A Suitable Boy(151)
‘What do you mean, not entirely?’
‘Well,’ said the lady, ‘my husband would prefer me to sing not classical music but Rabindrasangeet.’
‘Hmmh!’ said Ustad Majeed Khan. That the sickly-sweet so-called music of Rabindranath Tagore’s songs should be more attractive to any man’s ears than the beauty of classical khyaal clearly marked such a man as a buffoon. To the shy Bengali woman, the Ustad said in a tone of lenient contempt: ‘So I expect he’ll be asking you to sing him a “gojol” next.’
At his cruel mispronunciation the Bengali lady retreated entirely into a flustered silence, but Malati and Veena glanced at each other with amusement.
Ustad Majeed Khan, apropos of his earlier lesson, said: ‘The boy has a good voice and he works hard, but he sings as if he were in church. It must be his earlier training in western music. It’s a good tradition in its own way,’ he went on tolerantly. Then, after a pause, he continued, ‘But you can’t unlearn it. The voice vibrates too much in the wrong kind of way. Hmm.’ He turned to the Bengali woman: ‘Tune the tanpura down to the “ma”; I may as well teach you your “Malkosh”. One should not leave a raag half-taught even if it is the wrong time of day to sing it. But then I suppose one can set yogurt in the morning and eat it at night.’
Despite her nervousness, the Bengali lady acquitted herself well. The Ustad let her improvise a little on her own, and even said an encouraging ‘May you live long!’ a couple of times. If the truth be told, music mattered more to the Bengali lady than her husband and her three wellbrought-up sons, but it was impossible, given the constraints of her life, for her to give it priority. The Ustad was pleased with her and gave her a longer lesson than usual. When it was over, she sat quietly to one side to listen to what was to follow.
What followed was Veena Tandon’s lesson. She was to sing Raag Bhairava, for which the tanpura had to be retuned to “pa”. But so distracted was she by various worries about her husband and her son that she began to strum it immediately.
‘What raag are you studying?’ said Ustad Majeed Khan, slightly puzzled. ‘Isn’t it Bhairava?’
‘Yes, Guruji,’ said Veena, somewhat perplexed herself.
‘Guruji?’ said Ustad Majeed Khan in a voice that would have been indignant if it had not been so astonished. Veena was one of his favourite pupils, and he could not imagine what had got into her.
‘Ustad Sahib,’ Veena corrected herself. She too was surprised that in addressing her Muslim teacher she had used the title of respect due to a Hindu one.
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 re-tuned 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.