(Something I plucked from the past.)
…“My love has forgotten me..O, He has forgotten me…He had promised…Here to meet me …On this street…But he hasn’t come yet…O, promises he had made to me…But he hasn’t come yet…To find out how I am…”…Where was that old song coming from? Who was singing it…I knew it from long ago..
I didn’t know what time of the day it was. It felt like evening, but I wasn’t sure. There was a strange glow in the sky. But I couldn’t locate the sun. Neither were there stars, or any sign of the moon. It could be early morning, but it didn’t feel like it. Something in your bones always knows what time of the day it is – but something seemed awry with mine. It could even be a clouded mid-morning – but I couldn’t see any clouds in the sky. In fact, the sky didn’t look like the sky at all – just this eerie glow. And I couldn’t locate the source of the light.
…“That evening that day was strange…This evening today too is as strange…Yesterday it was close to me…Today too it feels just as near…”…And where was this voice singing these old songs from pasts…?
I didn’t even know what I was doing there. In the middle of the narrow ribbon of road. There were some people going up and down – but they seemed shrouded. I couldn’t see their faces or their eyes. An occasional rattly vehicle trundled by now and then. I tried to retrace my thoughts to where I had been before I had got here – but I couldn’t remember. I looked behind me, but it was just this narrow grey road going as far as I could see, both behind me, and in front.
And unbidden comes another song…“I call your name as I walk along…through these streets and narrow lanes…All I want..Is to feel..the shade…of the cloud..that your tresses make…Just for one look of love from your eyes..My love…I call your name as I walk these streets and narrow lanes…”
And suddenly I thought – but who am I? I knew I was me – of course I knew me. I mean I could feel my familiar self, the familiar thoughts coursing through my brain. I looked at my hands – they were mine. I looked down at the rest of me. My chest, my belly, my legs. They were mine. I knew them to be mine. I had them all my life. So physically I belonged to a past. I mean I couldn’t be here now, within this body, unless I had arrived from somewhere, could I?
But where had I come from? I felt a vague uneasiness welling up. I had been on my way somewhere. I mean I had set out from somewhere - which I couldn’t remember. - to go somewhere - which I’d forgotten. Or seemed only vaguely to know.
… “Are you some dream..Or are you some kind of reality…Tell me…Who you are…You’ve been standing there..So far away…For such a long time…Come close to me…Let me see…Who.. or what you are…”
I cajoled my mind to try and think. Wait. A train. I had set out to catch a train. I didn’t know where I was going by that train, I had no idea where the station was – all I knew was that I had to get on that train. And this road I was in, would lead me to it, if I followed it.
So I began, or resumed, walking. I must have been walking to get here. Or travelling by some mode. All I knew was that I was standing there, in the middle of that road, under this strange sky, where I couldn’t tell the time, and that I had to go somewhere, for which I had to catch a train. So I set off. Somehow I knew I didn’t have to hurry too much. I had time on my hands. Not indefinitely. But enough for me not to hurry.
… “Come, Come my love..Walk with me..And I’ll take you to a place.. under a sky…Where there is no sorrow..Not even tears…Where only the flowers of love fruit lusciously…We’ll walk under such a sky…”…sang another familiar voice..
And the road? It was familiar. Yet, strange. I mean roads are like people you know. You know their features. You know what their voice sounds like. You can even predict how they think, and respond to a given situation, if you’ve associated with them long enough. This road felt like a friend whom I had not met for many years. Whose ways I had to re-learn. The familiarity regained from the mystery of strangeness grown through time not traversed together.
… “My Friend..you’ve not remained a friend…My love…you’re no longer my love…Life…I’ve lost faith in you..O Life… I’ve lost faith in you...”
And as I walked through the familiar sepia tinted path, it felt like I was listening to an old record. You know, like those solid 78 rpm records from the past. In my childhood I listened to them on hand-cranked record players, with needles that blunted and needed to be changed after every five or six times you played a song...
Songs that went something like this…“I don’t know what kind of people they are…Those who get love in return for love…When I asked for garlands of flowering buds…All I got was a garland of sharp thorns…”
Records playing old songs, sounding tinny with age. Sounding scratched because the needle gets blunt, and keeps slipping and skittering, finding it hard to stay in its groove. The past melding into the present, leaving only a grooved trace of the trail. Threading its way to a future, a smooth black blank space, where the groove runs out, and so does the song. Where the needle oscillates to and fro with a hiss, once the song is done – from the label, which cannot be read, because the turntable is still turning, to the end of the grooved thread it had just slipped out from.
And another song from the past begins humming in my head, a song somebody used to sing, long ago … “as long as my lips do not drink the nectar from your lips to its last dregs…this traveller’s feet will forever be entangled in your tresses…and I’ll hum this song… to your eyes and your face…wherever you may be..whatever path you may tread..I’ll sing my song..just this way..for you”…
So the song went..insistently hissing and scratching..from the needle which had slipped free from its groove.. I heard the song in my head…but I couldn’t read the label of the still turning record from which it played…the singer's song played in my head, his name blurred, obscured by the haze that distant pasts create.
As I walked, I began noticing the occasional abode that lay strewn on either side of the road. Moulding walls, spider-webbed with tiny cracks crawling all over the facades. The windows, heavy lidded – the coquettish eyes of aging beauty, long lashed, fluttering and flirting, enticing the shrouded passers by, in the decaying half-light, who did not pay any heed. Narrow, half opened doorways, withered, gnarled, beckoning, into musty darkened interiors…
From where a cracked voice sings from another hissing old record..“..do not leave me.. O my love… tearing your arms away from mine.. O my love..for then I swear.. On you and your name.. O my love.. I will not be able to stop the tears I shed..”..Was it coming from inside one of those houses, or was it playing in my head? I wasn’t sure. I walked on.
It was a town where time seemed to have stopped for a while, as if caught in a frieze. But which felt that it was about to start ticking again, anytime soon. As soon as it remembered how. The shrouded people that passed by seemed to be afloat in some lost romance, like the decomposing buildings. Their iconography displayed everywhere – like peeling posters plastered on crumbling walls. Giant murals of painted men and women frozen in mid air. Lurid dreams fossilized in rickety hoardings.
While the ancient vehicles, along with clanking bullock carts, chugged and huffed up and down, flowing like boats flitting on a river, or clouds skidding in the sky…
“Where does the Ganga come from…Where is the Ganga going to…Its waves flow…like shadows and the sunlight float in water..” --- Sings an old street singer, sculpted in stone, a beggar, really – holding his calloused hand out for a few coins --
While the noisy vehicles pass petrified roadside vendors, men in threadbare turbans, women in flowing, once vibrant, clothes, now tattered and faded, caught in frescoes, haggling their wares -- vegetables, fruit, or fries -- wheedling at their customers, and cursing their beedi smoking men, in the same breath.
I had been sensing it for quite some time now. There was someone following me. The light was beginning to wane, the road was darker. I looked behind me – but there were just shrouded figures walking. Just my imagination, I thought. I was just nervy, I decided. And walked on.
And I heard another haunting old melody… “Wherever you walk…My shadow will always be with you…My shadow will always follow you…If you should turn around and look for me…Even though you may not see me…My shadow is following you..My shadow is always with you…”
The feeling persisted. I could feel a presence looking at me intently from behind, and following me. I twisted around sharply, once or twice, to catch out the person, but each time it was just those blank shrouded people behind me that met my eyes. Now this shrouded figure that I had caught following me seemed like a chink of light in a darkened tomb in which I felt I was buried alive.
I turned off the road and entered an empty, dark, narrow lane that went into a thicket of trees, and waited, half hidden behind a tree. And sure enough, soon a shrouded figure stepped cautiously into the lane, and peered into the gloom. I stepped out and accosted the shroud, I could not tell if it was a man or a woman: Why are you following me, I said.
At which he or she turned around swiftly and went back into the road. I followed half running: Wait! I yelled. Stop. I called. Why are you following me? I asked. But the shrouded figure only walked faster, trying to melt in with the other shrouds. But I had it pinpointed in my eyesight. I had an imperative need to catch up and know what this was all about. What I was doing there. And why had he/she been following me. I was sure the shrouded being knew something. I had tried talking with the other shrouded figures around me – but all I got was silence.
…“My heart said something…It was nothing…My heart heard something…It was nothing…Such conversations too happen..My love…Such conversations do happen..”
So I held my shrouded figure hard in my sights, and followed it doggedly. But the faster I walked, the faster it seemed to move too. The distance was lengthening between us. I began running and calling out desperately: Hello! Wait! Please, Wait!
It had entered a big, crowded building – I knew I would lose him, or her, if I didn’t catch up now. I ran inside desperately looking for my shrouded creature and I suddenly realized I was at the station. And suddenly I knew why the shrouded being had been following me – to lead me here. I looked here and there, but I couldn’t see it anymore. It had melted with the others who were walking silently to and fro the platforms where trains were waiting.
I knew my train was on platform number three – I didn’t know how I knew that – I just knew. I walked up to my compartment, found my berth – all of which I also knew somehow – and lay down tiredly. It was dark now outside. I drifted off to sleep. And I didn’t even know when the train began to move.
“…I know not what paths I must walk..I know not what my world is…Whose hand I shall I seek…To help me traverse these paths..And I know not what my destination is…But my heart tells me…This is my world…And this is my destination…”
From the depths of deep slumber I heard someone calling me.. Rita…Rita..Wake up..
I wished they wouldn’t..I was so tired..I wanted to sleep – but somebody was shaking me now – Rita..Get Up..
I opened my eyes. Through the haze of half sleep I saw it was my mother shaking me and calling me: What is it..? I said drowsily. Let me sleep…
Get up..Or you’ll miss Belampalli..
And I was suddenly wide awake. It was broad daylight. Our train was moving slowly – a signal ahead had not given it clearance, my father told me. My mother and my father were sitting opposite, eagerly looking outside the window. We were on our way to Hyderabad – a journey we were making after almost twenty years of leaving the place.
But more than Hyderabad, where I went to school, it was Belampalli that we were all eagerly waiting for. For it was in Belampalli, a small coal minig town that my father had worked all his life, until he retired. It was in Belampalli that I had left my childhood behind.
Suddenly I yelled excitedly – I was a child once more – Ma, Baba, look – there’s that old movie theatre – Gawd, it’s still exactly the same—
Yes, time had stood still at Belampalli – the train was moving through its tiny station now, not stopping. So many times had we come to this station, usually on our way to school to Hyderabad, sometimes on journeys to Calcutta --- drunk tea from that tiny tea stall, waited hours for trains perpetually late.We watched in silence, tears in our eyes, as the train slowly left tiny Belampalli behind.
And an old song I loved came to my mind – “Bichad gayaa har saathi dekar pal do pal ka saath kisko fursath haijo thamme divaano ka haath humko apna saaya thak aksar bezaar mila - Isko hi jeena kahthe hai tho yuhi jeelenge - uff na karenge lab see lenge aasu peelenge - gam se ab ghabrana kaisa – gam sau baar milaa-”
“Separated …All our companions have left us…After spending only a moment or two..Who has the time Or the inclination…To hold the hand of old memories…Even my shadow has forsaken me… If this is what they call life…So I will live it as it is…Not a moan, nor a complaint shall pass through my lips…I’ll seal my lips…And drink my tears…Why should I fear sorrow…For familiar Sorrow has come a hundred time…”
(All the words within quotes are songs from old Hindi movies, from the late fifties, through the sixties, and maybe patches of the seventies – The golden age of Hindi cinema, and its music. Unlike in the West, India had no outlet other than its cinema for its popular music. Hindi cinema therefore, in those times, attracted some of the best poets the country has produced, and music composers, and singers. Their like will never be seen or heard again as we sink into crass cheapness and garish loudness that our cinema and music have generally degenerated to these days.
This story is dedicated to all those singers, composers and lyricists that gave so much meaning and beauty to my growing years – The golden voices of Hemant Kumar, Manna Dey, Mohammad Rafi, Mukesh, Talat Mehmood, Kishore Kumar, Geeta Dutt, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhonsle... Music composers like SD Burman, RD Burman, Salil Choudhuri, Laxmikant Pyarelal, Kalyanji Anandji, O P Nayyar, Ravi. Lyricists like Sahir Ludhianvi, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Gulzar, Indeevar, Shailendra --- Just to name a few. They took the music from the traditional sounds of India – Folk, Classical etc, they took from the Western traditions, sounds from the Middle-East, and the far East --- and they made the most wonderful music. Of course translations can never capture the beauty of its originals – I have kept mine simple, perhaps simplistic, and direct – )
