on page one-knot-seven of the Muji notebook i was gifted years ago
i listen to the 2002 Bally Sagoo remix Noorie. Like a magic potion, the song balms the senses at the same time emboldens a nostalgia long lost, hidden in the cervices of the grungy remixes spiraling out in the noughties. Sung by a certain never-before-never-after heard of Gunjan in a singular shivery voice, the ode to love, sets tune to some of my mornings in Delhi in the summer of 2018. As i retreat steps to the palace of memories, the secret place where nostalgia hangs out, i find myself receding into a grimy corner of muggy of the dawn of a new millennium.
The elder brother and I would sit in the emptiness of the living room, watch the black and video in rapt attention. Eyes glued to the vision of a tall lady in a white saree skating her way motionlessly though a metrocity. Her hair, the same length as the alaps taken by a mesmerising Gunjan. As the voice hits crescendo, my eyes wouldn't an eyelid, the treatment of the video making me livid with an innate query of wanting to know where the lady in white was headed to.
She would then croon Noorie in the voice that deceived no longing, only beseeching a hideous amount of attention. The record now invokes a miscellaneous fit of memories, snatches from the unending summer afternoons spent in the aimless summer vacations. The brother and I scooping in as much tele and music life as possible before the parents would come back home from work.
Bally Sagoo songs held a special centrifugal space in our hinterland hearts. Hearts that knew thumris and ghazals all too well. Hearts that went akimbo at the beats of Noorie. The milieu of the song, its black and white video, the aloof, unperturbed, unblinking protruding eyes and chiseled cheeks of the model in the video seemed alluring and almost alienating at the same time.
The original, sung by a saintly also almost other-worldly white-sari clad Lata Mangeshkar, pales before the audio of this remix. The desi beats, stilting, hanging thirkan of the ghungroo as the song sets steady pace, waiting to unleash itself provoked something in us. The mere prospect of bringing together beats so new, incomprehensibly attractive to the ears, before the word 'earworm' was even thought of by people my age, seemed liberating. The chiming of the traditional Indian musical instrument worn by classical dancers on their feet, seemed like a dare accepted and executed in utmost earnestness by the British musician.
One almost wonders how the video would have been imagined, the vision so spectacularly singular unto itself that it stayed in the audience’s mind's eye till date. The song nears its two decade anniversary and I wonder why a treatment so visceral, yet real, held my attention so dearly. The role of the candle just as pertinent as that of the coffin from which Noorie is shown to rise. The lyrical movement of her neck almost sifting to the tune of the song's rising crescendo, I remember had caught me in my tracks.
Walking through a field with farmers tilling the soil, her back upright, she holds a classic white church candle, lit since we as viewers do not know. Through the video, she is shown doing things that are deemed unfit for human involvement. Walking in the pitch dark, her eyes wide open, she holds a sated smirk, making us wonder over and over again about her intentions and the way her mind works.
We are shown that she—a potent ghost—on her way to a disco bar, is chased by two streetside goons, who run away at the slightest decry of the unknown. Worling down the video clip through those minutes on tele our purpose-driven minds had wondered a lot, and it is yet to make sense. But the incantation like "noorie" ricochets in the mind, often unwavering and returning on windy days like today.
A friend on Facebook shared a link to a compilation of vocabulary on Indian Hai. N is for Noorie it read. She later commented at me, "You are another Noorie...the kind that suddenly produces a shower of creamy pink flowers on a humid April day, deep inside a neglected, ancient park..."
I wonder how to retrace the steps taken forward yet leading to the past, how to come undone of the sadness that accosts me on sullen minutes. Will the smell of litchis from the plastic bag kept on my work desk help? Will another reading of Sumana Roy's How I Became A Tree become my guidebook all over again? The heartless sensuality of the everyday grips, as I sit rapturous, lusciously entwined in the then and now. I could use a pre-fall tipple, or perhaps a giant night-cap. Tut tut tut, as a friend would’ve replied to this on SMS.
In the meanwhile, words in the fist-cage of the heart glean the ennui of eulogies not written for the fallen leaves.
A poem by Tishani Doshi, only read a few days back tails off in the foreground, while the background accumulates dust of unnumbered friendships ended and eroded in coarse times.
I pour an imagined emotion on my breath, debase an effervescent smile, a part of my stock-in-trade, I see fantasy surface in the middle of unmuffled reality.
What is the name of this emotion? I christen it Sethia.
My pay-packet for the day, ripe with bludgeoning Litchis, collecting my wares, i lean against the bluesy, noiselessness of the windy weather outside the office. A modest papercup half-full of chai sits between my index finger and thumb, as a dust storm brews in the far distance. Soon the city will be the colour of earth, the colour of my tee-shirt, the colour from which we come and to which we go back, the colour of nurture, and the colour we devolve nourishment to. Soon we shall be home and the tune of Noorie will rise again, its crescendo building, this time in the foreground against the clapping doors and windows. With muck on your tongue and soot in your eyes, you and I and the collective of us will walk the walk of a tired child, a pained labourer, a brick-kiln roustabout, we shall hanker and hang around, waiting for the unseen girls to rise…
Girls are coming out of the woods,
wrapped in cloaks and hoods,
carrying iron bars and candles
and a multitude of scars,
collected on acres
of premature grass and city buses,
in temples and bars
