“Zafar bhai, what do you say?”
Zafar, who is not best pleased by my bringing up this subject, replies that likening music to promises is as absurd as comparing a vulture and a potato, potatoes don’t have feathers and vultures don’t grow under the earth. Says he, “You are making an equation of two things which have nothing in common.”
“Zafar brother, what is an equation?”
“A way of showing how two different things can be the same.”
“So then I accept this vulture-potato challenge. It’s easy. A vulture’s egg is the same size as a potato.”
Zafar laughs and says my answer is ingenious, but how do I know?
This I can’t admit. Up until a few years ago there were plenty of vultures around Khaufpur, they used to fly down and settle on the garbage dumps where I also foraged, one day I found an egg which at first I thought was a potato, till I picked it up. Washed and boiled, it tasted good. Nowadays there are no vultures left and whether it’s because hungry fuckers like me ate all their eggs I don’t know.
“Saalé,” says Farouq, still well pissed off with me, “don’t get ideas above your station, which is low in life.”
“So say, Zafar brother,” it’s Chunaram. “People are puzzled. Elli doctress, Pandit Somraj. We all see these days they are quite friendly. So why continue this boycott? Shouldn’t we all benefit from her friendship?”
“Pandit Somraj is just being kind to a neighbour, that’s all,” says Zafar who’s well aware that people suspect that Somraj has been quietly receiving treatment from Elli doctress.
“Forgive me, Zafar bhai, even this idiot boy has noticed that whatever’s going on, it’s something more than kindness.”
“You fucking turd’s apostle,” I yell. “Here I’m trying to have a philosophical discussion, all you can do is gossip!”
They’re all in stitches, so I’ve left that place of wankers.
“Zafar brother, tell me.” I’ve caught him a while later. “The first secret of music, many times I’ve heard Pandit-ji say this, is that the notes themselves are nothing, their only meaning is when they’re compared to the boss note of sa. ‘Don’t listen to the notes,’ Pandit-ji says, ‘listen to their fluctuations away from sa. This is what gives rise to rasa, or emotion. If you grasp this you have got the music.’”
“Yes, so?”
“So I got thinking about this fluctuation business. Stuff can’t fluctuate without moving. Further, nearer, it’s a question of measure. So the notes of music are measures. Plus, see, you can’t know what a thing is if you don’t know what it isn’t. What makes a thing itself is it always keeps its difference from other things. The note of dha always stays the same distance from sa, isn’t that a kind of promise?”
Zafar groans, “Go away Animal, I wish Elli had never said you were an intellectual.”
I pluck up courage to ask Somraj about my idea that the musical notes are promises. He listens gravely, then says there’s a thing I’ve forgotten. The nature of a promise is that it comes without guarantee. Then he says he will tell me the deepest secret of music. Says Somraj, “The notes of the scale are all really one note, which is sa. The singer’s job is to sing sa, nothing else only sa, but sa is bent and twisted by this world and what’s in it, by grief or love or longing, these things come in and introduce desires into sa, bending and deforming it, sending it higher or lower, and the result is what we call music. The singer’s job is to express the emotion yet remain true to sa which itself is eternal and changeless. And since in our music there is no difference between the singer and the song, the promise is made by the singer not the notes. Ragas are journeys through the human condition, scales that express certain feelings, and the singer’s promise is to deliver that emotion. But it can happen that the singer departs from the scale, making the audience cringe, then the promise is broken.” Then he says that it’s because of all music being one thing that there’s music in all things.
“Zafar bhai, listen to one more idea.”
“What is it now? I am really busy.”
“You will like this one, it solves everything.”
So I’ve explained that if Somraj is right, then it’s obvious how a world made of such music is also a world of promises made by auto-rickshaws and blacksmiths, bees, rain and railway engines, for the squeaky bicycle of Gangu who pedals round the Nutcracker selling milk would not be heard if he did not keep his promise to be a milkman, there’d be no rattle of truck exhausts if the drivers and their assistants who perch in the cabins with their feet out the windows weren’t all keeping their promises and doing their jobs, maybe there’s even some kind of music to be had from potatoes and vultures, if so Somraj is sure to have thought of it, and all these sounds are fluctuating around some great sa that hums constantly in Somraj’s head, by which he tunes the universe.
“Zafar, why are you crying?”
“Something in my eye,” says Zafar, down whose cheeks tears are running. “Animal, do me a favour, don’t spout these theories to Nisha, I don’t think she would understand. She’s not so happy about her dad being friendly with Elli.”
But it’s thinking about rain that solves my mystery, for there would be no music of falling drops if the clouds each year did not keep their promise to burst overhead, and I remember Elli saying that the tides are the moon and sea keeping their own promises, and that’s that. A promise involves a thing that can’t be measured, which is trust and I can’t speak for rain and the sea and moon, but I can ask why people keep their promises, and maybe the answer in the end is love.
One midnight Elli’s woken by her doorbell, someone’s out there with their finger jammed on the button. She grabs a shawl around her, runs downstairs. Of all the people she doesn’t expect to see, it’s Nisha in her nightclothes, looking frightened. “Please come. My father, he’s very ill.”
“I thought you were boycotting me.”
Says Nisha, who’s terrified, “There’s no one else. He often has nightmares, he’ll shout, he gets breathless, but never have I seen him this bad.”
“Go back to him,” says the doctress. “I’ll fetch my bag.”
A minute later, she is beside the bed where Somraj is lying. He’s propped on a pillow, his body bare from the waist up, covered in sweat, his breathing’s shallow, kind of whistling, a pinkish froth’s crept out the corners of his mouth. She listens to his chest, takes his pulse, plus his temperature.
“I am so sorry,” says Nisha, who by now is in tears. “I’ve no right. I didn’t call you even when Zafar was ill. So many people could have been helped by you, we have stopped them. This is selfish, I feel totally ashamed.”
Somraj opens his eyes, wants to speak, but the doctress puts a finger on his lips. “Be quiet,” she tells him. To Nisha she says, “You are not to worry. Let’s just see to your father.” Somraj closes his eyes but Nisha keeps hers fixed on Elli, who’s preparing a syringe. As the needle slides from his arm, Somraj gives a deep sigh.
“Now he is relaxed,” says his daughter, but Elli knows he’d begun to relax even before she gave the injection.
“I thought he was going to die, Elli,” which is the first time Nisha’s called Elli by her name. Somraj is burning up, sweat’s brimming his forehead. Nisha fetches a cloth, wipes his face. He opens his eyes again and says to Elli, “You are a good person. I’ve tried to make my daughter a fine person.”
“She is a fine person,” says Elli, who has no reason at all to believe it.