his behaviour this morning, and again a smile curled up at the corners of her mouth. Lata would never be able to hear Professor Mishra lecturing again without seeing him emerge from the tub as wet and pink and helpless as a baby.

‘But some young men are so silent,’ Saeeda Bai continued, ‘that they might as well themselves be idols in temples. Perhaps they have opened their veins so often that they have no blood left. Hanh?’ She laughed delightfully.

‘Why should my heart not be tied to him?’ she quoted—

‘Today he is dressed in colourful clothes.’

Young Hashim looked down guiltily at his blue, embroidered kurta. But Saeeda Bai continued unmercifully:

‘How can I praise his fine taste in dress?

In appearance he is like a prince.’

Since much Urdu poetry, like much Persian and Arabic poetry before it, had been addressed by poets to young men, Saeeda Bai found it mischievously easy to find such references to male dress and demeanour as would make it clear whom she was aiming her shafts at. Hashim might blush and burn and bite his lower lip but her quiver was not likely to run out of couplets. She looked at him and recited:

‘Your red lips are full of nectar.

How rightly you have been named Amrit Lal!’

Hashim’s friends were by now convulsed with laughter. But perhaps Saeeda Bai realized that he could not take much more amorous baiting for the moment, and she graciously permitted him a little respite. By now the audience felt bold enough to make its own suggestions, and after Saeeda Bai had indulged her taste for one of the more abstruse and referential ghazals of Ghalib — a strongly intellectual taste for so sensuous a singer — someone in the audience suggested one of his simpler favourites, ‘Where have those meetings and those partings gone?’

Saeeda Bai assented by turning to the sarangi and tabla players and murmuring a few words. The sarangi began to play an introduction to the slow, melancholy, nostalgic ghazal, written by Ghalib not in his old age but when he was not much older than the singer herself. But Saeeda Bai invested each of its questioning couplets with such bitterness and sweetness that even the hearts of the oldest in the audience were moved. When they joined in at the end of a familiar sentimental line it was as if they were asking a question of themselves rather than displaying their knowledge to their neighbours. And this attentiveness brought forth a yet deeper response from the singer, so that even the difficult last couplet, where Ghalib reverts to his metaphysical abstractions, climaxed rather than ebbed away from the ghazal as a whole.