#Scurf165: hello, goodbye
we need a bit of waiting on the sidewalk sometimes
January 9, 2023: One of the (physically) coldest days I have endured in my life started off a bit late as I got out of bed, dazed and unaware of where I was, who I was, what I was to with this thing call time (and an iPhone) in hand. Within three seconds of waking up my eyelids ached, my forehead and cheek(bone)s pained. The cold was needling through the human membranes of skin, muscle and bones.
I mustered on with some breakfast (brainlessly), and some chai (mindlessly). My upper lip burnt and tongue charred under the weight of the boiling hot tea that my senses clearly couldn’t perceive. Something kept calling me from the inner recesses of my phone. My toes curled inside the woollen socks — cold and probably about to fall off.
A strange, new indigestion-like feeling surfaced in my stomach. I could almost taste the nonexistence. What was it that I am dreading? Another loss? Some more pain? Perhaps some more loving? Who tf knows anything anymore!
I scoured through some emails, responded to some, laboured over the rest. I moved through the house, turning off one heater and on another. Nothing, including my brain seemed to function. I realised a smoke might help. But for that I needed a piping hot cup of coffee. I whipped one from the golden instant coffee jar in the kitchen cabinet. As I neared the sacred space from where I stare into oblivion and smoke my charades away, I realised something was still missing. I scrolled through the music on my phone, nothing seemed to click. I reached out to youtube, still nothing. I thought of an old love and their instagram music — too much work, pfffbbbtt. I scrolled back to my apple music app and tried to search for something. What was I looking for?
That’s when I saw the album tile of Kishori Amonkar’s Drishti and hit play on Ek hi Sang Hute. By now it was post-noon but I had found my tune. Things seemed settled. I had a pitch for this newsletter in mind — “on being (oh-so-f*cking pretentiously) saved by Hindustani classical in Delhi’s treacherous winters”. (Coy plug to last year’s ali-sethiesque winter lustening dispatch.)
Then came evening and a deluge of more calls and, therefore, a second cup of coffee (or was it first). I kept listening to Ek Hi Sang in between, yearning for something more but unable to put a finger on what exactly the heart was aching for. Did it pine to actually melt in the extreme windy chill? An anticipation and longing of a new kind, some would say.
That’s when I chanced upon a tweet by a friend about Ustad Rashid Khan. One of the first visuals that sprang to mind was that of his Swarmandal and his ever smiling face. The façade of a soul-stirring singer, a sage who distilled peace through thought and music into my sill life some years back. I wanted to inject his rendition of Raag Yaman immediately to soothe pain but instead moved on to completing some more calls.
By the end of my workday, I was exhausted, cupping a warm whisky thingie and had entirely forgotten about Ustad and my (unwitting, inadvertent, wholly pretentious) writing pact with the self and of being (or wanting to be) saved by Hindustani classical.
At 1am though this thread by a mutual reignited the shoals inside my coffee-addled brain. I coaxed the self out of bed to bring out the laptop from its drawer and type out these meaningless nothings. Into the ether. Into the nothing that constitutes the space between what we know and what we don’t. Into the attempt of wanting to seize whatever we can of everything, everyone who is (almost) always on their way out. Into a feeble experiment at asking the void to stop, lurk and sometimes even, to call back.
The wind outside gushing so hard, I feel it’ll break through my glass windows. The dogs, mercifully, continue to lend a bgm to my 2am.
Words then came (or not) as a way to commemorate loss. The harmonium playing so late at night like it used to in my mother’s village at odd, unearthly hours in the morning. Waking up to the tabla and harmonium blistering out on the loudspeaker, dozing off to their sound at night— a major chunk of Dussehra holidays were made of this stuff. Some nights musicians from far off villages would assemble in the ground to perform for the pack of Brahmins and Thakurs in the village. Some times there would also be cross dressers and dancers. Everything was open to attend to all. Only women shied away and stayed on terraces of kaccha houses that surrounded the ground. Sneaking glimpses between sips of chai, from inside their ghoonghats. My brother and I — being kids— had the front seat to all this drama, however reluctantly so. A solemn tear escaped my eyes almost nobly.
This was my intiation into Hindustani classical’s balsamic, bucolic beauty. In its most raw, unadorned, pared back form. This is back when I didn’t know much else except that I hated hindustani classical, this very thing that I crave with all my being, which was played ever so often at home and most other places where I went.
I come from a family where the biggest highlight of a wedding at home was a shehnai-vaadak or group papa had sought out from the outskirts of Banaras. At 10am the shehnai would start, joined solemnly by the harmonium (or not) and everyone stood where they were. Frozen in their praxis. In the middle of a seventh cup of chai, having the little one’s leftover poha for breakfast, doing haldi-uptan on the groom, preparing the mandir for upcoming pooja, decorating the balconies with marigolds and bel patra… or just getting out of bed. As a family we’d cry, remembering older members of the family who had passed away few years ago, others recalling lost lovers, some thinking about parents, others just going with the melody and submerging themselves in the moment and letting the pain wash away….
Ustad Rashid Khan’s work was all this and more. Till date the sound of the harmonium with his rapturous alaaps brings to mind a hundred different musical memories. Most arousing thing from all being that I can remember absolutely no humans associated with these memories. None, except my mother perhaps and, the alaaps. How much I pained to get out of those auditoriums, to get away from the slow, renegaded palindrome-like pace of the harmonium, the annoyance of the table ka tirkit. Those nights after we’d come back home I’d not talk to my parents till next morning, and crib about wanting to watch TV to listen to some “Pure Hindi film songs” to erase the devotional type music I’d just heard.
Cut to being away from home for more than 15 years. Spending hours in galleries staring at paintings that made me feel too much. Listening to Kishori Amonkar’s voice ringing through the vast, empty stretches of my house (and really, life) on weekday mornings. Reading through reams and reams of medieval european literature. Scouring through pages of old notebooks and new books. The taans of life, they yawn and stretch to reveal the same pithy truth at their center. All of my recent few years appear the same. When I try to write, only these words rally out: “What do I do with my Saturdays without you?”