Beloved Strangers (10 page)

My mother, on the other hand, enjoyed her time alone. She hummed and pranced about the house. Often she dragged her harmonium from the music room to her bedroom, shut the door and spent hours singing or listening to music and reading. Her affection for my father was more subtle, reserved in special signs. Like the way she never called Father by his name, referring to him only as Jaanu, meaning heart. The far-too-obvious way in which she tried to suppress her excitement on the days he returned from a work tour abroad. The way she looked at their wedding photographs, sighed and said the same thing every time, ‘Look how handsome your father was.’

Heaven forbid if mother had a radio programme or television shoot. Between her nervousness and my father’s stubbornness, the conversations at meal times were poisonous.

‘I may be gone for most of the day today,’ my mother announced one morning. ‘I’m not sure how long the shoot will last.’

‘How late will you be?’ my father asked immediately.

‘I told you, it’s hard to say.’

‘Well you should at least try to make it back by dinner,’ he said. There was an edge to his voice.

‘What if I can’t make it?’ came the sharp reply.

Soon their voices sizzled louder than the eggs frying in the saucepan.

‘Don’t you work late when you have to?’ snapped Mother.

‘Yes, but—’

‘But it isn’t the same for me. Is that it?’

‘It’s not so black and white. There’s a right time for everything. We have children to take care of.’

‘I’m twenty-five years old; I’ve been singing since I was five. This is all I know how to do. If not now, then when is the right time for me?’

‘It’s not like you don’t sing. You have music lessons every week.’

‘Listen to you. I’m supposed to be happy with only my lessons? Why don’t you just put a leash around me?’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘Just say it. You think this is a hobby, not a career.’

‘Bloody hell!’ shouted my father, ‘Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about.’

‘Bullshit!’ screamed Mother, ‘Every single day I have to deal with your bullshit.’

‘You’re calling our life bullshit?’

‘I’m calling my life bullshit.’

‘So you hate your life?’

‘I just want to sing. Why won’t you let me?’

‘That is not true! You have one of the best gurus coming in twice a week to train you. You have your television programmes—’

She cut him off. ‘I don’t need any more training. And I don’t want to do small-time television shows for ever. I want stage shows, my own albums, movie soundtracks. I want to tour the world. All the real stuff.’

‘Nothing will ever satisfy you,’ my father said bitterly, throwing a half-eaten piece of toast back onto his plate.

‘You fell in love with my music,’ she said, suddenly lowering her voice.

My father cradled his head in his hands for a minute before angrily pushing his chair backwards. It screeched loudly against the grey cement floor, dropping his blazer from its back. He picked up the blazer and rushed towards the door.

‘Go! Escape! Run away and leave me in hell,’ my mother yelled at his retreating back. Then she turned to us. ‘You girls aren’t growing up to be singers. Or
anything
for that matter. I’ll see to that.’

Naveen and I both raised our lowered heads. The woman who sat before us was a fire goddess. There was fire coming out of her eyes and ears and mouth, even her hair looked ablaze in the morning sunlight. We must have looked stunned.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said, ‘You are girls and girls ought to get married. God knows marriage is the death of an artist.’

There was a shuffling noise as Amol came in with a plate full of eggs, sunny side up. He had been waiting near the door, unsure of when to make his entrance. The minute he placed the eggs on the table, mother picked up her fork and stabbed the egg sitting in the middle of the plate, making it leak yellow goo everywhere. My sister and I sat helplessly, unwilling to eat the sullied eggs but too afraid to leave the table.

Every time I look back on that morning, my mind tends to skip over the screams and tears and hurtful words, coming to rest on the image of a sodden eggy mess. It makes me wish that my parents could have been gentler to each other. It makes me wish that we could have all had our eggs that morning, together, cheerfully, sunny side up.

Even though Mother made it clear that she no longer benefitted from her lessons, she nevertheless continued to take them. Her zeal and dedication for Guru Azim Khan and his every instruction were evident in the very way she looked at him, nodded frequently when he spoke, lowered her eyes when she sang for him, blushed in silence when he smiled at her or crumbled under his judicious stare. On Sundays, she let me and Tilat accompany her to Azim Khan’s house as we were close in age to Zubair and Amina, his two children. On these days, Azim Khan’s wife squatted in front of their woodfire stove and cooked lunch while Mother finished her lesson and Zubair, Amina, Tilat and I played on their expansive roof. We made a little makeshift kitchen out of cardboard boxes and played a game of pretending to be street-food vendors. We found discarded clay pots, which we filled with water. We ripped heart-shaped leaves from moneyplant creepers and slipped them into the water-filled pots, one by one, making sizzling sounds with our tongues, pretending to fry samosas and parathas in boiling hot oil. By the time the adults ushered us inside for real food, we were dirty, sunburnt and exhilarated.

Inside the Khans’ home, however, it was hard not to notice the strict order of things. Our unruly games were not allowed inside. We had to take off our shoes, wash our hands and feet and speak softly. Amina’s mother stood erect and monitored our every movement. She stood guard until every morsel of food had been wiped off our plates. Watching her clear the table afterwards, her husband would smile at her benevolently, sending a rush of colour to her cheeks. We called her Khan Auntie, unwittingly destroying the last shred of her identity but she never seemed to mind. The compliant tone of her voice, the forever-upturned corners of her mouth, the way her able hands produced magnificent feasts out of meagre means – it was all as if she lived to please and placate.

Still, it was Khan Auntie’s warm laughter and delightful meals that brightened up those Sundays. We did not dare tell Mother, but we were petrified of Azim Khan. His face was eternally puckered up in a rude sneer. His sardonic jokes about how spoiled her children were did not seem to bother our mother but they made us shrink further and further away from him. As the years passed and I became more attuned to his sarcasm, I heard him make many startling remarks to my mother. He brought his small mouth close to her ears and spoke softly, meaningfully, with minimum consideration and maximum impact.

According to her beloved guru, my mother was never quite ready to present her music to the world. The lessons continued in earnest but she never became the star pupil or even the capable student. Before every lesson, Mother pored over her music notes, trying to master whatever assignment had been given to her. But Azim Khan had successfully planted in her the ever-growing seed of self-doubt. She never felt satisfied with her own efforts, just as he expected her not to.

‘I need more practice . . .’ she’d murmur, voice trailing, eyes glazing.

‘Yes you do,’ Azim Khan would say, chest swelling with conviction, ‘Forget about all those awards you won as a young girl. They mean nothing. You have a long way to go.’

His words not only stunted her growth and clouded her hopes but also crushed the pride and glory of her former years. To my astonishment, Mother never protested. All the spunk with which she fought her husband and disciplined her children vanished when Azim Khan spoke. I watched them, facing each other across the body of the harmonium, mirthlessly practising ragas. He almost gave her a real opportunity once. Or did he only pretend to? He asked her to prepare a song he had composed for the soundtrack of a Bengali feature film. This was to be her big break, a debut into the higher echelons of the music world. This act of uncharacteristic kindness came without warning, which perhaps in itself should have been a sign, but not for Mother. I had never seen such unbridled joy in her. Night after night, she stayed awake and practised the song. She even gave us the rare privilege of listening to her and offering our critiques. Then came the day she was to present the product of her untiring toil to Azim Khan.

‘You’re not ready,’ he said, the familiar words flying out of his mouth as soon as she had finished her song. It was as if he knew all along what he was going to say, except this time those words were meant to squash her one last time, stamp the life out of her like a cockroach under his foot. Just that once, Mother came back from Azim Khan’s home, closed the door to her room and howled like a wild animal. Naveen, Tilat and I stood outside the door. We took turns pressing our ears to the cold wooden door and peeking through the keyhole.

To yank the scab off of her wound, my mother’s guru often boasted to her about the commercial success of the song, which he had assigned to another student. I like to think it was my mother’s perseverance that tied her to him for so long. She had a habit of wanting to match her strength against adversity, as if adversity was a person she needed to impress rather than leave.

As single-minded as her, I too was determined to start music lessons, despite all the angst I naturally associated with music and all the disdain that Mother wanted me to associate with it. I finally announced my decision when I was sixteen years old. Without a shred of enthusiasm, and with something bordering on exasperation, Mother suggested that I should, of course, start under the expert tutelage of Azim Khan. I dreaded the prospect but I was so grateful for her permission that I dared not say anything that might change her mind. Besides, I was older now and less impressionable. I’d also had years to acquaint myself with the man who was to be my new guru. I knew his flaws only too well. Perhaps, now, I could understand what Mother had always seen in him that allowed her to be so tolerant of him.

The first few lessons were uneventful. After a month, I had almost stopped bracing myself for the punishing words when Azim Khan scrunched up his pointy nose – as if there was a bad odour in the room – and asked me what I hoped to gain from music.

‘It makes me happy,’ I said without thinking.

‘Oh, really?’ he said, the question, lingering not so much in the words as in the deadening look in his eyes.

I held my ground and stared back at him.

‘Look,’ he said, suddenly relaxing, ‘I’ve always told your mother the truth, so I’m going to do the same with you.’

It was shocking how quickly he changed his tactic, how quickly he went from openly condescending to cold and calculative. He needed me to believe him.

‘Do you know what kids like you remind me of?’ he was saying.

I shook my head, surprised by how the sharp pitch of his voice betrayed his tranquil features. There were tiny beads of sweat above his thin upper lip. He was trying hard not to let the bitterness spill out of him and into his face and on to the harmonium and down to the very ground beneath our feet.

‘You remind me of young green grass, crushed under a rock. You have no hope of sunlight and no place to grow. Your attempts are in vain,’ said Azim Khan.

I didn’t refute his sweeping verdict. I couldn’t. There was a hypnotic quality to his malice, a certain flair and flow to it. This was a man who spent so much time thinking vindictive thoughts that there was eloquence and ceremony in his words. To argue with him would be to try and fight a wild beast with one’s bare hands. Not unlike the lion or the tiger, he was always poised to pounce on his opponent, dig his fangs into their powerless flesh and tear them to bits. Eventually, I learned to anticipate the first gleam of attack in his beady eyes, just before he was about to make a vicious remark. I memorised how he swayed his balding head from side to side when he disapproved of something, which was often. I came to imitate, perfectly, the shape of his small, cunning mouth right after something vile had come out of it. Listening to his unkind words was like watching a puppet show where, despite knowing that someone else manipulates the lifeless figures, you watch, spellbound by the puppet’s tricks. In later years, when the immediacy of our interactions receded from my memory, a different aspect of his face emerged, penetrating through the mask of harshness I had come to know so well. Deeply embedded in his small features was a vast fear, one that he sought to transfer to others.

I no longer remember how exactly the lessons stopped. There was no finality or grand conclusion to it. The whole enterprise fizzled out like a fire that never quite reached its potential. I can only assume my mother had expected it because she did not say a word about it nor offered to find me a new guru. Our silence on the matter was mutual, impenetrable and absolute. I continued to sing in the bathroom but there was a hush in my voice and a dullness in my movements. It was hard to believe that just the year before the bathroom had been the sanctuary of my dreams, the mirror a glittering reflection of my unfaltering hope and joy.

Two years later, in my college course catalogue, I came across a picture of Shiva Nataraj, the God of Dance. I ran my forefinger along Shiva’s raised limbs as I eyed the caption for the class: Indian Classical Dance I. Old yearnings stirred inside. What if I could find a different passion? A passion to replace music in my life, or more correctly, to erase it from my dreams. Was it even possible? Was it worth the trouble? I ended up signing for the class.