The Eighteenth Parallel (10 page)

The only occasion that found my older sisters singing was the nine-day festival of dolls, Navaratri, when it is more or less mandatory for girls to sing before the array of dolls. Otherwise, apart from their learning time with Mr Alwar, they were not given to much singing. But the rest of us at home began to sing too. I sang. My younger brother and sisters sang. I even heard my father humming the tune of that little beginners' song.

Mr Alwar's unquestioned supremacy as the music teacher of Secunderabad faced a sudden challenge with the arrival of a new music teacher in the city, a Mr Sundara Bhagavatar. Sundara Bhagavatar sported cropped hair and side burns and wore a gold bordered upper cloth. Alwar, one of the old school, used to teach sol-fa singing first and might not progress beyond it for months or even years. But the new teacher taught full-fledged songs even to beginners. For ears till now used to hearing only meaningless notes of the octave in various permutations and combinations, these songs sounded heavenly. Within a month of his arrival, no less than twenty families had engaged Sundara Bhagavatar.

Sundara Bhagavatar wouldn't come every day. He took only two or three lessons a week. His minimum fee was five rupees. He began by demanding fifteen rupees from us and finally came down to seven, after much bargaining. He had big eyes that were always reddish. His entry into our house would be heralded by a general knocking down of things in his path. If you spread a mat or rug on the floor for him to sit on, he would lift it up by the ends and shake it out with a bang before sitting on it. While he beetled away at the harmonium, the keys kept up a constant tap-tap along with the notes. Self-confidence incarnate, Sundara Bhagavatar awakened the musical sensibilities of the Tamil population of Secunderabad. There were of course those who thought that all he did was degrade public taste. Our Alwar subscribed to this school of thought: 'Look at this man reeking of perfume, teaching children classical songs as if they were folk music. Is that the way to teach music? Shouldn't they be taught the basics? Stop a little girl on the street and repeat a song a few times and she'll surely pick it up. But is that all there is to music? The goddess of music must surely be shedding tears.'

Within two months of replacing the old teacher, all of us at home had graduated to humming the great Tyagaraja's composition,
Sri Rama Padama.
During his lessons you'd find Sundara Bhagavatar tackling the bellows of the harmonium with every ounce of brute force he could summon, while the fingers of his other hand would hammer away on the keyboard with equal ferocity. He would belt out the song as he played the harmonium:
Sri Rama Padama...
My sisters would scream at the top of their lungs in reply, and the song would be sung at a hurtling speed. Any newcomer chancing upon the scene would be hard put to comprehend what was going on. I'm afraid I may not succeed in conveying to you what was happening in all these homes scattered across the city of Secunderabad during Sundara Bhagavatar's music lessons. Nor would all your powers of imagination – however highly developed – be of much help unless you could also make the necessary connection with medieval jousts and adventures.

Sundara Bhagavatar's spell of spectacular success during which he eclipsed Alwar totally lasted six months after which he made an unannounced exit from Secunderabad. It transpired that he owed money everywhere: to the milkman, grocer, landlord. Once it became clear that it was no use waiting for him, Alwar was reappointed to teach several of his old pupils. The interlude benefited Alwar—his rates went up. He stopped spending hours at each tuition. And it was no more than three lessons a week now.

Music in Secunderabad followed neither Alwar's style nor Sundara Bhagavatar's. Each house cultivated its own distinctive dismal style of singing.

And thus it began to be said, 'Why, Chandru sings quite well. Not bad at all.' I believed it myself though I was too young them to distinguish between good and bad music and my circumstances didn't allow me to find out for certain. I learnt songs by listening avidly to the Madras station on our Philco radio. Madras could be heard only at night and that amidst a lot of disturbance. I picked up a few songs with simple tunes this way, but remembering the words of songs was not easy. To make matters worse, the singers would swallow half the words and mutilate the rest. I remember a Tamil song in support of the Indian National Congress sung by a famous musician of the day, Musiri, which I used to sing often. But my version had liquid sounds in the place of nasals, which made gibberish out of high patriotism. It was a long time before I deciphered the words of the original.

In an unprecedented move, our school, which till then had Telugu or Urdu speaking headmasters, suddenly appointed a Tamil enthusiast from the Tamil districts as headmaster. This should not have occasioned any surprise as our school was founded by a Tamil family. But having lived for three generations in the Nizam's State, what the present generation of the family spoke was not strictly Tamil; it was a curious mixture of tongues. Among those huge portraits of our patrons in the school hall, Somasundara Mudaliar and Hanumanta Rao were repeated quite often. Some honorary title or other like Diwan Bahadur, Rao Bahadur or Rao Sahib was attached to every name. All of them sported brocade caps or turbans, moustache, a daub of holy ashes, sandalwood and vermilion on their foreheads and a pocket watch with the chain showing. One was an equestrian figure. Another – the only name preceded by a 'Sir' – had a sword hanging from his waist.

I often stood in front of this picture, lost in contemplation of the sword.

Though established by a Tamil family, no more than a hundred students in this school out of a total of a thousand were Tamil. The new headmaster – he was called the principal – got acquainted with each of the one hundred.

With the new principal came new rules in the running of the school, like closing the gate after the third bell in the morning, and opening them in the evening only five minutes before closing time. During our prayer meetings, a teacher was asked to address the students every week. All the classes were to take turns singing Tagore's song on India,
Jana gana mana,
each class singing it for a week. The final touch was that the new principal started a Tamil Association in the school and ordered all students including Telugu and Urdu boys to attend its meetings. The inaugural meet of the association was held one fine afternoon at three. No classes were held during the last period.

I sat with the rest of my class on a sheet spread on the floor of the hall. The crowded hall had only a single fan whirring straight above the dais. But we were at an age when the body did not seem to mind the heat and the stuffiness.

It was four o'clock when the principal made his appearance along with the chairman and secretary of the school committee. These two men wore a brocade cap and a turban respectively, but the principal's cropped head was uncovered.

The principal spoke first, welcoming the two guests. His speech was in chaste Tamil, something we had never heard in our city. Even our Tamil teachers generously sprinkled their speech with Urdu words like 'jaldi' and Telugu words like 'jitam'. It was always 'Jaldi vaa' for 'come quickly'. Telugu also came in handy when we had to be scolded.

After his speech in praise of the founders, patrons and office-bearers of the school, the principal announced: 'Now we shall have a prayer song.' And then he called out, 'Chandra-sekharan!'.

A deep silence hung over the hundreds of students sitting on the floor, the dozens of teachers standing along the wall and the three on the dais.

I looked about to find out who was being called. A few small bodies wriggled but no one stood up. Our Tamil pandit, who was standing some distance away, caught my eye and said,
'Ai
Chandrasekharan, he's calling you.' I still looked round.

But now, well-aimed punches caught my back and waist from the boys sitting close to me. The Tamil pandit took a few rapid strides towards me. 'Go on, sing,' he said. I got up. The pandit shoved me forward with a 'Go!'. And I embarked upon the journey to the dais, a seemingly interminable one.

The shirt I had on that day was too short for me. Through its split ends on either side my waist was visible, along with the bulge formed by the rolling up of the extra length of my shorts. It i was there for all to see, I don't know if they did see it. With my hands pulling down the shirt, I began to inch forward. My shorts were too big for me and kept flapping like those billowing full skirts worn by the gopis, the milkmaids who danced with Krishna. I felt a cool wind blow up the flaring shorts and freeze my stomach. I managed to reach the dais. Just one step but I stumbled and my head rested on the secretary's lap. The sesame oil I had applied to my hair must have stained his trousers.

I looked from the dais at the vast ocean of humanity before me. Each pair of eyes pinched me all over. Krishnaswamy's fumed with venom. All his brothers, the boys I had known, not known, those I had seen but not known, those I had not seen at all... In that corner Balwant Singh who was in my class and who constantly harassed me with his pea-shooter from the back bench now riddled me with his eyes. The kittenish growth of hair from his turban was now on its way to his throat. Did they pity me for my predicament or envy my sudden importance? This vast turbulence lay before me, seething with expectation. If only I could drown and disappear.

'Sing a song,' said the principal, 'sing something devotional.' He had a broad face with a forest of a moustache on it, a potential lair for lions, tigers, pythons.

'Sing, boy, sing.'

The secretary, the chairman, the principal, all of them waited for me. I wondered who had done this to me. Which implacable enemy of mine could have told the principal I could sing ?

The moment was inescapable. It might lengthen into hours or eons and I would still be standing there, incapable of bringing it to a close. There was no way of avoiding it without singing. Oh why was it that my eyes could still see and my ears could hear! I was still conscious, I could follow what was being said.

'Come on now. How long are you going to stand there? Can't you sing a prayer?'

'Maybe he can sing only film songs,' said the secretary. The three of them laughed.

I felt a little less tense now, shifting from one foot to the other. Oh for a song, a song! A song did flash through my mind.
Sri Rama Padama.
But I didn't want to sing it. It was somehow inseparable from Sundara Bhagavatar, the harmonium and my sisters. Sundara Bhagavatar sitting cross-legged on the floor, keeping time with his hand beating his thigh, or his thigh bashing the floor; and my sisters erupting into a volcano of notes sung at high speed. All this was the proper milieu of
Sri Rama Padama.
If the principal had offered to play the harmonium perhaps I could have had a go at the song.

But I did sing something in the end. I had no idea what I was singing until the first line was out of my lips. It turned out to be a love song. The secretary was quite right—it was a song from a film, from
Sakuntalai.
It was sung by the heroine after her meeting with her lover Dushyanta. I hadn't seen the film, though. It had been released only recently and was not worn enough to reach our city. I had learnt to sing a garbled version of the song by listening to it on our radio.

The song began with a reference to the belief that the twitching of the left shoulder and eye was a harbinger of future joy for a girl.

I proceeded to sing it at great speed, slurring over the words and leaving out parts, reached the end of the song somehow and got off the dais. When I walked back to my place, there was absolute silence in the hall. No one seemed to know what had happened.

The secretary stood up to make his speech. Unable to find my class and my row, I stepped on the thighs and on the legs of a new set of boys and sat down somewhere. The boys kept pushing and hissing but I was in a trance, fidgeting restlessly yet with no will of my own.

The major part of the secretary's half-hour-long speech was devoted to fulsome praise of my 'devotional' song. The poor man didn't know it was a song from a film. Nor did I for that matter, at that point of time. Ail those details about who sang it, when and in which film was knowledge which lay in the future. Possibly the secretary had never heard any Tamil songs before. Though aware that there were songs in films, he was innocent of any knowledge of
Sakuntalai,
the classic of Tamil cinema which was bewitching audiences in the southern parts of the country. Even those famous initials MS and GNB, must have meant nothing to him beyond being letters of the English alphabet. They happened to represent the initials of the actress and the actor who played the leading roles in this film. That could easily explain why he praised my song. He went on to give us some advice as well about the words of the song. Since the first line of the song suggested that the singer was a woman, it could be made more suitable for a boys' school like ours, he said, by changing the words of the song, the twitching of the right shoulder and eye rather than the left, since for a boy a twitch on the right side brought good luck. I didn't expect the secretary's praise of my musical abilities to have any long-term repercussions, though I did go round with a sort of ghost-stricken mien for the rest of the day, eyes unfocussed and unblinking. At home I was made to swallow a pepper brew, a home remedy you can't escape, whatever the nature of your illness, whether a stomachache, sprain or a hard blow on the head. A few days later, at school, I was told by our watchman Gangaram that the principal wanted to see me. Gangaram was the least sickly looking of the three or four odd-job men employed by our school. He spoke a kind of Maharashtrian Urdu. By the time I deciphered his message and reached the principal's room it was fifteen minutes past closing time. All those big buildings and playgrounds were hushed and deserted. The principal was not in his room.

I stood there and took in every inch of the room. The cupboards were full of shields, cups and scrolls all covered with the patina of age. Maps of the world, India, the British Isles and the State of Hyderabad, and a few charts of the human anatomy, hung on the wall.