The Age of Shiva (16 page)

Fortunately, the ganga walked in on one of my chappati experiments. “You have to add less water to the flour, and knead it more,” she diagnosed, as she squatted to run her cloth over the floor. For mutton, she suggested mixing in yogurt to tenderize the more stubborn pieces. “Cauliflower is expensive,” she told me another time, “you can cook cabbage the same way, you know.” Although I could never summon the gleam of enthusiasm I saw in the ganga's eyes, I did follow her advice, and little by little my cooking improved.

Biji sent me a scandalized letter (dictated out as usual in Sharmila's handwriting) when I wrote to her about all the chores with which I was filling my time. “It's bad enough that the granddaughter of a zamindar is callusing her hands with such menial work. But to learn from a ganga, the same person who cleans your floors? I hope you have a big bottle of Dettol at home, to disinfect your utensils each time she touches them.” This was in addition to her lament that Paji's cheapness had landed us in the midst of a slew of Muslim neighbors. “Are there no Hindus left in Bombay, that he couldn't have found a more suitable building for his own flesh and blood?”

Dev had remarked on it while reading the residents' names at the bottom of the steps one day. “…Azmi, Hamid, Khan. Dr. Kagalwalla could be either Muslim or Parsi. But Afzan, Karmali, Hussain…? All these people on all these floors—could we be the only Hindu family among them?”

There were even a few ladies in the building who dressed in burkhas. They glided down the steps in flurries of mauve or brown, their silk robes scenting the air with attars of jasmine and rose. Their veils were always drawn back over their heads and fastened in place, and sometimes I saw lipstick, even eye shadow on their faces. As I got to recognize them better, I realized they only donned burkhas for certain occasions, being perfectly comfortable at other times striding into the street like me in a salwar kameez.

Surely Arya, like Biji, would have bristled at being surrounded by so many Muslims. Dev didn't seem to think that way, and neither did I. Still, it did make it harder to assimilate into the life of the building community. I felt self-conscious as the only woman to descend the steps wearing a bindi on my forehead. Every day I glanced at the banisters leading up to unexplored floors, and imagined meeting one of the apparitions I had seen, floating down in her billowing attire. My fantasy was that I would ring a doorbell at random, and boldly introduce myself. Perhaps I would even be rewarded with a bosom friend—someone to address my aloneness, quench the longing to unburden myself.

Except I had always been reticent while making friends, even worse at opening up to them. Now, it was not only my shyness that held me back, but also the religious differences that might confront me after pushing the doorbell.
What if they were in the middle of their namaz, and the presence of a Hindu annulled their prayers? What if I interrupted a meal, and it turned out to be beef, which they invited me in to share?
Paji's secular guest list had not been enough to neutralize the years of wariness Biji had drilled in. I nodded at my neighbors and they nodded at me on the stairs, but months of such cordiality were not sufficient for us to progress from there.

Dev, unlike me, quickly tapped into a network of musician friends. I had little in common, and did not mix with them. It was good to be so isolated, I told myself—it would force me to appreciate Dev more when he returned in the evenings, make him easier to bear when he satisfied himself. Each morning, I turned on the radio to dispel the stillness that hung around the house, and waited for the ganga's visit to fulfill any need for company I had. When the cooking failed to ward off an impending attack of melancholy, a visit to Chowpatty helped. I considered a matinee at the Diana a few times, but the clientele looked too unsavory, and I always walked on to the sea instead.

My only significant contact with anyone other than Dev was through the mail. Biji sent me two letters a week, dictated to Sharmila, who always scribbled extra lines of her own at the end so as not to waste any of the blue inland sheet. Hema kept me apprised of all the news at Nizamuddin—a blanket of moroseness, she claimed, had descended over the entire colony due to my leaving. “Mataji is always irritable, and Babuji has started drinking so much that he's passed out twice on the verandah already. Even the radiogram broke down the day before when I tried to play cheerful records in the evening. Nobody seems concerned about fixing it—all they say is to stop nagging them about it.” Compounding everything else, Pushpa's family down the street had bought a fridge (a Kelvinator at that), and people were going around saying how the ice it made was a lot colder than that of their Godrej. “It's getting so miserable that any day now I'm going to run away and come to live with you and Dev bhaiyya in Bombay. You can take me to the jewelry shops at Zhaveri Bazaar, show me the zoo.” In one corner of each letter, Sandhya always painstakingly wrote out her name. It was her presence I missed the most—I wished there were some way for us to directly communicate.

A long letter from Roopa arrived in June, filled with details about the newly built naval quarters in Visakhapatnam and the glorious birth of her twins. “It's such an amazing feeling being a mother—to wake up with a glow every morning. You can't imagine how beautiful they look—the two lives I've created, sleeping side by side.” I wondered whether she was gloating on purpose, or simply being her usual insensitive self. Dev pored over the letter all evening, holding it up against bulbs and lamps as if a secret love message, inscribed in invisible ink, would magically come to life.

It was Paji's missives, however, that made me the most uncomfortable. The same precise handwriting, the cursive letters so neatly formed, the envelopes all white and creamy, not hinting at the dangers they could be concealing. Most of them turned out to be quite benign. In one, he simply asked after the new radiogram and fridge he had bought as promised. In another, he sent me the certificates I would need for college admission the following year. But soon to come was a letter from Paji which once more would have a profound effect on our lives.

D
EV BEGAN HIS EFFORTS TO BREAK INTO SINGING FOR FILMS AS SOON AS
we got to Bombay. He came armed with two pages of contacts' addresses, compiled from musician friends in Delhi, and methodically started going down the list. None of these contacts had phones, and the residences were often in the outer, less developed suburbs like Malad and Borivili, so Dev had to take long train rides to get to them. Even when it became apparent that the purported connections to the film industry were quite nebulous, Dev persevered, determined to leave no name uninvestigated in his quest.

His search eventually led him to a squat green building only a few streets away, wedged between the Tardeo Medical Clinic and the distributor for A-1 potato chips. Famous Studios was where the songs and background score for many movies were recorded. A friend introduced him to the owner, who allowed Dev to spend his days in the lobby. But despite daily sightings of music directors like Jaikishan and S. D. Burman, and even the Mangeshkar sisters, fast becoming the empresses of the singing world, Dev remained undiscovered. “So close, and I didn't know how to approach them,” he lamented to me in the evenings.

The only people who spoke to him were the musicians—maestros of the traditional tabla and sitar, but also percussionists and guitar players, who with audiences' westernizing tastes were increasingly in demand. Sometimes they dropped by our flat after a recording. Bottles of fluorescent fruit-flavored liquor invariably materialized on these occasions, and I hid in the bedroom as the congregation got rowdier. Once the alcohol ran out, they staggered back towards the recording studio, to the speakeasy called “Auntie's Place” in the alley next to the chip factory. Dev returned so intoxicated that I always wondered how he managed to find his way back home.

By September, more than half the money with which we had arrived was gone. Underneath Dev's optimism I noticed a jittery desperation begin to form. His musician friends stopped coming around—he spent long evenings with them at Auntie's instead. He knew his studio days were numbered, without a job we would not be able to go on.

That was when the letter from Paji arrived. He had addressed it, for the first time, to both of us—Dev's name before mine. The contents were brief. One of the men in Paji's qawwali circle was a good friend of Nawab Mohammed, the music director—the same one for whom a decade ago, Saigal had sung some of his best work. If Dev wanted, Paji could help arrange an appointment with him.

Dev folded up the letter and inserted it back into its envelope carefully. “Years from now, I want to be able to look back and read this letter again,” he said, touching it to his forehead as if it were something holy. He placed it among his prayer things, between the statue of Sai Baba and the picture of Lakshmi. “Your father never had a son, but I feel he has adopted me.”

NAWAB MOHAMMED LIVED
in Bandra—not in the area which film stars had recently begun eyeing for their bungalows, but in the older, less trendy part of Pali Hill towards the church. Perhaps this reflected the fact that his heyday had passed—the golden period when producers lined up on the street in their Impalas to sign him up, when Saigal himself coronated him “the nawab of music directors,” a title Mohammed soon incorporated into his professional name. Long after the movies themselves had been forgotten, and Mohammed's star had embarked on its irreversible decline, the songs he had composed for Saigal still scintillated over the airwaves, with a frequency that augured immortality. His name adorned a movie only once a year or two now, but it was still a name well recognized—the taxi driver at Bandra station knew exactly which house to take us to at its mention.

The evening before, I had accompanied Dev to the Babulnath temple to pray for his success. Chowpatty was just down the road, so we went there afterwards. “It's finally going to happen,” Dev said, as we walked along the shore. “I can feel it in the air, feel it in myself.”

I stared at the serpentine contours marking the degrees of dampness in the sand. Crusts of foam swirled around our feet.

“Don't think I don't realize what a difficult journey it's been. I'll never forget the sacrifice you made—what Paji asked, what you agreed to give up for me.”

I looked up, astounded. Could I make Dev wilt by staring him in the eye? But he was done with the past—it was the future at which he was now gazing. “Can you make out that beige building—there, in the middle of Marine Drive? I think it's called Keval Mahal. Right on the top floor—that's where we'll buy our flat.”

After dinner, though, Dev's assurance began to crumble. “What if I can't do it?” he said, his face drained of blood, a tremor in his neck. “What if the words get stuck? It's been a year since I've competed, and it's never meant so much.”

It occurred to me that I could demolish his confidence completely if I wanted. Here was an opportunity to convince Dev his pursuit was doomed, the city a waste of time. A chance to exploit his vulnerability and avenge my “sacrifice.” But it was only numbness I found searching inside myself, not an appetite for revenge. In any case, Bombay was where all our prospects lay now—there was no advantage in precipitating a return to Delhi. The only practical course of action was to build Dev's spirit back up that night.

“You have the exact voice he needs to start crafting hits again after all these years. You'll sing so well tomorrow that he'll think Saigal himself has come back to life.”

Nawab Mohammed's house was replete with all the trappings of wealth, or at least the ones used to depict it in Hindi films. Chandeliers glittered like ice sculptures from the ceiling, a double-banistered marble staircase swept majestically to an upper level, plush white rugs vied with extravagant Kashmiri carpets to adorn the floor, and on one wall hung an oil portrait of Mohammed posing heroically with his foot on the head of a dead tiger, as if he really was the nawab of some princely state. After waiting an appropriate amount of time for us to be impressed by our surroundings, a servant led us to a side room, where the Nawab reclined against a row of bolsters, sampling kebabs from a selection on a plate.

“I'm so glad you brought your wife along,” he told Dev as we sat against the bolsters along the facing wall. “Sawhney sahib himself made another trunk call to me last night from Delhi. I understand you want to sing.”

We sipped the rose sherbet the servant brought us, and took polite pieces of kebab from the plate at Mohammed's urging. His body seemed puffy, and his face had a pallor to it, as if he was not getting out into sunlight enough. Near his foot was a harmonium and, in case the carpets and kebabs and tiger were not sufficient to underscore his Nawab title, a jewel-encrusted hookah.

“Such an amazing talent, to be able to bring forth beauty from one's throat. And yet so rare to see it done well. I would have become a singer, believe me, had I half a voice. But I suppose people would say I've done my share to propitiate the gods of music.” He chuckled softly, as if agreeing with himself. Abruptly, he raised his head to look straight at Dev. “So sing. Let me hear this Delhi voice with which you'd like to intoxicate our city.”

I thought Dev would break into “Light the Fire,” but he surprised me. He sang “When the Heart Only Has Broken,” one of Saigal's last songs. It was a particularly soulful rendition—for an instant, all that had happened over the past year was left behind as I allowed myself to be swept away by the emotion in his voice. Could I have misjudged him, I wondered, could I have failed to understand this person I was living with? To recognize the sadness that must imbue his heart, to appreciate the pain that he, too, must be steeping in? I noticed that even the servant had padded back silently, and was listening from the doorway. Through it all, Nawab Mohammed leaned back with his eyes closed, his ring-studded fingers strumming through the air, as if plucking the strings of invisible instruments.

He seemed to enjoy the song so much that I thought he'd insist Dev perform his entire repertoire. But Dev had scarcely commenced the medley he had prepared when the Nawab opened his eyes and held up his hand. “Are they all Saigal songs?” he asked, with the air of a doctor convinced of a diagnosis, inquiring about lesser symptoms for form's sake. “Let's hear them some other time then.

“Do you know next year, it'll be a full decade since Saigal passed away? January 18, 1947—that's the day his drinking finally caught up with him. Even before his ashes were cool, people started saying the Nawab was finished without him. ‘He'll never find anyone, poor man, who can sing like Saigal.' But that wasn't true.
Everyone
sang like Kundan Lal after his death,
everyone
wanted to be the next Saigal. Just listen to the first few songs recorded by Mukesh.

“But it's not what the listening public wanted. No, people were tired of melancholy, they were sated with pain. They wanted to laugh now, laugh and love and live in this new country. It was not as if sadness had gone out of style—it just had to be sadness of a happier, more uplifting kind. Mukesh was shrewd enough to understand this—he switched in the first year itself. Rafi was even smarter—he never even tried going the Saigal way—his sadness was of the mendable type—it came from the heart, never the soul. And the public loved it—these citizens of the new republic, these free, optimistic people who had been promised a dream that was finally within reach. It's just as well Saigal died in the same year the British left. If the drink hadn't felled him, Independence would have.

“So why didn't I change as well, you might ask? At first, it was pride. I was the Nawab, after all—hadn't Saigal himself said that? If the public didn't like what I was composing, it was the public's fault—I was the arbiter of refinement, of taste. Of course, I realized eventually I was wrong. I jettisoned the people I had trained to sing like Saigal. I tried to woo Rafi and the other young upstarts. But it didn't work. I wasn't as adaptable as Mukesh. I simply wasn't able to comply with the public's taste. Composing things I didn't believe in ripped into my core. I watched, helplessly, as Shankar-Jaikishan and all the other newcomers moved in. The industry sealed my fate by giving me a Filmfare lifetime achievement award at forty-eight.

“Since you've come to hear my opinion, here it is. Your voice isn't perfect, but Saigal would have approved of it. With practice and some training, it might one day come close to his. But the world doesn't need another Saigal, it already has enough songs by him. Which means my advice to you should be to learn to sing some other way. Perhaps like all the ditties that stir the teenage hearts of today. Except you're going to remain true to yourself—you're like me, not Mukesh. I can hear it in your voice, recognize it in your face. Go back to Delhi, is all I can say. Let your singing be a hobby to brighten your days. Give up this idea you have of singing for films. Neither you nor your wife deserves the heartbreak. It's the best advice, the only advice I can give.”

Dev looked like he was in shock on the train ride back. I attempted to engage him in conversation, but he barely reacted. I tried feeling sorry for him, but the emotion that surged over everything else was relief—relief that Dev had finally had his fair chance, even if it hadn't gone well. Now, perhaps, he would stop squandering his time at the recording studio. I had accepted that my future, for better or worse, would be with him. Perhaps there would be an opportunity now to sit down and plan it rationally.

At home, I thought Dev would cry, or drink, or do something sentimental like listen to his Saigal records. But he simply sat at the dining table and stared through the window at the darkening sky. Finally, he turned to me. “If people hated Saigal so much, why would he still be on the radio? Why would I have won the competition last year? Why would I even be in this flat in Bombay with your father's blessings, and sitting next to his daughter?”

Something stirred in my mind. The trunk call that Mohammed Nawab had received the night before from Paji—could my father have had a hand in this? Could he have instructed the Nawab to be so thoroughly demoralizing that Dev would stop wasting his time?

“No, I don't believe what that Nawab Mohammed claimed,” Dev said. “He's just frustrated, that's what it is. He tried to make it after Saigal, and couldn't, so now he's bitter at the world. He'd rather discourage everyone who comes to him than take the risk of having to see someone else succeed.”

A bottle of something green and illicit-looking had appeared on the table. “I'll show him,” Dev said. “It takes more than a has-been like him to make me quit.” He poured out a shot of the liquid, paused, then filled the glass to the rim.

I NEVER DID FIND
out whether my father had been behind the audition, pulling his puppet strings and interfering once again. But if Paji intended for his son-in-law to give up singing in the pursuit of a respectable job, it had the opposite effect. The desire to prove Nawab Mohammed wrong strengthened Dev's resolve, gave him new tenacity. “I've convinced the owner of Famous to hire me as his new receptionist,” he announced, showing me the box of tandoori chicken from Sher-e-Punjab he'd bought to celebrate. “The salary's quite pitiful, but now when the music directors walk in, they'll have to talk to me. And being a studio employee, I won't be so hesitant to approach the ones who might be able to help me.”