Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Ustad Majeed Khan continued: ‘And if you are singing Bhairava, don’t you think it would be a good idea to retune the tanpura?’

‘Oh,’ said Veena, looking down in surprise at the tanpura, as if it were somehow to blame for her own absence of mind.

After she had retuned it, the Ustad sang a few phrases of a slow alaap for her to imitate, but her performance was so unsatisfactory that at one point he said sharply to her: ‘Listen. Listen first. Listen first, then sing. Listening is fifteen annas in the rupee. Reproducing it is one anna — it’s the work of a parrot. Are you worried about something?’ Veena did not think it right to speak of her anxieties before her teacher, and Ustad Majeed Khan continued: ‘Why don’t you strum the tanpura so that I can hear it? You should eat almonds for breakfast — that will increase your strength. All right, let’s go on to the composition—“Jaago Mohan Pyaare”,’ he added impatiently.

Motu Chand started the rhythmic cycle on the tabla and they began to sing. The words of the well-known composition lent stability to Veena’s unsteady thoughts and the increasing confidence and liveliness of her singing pleased Ustad Majeed Khan. After a while first Malati, and then the Bengali woman got up to leave. The word ‘gojol’ flashed through the Ustad’s mind and it dawned upon him where he had heard of Motu Chand before. Wasn’t he the tabla player who accompanied the ghazals of Saeeda Bai, that desecrater of the holy shrine of music, the courtesan who served the notorious Raja of Marh? One thought led to another; he turned abruptly towards Veena and said, ‘If your father, the Minister, is bent upon destroying our livelihood, at least he can protect our religion.’

Veena stopped singing and looked at him in bewildered silence. She realized that ‘livelihood’ referred to the patronage of the great rural landlords whose lands the Zamindari Abolition Bill was attempting to snatch away. But what the Ustad Sahib meant by a threat to his religion, she could not comprehend at all.

‘Tell him that,’ continued Ustad Majeed Khan.

‘I will, Ustad Sahib,’ said Veena in a subdued voice.

‘The Congress-wallahs will finish Nehru and Maulana Azad and Rafi Sahib off. And our worthy Chief Minister and Home Minister will sooner or later suppress your father as well. But while he has some political life, he can do something to help those of us who depend on the likes of him for protection. Once they start singing their bhajans from the temple while we are at prayer, it can only end badly.’

Veena realized that Ustad Majeed Khan was referring to the Shiva Temple being constructed in Chowk, only a couple of lanes away from Ustad Majeed Khan’s house.

After humming to himself for a few seconds the Ustad paused, cleared his throat and said, almost to himself: ‘It is becoming unlivable in our area. Apart from Marh’s madness, there is the whole insane business of Misri Mandi. It’s amazing,’ he went on, ‘the whole place is on strike, no one ever works, and all they do is yell slogans and threats at each other. The small shoemakers starve and scream, the traders tighten their belts and bluster, and there are no shoes in the stores, no employment in the whole Mandi. Everyone’s interests are harmed, yet no one will compromise. And this is Man whom God has made out of a clot of blood, and to whom he has given reason and discrimination.’

The Ustad finished his comment with a dismissive wave of his hand, a wave that implied that everything he had ever thought about human nature had been confirmed.

Seeing Veena look even more upset, an expression of concern passed over Majeed Khan’s face. ‘Why am I telling you this?’ he said, almost in self-reproach. ‘Your husband knows all this better than I do. So that’s why you are distracted — of course, of course.’

Veena, moved though she was by this expression of sympathy from the normally unsympathetic Ustad, was silent, and continued to strum the tanpura. They resumed where they had left off, but it must have been obvious that her mind was not on the composition or the rhythmic patterns — the ‘taans’—which followed. At one point, the Ustad said to her: ‘You’re singing the word “ga”, “ga”, “ga”, but is that really the note “ga” you are singing? I think you have too much on your mind. You should leave such things with your shoes outside this room when you come in.’

He began to sing a complex series of taans, and Motu Chand, carried away by the pleasure of the music, started to improvise a pleasant filigree of rhythmic accompaniment on the tabla. The Ustad abruptly stopped.

He turned to Motu Chand with sarcastic deference. ‘Please go on, Guruji,’ he said.

The tabla player smiled embarrassedly.

‘No, do go on, we were enjoying your solo,’ continued Ustad Majeed Khan.

Motu Chand’s smile became unhappier still.

‘Do you know how to play a simple theka — the plain unornamented rhythmic cycle? Or are you in too high a circle of Paradise for that?’

Motu Chand looked pleadingly at Ustad Majeed Khan and said, ‘It was the beauty of your singing that carried me away, Ustad Sahib. But I won’t let it happen again.’

Ustad Majeed Khan looked sharply at him, but he had intended no impertinence.

After her lesson was over, Veena got up to leave. Normally she stayed as long as she could, but this was not possible today. Bhaskar had a fever and wanted her attention; Kedarnath needed cheering up; and her mother-in-law had just that morning made a hurtful comment on the amount of time she spent at the Haridas College of Music.

The Ustad glanced at his watch. There was still an hour before the noon prayer. He thought of the call to prayer which he heard every morning first from his local mosque and then at slightly staggered intervals from other mosques across the city. What he particularly liked in the morning call to prayer was the twice-repeated line that did not appear in the azaan later in the day: ‘Prayer is better than sleep.’

Music too was prayer to him, and some mornings he would be up long before dawn to sing Lalit or some other early morning raag. Then the first words of the azaan, ‘Allah-u-Akbar’—God is Great — would vibrate across the rooftops in the cool air and his ears would lie in wait for the sentence that admonished those who attempted to sleep on. When he heard it, he would smile. It was one of the pleasures of his day.

If the new Shiva Temple was built, the sound of the muezzin’s early cry would be challenged by that of the conch. The thought was unbearable. Surely something must be done to prevent it. Surely the powerful Minister Mahesh Kapoor — who was taunted by some in his party for being, like the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, almost an honorary Muslim — could do something about it. The Ustad began meditatively to hum the words of the composition that he had just been teaching the Minister’s daughter—‘Jaago Mohan Pyaare’. Humming it, he forgot himself. He forgot the room he was in and the students still waiting for their lessons. It was very far from his mind that the words were addressed to the dark god Krishna, asking him to wake up with the arrival of morning, or that Bhairava — the name of the raag he was singing — was an epithet of the great god Shiva himself.

Ishaq Khan, Saeeda Bai’s sarangi player, had been trying for several days to help his sister’s husband — who was also a sarangi player — to get transferred from All India Radio Lucknow, where he was a ‘staff artist’, to All India Radio Brahmpur.

This morning too, Ishaq Khan had gone down to the AIR offices and tried his luck by talking to an assistant producer of music, but to no avail. It was a bitter business for the young man to realize that he could not even get to state his case properly to the Station Director. He did, however, state his case vociferously to a couple of musician friends he met there. The sun was warm, and they sat under a large and shady neem tree on the lawn outside the buildings. They looked at the cannas and talked of this and that. One of them had a radio — which he had ingeniously connected up to a socket inside the main building — and they switched it on to the only station they could receive clearly, which was their own.