And he loved the rains. What Malhars he composed! Sughrai Malhar, Adana Malhar. . the oddest possible combinations.
In the morning, the ten-year-old sat listening to Gosain Baba. He became lost in the music; even his right leg, on which he leaned for an hour as he sat cross-legged, seemed, as awareness returned to him, to be elsewhere, he could not feel it, and it came back to him gradually with a discomfiting tingling sensation. Ram Lal sat still, between the fading of the raga Bhatiyar and his temporary disablement, until he was sure he could get up.
A new seriousness came upon the boy; Trilok had seldom seen him so solemn — not even did the mention of his dead parents or an illness make him as sad. Finally, the boy revealed to his brother the thought that was troubling him; he spoke with the obstinacy of a child who expects to be refused, and, to pre-empt disappointment, becomes glum and implacable:
‘Bhaiyya, I want to learn from Babaji.’
And Trilok, who was father and mother to the boy, was amused and surprised by this new desire for discipleship, and wondered how long it would possess Ram Lal.
Never one to procrastinate, he went to Gosain Baba and touched his feet, stirring the man from his sluggish spiritual reverie. Ram Lal skulked at the back, a fidgety miscreant.
‘Babaji, maharaj,’ stammered Trilok, ‘my brother Ram has a good singing voice and a great love of music. All these years he’s wasted singing nautanki songs, and now he’s ashamed of his ignorance. He wants to learn from you.’
‘But where is he?’ said Gosain Baba.
‘Come here ulloo!’ said Trilok to the figure standing a few feet away; and the boy, impertinent, at first didn’t listen, and then, at his brother’s urgent frown, thought it wise to obey.
‘I have seen him before,’ said Gosain Baba, looking at the thin boy tranquilly, with recognition. ‘What do you know?’ he said, addressing Ram Lal directly.
‘Very little,’ intervened Trilok. ‘In fact, he knows more dance than he does music.’
‘He will have to forget his dancing for now,’ said Gosain Baba.
For four years then, the story goes, the boy learnt from Gosain Baba. In that ashram, he practised the ragas endlessly, in a blind, joyous addiction to perfection and the sublime, often sitting down to sing when he shouldn’t, after the midday meal, for instance, leaving him with the dyspepsia that would bother him later in life. Already, he was beginning to take very ambitious taans; he created a storm, sudden pent-up torrents of notes, inside the small room.
From the ashram, Trilok and Ram Lal went back to Jaipur. The world was changing; nationalist slogans everywhere exhorting the sahib to leave. The brothers were oblivious. Soon after their return, they got married to two sisters.
Their father-in-law was an extraordinary man. He, Murli Prasad, had been the court dancer at the palace of the Maharaja of Nepal; his patron had showered him with gifts, jewellery mainly, which he wore and displayed with an indifferent contentment — chains, rings, gold bangles, elaborate earrings even, which dangled proudly from his pierced lobes. A large man with long greying hair, thickset, carrying off the jewellery with an instinctive delicacy. Among his wondrous prizes were the silver ghungroos that the maharaja had once given him, and which he occasionally tied round his ankles, and walked about, replete and musical.
Those ghungroos became Ram Lal’s. A bag of silver rupees from Murli Prasad’s underground vault was also given to him as the groom-price. All this with a dark, stocky twelve-year-old girl.
In a year, he was bored of the village and of Jaipur and wanted to return to Delhi. A new age was dawning there; huge meetings were being held; the British were leaving. He took a rented room and, without much thought, sold the ghungroos; then satisfied what for some time had been a secret urge — to float a theatre company. A band of ready and unthinkingly devoted disciples gravitated towards him; learnt singing from him, cooked for him, washed his clothes. The rented room doubled as a setting for their rehearsals. The company came to nothing.
In his, and his country’s, new-found state of unrest, teetering towards independence, he found a job at All India Radio; as supervisor. He wired his brother-in-law to bring his wife to Delhi; she, who wouldn’t look at him at first, soon became, to his wonder, talkative, with an endless number of things to say at any given point of time, as well as forceful and active in more ways than one. In Delhi, a year and a half after that reunion and discovery of one another, a child — a boy — was born to them; and he died almost immediately.
Then, after they had recovered from this first grief, and stopped puzzling over the early evidence of destiny and the hand of God, the young, bereaved mother, still hopeful, suggested: ‘Should we go to Bombay? Remember my uncle said there is always a place for us there.’
Her maternal uncle; who’d already made a name for himself as a music director in the film industry.
Ram Lal, nineteen, did not need much persuading. He was momentarily defeated; but he was hungry to make a fresh start.
The uncle, by wire, asked them to buy tickets to Victoria Terminus.
So began that lineage of music, sketchily. Bits of this story had come to Nirmalya at different points of time. Of how Ram Lal’s wife returned to Jaipur when she was with child, and there gave birth to Shyam. Then returned to Bombay with the little mewling infant, who had made her breasts sore, when he was three months old. Two years later, the younger brother Banwari was born, calmer and less importunate than the older child, as if he had accepted from the first the world for what it was. These details — of his teacher and his brother in their most unguarded moments, defenceless, before they became what they were — had, for Nirmalya, the significance of secrets and revelations, as of the birth of kings or holy men in the seemingly unremarkable age we live in. Who knew now, as they went teaching or playing from home to home, of their momentousness? But are not the great among us banal and mortal, even to themselves?
Three years ago, Shyamji began an annual function in his father’s memory; to pay respect to Ram Lal’s legacy, but also, without being wholly aware of doing so, to tame it, to rework it in terms amenable to him. Because his father’s world was not the world Shyamji now lived in; and how could the memorial, in all that it was, avoid reflecting that fact? It must enshrine the past; but it must belong to the present and the future. It was known as the Gandharva Sammelan; Ram Lal’s admirers had, towards the middle of his life, in an onrush of slightly belated, sentimental gratitude, given him the title ‘gandharva’. A gandharva is a heavenly singer — there are some singers whose voices are so melodious that they bring to existence, for their listeners, the fictive world of kinnars, gods, and apsaras, from which they seem to be briefly visiting us; and they’re identified as gandharvas. Their music brings to this world the message of that other one, to which they’ll eventually return. Shivputra Komkali, renamed Kumar Gandharva — ‘the boy gandharva’ — at the age of seven by a shankaracharya for his musical gift, was one such person. Ram Lal was another.
So, around November, Shyamji became peripatetic with a grey-white cyclostyled form for advertisements in his hand: one thousand rupees for a full page in the souvenir, one thousand five hundred for the first page and the back cover, etcetera.
His wish to commemorate his father was acute and sincere; but he was going to hire a hall, and he needed to break even.
Naturally, he approached Mr Sengupta — in a world without patrons, it’s the companies, and the heads of companies, that must provide patronage — for an advertisement. ‘Sengupta saab,’ he insisted gently, almost singing, ‘it is time for the sammelan again this year.’ ‘When?’ asked Mr Sengupta. He was busy with other things, burdened by a fall in profits because of intractable trade union activity; the rise of Datta Samant and other inflexible union leaders had coincided unfortunately with his managing directorship; he could remember last year’s sammelan, but eleven months had gone by so swiftly, so impatiently, that he couldn’t believe it was time for another one. ‘December,’ said Shyamji, as ever impeccably patient and polite. ‘Ninth and tenth.’