Later, we sat on the floor in my room, and my guru taught me to tune the instrument. The tanpura can be held vertically on the lap or next to the upraised knee as it is played, when it looks male and perpendicular, or laid horizontally on the ground before one, when, with the surrendering slope of its long neck and the stable fullness of its urn, its mixture of acquiescence and poise, it looks feminine. The four strings provide only two notes as a background to the song; sa, or shadja, the first, the mother-note, from which all other notes come, with which one’s relationship is permanent and unambiguous, and the second note, depending on the raag, the father-note, circumstantial but constructive. To tune the tanpura, you must turn the keys on its upper end, keys which are huge, ornate, and antique, like the doorknobs of a palace. On the nether end, upon the urn, there is a flat bridge on which the strings rest briefly, before they pass through small ivory-coloured beads that are used for the finer adjustments in tuning, and travel at last to a small plank of wood at the end, where, pierced through four open but infinitesimal eyes, they are knotted. While this painful business, this struggle, of tuning continues, four white threads are slipped beneath the strings as they lie on the bridge, and moved up and down till a point is discovered where each string loses its flat metallic note, and buzzes, a hum like that of the wandering drone, or electricity. This buzzing of the strings, this resonance, the musicians call juwari. That afternoon, my guru and I, like patient surgeons, tuned the tanpura till the room filled with notes shadja and nikhad.
When one remembers a scene from the past in which one is with a loved one who is now dead, it is not like a memory at all, but like a dream one is having before his death, a premonition. In this dream which precedes death, the person is tranquil and happy, and yet, without reason, you know he is to die. When we recall the dead, the past becomes a dream we are dreaming foretelling death, though in our waking moments we cannot properly interpret it or give it significance. My memory of the day I bought the tanpura with my guru is like such a dream.
7
Before I met Shehnaz, I led a domestic life with Sharma, a warm kitchen-life of teas and conversations. In this country where afternoon comes suddenly, he was a desired and happy interference, sewing my buttons, cooking daal for dinner, advising me on which clothes to wear, forcing me to buy new ones. What brought us together, among other things, was a common love for the English language. Each night, till midnight, he would recount with delight new idioms and words he had picked up during the day, and from these words he would become inseparable for about a week, using them in every context, just as a child who has been given a gift of new shoes spends a euphoric period wearing them everywhere. After lunch, we would sometimes watch black and white British films from the fifties on Channel Four, and Sharma would tell me how charming he found the rhythms and accents of Old English. He was a glum reader and connoisseur of dictionaries, an admirer of the Collins’ and a baleful critic of the OED, and he had a special but clear-eyed insight into their limitations.
8
In Oxford, I would walk almost everywhere, because I had an inexplicable pride that prevented me from using buses. There were two kinds of local buses, the red double-decker and the small toy-like white and blue bus. When the double-deckers passed by, they looked grand and somehow inaccessible, while the white buses seemed warm and busy, with the people sitting in them clearly visible through the large windows. But sitting inside a bus was a different experience, unrelated to what one might have surmised from the outside. Once, I took a double-decker to Cowley Road. It was like entering another life, right from ascending the wide berth of the foot-board at the entrance, clutching with great immediacy the pole-vaulter’s pole that rose there from the floor, ignoring the stealthy staircase that crept primitively upward, to make one’s way shyly inside, braving the curious but not unwelcoming glances of other people. As the scene changed from the civic architecture of High Street to the grey brick houses and Indian restaurants on Cowley Road, bodies circulated gently and continually inside, as people got in and got out; it was strangely but peacefully crowded, and one had to cling economically to a loop of leather or a horizontal rod travelling over one’s head, and sway containedly from the top of one’s head to the base of one’s feet, and privately regain one’s balance, as the bus went on its stately but mildly drunken, intemperate course. Another time, I took a less dramatic journey on a white bus to Summertown. Everything about it was small and detailed, from the coin handed for my fare to the driver, the neat black seats, the roof lowering over my head. Behind me sat a group of chattering boys and girls, and their impudent London accent filled the bus. Only a little way away from me sat the Indian bus driver in his blue uniform, but for some reason I thought of him as ‘Asian’, and he became for me mysterious and unclassifiable. At each stop, he greeted kindly old ladies in a hearty English manner, ‘Hullo, dear! It’s lovely day, innit?’ and later bid them inimitable farewells, ‘Have a nice day, dear!’, but the way he was more English than the English was very Indian, and there was something surprising about his utterances.
Cowley Road was on the other side, East Oxford. Long ago I had accompanied Sharma, in hope of seeing an erotic Japanese film, In the Realm of the Senses, to the Penultimate Picture Palace. After the roundabout, three roads ran parallel to each other — St Clement’s, Cowley Road, and Iffley Road. Full of spirit, we took the Cowley Road to the Picture Palace, but found, alas, that there were no tickets. The road was lined with Bangladeshi shops, and energetic little Muslim boys wearing skull-caps played on the pavement; they did not look foreign, but very provincial and East London. After darkness fell, the shops remained lighted and open, and old Pakistani gentlemen in overcoats, holding crumpled carrier-bags in their hands, had a chance to meet each other inside and converse in idiomatic Punjabi. Politics was discussed; the Bhuttos; Kashmir; cowardly India; bullying India; and the Indian cricket team was dismissed, quite rightly, with a contemptuous but decorous burst of air from the lungs. ‘Asian’ couples with shopping-trolleys went down aisles stacked with boxes of chilli powder, packets of dried fruit, jars of pickles, and imported vegetables — roots and tubers — with the flecked soil of Bangladesh still upon them; the shopkeeper continued his conversation in full-throated asides while his hands worked at the till; and to pay him, finally, in pounds rather than in rupees was like a joke whose meaning we both shared. There was a row of Indian restaurants along the road; at six o’clock, Muslim waiters stood significantly by the windows, and at night, the interiors glowed with a lurid red light. The furniture, selected with some tender and innocent idea of opulence in mind, was cheap and striking; honest Englishmen sat being served among fluted armrests and large, mendacious pictures of palmtrees and winding rivers, helplessly surrendering to an inexhaustible trickle of eastern courtesy; everything, including the waiters, smelled strongly of mint and fenugreek. The restaurants were seedy, but generous with life; and from the silvery letters of the sign outside, to the decor within, was a version of that style called the ‘oriental’.