5
The first few weeks I knew Shehnaz, when we were still getting to be friends, was an uncomplicated time. We made appointments and did not keep them; we made appointments to discuss when we might meet; we liked each other but were occupied, like children, with other things to do. Sometimes I am nostalgic for that make-believe busyness, full of innocence, of having ‘other things to do’, the prelapsarian background of lectures, bookshops, friends, our lives spent generously and routinely like rain-showers, stopping and starting again.
We decided to meet at the St Giles’ Cafe near the Oxfam Bookshop. ‘Do you know where it is?’ she asked me with a smile; these sociable questions she would invest with a mischievousness, so that they became funny and meaningful, and I would always pretend to be embarrassed answering them. I did know the St Giles’ Cafe; it was the only place in Oxford that served a strong and dark coffee, with a scorched South Indian flavour; a white froth, almost a scum, formed on the top even before they had put the milk in it. Unlike the coffee in the Middle and Senior Common Rooms, it was hot, and one could, with a certain satisfaction, admire the steam rising from the cup before one drank from it. The cafe was a small, ugly and crowded place, full of students, and tramps minding their own business, hatted and bearded, with an unworldly look about them, like musicians. On either side of each table, there was a bench, and one had to squeeze past people to sit down, or have people squeeze past you as they got out. Thus, as one made small adjustments in position, one was always feeling grateful or obliged, strangely powerful or powerless; one shrank and hunched, and then graciously expanded again, in regular accordionlike time. Each table also had an introvert who sat in the corner throughout and looked at no one. When people were called to take their food from the counter, they were not addressed by their names, but by their orders—‘Ham and eggs!’ ‘Plate of chips!’ ‘Bacon sandwich!’—and, calmly and without confusion, those who had been labelled so uniquely rose and walked towards the counter. Whenever the door opened, a draught entered from outside, but the baked air inside, smelling of frying bacon, cushioned us from the cold and from other influences. The paradoxical confluence of timelessness and movement in the cafe made it an ideal place for a first meeting between two foreign students.
Yet that meeting, comically, was not to be. It was the beginning of summer, and some girls walked barefoot that day on Cornmarket Street. There was a hustle and bustle, a festive hurry, and even Ryman’s, the stationery shop, had inspired-looking customers queueing up to pay for envelopes and sheets of paper and Sellotape. Sharma and I were roaming around at our ease in loose shirts, two Indians who might never have met in India, feeling at home, giving studious attention, as if it truly mattered, to shop-windows and an ancient organ-grinder, edging our way towards Westgate, both of us feeling boyish, and I especially younger because I was wearing sandals. It began to thunder then, and rain very hard, as it does at home; girls screamed in English, and people who were waiting for the bus panicked, but soon the crowds deployed themselves into neat and dripping little squadrons, cheerful and brave, and the entrance of the Clarendon Centre and the great department stores were converted into shelters with an unfussy swiftness. I had never seen it rain like this in England before; water collected in the lanes and flowed past us as it does in Calcutta; and the English were excited at first and then reasonable and collected, telling each other jokes and enjoying themselves; it was all a little like but yet very unlike the wise dailiness with which an Indian outwaits a shower. Sharma looked at the sky and felt poetic and told me how he was reminded of his village. Thus I did not meet Shehnaz that afternoon but waited outside a shop that sold shoes and saw wet and laughing people running and disappearing, and committed to memory the rare, leisurely couple who walked by, contented and soaked. Later, Shehnaz told me how she had cycled to the St Giles’ Cafe after it had stopped raining, but had found it empty except for its owners, the stentorian callers of ‘Ham and cheese’ and ‘Bacon sandwich’, who were silent now, and busy mopping up the wet floors.
6
Sohanlal comes in the mornings. He is married to my music-teacher’s sister. Though he is quite short, he wears bright kurtas that come down below his knees. He demands the tablas from Ponchoo, strutting around the hall like a rooster in his early morning plumage. Then he tunes the smaller tabla with a hammer, and the bigger one on the left he booms with his fingertips. When he plays as my mother sings, his hands, which are old now, produce a pitter-patter noise. After twenty minutes, he takes a break, smoking a beedi on the veranda; and then, before he is finished, throws it away and coughs a dramatic smoker’s cough. He likes doing things; returning, he takes out his handkerchief and dusts the harmonium, wiping the smooth, rectangular top. It is a harmonium made in Calcutta by Pakrashi, and he takes care to probe, his forefinger shrouded with the handkerchief, each English letter of PAKRASHI carved largely on the wood, blowing sensuously on the angular K and tracing the curves of the P and the R till he is satisfied. Then he polishes the black and white keys, and opens the cover; inside, the two rows of innumerable reeds lie bone-white, each reed a delicate white splinter, with a pinhead on one end and a flat metal strip on the belly. Sohanlal blows quietly upon them, as if they were on fire; how silent music is as it rests in these reeds, white paper-thin wands! He replaces the cover, because it is almost unpleasant to watch, the inner nakedness of a harmonium. Eagerly, he moves about again, his spacious pyjamas billowing around him. As he prepares to sit, they open at the bottom like alligator-mouths that have swallowed up his legs. After an hour, he glances at his wristwatch and collects his money politely and hurries out of the front door. Then next morning he is reincarnated in his fantastic kurta and pyjamas as if from a magic lamp.
It was on an afternoon in August I bought my first tanpura. We were visiting Calcutta then, and my music-teacher, my guru, had come with us and was living in our house; he was going to sing at a ‘conference’. He would practise in the mornings, and take time off to vanish to the Kali temple, returning with a tilak, a great vermilion stain on his forehead, telling my mother ‘Didi, I went to see Ma Kali!’ On some mornings we would sing raag Bhairav together, our two voices and styles mingling closely and floating over the other sounds of the house — pigeons, and the distracted noise of servants — his voice sometimes carrying my hesitant voice, and negotiating the pathways of the raag, as a boat carries a bewildered passenger. In the moments of simple imbibing, I would forget my voice was my own and become an echo of his style and artistry. The greater part of the unfolding of a raag consists of a slow, evasive introduction in which the notes are related to each other by curving glissandoes, or meends. The straight, angular notes of Western music, composed and then rendered, are like print upon a page; in contrast, the curving meends of the raag are like longhand writing drawn upon the air. Each singer has his own impermanent longhand with its own arching, idiosyncratic beauties, its own repetitive, serpentine letters. With the end of the recital, this longhand, which, in its unravelling, is a matter of constant erasures and rewritings, is erased completely, unlike the notes of Western music, which remain printed upon the page.
That afternoon, we took the car to Rashbehari Avenue. My guru was dressed as usual in a loose white kurta and pyjamas. It must have been six or seven years before his death, and he must have just turned forty. He was humming a complicated tune with tiny embellishments when he was not talking to me, and the oil he had put in his hair before he combed it smelled sweet. We walked to the shop, no bigger than a room, called Hemen and Co. Outside, the pavement was broken, its edges blue-grey with ash from charcoal stoves; mosquitoes hung in the air. Ascending the three steps, we saw unfinished tanpuras and sitars, long patient necks and the comical but gracefully distended round urns; some instruments hung upside down from the ceiling like bats; and a man was planing a piece of wood. My tanpura was ready with its four new strings; I remember the tentative shyness with which I touched it.