The idea of withdrawing — into himself, into some temple of art, or some space uncontaminated by the sort of life his richer students led — never occurred to him. Or if it did, it was as a metaphor; something to be admired fervently and solemnly for its truth, while avoided carefully in reality. You couldn’t confuse a fiction, however sacred and beautiful it was, with what life could actually offer you. Because life could be bountiful; he observed, every day around him, its generosity and largesse.
The memory of his father made him reverential and nervous. He praised him constantly; at the same time, he was at work all the time to distance himself, in effect, from Panditji’s legacy. The immense sacrifice Ram Lal had made for the classical arts! This is what he’d left them in the end, the chawl in King’s Circle, from which you could constantly hear the gurdwara loudspeaker.
This was how the story of the family lineage went. Hanuman Prasad and Kartik Prasad — two brothers. No one could say with certainty where Hanuman Prasad got his talent from. His brother, Kartik Prasad, was a farmer. Their mother had a strong and tuneful voice — she used to be heard, before she died, at festivals and at nighttime, singing lullabies in that almost masculine voice.
‘That idiot is no help at all,’ Kartik Prasad would mutter when they were growing up. Where Hanuman Prasad picked up all those compositions from, and how he learnt to sing them, no one knew. He had been a general nuisance to the family. At night he would lie on his khatiya and look up at the sky. These days he was in the pay of the Bikaner maharaja, and performed in the Jodhpur maharaja’s court.
He spent a lot of his time smoking ganja from a chillum. Hanuman Prasad’s wife was long-suffering. She bore him two children. The first one they named Trilok; when the second one was born nine years later, they named him Ram Lal. It was during the birth of this child that the woman, who’d anyway been in poor health, died.
An emissary from the court would come to the village and say, ‘The maharaja wants you,’ and Hanuman Prasad would disappear for a few days. There was an amusing story about him. After a performance, the maharaja was full of admiration and asked him what he wanted in front of the sabha. Hanuman Prasad asked for some ganja. When Kartik Prasad heard about this, he was outraged. ‘You know we have an ailing mausi, who brought us up like a mother, and all you can ask for is ganja?’ He dealt him a couple of blows. The next time he performed in the court and was asked what reward he wanted, he took five rupees to buy medicine for his aunt. When Kartik Prasad heard of this, he hit him a few more times. ‘Five rupees?’ he shouted. ‘Is that all you could ask for?’ Hanuman Prasad was quite bewildered and angry. He began to realise nothing could satisfy his brother. He nursed a resentment inside.
He bided his time with his usual indifference to exigencies. When he was summoned to the court again, he said after his performance: ‘I would like a gun.’ ‘A gun?’ But they didn’t question him further; they presented him with a musket encased in wood. When he went home, and his brother asked him what he’d received from the maharaja, Hanuman Prasad said, ‘A gun.’ Kartik Prasad was flabbergasted; what did his brother mean? ‘You’ve made my life a misery. I’m going to kill you,’ said Hanuman Prasad, and displayed the musket. But he had no idea how to use it; in fact, it was doubtful if he’d seen a gun before. ‘Do you know what it’s for?’ said Kartik Prasad, and gave him a sharp smack on the head.
That gun lies with the local zamindar to this day.
He died suddenly; they found him dead in his bed, the chillum by his side. Ram Lal was a year old; Trilok, the older son, was ten.
It was Trilok who brought up Ram Lal. Ram Lal was a sickly but indefatigable boy; he had absolutely no understanding of the fact that his father was not alive, and that his mother had died a year ago. He ran about; played with marbles. Meanwhile, his older brother helped his uncle in the field, but never lost the interest in music that the nine years he’d been with his father had brought him. Ram Lal was reluctant to learn anything; nevertheless, Trilok sat and taught him some tunes, like raga Kedar and raga Vibhas. He noticed that although Ram Lal didn’t pay the slightest attention during these lessons, he picked up the ragas anyway, and could be heard humming them in the middle of some other activity.
The local zamindar rather liked Trilok’s singing. Someone had taken him when he was fifteen to the zamindar’s mansion and presented him there, saying, ‘Sir, listen to him. This is that ganja-addict Hanuman Prasad’s older son, and though he works on the field and never learnt from an ustad, you’ll find he has something of his father’s ability. Besides, he’s a very serious boy.’ And so Trilok, in his sweet, high voice, sang Maand, and, of course, the zamindar was charmed, and gradually, like an inert thing melting, his expression changed as he listened, and he shook his head, nostalgic with some secret yearning. When Trilok finished, he was silent while the boy sat with downcast eyes; then said finally: ‘Sing something else.’
Two years later, Trilok received a harmonium as a gift from the zamindar. It was a black, stout thing with knobs in the front, and bellows at the back which collapsed when you undid the clips on either side, but which had to be pulled constantly, tirelessly, by the dutiful, self-effacing left hand for the keys to burst into sound. And burst they did; it was like having a little band in the house. More and more, Trilok played while the boy Ram Lal sang, in a voice even more high-pitched than his brother’s, full-throated and careless, stopping between games or work to suddenly become an instrument that had no other thought or function.
Ram Lal had a fondness for histrionics; he came into his own when he was dancing or playing a part. Gradually, he became known in the villages for playing Majnu, thin, mercurial, a live wire of ardour, in the plangent tale of love and separation between his character and Laila. Still only twelve, he became a player in nautanki, travelling with a ragged theatre group and his brother, who lugged his harmonium around with him, guarding it only a little less scrupulously than he did his younger brother, as they went from village to village, gaping crowd to crowd.
The zamindar had a pain in his chest one day; and he was clutching it with his hand when he died. This left Trilok and Ram Lal more at the mercy of the nautanki group than they’d been before; but it also gave them greater freedom now to travel from village to impassioned nautanki performance in some other village in the evening, and back home again by dawn.
Late in the night after a performance, Trilok was trying to sleep not far from a fire, Ram Lal next to him, both of them covered from head to toe in blankets, and the older brother heard two men from the nautanki warming themselves by the fire speak in low voices:
‘Trilok is of no use to us. He’s a headache, always behaving like the father of the boy, as if no one else has a right to him. The majnu should be one of ours — he is one of ours. We are his family.’
‘That’s what I’ve been saying too.’
Then there was only the crackle of wood, and the protracted, drawn-out pleasure of one of the men clearing his throat and expectorating. Trilok did not stir; he lay still as a gunny bag.
‘When there is an opportunity we should. . especially on one of the journeys back. . fast, and quickly. .’
‘Arrey bhaisaab I will do it.’
And one of the men began to sing in a low, cracked voice.
The story goes that Trilok took fright and fled with Ram Lal two days later to Delhi. And they wandered about until they put up at an ashram where Gosain Baba sang. Gosain Baba, long-haired saint, who’d given up worldly success in the royal courts to contemplate the deities he adored, Radha and Krishna.