The implication was, of course, that this was not an age in which you saw the raga any more; that for musicians today the raga was an agglomeration of notes, conventions, and rules, to which they brought their subjective passion, their instinct, and different degrees of ability; but to Pyarelal, scratching his chin and imparting his vision to the boy, they were in error — the raga had not only to be played correctly or well; it had to be courted and pursued.
When Mrs Sengupta found them talking, Pyarelal smiled with a mixture of mischief and satisfaction, as if two lovers had been interrupted by a friend. If Shyamji happened to find them, he started guiltily and got up.
Unlike many male dancers, there was nothing effeminate about Pyarelaclass="underline" he was short and sturdy. Wrestling had been one of his passions in his youth; he used to spend hours at the akhara, watching indefatigably as men rolled in the sand, or strained, bull-like, their arms locked around each other; bending introspectively, he’d practise holds and positions. ‘Being a man’ was always important to him, as were its fierce attendant concerns, honour and pride.
His face — thin lips, thin moustache, hooked nose, a small wart beneath one eye, the longish hair combed back from his forehead — was hard and bony. Only the occasionally raised left eyebrow, arched and kept dangling briefly in the course of a conversation, bore testimony to the dancer’s art.
‘Kathak’ derives from ‘katha’ or ‘story’; Nirmalya hadn’t realised this before. Words hoarded meaning like treasure; and Nirmalya was at an age when mere etymology brought to sight and lit up an avenue — whose pull was mysterious and irresistible — he hadn’t known had existed. The dancer was not only a virtuoso but a storyteller; this fact was contained in the word ‘kathak’ itself. Sitting on the carpet in the air-conditioned room, the curtains half drawn behind him, Pyarelal showed Nirmalya how Radha would pull the end of the sari before her face to protect herself from prying eyes when she went out into the lanes towards her lover; a motion of the wrist, an avertedness of the eyes, were enough to convey Radha’s vulnerability, her racing heart. Nirmalya, in blue jeans and kurta, for the moment seemingly without occupation, education, or future, leaned against a cupboard door as this fifty-four-year-old man tried, at once, to impress him and to do what was surely legitimate: to reveal to him the elements of his craft. Pyarelal shook one foot slightly to remind him that the bells strung round Radha’s ankle were too loud; that any moment her mother-in-law might awake and discover her liaison. He never got up from the carpet. Sometimes he whispered the song that told the story, which was really a litany of complaints to the divine, blissfully imperturbable lover who was awaiting her, ‘How do you expect me to come on this full-moon night, my ankle-bells ring and threaten to wake up my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, etcetera’, while his nostrils, as he sang, flared imperceptibly.
When Nirmalya asked Pyarelal to write down for him one of the many songs he had recited or sung for him in the last few months, he discovered that the older man was barely literate. The Devanagari script was largely uncharted terrain, a country Pyarelal felt no pressing need to visit, and which he’d avoided visiting for the greater part of his life with no excessive sense of loss. For Nirmalya’s sake, though, he made an attempt, and set down four lines in the exercise book that was Nirmalya’s songbook in a faint and almost illegible handwriting. He smiled, as if asking indulgence for a disability (not a serious or harmful one, but a disability nonetheless) for which there was no immediate cure, and which it was in slightly bad taste to discuss.
However much he hid it from the boy, and however much his memories spoke of a spontaneous joy in life, Pyarelal was marked by a sense of inadequacy. All his memories were, strangely, from before his marriage, his restless loiterings between Rajasthan and Dehradun (where he’d lived for four years) and then Bombay, where he’d deliberately inserted himself into Ram Lal’s life and then, as Shyamji would have it, got himself married to Ram Lal’s daughter. Pyarelal’s memories dried up after this; life seemed to have become more real, less surprising, and, somehow, less life-like. He compensated for that sense of inadequacy, his sense of the lack of the respect due to him, in his own way. It was common knowledge that he got drunk in the evenings; and, since everything in a family becomes familiar and then comic, especially to children, this fact became a joke, to Shyamji’s children in particular, who, since they were small, had both lovingly and mockingly called him ‘Puaji’, a lisping abbreviation at first, unable as they were then to pronounce ‘Pyarelalji’, and then just an appellation, like ‘uncle’ or ‘kaka’. People seldom mentioned the unfortunate closeness of ‘Puaji’ to ‘paji’, or ‘wicked’, but come evening, and the children in the neighbouring house knew that Puaji became garrulous and beat up Tara, their aunt. In his home, he was unassailable. Who was he? He was Ram Lal’s daughter’s lord and master, after all. Shyamji didn’t, wouldn’t, intervene; he was scrupulous about washing his hands of this unpleasantness, as he was about many others. What Pyarelal and his family did in the confines of their four walls was their business.
* * *
‘WHAT DO YOU talk to him about, baba?’ asked Shyamji sadly. He looked calm, but his resentment was essentially stubborn, unappeasable.
Pyarelal had just made an exit, scraping, bowing, saying ‘Yes, bhaiyya, no, bhaiyya, bilkul, bhaiyya’ to Shyamji.
Nirmalya was at a loss for words.
‘He’s a master of drama,’ said Shyamji, before Nirmalya could answer his question.
Pyarelal had his own method of exacting, quite ingenuously, revenge on Shyamji; he did it by extolling his father-in-law, the dead Ram Lal.
‘The first night of the conference in Calcutta, Bade Ghulam Ali sang Bihag,’ he recalled with a half-smile, as if the ustad’s voice were audible to him. ‘And then there was Bihag and only Bihag in the air. The second night Panditji’ — that was how he referred to Ram Lal — ‘sang Malkauns. And then there was Malkauns and only Malkauns!’
The son-in-law, who’d arrived out of nowhere and inserted himself into Ram Lal’s affections, recounting the dead.
‘But what about Shyamji?’ asked Nirmalya, his heart brimming with feeling for his often-absent teacher. ‘He sings wonderfully too, doesn’t he?’
‘He sings very well, but he’s only four annas compared to Panditji,’ said Pyarelal with a ruminative laugh. Four annas; a mere twenty-five per cent. And since it was the father who was being praised, even Banwari, the younger son, had to nod solemnly when remarks like these were made. Not only Banwari — a swift shadow passed over Shyamji’s face when words like ‘But no one can sing these songs like Panditji’ were said, and he’d nod in defeat and add, ‘He’s right, baba, you did not hear my father.’ It was as if, at such moments, logic deserted him, and the insurmountability of life revealed itself. And the sixteen-year-old would be filled with pity, and at the same time convinced the claim was a lie; that people create lies about the dead to torment the best of the living.
The best of the living: although Nirmalya was convinced his teacher was among the ‘best’, he was disappointed by Shyamji’s pursuit of the ‘light’ forms, his pursuit of material well-being. An artist must devote himself to the highest expressions of his art and reject success; he was going to be seventeen, and these ideas had come to him from books he’d read recently, but he felt he’d always known them and that they were true for all time. He put it to Shyamji plainly: