Music Nights

'Ommmmmmm. Aaaaeeeeeeeeeee. Uh huh. Uh huh!' A cat with a woman's voice wailed, coughed and punished her vocal chords, punctuating the stillness of the night with ripples of her raga.

Joining her band was a percussionist who beat the tabla black and blue, punching beat after beat out of the hapless instrument.

'Ta dhin dhin ta, taka dhin dhin ta!' The tabla moaned.

'Screeeeech!' Tore in the sarangi, lamenting the days gone by. Lovelorn, it howled into the night, filling the spaces in between with haunting melodies.

“Why,” I started out, “do we have to listen to that every night?”

Opening her eyelids just so slightly, she lifted her right hand and reached out to my face. In the manner that is mostly accredited to mothers and on older girls you have crushes on, she gently pinched my cheeks so that my mouth resembled like a opened envelop and shook it.

“Because,” my mother said, “I like it.”

Twenty-six years ago, when my father married my mother, he welcomed something into his life, besides her loving care, that is. Music wormed its way into his life. Every night, before we all drifted to sleep, someone would wail on my mother's Philips stereo. In what sounded, to me, like a stricken dog's howl ringing through the night, she would try to find peace and solace. Sometimes she would sigh, close her eyes, shake her head and mutter one of her much loved phrases, the one she oh-so-frequently used. “Life's like that,” she would say and drift off to sleep.

From the point of a ten-year-old kid, my mother had a strange and somewhat weird taste in music. I had none whatsoever, but thought I could tell between a good song and a bad one. I was deeply suspicious of my mother's stereo. I tried to tune it out of order, change the stations and get it to play the music of my liking. I distorted its antenna, played around with the buttons on its bulky mass and it lay there dead before me. Not even a single note escaped from its honeycombed speakers. But, my mother was something else; she was a magician. One slight touch and it sprang to life, breathing music through its speakers.

She teased the controls, speaking to it in the language it understood. She fiddled around with the tuning knobs until the signal fluctuations eased their way into soulful music. “This is Aakaash Vani,” it reported, as it came to life. “And you are listening to classical music hour.” And so my troubles would begin. In what she called the 'divine hour', I would die a thousand times over, harpooned by the nauseous din regurgitated by the stereo. For what it seemed like an eternity, the torturous session would go on. In barely understandable mutter, the pundits and the occasional nightingales sewed polyphonic syllables from their extended repertoire into what they called song but what I called, a prescription for a headache. Pundit Bhimsen Joshi, the most requested singer on the airwaves, would take an aalaap (part of the raga) and create an epic out of it. For god-knows-how-many minutes, he would stretch his larynx to make music. To my untrained and frankly uninterested ears, he was merely yodeling through the alphabets of the Devanagari script.

“I can do that better than him!” I'd retort.

"Aaa aaa, la la la, rum pum pum!" I'd sing into the night, breaking into a brilliant aria of incoherent howling, making up the words as I went along. I would leap off the top of the bed, cover my ear with one hand and launch the other in the air and start to sing. Eyes closed, head swaying to never heard notes, I'd imagine conquering the world stage with my singing abilities.

"Call me an Ustad," I'd demand from my audience, which mostly comprised of my irritated parents and my amused little sister who always provided the much necessary chorus of vanity. "Wah, Ustad, wah!" she'd say.  

Often, a sharp knock to my head would silence me, draining the drama of the moment, shutting down my natural theatrical skills, if not my singing ones.

Hearing my displeasures, mother would pull both of us brother and sister closer. “Will you go to sleep if I sing you a lullaby?” she'd ask.

“Yay!”

“Sing us our favorite one, please,” we begged of her, tugging her saree until she gave away to our wishes.

“One song and you'll go to sleep, ok?”

We would nod in silent agreement. And, then she would start to sing. Her golden voice soothing our naughtiness into sublime poetry dedicated to sleep. By the end of the first verse, sleep would slowly crawl into our eyelids luring us into what lay beyond. The sleep fairy promised an exclusive tour of her castle filled with treasure troves of beautiful dreams, ones that promised to come true.

Her songs kissed us to sleep, the echoes of the lullaby tucking us in. Ah! Those were the days; days of a golden childhood I will never forget.

Rishi Amatya considers this story, Music Nights, in which he has described about his earliest memories, as his best-written story till date. He dedicates this story to his maa who, despite being a full time teacher in both higher secondary and secondary level, still finds time to take care of the entire family, cook up a feast when the occasion calls for it, dispense “super-duper” practical wisdom and oh, still find quality time to listen to all those ustads and nightingales.