A tale of two music stories | Book Review

When her veena teacher suddenly kissed her fingers after catching hold of the left hand that was running deftly along the frets of the instrument, teenaged Ramya was taken aback. The master, at 30, was young but a good 13 years elder to the girl, who was actually a reluctant student of Carnatic music. The unexpected move made her scream, hearing which Ramya’s father rushed in and slapped the teacher. Her mother cursed the guest.

Three decades later, the incident had faded in the memories of a married Ramya, living in the same city: Madras. That evening, her husband was to accompany her to a light-music show not far from their home when an obituary in the day’s newspaper hit her hard. Maestro Nagapattinam A P Jagadeeswara Sarma, 60, died at a hospital in downtown Royapettah, the third column of the page said. The man was her veena guru. Only now she learned the master had won a Padma award and, on the personal front, was survived by his wife and two sons. Equally vitally, he is survived by Jagada and Eswari, two ragas the musician had composed.

The news plunges Ramya back into the day the master was chased out of her home. But Jagadeeswaran, she had later realised as a mature woman, was actually intoxicated not with the beauty of her physique, but of the glorious melody of a Manirangu-raga composition of Muthuswamy Dikshitar he was teaching her. The master’s death prompts Ramya to visit his widow, following which the story takes a forward movement that adds to her cobweb of thoughts and experiences.

‘Echoes of the Veena’, as the story is titled, is by Tamil writer R Chudamani, who died eight years ago, months short of turning an octogenarian. It’s also the name of an English book into which 18 such works of the Chennaiite have been translated and brought out by Delhi’s Ratna Books recently. Going by the integral link between its musical notes with life at large, ‘Echoes of the Veena’ can remind the reader of a story by a well-known Indian English writer published four decades ago. Anita Desai had in 1978 brought out Games At Twilight as a collection of her stories that had one by the title ‘The Accompanist’.

If Ramya in the veena story never quite manages to emerge clearer in her feelings towards her late guru, Desai’s main character succeeds at setting in order the nuances of his relation as a 30-year-old man playing the tanpura for a top Hindustani vocalist he had first met as a mid-teenager. Unlike with Ramya, the ustad in ‘The Accompanist’ has been a major influence in the the protagonist’s life for one-and-a-half decades now. Ever since he met senior sitarist Rahim Khan on a stage onto which the boy had walked to hand him over a tanpura his father had made for the ustad, an intense and unbroken relation had developed between the two characters. Yet the ustad tended to look down upon him — a far cry in the case of Ramya: she had her master encouraging her, having noticed the talent had for playing the tough instrument that never interested the pupil, though.

“Wonderful! This is it, this is it! What the fingers play sounds like a human voice...” Jagadeeswaran would rave in wonder, narrates Chudamani, in lines smoothly translated by jurist Prabha Sridevan, an advocate of human rights. Ramya, but, was thoroughly bored with this twice-a-week evening tuitions that were imposed on her by parents who wanted to the make the girl an all-rounder in the fine arts. When the master would appear in their home on Mondays and Fridays for the two-hour classes, “...and all I want to do is to play badminton with Kamala!”

With the ustad’s disciple, it had been the other way round. He too had his parents wanting to make him a master of vocals besides all leading instruments the family had been making for generations. At the age of four, the boy would be woken up at small hours by his father, who would give him a load of lessons in the tanpura, harmonium, sitar and even the tabla. The sessions would sometimes turn so strict and punishment-riddled that he freed himself in activities typical of the boys of his age: playing in the street, buying sweets from the corner shop and watching movies at the neighbourhood talkies (after stealing cash from the wallets of his parents). It was amid such a mischievous run that he, at age 15, met the ustad, who was readying for a concert in a hall. In one glance, he was mesmerised by the sitarist seated on the dais. The master permanently wooed into the world of classical music that began sounding refreshingly grand thence.

Critically, the teenager had to provide the drone for the master’s music within minutes of the first encounter. For, the tanpura accompanist for that concert didn’t turn up. From then on, he had been under the master’s spell. They had since been living under the same roof, travelling to concert venues together.

Ramya, on her part, only attends music shows, and not necessarily Carnatic. The accompanist is her dutiful husband Mahadevan, who has no flair for the arts whatsoever. It was at one such cultural evening, the very day she read the news of Jagadeeswaran’s death, Ramya managed to get the residential address of her master.

At the house of her guru the next day while talking to Jagadeeswaran’s widow as just another guest to offer condolences, Ramya notes to herself that he was “a person of no consequence” who had crossed her life long ago. Then why had she come? Was it a part of that ‘Forgive us, sir’? Not once does Ramya’s reveries throw light on Jagadeeswaran’s physical appearance, while the ustad’s looks had always been magnetic for the man.

The accompanist, too, is married, but doesn’t live with his wife, who is staying with his mother in their town. He occasionally visits them, but towards the second half of the story finds a reason to revisit the ustad in detail. It’s not a physical face-to-face, but one where a just-ended disturbing episode with childhood-time friends plunges the accompanist deep into an eddie of thoughts. The calm and patient analysis enables him to realise yet again — this time much strongly — the value of his intimate relation with the master. Notwithstanding his on-stage role being nothing more than playing the tanpura like a puppet, the man notes that he knows every moment the ustad would make before he himself does. “Is this not love? No marriage was closer.”

Inversely, but expectedly, Ramya in the veena story, apparently penned in the mid-1970s going by the reference to the horror film Exorcist being screened in town, had only a “superficial understanding” of Carnatic and could at best “recognize a few basic ragas”. That’s why the news of the death of her master doesn’t affect her daily chores: the homemaker dusts the sofas and chairs, arranges the books on the shelf and hands over the clothes to the ironing man and goes for an evening outing. It’s only the next day at the guru’s house that Ramya suddenly goes speechless. That is when the Jagadeeswaran’s wife, after talking about her sons Viswam and Balu, enquires with her if she could find a buyer for Jagadeeswaran’s veena.

Returning, inside the taxi, Ramya tell herself, “Sir, you have really died.” When the chatty driver tells her the master has two children, she says, “Yes. Jagada and Eswari.”

The ustad’s accompanist, overall submissive and all the more self-contented towards the end of the story, concludes that he could not have wished for a destiny finer than being with his master. “Leaving the park, I hailed a tonga and ordered the driver to take me to my Ustad. Never in my life had I spoken so loudly, as surely, as I did then. You should have heard me. I wish my Ustad had heard me.”

Echoes of the Veena and Other Stories | R Chudamani | Translated from Tamil by Prabha Sridevan | Ratna Books | Page 232 | Price Rs 349