Madhu, alas, was not so impressed. The first part of my lesson this morning was spent dissecting the performance, and she wrote Jasraj off as a sensation well past his prime. She claimed that she had spent most of the concert texting her friend, although she gleefully described a contretemps she had had with an English woman in the row in front her.
“Please be quiet,” quoted Madhu in an eccentrically haughty English accent. “I am trying to listen to the music.”
“Actually [back in her own voice at its most steely], I was discussing the name of the raag.”
“Oh... [face puckered to its fullest degree]... I see.”
Banter notwithstanding, I don’t feel I talk to the Khandelwals as much as I used to. I think this is more because of time constraints on my part and theirs than anything else. I still hope for a dinner invitation before I leave. A while ago, Madhu and I had an animated argument over post-lesson chai about whether music is the hardest of all the arts, and if so whether singing is the hardest form of music. She argued that this was the case, whereas I challenged her premise that music is harder than the other arts.
“Why should it be?” I asked.
“It is written in books that…”
“That doesn’t impress me at all.”
“It may not impress you, Jon, but we can read in books that music is truly the toughest of all the arts because [I cannot now remember the reasons she gave, but I wasn’t especially convinced by any of them].”
In the end I changed my tack to: “Well even if singing is harder than anything else, does it really matter?”
Madhu’s response was something along the lines of, well, yes, we need to acknowledge that our best singers are truly our most accomplished and hard-working artists. Mrs Khandelwal clearly enjoyed listening to the whole thing.
*
I met Abbas, my Bohra friend, and some of his friends this evening. We sat outside a stall off Sukhadia circle, eating pav bhaji [20] which, after considerable opposition I was allowed to pay for. We talked about travel. Abbas’ brother is currently working in Sharjah (UAE) and Abbas is debating whether to join him.
“Which country world-wide would you most like to travel to?” asked one of the friends, Akheel.
“Iran,” I answered firmly. “Or maybe Mali, in West Africa.”
“Interesting choice, yaar?”
We talked a little about Persian and Malian culture before I bounced back the question.
“Namibia,” he said with equal firmness. I burst out laughing.
“Why Namibia?”
“Why? Because the sexiest women are there!”
“Have you seen many Namibian women?”
“Just one actually,” said Abbas. “We saw pictures of Miss Namibia 2006. She ranked 17th in the Miss World contest. She was 100% hot, man!”
“So you want to go out to Namibia to seduce her?!”
“OK, yaar, this is a crazy plan, but it is our dream.”
There didn’t seem to be an answer to this and we veered off onto a new issue: Muslims in India. Feeling that we had bonded enough over Miss Namibia I asked them bluntly how they, young Indian Muslims, regarded Pakistan.
Abbas
Now there’s a topic - Indian Muslim attitudes towards Pakistan! There is a hoary cliche of a grouchy old Hindu man damning his Muslim compatriots with a Tebbitish “Well they all support Pakistan in cricket matches anyway,” but the reality is naturally more complex. Most of the Muslims I have met have been quick to assert themselves as Indians, but there is something uncomfortable in their relationship with Pakistan. A charming man I once waylaid outside a mosque in South India told me that Indian Muslims should take on board Pakistan’s “good points” - mosques, piety, Urdu (none of which, of course, are indigenous to Pakistan) - while rejecting its “bad habits” - fundamentalism, terrorism, human rights abuses (all of which can be found in India!). This seems to be the view of Abbas and his friends, who are sympathetic towards Pakistan, but firmly condemn the Taliban and its misinterpretation of the concept of jihad. Akheel, in fact, believes that India and Pakistan would be better of re-uniting, both for reasons of political stability and because Pakistan is rich in natural resources.
*
Meanwhile, I have not been neglecting my tourist-ville friends entirely. After changing some money this afternoon I paid a visit of state to Hari’s shop. He was full of news as always, including a story of bribery and corruption from a recent trip to Delhi. He was accompanying his Irish lady friend, and this apparently alerted the attentions of the Tourist Police. They told him that they had been tipped off by an old woman running a stall nearby that the Irish girl was being hassled, and as a result they threatened Hari until he paid them Rs 600 (about £8, but a reasonably big deal for him) to leave him alone.
While we were talking, a friend came in with the latest bit of gossip from the tourist scene (news travels like wildfire around Lal Ghat). Apparently a guide took a single lady to a textiles emporium out of town and, because they were getting on so well, told the shop owner that he (the guide) would personally attend to her – this is acceptable here, it seems. He proceeded to sell her a mock-Pashmina shawl for Rs 75,000 (c. £940). The next day, the lady went to Jaipur and saw the same kind of shawl going at around Rs 500 (c. £6)! She promptly called her country’s embassy, who managed to find the guide and get him to come to Jaipur and pay the lady Rs 50,000 in compensation. He was then arrested, although the emporium owner (who was presumably in cahoots with the guide and must have received a good share of the original spoils) was not. What possessed somebody to pay Rs 75,000 for any kind of shawl is beyond my imagination!
Footnotes
[20] A delicious street snack originally from Bombay, consisting of a fluffy bread roll and a plate of rich potato curry with onions and plenty of refreshing coriander. Pav is the Marathi word for bread and may have been a loan from Portuguese, whose word for bread, pão, is related to the French pain and Italian pane.
No comments:
Post a Comment