Before The Fiddlers Have Fled...1

A friend insists that my pursuit of musical literacy is an experience worth documenting, so here’s the beginning of a documentary.

My daughter, who is five, can carry a tune and shows an avid interest in music. Five is the right age to start musical training, I hear. So when a friend does an Internet search for a violin teacher in my neighborhood and finds me a number to call, after tolerating my whining about how far I live from anywhere and how impossible it is for me to sign my daughter up for any extracurricular activities, I am left with no excuse but to call up said teacher. I do want her to acquire the musical literacy that I have always craved.

Except, as I am discussing her lessons with her teacher, something makes me inquire if the teacher will take me on as well, my question is couched within a nervous giggle and an intention of sounding as if I was only joking. In reality, although I doubt I knew it myself, I was dead serious. The teacher assured me that it was possible to learn at any age while the cynic within taunted with a quip that a tutor’s optimism is perhaps directly proportional to the promise of income.

The next step was the renting of violins, the short and sweet one required the tiniest violin I’ve ever seen – an eighth size. This is the only size that allowed her to touch the scroll of the violin with a ninety degree bend in her elbow. The taller musical troglodyte required a full size violin.

The mother and daughter duo have now been taking lessons for six weeks. We have learnt to play a scale and the nursery rhyme – Mary Had a Little Lamb. We practice the tune religiously at home. Thank God for our remoteness and unshared walls with neighbors; although we are probably sending many a deer from the woods all around us scampering away to their doom.

When I am done with my daily chores for the evening, and have finished practicing what little I know of violin playing so far - the one nursery rhyme - and when it is time to get online again, I check message boards and hunt and peck on the keyboard till the early morning hours, trying to find some assurance that it is indeed possible for a creaky jointed person to learn to play an instrument that needs the dedication of a lifetime. No such assurances are forthcoming. There are concerned eighteen year olds on these message boards, imploring, asking if they can hope to be respectable violin players one day. They are bluntly told that they have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being any good. One is up against people who picked up the instrument when they were barely out of diapers! How is it possible to hold ones own against someone who has been doing it since they were in kindergarten? “Holding one’s own” should really be the last thing on the mind of an old person trying to learn. The wizened ones need to be doing it for the love of music alone!

So there appears to be some hope for my kindergartener and I need to tell myself that it should all be about her now; that I need to stop feeding the hungry monster that keeps pushing me towards a quixotic quest for “I-don’t-know-what”. I need to find indescribable joy in teaching, guiding and shaping a young person who can face the world with knowledge that I didn’t possess. Anyway, that is what should be happening. But it isn’t. It helps to have an “upper limit” – something to “tend to” as one learnt in Calculus. Doesn’t mean it is going to happen. Instead it seems like I have found the entrance to a cave of treasures similar to the one Ali Baba found.

In the past few weeks I have hungrily scoured every musical resource on the net, every book I could lay my hands on and tapped every person who possesses the tiniest bit of musical knowledge to help me feel less lost in the world of flats and sharps and majors and minors.

My five year old goes around saying. “Mommy, I think I know how to spell ‘STOP’ as we stop the car at a stop sign, she can also read ‘NO TURNS’ or ‘EXIT’ or ‘DEER CROSSING’ or almost anything that she can sound out phonetically and register sense. I feel like I am musically at the same level as she is with her alphabets…I can be found exclaiming, “Hey that curly sign that looks like and ampersand is a treble clef!” I now know the differences between the black and white keys on a piano and am developing a vague understanding of pitches and octaves, of equal temperament and just intonation, of the circle of fifths which anti-clockwise is also a circle of fourths.

I am thrilled that I can read music now; that is if I stare at a staff for 15 – 20 minutes while feeling the onset of a headache and red-rimmed eyes, but I can do it! It was a mysteriously alien thing just two weeks ago and now it’s getting demystified.

Whether my ear will ever learn to follow along trippingly and transcribe what I learn to the strings of the violin remains to be seen. The hope is that the different pieces of the musical jigsaw will come together someday and culminate in an “aha” moment of sorts. After all if one sets out on a path it is bound to lead somewhere. How my friend’s bow seemed to magically hover over the strings, producing the most delicate of notes and how our violin teacher’s hands move so swiftly over the strings remains something from the realm of fantasy, a mystery that seems so out of reach. A mystery that I am sure my fellow student will have better luck resolving if I can do my job of sustaining her interest.

In the meantime I’ll keep plodding away at torturing some form of consonant notes out of my instrument while taking baby steps toward the all important CORRECT note - the one that seems to be so conspicuously lacking from nearly all aspects of life; the one exception being the one she uses when she calls out my name and asks me if it time for us to practice what we’ve learnt.

I wonder what makes me think of her luscious tones as ‘plummy’. Have I ever heard a sound described that way or is it my own invention? I am not sure. We collect impressions and sometimes it’s difficult to tell acquired thoughts apart from original ones…but when she calls out my name I picture a round, juicy plum and I sense richness…it’s as if I can hear, taste and see the rich outlines and hues of all her words. When she calls it seems like the only correct note I recognize is the sound of her voice. It travels through my inner reaches and hits the spot where it can give me utmost satisfaction.

Perhaps one day we’ll both come close to producing a similar note from our instruments, or perhaps we already have.

A Dream!

A dream! Finally a dream I remember!

There are familiar characters - like my very sweet,very cloyingly insistent and driven boss. She has a chart with her that needs to be diligently maintained. The maintenance of this chart, which seems to be nothing more than a recording of the daily sunset and sunrise timings, is to be our highest priority for the upcoming weeks. It has to be updated and analyzed at all costs.

I remember offering a slight resistance and expressing some barely concealed annoyance at the idea. I'm telling her how difficult it is to actually be awake at the precise moment of sunrise. I ask her if she really expects me to be awake and ready with pen, paper and clock to observe the break of dawn and she answers in the affirmative.

I switch to my ‘reasonable’ mode and tell her that it wouldn’t be that difficult to record the precise time of sunset but that she needs to bring in some other experts or consultants to do the recording of the sunrise.

I even comment on how unreasonable the whole project is and she answers by saying she has something to share with me. She then tells me that the company is planning a softball event in which participation is mandatory. She says she has been assigned the task of picking the team and ensuring practice sessions. Therefore, she says, it becomes important to keep track of exactly how many hours of daylight we have in which to work effectively.

I react by saying, “Wow! Ok! That makes complete sense! I get it now!” She reacts by looking pleased and telling me how she always wants me to express myself freely so that she can share things with me so I don’t get a sense of being left floundering in the dark.

I tell her then that since we were talking freely she would need to know that I have never been good at baseball or softball and that she shouldn’t have high expectations. She looks surprised and asks me why I think I can’t play well. I tell her about my school where students were required to play baseball, starting with Grade 5. I remember being told to hit the ball with a bat that wasn’t flat like a cricket bat! I didn’t see how it was possible. And that I could never connect ball with bat. She reassures me that I would do fine.

My dream takes me home then as I ponder the problem of the recording of dawn, now that I know what it’s for. The problem keeps me awake half the night (yes, I seem to be an insomniac even in my dreams!) and then I have a “Eureka” moment where I decide that it’s really so easy, that there is no problem at all: there are a million sites on the web that offer us sunrise and sunset timings. I kick myself for not thinking of it sooner.

I fall asleep in the dream then as I wake up in the real world, relieved that there isn’t such a project afoot.

Not only did I dream but I was actually blessed with one whose precedents are so easy to trace back to two things: JJ’s poem “Discourse” and recent interactions with the boss!

Or are they really? Is something else going on that isn't so obvious?

No ends, no beginnings...just thoughts

Most days are dull. I know I won’t remember them when I look back from a vantage point of twenty years hence. Some would stand out. Some for no reason at all and some for the richness of the moment or for the depth or intensity of feeling they inspired.

I have always liked this program of old Hindi songs on satellite TV called “Abhi to Main Jawaan Hoon”. The presenter of the program is so humble and self-effacing that I still haven’t learnt his name, even after years of watching this program.

Unlike the video jockeys of today he projects the idea that this program is not in the least bit about him but about the gems of music that have emerged from the work of Indian lyricists, musicians and singers in the first half of the twentieth century. And gems they are. I can get so absorbed in these songs that nothing else around me would register. It is the only thing that would make me understand why the musicians on the Titanic played on even as the ship broke in half and sank.

The selection today was mesmerizing and included Akele Akele Kahan Ja Rahe Ho, Deewana Hua Baadal, Dil Cheez Kya Hai and Chupke Chupke Raat Din among others. They have been my favorites for a long time; from the time when they appealed to me at the most basic level; the universal language of beautiful music. Now in the fourth decade of my life, as I contemplate the words “break it down”, every time I hear a rock band perform and the lead singer utters them before giving each part of the band an individual turn, or when I return to fundamentals as I try to solve a problem, or thinking of Mr George Mayer*, who always talked about getting back to first principles, I hear these songs and watch the accompanying visuals with closer attention. I notice each part, observe and marvel at each nuance. Nuances that have me drifting, free associating, making connections to recent events in my life or in the lives of people I know

There’s the song Chupke Chupke Raat Din where Ghulam Ali effortlessly emotes with his voice and then I listen to the words…Kheench lena wo mera parde ka kona daffatan, aur dupatte se tera wo mooh chupana yaad hai…those words speak to me about the essential difference between a man and a woman in any relationship. The man wants to uncover the mystery, the woman wants to conceal, as long as possible…when one curtain comes down, another one must go up; they must be kept guessing. Whether she knows it or not her very existence depends on preserving this mystery, to sustain it, for when the mystery is gone nothing remains, just a void that seeks to devour everything within its dark expanse.

Then there’s the line about the girl braving the blistering of her feet on a sun baked roof on a hot summer day to call out to her beloved…she didn’t want to lose a single moment, not even to slip her feet into a pair of slippers, so eager was she to get to him. How often have I felt that way myself? It’s a sense of anticipation unabated yet secret; one that begs disclosure as much as it seeks concealment.

The song is of course a reminiscence of a remorseful lover, of the things he failed to appreciate and the tenderness he destroyed and these thoughts instantly connect with a synaptic glow that revives a heart-stopping quote from someone who said, “Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled…”

The song from Umrao Jaan…Dil Cheez Kya Hai…has me marveling at Rekha’s performance, the Kathak moves all seem significant and meaningful (something I had always failed to notice before), not a single wasted or extraneous motion, nothing to detract from the significance of the song to the movie and its contribution to the story.

The tabla is an instrument that I can’t say I never noticed before, I did, but I didn’t pay it much mind, and now watching this song I think of the ‘taal’ to which Rekha, playing Umrao Jaan, takes several steps forward while dancing for an audience, toward her audience, and I know this moment will be memorable for me when I look back from the future.

Twenty years from now, when I am thinking about my disgust at my monochrome days of yore, these sepia toned moments of colorlessness will show a splash or two of color, of my absorption with every scene I watched on this program and every song that led me to close my eyes and sing along in sync and with perfect timing. I’ll remember my desire to be able to play these tunes on the violin (perhaps by then I will be a respectable player of the violin, there’s always hope). I know I will remember this otherwise dull day…I think.

Although there are moments I remember now when nothing happened: I don’t remember every single day of my past, most of it went by in a blur but if I am ever in a position to see my entire life flash in front of me, I wonder which moments will be the chosen ones.

I wonder why I remember the moment from 1989 when I was walking from my basement apartment in Riverdale, MD to the parking lot, before leaving for work. I remember the feel of the day, what I wore and even what I thought. It was something as mundane as, “I guess Mr Nagendra won’t be giving me a ride to work today.” I still can’t remember why that moment is memorable. Perhaps the moments we remember are not the most significant ones or perhaps I fail to see the significance of that particular moment and it will either appear to me in a dream or in some moment of déjà vu where I am similarly attired or the morning has the same feel to it as that morning 18 years ago.

The biggest set of questions that arise out of this piece of writing, or free associating, which isn’t really trying to say anything at all, simply a chain of words with which I am trying once again to hammer in a peg, or lay down an anchor of some sort, so that the past isn’t as blurry, is this – Why the fascination with the past? Why does it seem so important to avoid a blurry past? Why does it feel crucial?

And as I ask myself these questions I wonder why the words – home, roots, the rounded spoon (a relic from my childhood) – why do they come to mind? There is the obvious answer – because I am thinking of the past. But why am I doing that? I am still young enough to gaze into the future instead but I rarely do.

I often wonder why the people of this very young country are willing to pay any price for an old home, the older the better, the more dilapidated the better. They often change the old place, renovate, rebuild, add amenities and then stand back and observe their handiwork with immense pride. The insides of such homes are always new, always modern so why then is it all important to have a foundation that’s centuries old and to have four walls that can tell a story.

All in all a realm of constant wonder with connections that are not entirely obvious but exist all the same in a world of old favorites in music, old relics from the past, fascination with old homes, and the palimpsest like insights in all things I’ll accumulate in a long and ordinary life.

* Mr George Mayer - Our much respected principal who recently passed away.

PS: I considered it Prufrock, but didn't find "lightening up" enticing! :)