M  Y  S  T  I  C  E  T  I

When I remember five I remember Yellow. Or Orange. Or Amber. Mostly, the colour of light. I am just back from school, and even before I push open the bedroom door, I hear pulsing music waft towards me. There were not many days when our house felt like peachy Summer; up in the foothills of North Bengal, when it wasn’t damp, it was oppressively balmy. When it wasn’t that, we huddled close, my mother and I, in our search for socks without toe holes. Now at twenty four, when I look back, it is towards a land before time. I picture that room now, sky-blue flecks of paint falling off to reveal patches of powdery whiteness. The only working bulb in the two-pronged outlet, lit up, even though it is barely past a bright noon. Holding the room aglow, awash—assisted by the open balcony door. Our Sony music player lifts the room in its thrall, transforming it into a chamber of inimitable exuberance and, at the same time, piercing privacy. My mother, dancing by the bed, is suddenly caught off-guard by my entrance, perhaps as jolted as I am by the fact that it is the first time I am seeing her dancing at all, let alone witnessing her akimbo with such incandescence. The next second she rushes towards me, and pulls me into her steps. I look up at her, noticing the way the caves of her cheeks match her darting eyebrows. Mostly, the colour of light.

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One of the first books in English I remember reading is Alexander Raskin and Lev Tokmakov’s "When Daddy Was a Little Boy". Especially back in the early 2000-s, English, as an instructional or pedagogical modus operandi, was insuperable in the privileged domesticity of the country. The seminal picture book was not too atypical a prescription in this sphere; copies of it must have constituted the childhoods of many beyond those I know. The copy I read, I was told, had been a gift to my father from his. My father had been (and continues to be) posted in different cities all my life, creating a vacancy whose keys were entrusted to my mother with no say of hers. Naturally, when I read about Daddy, the fiction didn’t supplant any image of my father; there was no reality with which to contend. I imagined Raskin’s stories to be my father’s, and I visualised his childhood through Tokmakov’s illustrations. There was no one to contest; there was no one to verify. My mother and I, guardians of our encroached, poached dominion—up in the bedroom—in an inexorable joint family setup, when we weren’t losing count of our shared bruises, would often complain about the damp deposited on the walls by our neighbouring eucalyptus tree. As a child, I was not exactly a sprat in her pickle jug, and we were anything but a sum well-done. She had had me when she was twenty one, and naturally I grew up with less a mother and more an elder sister. There lies a sort of unenviable clarity in one surviving the death of their life; her favourite song from Bikram Singh’s collection of Rabindra Sangeet—"Tabu Mone Rekho" (translation: “still, remember me”)—to date remains the last song of the album, where Singh’s voice stands at the denouement of corporeality, mourning a life where nothing, really, worked out. When I revisit the memory of that day in the bedroom, after its cherished joy, comes the epiphany that it wasn’t a coincidence that I had never seen her dance. My presence at school had meant my absence at home, which in turn meant an effervescent amnesia for my mother, whose forsaking of her maternity was all the more legitimised by the mortality of the act. Soon, I would come home, and soon she wouldn’t be a girl anymore. Most days my recollection is fortunately unscathed by my realisation of myself as an intruder in the home of her girlhood, by my futile desire to retroactively come home late that day. Today, all I remember is iridescence.

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An abiding love for music perennially nudges me to contemplate its politics, especially given its status as a form of art, engaged with its peers in a bid for survival in neocapitalism. Consequently, this avenue in turn inevitably leads me to ponder on the steadfast erasure, and near-extinction of conscious consumption of physical music. What brought me to write this essay—or perhaps what Toni Morrison would call a rememorial—is our cassette player, or more generally, the novelty that is (or was) the cassette player as an audio system, or put more simply, even as a machine. Despite my understandable forgetting of the exact particulars of the model barring its make, I remember its visuality with a discerning keenness. It was a sizeable chunk of hardware, nifty for its time, with a two-in-one system that allowed for cassette and compact disk playbacks. It would sit atop our wooden wardrobe, a throne fittingly high for its speakers to thrum, covered by a dust-protecting cloth that would just stop short of covering the sheen of the silver Sony logo. Back to the present, while physical music does seem to be making a slow, belaboured return, it is through an aesthetic that is indubitably exclusionary. At the present at least, as the vanguard of such a return stands the vinyl record, whose viability on the levels of purchase, (conspicuous) consumption, and maintenance, stands on grounds that are perceptibly and categorically bourgeois. Even though back in the day the cassette and the compact disk as playback formats were not really inexpensive (at least in our household), they were affordable as a sensory indulgence (as far as I can recall, an LP-length album in the compact disk format would cost one around a hundred in Indian currency). Notwithstanding the very peculiar—even if understandable—precarity with which novel objects are handled in middle-class households, cassettes and compact disks, already exempt from the rigour of maintenance reserved for vinyl, constituted a sort of exception. The induction into banality was steadfast and immediate, and soon the physical carriers of music themselves took on a sort of utilitarian grace, ready for service at the mind’s behest; soon, there were too many cassettes to rearrange, or too many compact disks to choose from if you owned a car and were running out of dashboard space. Of course, similar analogues exist for art in its myriad forms, and this cannot help but be—just as a planet cannot help but have gravity. We live, obstinately, in unconditional tetherment.

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I consider music to have always, bereft of any cliché, brought a sort of grammar to my life. In my mother’s words, I learnt to sing before I learnt to speak; in no time, I was picking up melodies and cadences, vocalising so hard that my body was struggling to keep up. She often talks of the time she took me to Kolkata for a death in the family—that of a brother of hers—where the mourning faces of many turned to joyous incredulity at the sight of a two-year old sitting on his porta-potty, thumping its sides, singing to the top of his voice a song he’d caught during a play-rehearsal of "Juddho Juddho Khela" (translation: “game of wars”). The sight of a baby blissfully unaware of the decorums of morbidity, singing when he could not in ordinary circumstances string three words to coherence, must have been a sight for sore eyes. At the fringe of mortality, this was incomprehensible eternity; a pure being who knew nothing and everything about the coexistence and irony of life and death.

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The confoundment of poetry is a topic whose commentators have understandably enjoyed the central conundrum therein. To broach the prospect of a definiteness beyond “imagery set in verse” seems to do a deliberate disservice to the art; some people, I’ve heard, pay money to name stars after them. Songs are often, essentially, verse set to music, and the auditory accompaniment makes the meaning richer by making the confoundment deeper. If such a preface is necessitated, it is only by the admission that to write (in prose) about music or poetry is already moving beyond the point, where one’s best bet lies in submerging lyricism in, as Angela Carter puts it, “overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose”. Indeed, if this tract suffers from self-indulgence, it does so as the only salve for my purpled body. I was around four when Lucky Ali and Ramya’s "Na Tum Jano Na Hum" (translation: “neither you nor I know”) reigned the popular music channels on the television. My Bengali tongue, which would later, in subsequent boyhood and adolescence, get used to correcting people that my name ended in a ‘b’ and not a ‘v’, would croon: "Kyon chalti hai paban" (translation: “why does the wind blow”). Enamoured by my glee, my mother went to one of our neighbours to borrow a cassette that had the song, just so that I could listen to it to my heart’s content. But seasons, of course, change with days, and just as easily, suddenly I am whisked into the first memory I have of feeling real, true sadness: a memory of listening to Pratima Bandopadhyay. In her candour of inimitable frailty, she sings a song of almost sirenic sorrow in "Bansh Baganer Mathar Opor Chand Uthechhe" (translation: “the moon has risen over the bamboo grove”), lamenting the loss of her elder sister in a rhetoric plea to her mother, asking where she is. I distinctly recall the monochromatic cassette cover, the listed songs, and my mother not stopping the playback even after I had mentioned how desolately sad the song was making me.

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To be clear, it is not resentment, but heartening that I speak with here. I am, still, too young and too old to reject gratitude, especially one owed to an increment in character, irrespective of the intent or lack thereof behind the lesson. It matters not whether she was inclement at the face of my sorrow, or even apathetic (and chances are, she was neither); it does however, that at the precipice of such a lack of choice, I could take what was coming. In retrospect, it is perhaps hardly a coincidence that one of her favourite songs in English has always been John Denver’s "Sunshine on My Shoulders". In my frantic and ultimately futile search in our house for a cassette with that song, it was remiss of my juvenile myopia to not notice that she knew, as well as Denver, of the caveat of “almost always”; there are no pure things, just pure intensities. We are what we eat, consume; it is a privilege, and as important as feeling lightness, to eat depth no matter how dark it can be. Grief, irrespective of how much space it occupies, inflates the heart before it begins to make room, and therein lies a lesson of how big the heart can be only if it is allowed to admit reception. As Rilke tells us, finality is a myth; grief’s lease, however long, expires, and leaves a (nimiety of) vacancy. Joy does not come rushing in right after, however, nor does anger. Nor does pain, jealousy, gluttony, or any of the myriad feelings one can think of. For some time—perhaps a long time—what stays is the vacancy itself. That itself, to me, is a coveted lack; to feel room is at times a greater privilege than occupying it. There is a whole world in this lack of itself, a white light encompassing the polarity of pleasure and pain; as Anne Carson writes in "Eros the Bittersweet", “Love and hate construct between them the machinery of human contact.” There will be candy and confetti tomorrow, but for now the walls themselves have something far more important to say. They want to confess that gentle hands can push them farther away. We (ought to) know it, Gregory Orr did too: “Squander it all! / Hold nothing back. // The heart’s a deep well. // And when it’s empty, / It will fill again.”

 

Music will live on, as all art does, for there is always perpetuity in song (and the other way round). I usually refrain from viewing art from a pedagogical lens, but if it is capable of teaching anything, it is empathy. We should not, however, see this as a beacon of planar optimism, but as a sentient sceptre, because like all art, music is anything but a magnanimous lover. It is selfish, and has a mind of its own; as much as it gives, it takes, from us, specifically our living lives. Like all art, it is far from inert, and is a living, breathing thing, as mortal and immortal as the human species itself. The thought of its preservation, before fashioning it in a light of didacticism, lies in the interest of us and our stories. We gave away our music player with a newfound sense of object permanence—with the knowledge that it would always have us as we would have it. It was thought, once upon a time, that greenery was engaged in competitive survival; that trees lived on the basis of stealing nutrients off of each other, until it was found that the case was just the opposite. If a tree is dying, its neighbours contribute nourishment through underground networks of fungi. My mother and I were no less than trees, exchanging potions of love and sorrow through music, our funky, fungal friend. The stories in that black box, of us, have been its own, too; our shared mother tongue, to this day, remains song. Directionally challenged, we speak in garbled tongues and hopeful falsettos, because there is no use in directions when we are already home. It is a livable life, to have lived like open veins. It is the remnant of an epistemology lost and found, time and again, knitting us from a spool whose blankets still keep us warm.