A taxi driver once asks her, “How long does it take to learn what you’re learning?”
“At least 10 or 15 years,” she says.
“Ten or 15 years,” he says, looking ahead at the unending traffic.
When she gets off, he says, “Let me do it.”
He takes out the tanpura, slowly, diagonally, making sure it hits against nothing on either side, and puts it in her arms.
Once a week, she travels to this room. She eases her upper body in through the door of the cab and puts in the tanpura first, in its thick cotton cover, bending low and putting it diagonally across, the gourd on the back seat, the stem reaching past the side window in the front, then eases her body out, without hurting herself against the low roof of the cab, goes around to the other side and eases her body in again, sits down and puts an arm around the gourd to steady it, holding it constantly, awkwardly, on the 40-minute ride.
There is no daylight here. In this small, carpeted, windowless room, the only light is the small yellow one directly above the framed image of Saraswati on the wall. Trucks go by on the main road nearby, bringing goods from outside the city, along with water tankers, and long distance buses. Inside, the stems of two tanpuras rise out of the darkness. At a few places, their wood responds to the faint yellow light by gleaming, and the gleam moves as the body that holds the stem changes the rhythm of its breathing. Engines run loudly as they wait in the stalled traffic outside. When they move, gathering force and releasing even harsher sounds, their wheels break up the asphalt into craters, pebbles and gravel scatter in the air. She faces the young man, her teacher. His family has played and sung this music for 17 generations. As she begins, her voice falters, the note sustains for a few seconds, then breaks.
It is night in the forest.
In the foreground there is the most reticent golden light, without any known source. It does not illuminate more than what is necessary, does not squander itself, is never more forceful than it needs to be. It is much more than a means to looking.
The light comes from within the darkness, as light often will. Then it matures into an extreme serenity. It may rise to create a night-glow in the sky, or remain close to the ground, on tree trunks and leaves.
Parrots fly through the trees. Akbar stands watching as Tansen sits before Swami Haridas. A sunflower on a long stem bends and hovers over him. Two banana trees spread their leaves on either side. Creepers fall to the ground through their branches. Look, he says, how curious and sceptical Akbar’s eyes as he looks at Swami Haridas. As curious and sceptical as anyone looking at his own opposite. On the grass a peacock stands still. White flowers bloom on small bushes.
A little distance away from Akbar is Tansen, sitting with his legs folded behind him, looking at his guru. His face has the attention that an exacting reverence brings. A tanpura lies next to him on the grass. To the far right is Swami Haridas. Tansen will have to travel the distance which is in Swami Haridas’ eyes. The Swami, still a young man, perhaps younger than Tansen, sits at the foot of a saptaparni tree. His bare body is almost skeletal, and he holds a tanpura in his right arm. He lets a thin branch of the tree pass over his arm, parallel to the stem of the tanpura. It erupts, a little beyond his arm in a profusion of leaves.
The forest is conscious. Things curve and bend, but never droop. It is a place of rest, not languor. There are birds and flowers but not their extreme profusion. There is nothing in this forest that breaks the restraint of the universe.
“Swar kya hai?” she asks.
“Sirf ek arzoo hai,” he says.
Akbar is unbent, composed. He will not kneel or sit before Swami Haridas. Tansen sits as someone who has been changed by another, this man whom he faces. He will always be in-between. Swami Haridas sits lightly on the grass. He will not stand up before the king. He is the only one whose arms are not close to the body but held away, the legs spread apart, one stretched out on the ground, the other bent at the knee and pulled upward, his person unguarded, open, susceptible to injury.
The colour of the light is the same as that of Swami Haridas’ body. The light is as susceptible to being extinguished.
This light, she says. It can put her most vicious longings to rest. I know, he says. The space between Tansen and Swami Haridas is where the forest becomes inscrutable, made of impure black. That is the way we have to walk, he says. Come. Perhaps he thinks the light will become an undeserved solace if they stay too long, or that its extreme serenity will blunt the heart. But the light is percipient. Its serenity is for survivors. The light has learnt illumination from the sudden turnings of love, the dilemmas of the ascetic, and the movements of animals hiding from the arrow on night hunts. They enter the darkness of the forest. The light stays behind.
™
The red sandstone house of Mia Tansen stands on a hill in Fatehpur Sikri, outside the palace grounds. It could not really have been his home, say the historians. It is only one very large room, raised on a plinth, and surrounded by verandas on all four sides, like a village house. If a traveller were to walk around the house and stand near the veranda, he would face an ordinary landscape. It is when they both walk through the house and come upon the veranda that the same landscape changes. They look down at the plains below, facing east, towards where there would have been a lake in Tansen’s time, and where even now two peacocks are moving through the pale winter shrubs and grass that stretch all the way till the horizon. The sky is an undisturbed blue. The wind in the shade is a cold wind as the sun sets behind the house.
Everything begins to move very far away, away from the red imperial stone, away from the petals of the carved flowers in the walls, away from the slanting roof over the veranda with its long, thick beams of stone imitating beams of wood, till there is so much expanse, unbroken, that a traveller is left with little sensation of his own body or the stone, except a hand on a pillar. What makes the house is forgotten, but the house is necessary to that forgetting.
They know, whether he lived here or not, this is where he used to be. But even that no longer matters. The house does not contain the royal court, or music, or even the gift of genius. Stone has been quarried, broken, carried, shaped, cut. It has been made into beams that would have needed 10 men to carry. The finished house is as light as a hut.
Those who stand on the veranda in twos or threes, even if they are the oldest of companions, feel very far from each other, solitary, no longer related, so that they cannot even say to one another, Look, how perfect this arch, how carefully carved this lotus stalk.