Emraan Hashmi, long drives in the rain and what else
#Scurf204: a memory snatch from 2006, a whirlwind of nothing, a snag in the programming of november 2024
As a shy, gauche, newly hormonal and stupidly pretty teen in 2006 I ached to be more than just what the skin showed. Where was the pain? I pined for that depth, intensity and seriousness that comes from "having suffered". Kurt Cobain was yet to be introduced, Janis Joplin was a far dream, I was mostly dancing away to Avril Lavigne's punk. My favourite teacher in school (Mrs Bhattacharya I MISS YOU MORE THAN EVERYTHING) had scolded me for scoring poorly in accounts and eco: “The Kajal in your eyes won’t hide the zeroes in your marksheet.” My Eco teacher (Ms Bakshi), I think she secretly hated us all and was jealous of our freedom, had told us: “You’re at an age, 16, where even pigs look pretty!” In hindsight I take offense on behalf of our beloved pigs who give us so much (bacon, my sweet, sweet breakfast) and wonder what propelled her to say those words.
But I was someplace else altogether. Obviously, isn’t that was being 16 is all about? I had just made my first boyfriend, was in my rebellion phase where I'd lock myself up in the garage of my parents' house and just studied English and Mathematics for unending hours. Music was taboo, as were novels, but I had siphoned enough of those from Scholastic bookfairs, using stolen money.
Then came Gangster which was watched on the DVD player in the darkness of our living room in the presence of parents, a dear uncle and my brother. Brother and I were besides ourselves with joy and ecstasy at finally getting to watch bad boy Emraan Hashmi's movie. I think it was our first.
Once the movie started, it's blue-grey brooding visage washed over our faces and the milieu took grip on us like a fever dream. The timid street light pouring in felt like an apt distraction. More than the story, the places the movie took us to, and everything else wrong with it, what caught me unawares was Emraan Hashmi's striking handsomeness and Kangana's wilting beauty in that sadly beautiful role. The songs felt unreal.
I remember being so desperate to just be something more than my then self, something more than the joy that comes with being freshly in love, the bounce that comes with being good in studies (almost), the joy of all the presents my then boyfriend would casually, regularly lavish upon me. The movie's songs were a smorgasbord of different musical styles, but they mostly, largely pointed to the general direction of despair that had till then been unknown to my smallcity, carefree but moderately moody self.
I remember squeezing them to their fullest, like a bag of wine wrung the last drops out of, each time they came on the radio. If I had had a diary then, those lyrics are what I would’ve filled it with. If I listened intently enough, I would be just as sad as Kangana, and be loved and saved just as intensely by my own sulky, stubble-beard Emraan.
Ya Ali took me to the bylanes of kurbani in the name of yaar, there was the self, one discovered, to be sacrificed in the name of the beloved. Yeh hasti, yeh khudi, yeh zindagi - everything had to be foresaken to be in love, one noted. DJ Suketu's remix version of the track proved to be even more fatal. That it banged, was not even a thought, the song was a religion, a faith, a tribe one solemnly swore never to bow out of.
My gangly teen personage was impressionable but I was also interested in and inclined only towards a certain kind of ennui (that might’ve really stemmed from me being really undernourished). This moodiness was just it. I leapt at it, arms wide and eyes hopeful. The self then became a sponge to soak in all the various moods that sprang from the bulbous album of Gangster. There was a me who existed outside of these songs, and there was one who listened to them as and when they surfaced on the TV or radio and went somewhere with them. Apart from me being present in both these places, a peripheral, fossilised figure unsuited to being the protagonist, it was all too weak to hold these two varied fragments together.
James' Bheegi Bheegi was a salve to the nights when I fought those silly, asinine fights with the boyfriend, there was a joy in succumbing to the song's hum as the night dawned outside. It was going to be hamari adhuri kahani in a way, the immediate direction in which our relationship was heading towards, but on those nights I felt like the song was cradling me into a form of oblivion, closer to a version of myself I had so strongly wanted to be.
Cut to the morning when I’d send an SMS to the boyfriend from the mobile phone I shared with my brother (more on that, sometime). A sorrowful "I love you, please forgive me" as if he was the gangster and I was his girlfriend destined to be torn away from him shortly. Our time together was brief, my boyfriend's and mine, and yet it felt unending in those moments.
On my way back from school, as I walked back alone, the unwieldy standard XI bag lugging heavy as ever on my back, I saw a familiar Honda City around the bend. I read the number plate (151) and knew he had come to pick me up. As I sat inside the car, he played a song that till today reminds me forever of those initial days of being together. John Abraham's sensuous Mann Ki Lagan crooned boldly on his Ericsson speakers as I held his hand -- yep, yep, that was the ultimate form of expressing something close to love in those days.
I remember being immediately put to ease, Gangster's blues washing off of me, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan's gentle murmurations cradling us into a reverie. He drove us to the other side of city, the hep part with the Cafe Coffee Days, the Baristas, the Waves, the part where the roads were paved and well lit and lined with trees. A charcoal black sky encroached over us, and in no time he interlaced his right hand's fingers into mine. I blushed, tried to fight the smile off my stupid face, and stole glimpses at him. We were changing gears on his City together - hand-in-silly, cheesy, cloying-hand! The song continued as the weather outside turned monsoon-ish in the beginning of May. Were my blues literally being lifted away or what? He parked the car in a side-alley in a neighbourhood where neither of us knew anyone, increased the air conditioning and embraced me as the song continued softly in the background.
We emerged after half an hour, searching for the skies from the windshield. The rain was still pelting itself down. Nothing was visible outside, the greyness engulfing us all over again. A couple of hours later we found ourselves listening to Lamha Lamha from Gangster and staring down the Ganga river, his car parked on the Barrage bridge.
Not a person in sight, this was our umpteenth visit to this spot. Away from all of everything that we had known, the little island gave us shelter, holding hands, we’d walk barefoot letting the sands trickled between our toes. In the years to come, this place would gather some sort of a cult status in our post-industrialised city. Horny teens would flock here to make out, drink beer, smoke careless first few cigarettes and hold hands. In that evening light, rainwashed, clear-skied, the river gushed so full, but still only as full as our love. He kissed my hand, squeezed it tight and caressed my cheek. The thrill of that moment, that minute! I was rhapsodic!!! Time froze, and it was as if a happier me crawled out of the skeletal of my former, sad, brooding self. Nothing, not even meeting Benedict Cumberbatch can come close to the tingling sensation I experienced in that moment. Just thinking of it now, sitting at my desk here in far away land Sweden, I have a silly smile stuck on my face. Maybe, meeting Paul Mescal or Franz Rogowski would come close to that gooseflesh-inducing lightness and bounce. Who’s to know!
In those hours these songs played more times than we could care to remember. We had been ensconced, transferred to another place. The drift was catching up with us. The blues left far away, lurking somewhere far off by now, and I was back to being my much loathed, sweet, saccharine self. Later that evening when he dropped me near home, neither of us knew when we'd meet next. As I got out of his car, I paced back home so fast as I didn’t want to be seen by any of the neighbours. Once inside, a sadness came over as I remembered the accounts and eco homework I had to finish that night. What a silly, lonely life, I heaved and back I was in the gurgling, broody bylanes of Gangster, singing those sad, sad tunes to myself.
Yaar this was such a throwback read. Mazaa aa gaya!
I remember buying those compilation mp3 which had all the latest songs of that month and their cover art at the back. I remember finding gangster and zeher songs in it. Songs dot pk was still couple of years away and these cds that I my sister used to buy were my only access to new music.
Uff! It was best of times.