Last Saturday was hardly special. I was in our office store room, removing the contents of a trunk, keeping what
I wanted and discarding what was of no possible use. A moth-eaten blanket (“keep until fully
destroyed, for sentiment”), a book in excellent condition (“give away”), the
odd accounts file (“did I actually pay so much as tax in 1998 ?”), a few
long-playing records…..
I slackened the cleaning pace, for this was the best part. Each LP was special, suffused with memories
that emerged from the record itself, much like the genie did from a lamp, images,
movement and colour that the mind could see through its sepia-tinted lens. Each memory was from a childhood not so long
ago, one that could not ever come back, for the times have gone as have the
people. And I, much against my will,
grew up long ago (well, not so long ago).
There is nothing wrong in living in the past, if the past
has no bitterness to offer, no jealousy to adorn you with, no recrimination and
no ‘if-I-hadn’t-done-that, imagine-where-I-would-have-been-now’. The past is inspirational, motivating, exhilirating,
immersed in exaggeration and the starkness of colour in sepia. This morning, as I picked up a record with
the photograph of a large pot-bellied man on the jacket and the name Chembai
Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar, the colour in the sepia emerged. Staring out of the window, it was an easy
journey to 1973
We were at the home of Menon Uncle in Tinsukia, Assam –
amongst the millions of Menons encircling the planet and leaving their
indelible mark, he was ‘Tinsukia Menon’, a one-and-only tag that was about as
astute a definition as any. It was a
home on the first floor of a rather peculiar angular building owned by
Marwaris, of which community Tinsukia Menon was a honorary and esteemed
member. Perhaps it was Saturday evening,
as it generally used to be on our visits there.
The men – him, my father and an eight-year old who would act like an adult –
in one room, the women – four of them, Indira Aunty, two of her three daughters
in their late teens or early twenties and Mum – in another. Some laughter and small talk from the women,
subdued conversation from the men as, with an air of expectation and ceremony,
Menon Uncle removed the record from its jacket with care and placed it on the
mast of the record player.
The steps were routine:
Switch on the record player.
Lock the record in, by closing the ‘gate’. Drag the starter lever, along
a semi-circle until the ‘click’. The mechanism
then got into action, as the record dropped six inches onto the turntable, the
hand with the needle moved a good forty-five degrees until it was over the
record, and gently settled on the corner.
With a hiss –and the odd stratch – the record began to
play.
The music, to the ears of the uninitiated, was rather
odd. The voice was old and a touch out of
breath, yet Uncle and Dad were in a different world, and that was enough for a
child who wanted to be a grown-up. For
Chembai was no ordinary singer; he represented a generation of Carnatic legends,
devout yet iconoclastic, loving yet despotic, immutable yet open to
change. Stories about him were part of
music folklore and were shared with awe by the men; the boy soaked it all in,
as if he understood. A story on his
refusal to play in Guruvayoor because of a problem with money, after which he
lost his voice. To regain which, he sat
outside the temple doors and prayed that he would sing upon which the Lord,
needless to add, heard his feelngs and granted his voice back. Of his affection for his disciple, Yesudas, a
Christian who mastered the nuances of Carnatic music. Of his animosity to film music that he
derided as banal. Of his stringent standards
and harsh, yet constructive, criticism of accompanying musicians in
public. And so on….
Indira Aunty – dimunitive, cheery and gentle –interrupted
the reverie with a snack or two. My
personal favourite at their home was puffed rice with sugar and coconut and the
ubiquitous mixture was always no more than an arm’s length away to enrich the
evening. When the needle reached the end
of the record, Menon Uncle stood up with a sigh of satisfaction, and replaced the record with another. This time it
was Balachander’s mellifluous veena or possibly Semmangudi or ML Vasanthi
Kumari, all names now etched in the receding memory of an antediluvian
connoisseur. The music ended before
dinner, yet the rhythm, the incantation, the humming stayed on in the mind of
the little boy who was, for that evening, a grown-up.
As with most music, the more I listened to Menon Uncle’s
enviable collection of Carnatic music - Chembai, MS Subbalakshmi, Chittibabu’s veena –
the more it grew on me. Dad’s collection
of records was good too and he and I spent some very happy hours listening to
music that I could not even begin to comprehend, yet the fondest memories I have
are of that large room on the first floor in Tinsukia, the quiet company of the
two men and their music.
In the year or two
before we moved out of Assam, Menon Uncle had begun collecting spool tapes. This was new and thrilling, and as Dad
resisted buying a tape recorder, I looked forward to the evenings in Tinsukia. It
was there that I first heard – on tape - John Higgins, the American who had made India
his home and Carnatic music his mission.
Higgins’ singing was more Indian than most, and we collectively
marvelled at the commitment and talent of the man. And, much to Menon Uncle’s disapproval, it
was in his home that I heard my favourite song from Anurodh, a Rajesh Khanna
film, again on spool, his daughters having persuaded him to lower his standards
for the bourgeois.
Years later, we moved to Bangalore. Dad gave his rather bulky record player – with
its distinctive fragrance of vinyl and wood – away. It was a heart breaking moment for me as, I
am sure, it was for him as well. When
Menon Uncle followed us to Bangalore a few years later, record players and spools had given
way to audio tapes and he too gave away his collection. On the odd occasion when we met, our
conversation would veer around to the progression in Carnatic music. A tape would be fished out to make a
point. Yet, there was no sepia anymore. The magic of the music remained, yet the magic
of the experience had diminished.
I put the record back in its jacket and closed the
trunk. My cleaning for the month had
been done.
