He: (Shey) (Modern Classics (Penguin)) (15 page)

‘It’s much more difficult to break down a weakness than a strength. But you wanted to tell me what your Guru had said about the principles of tunelessness. Fire away.’

‘My Guru began his explanation right from ancient times. He said, when man was about to be created, Lord Brahma the Four-Faced
⁷⁹
produced a sweet tune from the lips on his two clean-shaven faces in front. Starting from the soft
re
and proceeding melodiously up the scale, slipping and sliding on a few smooth twists of the voice, he reached the soft
ni.
⁸⁰
This graceful wave of notes issued from the ruddy dawn clouds in the sky and set the sweet breeze swaying. In its gentle ripples, woman showed herself in the swaying rhythm of dance. Up in heaven, Lord Varuna’s
⁸¹
wife began blowing on a conch-shell.’

‘Why Lord Varuna’s wife?’

‘Why, she’s the Goddess of Water. The race of woman is pure and fluid; not rigid, but lively and vivacious, even setting other things into motion. When the earth was being assembled, the ocean came first. The women floated about on its waters, mounted on cormorants.’

‘Wonderful. But had cormorants been created by then?’

‘Certainly. Why, it was in the voices of birds that the first sweet notes were being sung. It was these frail creatures’ voices and wings that first proved how melody couldn’t be separated from weakness. Let me tell you something. Promise you won’t get angry.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

‘At the beginning of the new age, when Grandfather God
⁸²
created poets to bring mankind under the rule of weakness, he moulded them on the lines of the birds. That day there was a kind of literary gathering in his meeting hall and, as president, he exhorted all the poets who had gathered there to keep flying through space in their minds, to break into song for no reason at all, to turn everything unyielding into rippling liquid, to make soft what was sturdy. You’re the King of Poets—you’ve obeyed his decree to this day.’

‘I’ll have to go on doing so, until I’m moulded differently.’

‘The modern age is growing hard and dry; you won’t get your soft waxen moulds any longer. The Goddess of Femininity no longer sits in a nest rocking on the water, swung back and forth by the swaying lotuses.
⁸³
The world isn’t sunk in the depths of languid delicacy.’

‘Why didn’t Creation stop once it reached that smooth rhythm?’

‘Hardly had a few ages passed when the Earth-Goddess sent a pitiful appeal to Lord Brahma. She complained, “I can’t bear the lolling grace of these ladies any longer.” In rippling but afflicted tones, the women themselves declared that they were sick of it. From the higher regions came the question, “What are you sick of?” The maidens replied, “We don’t know.”—“What do you want?”—“We can’t quite find that out either.” ’

‘Did the termagants among them keep quiet? Did they only speak sweet words from beginning to end?’

‘There was no excuse for a quarrel, you see. There were no shafts of complaints to shoot off, so the bows remained sunk in the depths of the ocean, the twanging of their strings inaudible. No broomsticks to thwack anyone could sprout from the sea bed.’

‘I suppose Lord Brahma was very ashamed at this sad news?’

‘Without doubt. Why, all his four heads were bowed in shame. He sat in stunned silence upon the thousand-jointed wings of his swan
⁸⁴
for a whole Brahmaic aeon.
⁸⁵
But there was the celebrated priestess of ancient lore, the divine She-Cormorant, who, trying to match her colour with the pristine white of Lord Brahma’s swan, had dived a thousand times into the water and rubbed at her feathers with her beak till they looked like cabbage-stalks thrown out into the garden for compost. Even she said, “Where there’s too much mildness and decency, the chief delight of virtue is lacking, since you can’t nag other people about their faults. You don’t get any fun out of being good.” She prayed, “O Lord, give us mean-mindedness immediately, in large and potent quantities.” The Maker of Laws
⁸⁶
sprang up in consternation, saying, “I’ve made a mistake—it must be corrected.” That was it. What a voice! It was as if the Goddess Durga’s lion had pounced upon Lord Shiva’s bull,
⁸⁷
and the furious roars of the lion were mingling with the tremendous bellows of the bull to crack the sapphire-studded foundations of heaven. The sage Narada hurried out, hoping for some fun. Thumping his threshing-stone on the back, he declared, “Threshing-stone, my son, listen carefully to this root of all future discord. It’ll help us break up homes in due course.” The celestial elephants that guard the ten quarters of the universe raised their trunks and added their trumpeting to Lord Brahma’s furious four-throated roar. The sound was so powerful that the long hair of the Diganganas, the ten guardian goddesses of the earth, was swept loose and darkened the sky in billowing black clouds—it looked as if the sky was filled with the black sails of ships racing to Lord Yama’s burning ghats.’

‘Whatever you say, you can’t deny that the Creator is male.’

‘His masculinity could no longer be suppressed. The nostrils of his two bearded faces flared out like a pair of bellows. A storm cloud rushed scolding out of them to the four corners of the sky. That was when discord, with all its terrible force, was first released into the universe—roaring, thumping, grinding. The gandharvas shouldered their tanpuras and fled in hordes to Lord Indra’s courtyard, where Sachidevi
⁸⁸
retires after her bath to dry her hair in the fumes of parijat-scented
⁸⁹
incense amidst the shade of a mandar
⁹⁰
grove. The Earth-Goddess was sure she had made a horrible mistake: she trembled in fear as she recited the mantra to invoke beneficence. The erratic force of that storm of discord threw out male humans like fiery cannon balls.—You’re very quiet, Dada. I hope my words are hitting you.’

‘You may be sure they are. With loud thuds, too.’

‘I hope you’ve understood that the crucial period of creation was ruled over by discord.’

‘Do explain it to me.’

‘The calm sovereignty of rippling water was overthrown— butted, elbowed, kicked, punched and pushed, as land reared its stony bald head. Wouldn’t you agree that was the most important episode in the history of the earth?’

‘I certainly would.’

‘After all this time, the Creator’s maleness had found expression in land; the seal of masculinity had been set upon the soil. What fearsome strength there was from the very start! Now stirring up flames, now freezing over with ice, sometimes splitting the ground open with the force of an earthquake and making it swallow down mountains as if they were doctors’ pills—you’d admit there was nothing womanish in all that.’

‘I certainly would.’

‘The water broke into babbling waves, the wind whistled madly—but when the distressed land began to call, the sage Bharata’s treatise on music
⁹¹
was squashed into a lump.—But you look as if you don’t like this. What’s bothering you?’

I said, ‘All art is built upon an ancient foundation called tradition. Can you prove this art of tunelessness traditional?’

‘Of course I can. The root of traditional tunefulness lies in a she-god’s veena.
⁹²
If you want to trace the origin of discord, walk straight past the ancient stronghold of women and pause at the he-god Shiva’s threshold. At Kailash where he lives, the veena is prohibited, and Urvashi
⁹³
is never called in to dance
.
Shiva himself dances there—his furious dance of destruction, all out of time; his attendants Nandi and Bhringi blow horns, while the lord himself puffs out his cheeks and drums upon them with his fingers, or shakes his great rattle. Lumps of stone keep crashing down from Kailash’s walls. I hope the ancient origin of grand disharmony is clear to you now.’

‘It is.’

‘Remember that the story of Daksha’s Sacrifice in the Puranas,
⁹⁴
where Shiva brings confusion to King Daksha’s great ritual feast, centres upon the victory of discord over melody. All the gods and goddesses had once assembled at a banquet— rings in their ears, bracelets on their arms, jewels round their necks. The light danced off the forms of hermits and sages. Their voices rose in a hymn of faultless harmony. The whole universe thrilled to their song. All of a sudden, the tuneless brigade of everything ugly and hostile landed upon them, to the ruin of all the sweetness of this pious gathering. The victory of the hideous over the beautiful, the discordant over the melodious—the Puranas celebrate this principle with laughter and rejoicing, as you will notice if you leaf through the
Annadamangal
.
⁹⁵
There you have it—the tradition of tunelessness, confirmed by the scriptures. Why, don’t you see how eagerly everyone worships pot-bellied Ganesh? It’s a stout protest against the beguiling gracefulness of art. Today, Ganesh’s trunk has taken on the shape of a chimney and is trumpeting over the temples of manufacture in the West. Isn’t it the loud tunelessness of that song that’s bringing his devotees success? Think it over.’

‘I will.’

‘When you do, think over this as well—the invincible greatness of discord asserts itself on the hard soil. Lions, tigers, bulls—all those admirable creatures with whom heroes are compared—none of them ever practised the scales with an ustad. Any doubt of it?’

‘None at all.’

‘Even a humbler animal like the donkey, however weak, never professed intimacy with the veena
-
bearing goddess of musical circles
⁹⁶
—a fact both friend and foe will readily admit.’

‘That they will.’

‘The horse has been tamed. Although its hooves are ideally suited to kick with, it suffers whipping without protest: it should have reared up on its hind legs in its stable and sung an alaap
⁹⁷
in the Jhinjhitkhambaj raga
.
Its whinny might be a shower of foaming chandrabindus,
⁹⁸
but in the discord of its nasal tones, it doesn’t forget to uphold the dignity of the land. And the elephant—we needn’t even speak of him. All these land animals, disciples of Pashupati
⁹⁹
—can you find a single songster among them? Your bulldog Freddy, who keeps the whole neighbourhood awake with his barking—if God, in jest or compassion, gave him the voice of a magpie-robin or shama bird
,
I’ll bet he’d throw himself under the wheels of your motorcar, unable to stand the mockery of his sweet voice. Be honest: if a goat about to be sacrificed at Kalighat
¹⁰⁰
sang a Ramkeli raga instead of bleating in fright, wouldn’t you shoo it away disgustedly from the mother-goddess’s sacred temple?’

‘Of course I would.’

‘Then you understand the import of the great vow we’ve taken. We’re the devoted sons of firm land—we’ve received the sacrament of tunelessness. The world’s already half dead; we intend to revive it with quackery. We need an awakening; we need strength! The movement’s already started in the neighbourhood. The residents’ vigour is growing more and more indomitable, issuing forth in biffs and thuds—my followers bear the proof on their backs. The guardians of the British Empire have bestirred themselves; the authorities are on the alert.’

‘What does your Guru say to all this?’

‘He’s in a trance of rapture. His prophetic vision has shown him the coming of the worldwide renaissance of discord. All civilized races are saying today that discord is reality, bursting with maleness. Effeminate melody is what has weakened civilization. What we need is not Christian meekness but force. Discord is a rising power even in state legislation. Hasn’t it struck your eye, Dada?’

‘Why should it need to strike my eye, brother? It’s striking my back, and hard too.’

‘Meanwhile the twenty-five spooks of the old tale
¹⁰¹
have mounted literature’s back. Rejoice—Bengal’s following in their train.’

‘Bengal’s never hesitated to follow in anyone’s train.’

‘On the other hand, we’ve obeyed our Guru’s order to cultivate tunelessness by establishing a club, the Hoi! Hoi! Polloi. A poet has joined the ranks—his appearance inspired us to hope he was the New Age incarnate. His poems corrected our mistake: he’s one of your lot after all. We’ve told him a thousand times, “Beat out the backbone of your verses with a club.” “Reflect constantly that all sense is but nonesense.”
¹⁰²
We explained to him, “Respect for the meaning of words shows a slavish bent of mind.” No results. It’s not the poor chap’s fault; he breaks out in a sweat, but just can’t break out of that gentlemanly cut of his poetry. We’re keeping him on trial. I’ll read you the first sample of his skills that he showed us. But I can’t sing it.’

‘That’s why I venture to let you into my room.’

‘Then pay attention:

Man of music, leave your dwelling,

Run, instead, to distant reaches.

Flee from our impassioned yelling,

From our grunts and shrieks and screeches.