The street was deserted, and the houses were dark as if the city had suddenly been abandoned. In the cities in the plains of the Ganga, no one stays inside the house on summer nights. People come out and stroll around to see whether the leaves on any of the trees are moving, hoping to catch a whiff of some breeze that might have strayed in. But tonight, everything was absolutely still and silent.
As he passed through the street of the carpet weavers and entered the street of the artisans who engraved designs on brass, Amir Khusrau listened carefully, trying to make out if any of them were at work. The sound of a chisel moving over brass was one that had always attracted him. He had always yearned to invent a musical instrument that would recreate that sound. The sitar, like the veena of Hindustan, made a chain of individual notes while the chisel produced a continuous sound as it moved over brass, like the sound one string makes as it rubs against another.
The streets were narrow and the galis even narrower. When he came to a spot where a street and a gali crossed, Khusrau suddenly stopped. He strained his ears as if he had caught the outline of a raga. Yes, he could hear it distinctly, flowing out without any obstruction. It was so faint that he could not make out whether it came from a stringed instrument or someone was singing it. Its magical quality matched the disturbing emotions it evoked. What astonished Khusrau most was that the raga seemed very familiar to him.
He searched up and down the street. He went into the gali that crossed it and looked on both sides. He peered through windows and into balconies. But he could not find where the raga came from.
At last he came upon a man, thin as a creeper, seated on the veranda of a dilapidated building. The loincloth and shawl that covered him were tattered. There was no instrument in his hand and his lips were pursed. Strangely, the music that still hung in the air stopped the moment their eyes met.
The man bowed his head respectfully to Khusrau. Khusrau hesitated, then turned away to continue his search. Changing his mind, he looked at the man again. He felt he had seen him somewhere, that this was someone he had wanted to meet.
‘Who are you looking for?’ asked the man.
‘Did you hear a raga?’ asked Khusrau hesitantly.
‘What kind of raga?’
‘Maybe you wouldn’t understand if I told you. I’ll describe the notes. You know the individual notes you hear when you strum a veena with your fingers? And the continuous sound one string makes as it rubs against another? What I heard was something between the two. And the sound was full of pain.’
‘It was the cry of a cat,’ said the man in his simple idiom. ‘A cat’s unbroken cry when it is cruelly tortured.’
Khusrau looked at him suspiciously. ‘Where is the cat?’ he asked.
The villager shook his head. ‘In a distant town where it is a pastime for children to blind the poor animals. You would have heard it very faintly. But wait…I had abandoned that cat in a jungle.’
‘Then this must be the jungle.’
Govardhan laughed. ‘This is not a jungle, sahib, this is a city. The famous city of Dilli, in whose courts you sing your odes in praise of murderers and torturers, just as you sang them for their victims. And this is the street of the brass workers of that city who engrave designs on vessels with their chisels…’
The man got up as he spoke and walked away, gradually disappearing into the darkness. Khusrau stared at him as he went. Was he the owner of the raga he had heard, he wondered. Although the man had disappeared, the raga or its soul at least still seemed to hang in the air of the street, robbing him of his peace of mind.
The now silent strains of the raga began to pull him, drag him far away beyond cities and villages, beyond mountains and jungles and rivers, to a distant battlefield on the dry Deccan plateau. And there, like a flash of lightning, he recognized it.
He had accompanied Malik Kafur there on a campaign, heading a battalion himself, to wage war against the king of Devagiri, a non-believer. After a long and fierce battle in which thousands had perished, the king had surrendered and agreed to convert. The victorious army had camped on the battlefield for the night. The moonlight had had a magical whiteness that lay like a fine muslin cloth over the black rocks and the undulating land which curved like a woman’s naked body between them. Khusrau had shed his soldier’s role and journeyed through poetry into the realm of music. Taking out the sitar he always carried, he had sat down in the moonlight and plunged into the composition of a new raga. Capturing the faint and subtle sounds around him, he had found notes to weave bridges between them. When he finished, his eyes had overflowed, he did not know why. He had fallen asleep on the spot.
It was when day broke that Amir Khusrau had realized that the sounds he had used to compose the raga were the cries and moans of the wounded soldiers who lay on the battlefield waiting for death. He had forgotten the night before that he was seated on the battlefield.