Unequaled Music

One deceptively sunny morning, where defiant sunlight penetrated through dark matted clouds, mama decided that it was time for her little girl to start learning piano. The sun of course did not have any part to play in the larger scheme of things, other than in perhaps granting a deliberately vivacious mood to mama. She argued to papa that as they already had a piano, all they needed was a teacher to teach it. Mama knew piano was too grandiose a term. What they had in their house was just an old electronic keyboard, a present (or a hand-me-down if you will) from a generous friend, who was rich or ambitious enough to buy the authentic piano – the grandiose one – which had seven octaves, three pedals, and a shining black body. Mama painstakingly counted the five octaves on her dusty keyboard, noted the lack of pedals, and imperceptibly shook her head. But her keyboard was shaped like a piano all right. It had a wooden frame with three wooden legs and even had a top flap which opened on brass hinges. And mama knew that one didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

So mama called the piano teacher. She said she wanted her little girl to have personal piano lessons. The teacher was ready to come. They fixed the time and date.

The teacher was a soft-spoken lady. Mama liked her and the way she patiently taught the little girl. So after the first class was over, when the little girl rubbed her flexed thumbs and sore pinkies, and made faces, mama asked the teacher whether she can teach her too. The teacher was a bit surprised and asked why. Mama, perhaps a trifle too enthusiastically, explained that she always wanted to play Beethoven’s Fur Elise and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. The teacher laughed kindly. Let us start with the C, she said.

For the next two weeks, mama and little girl practised bravely and monotonously the notes of C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. They tried it in all octaves to break the humdrum, but that was about the only variety they knew. The little girl started carrying a pillow to her practice sessions. Mama tried to sort out the intricacies of semibreves, minims, dotted minims, and crotchets, nursing an almost forgotten, two-decade-old memory of guitar classes, while the little girl took patient naps by her side.

Time to learn a song, the teacher decided after the first two weeks. Mama perked up. Teacher played “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” quite brilliantly on the old keyboard. And her voice was mellifluous too. If mama was a bit disappointed at the unpretentiousness of the song, she did not show it. The next week saw mama and little girl playing the rhyme ad nauseam much to papa’s consternation. He grumbled that he did not bargain for two cacophonic renderings of a stupid nursery rhyme, or else they could have had another child. Mama asked him to stop sulking and sing along. Papa feigned deafness.

Two weeks went by and a Baa Baa Black Sheep was added to mama’s meager repertoire. She boasted to the teacher that she had played guitar when she was in college. The teacher condescendingly agreed that that training would stand in good stead while playing piano. Mama beamed. Teacher taught her another song – Mary had a Little Lamb. Mama dreamed of being a Chopin.

That evening, papa came in all exhausted from drudging work and there was mama and little girl by the keyboard. Mama was gingerly playing the strains of the newly learnt song and little girl was boisterously singing along – “And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.” Papa kept his laptop on the table and joined in, giving in finally. “He followed her to school one day” – papa sang in an affected tenor. Mama closed her ears and laughed. The little girl danced along. Music is indeed the food of love – even if papa, mama, and little girl did not have a taste for it.

Playing God

“Snap! went the fox and that was the end of the gingerbread man.” I end the story lamely. I had fielded at least a dozen questions from my 4-year-old by then – “How can the gingerbread man run?” “What is gingerbread?” “Can I make a gingerbread man?” “Can I make him run?” “How can the cow drink tea?” etc. etc. I shushed her each time not because I couldn’t answer the questions, which I might have been able to with staid matter-of-factness, but because I wanted to finish reading yet another fantastical but predictable story.

When she closes the book and runs to ride her bike, I rummage through her rack, leaf through a bunch of books, and ponder – on fairy tales and life and magic and playing god. Granting life to inanimate objects seems to be archetypical in children’s stories – just like our gingerbread man who comes to life and runs out of the oven. Fairy tales are full of them. Take a look at Pinocchio. Gestappo, an average woodcarver, makes a marionette from wood and accidentally gives it life. After many adventures, some of them as tedious as they come, Pinocchio, with his inexplicably morally conscious nose, finally comes of age and becomes a real boy. Thumbelina grows out of a magic seed given by a wise old woman. We have magic oranges that become beautiful maidens, a metal pig who can run when an innocent boy sits on it, a toy tin soldier who falls in love with a paper ballerina, and even an entire clock-work marching up to defend their clock-maker. Even in Cinderella, there is a convenient fairy godmother making horses out of mice and chariots out of pumpkins.

Making inanimate animate is not restricted to children’s stories alone. Victor Frankenstein creates a monster, gives it life, and later pays a heavy price for his irresponsibility. Perhaps an allegorical novel, it nevertheless highlights our preoccupation with playing god. Or take the case of Pygmalion. The statue he carves is so beautiful that he falls in love with it. Cynics of the present day might write it off as an acute case of agalmatophilia (attraction to statues, dolls, etc.), but the fact remains that the statue did come to life because of the sculptor’s devotion.

We have our own Indian equivalent in many legends and myths. A lump of flesh can become a hundred sons and a daughter. A clay statue can transform to a god, a rock can become a beautiful lady by a touch, or trees can turn into young men.

It is intriguing that across cultures and across ages, man has searched, dreamt, and written about creating life and achieving immortality. Is the act of creating life and playing god so entertaining or is it just a rudimentary impulse in man which gives rise to these fantasies? The search for the elixir of life or that elusive philosopher’s stone is ingrained in man’s psyche. A tiniest portion of the elixir or ambrosia or amrut or dancing water or aab-e-hayat, call what you will, will rejuvenate you – nay, make you immortal. Man can be omnipotent. Man can be god.

Where miracles and fairies and magic and potions don’t work, ingenuity might. Life might still be created in a lab from nonlife. If scientists can induce life to a lab-made genome and make it grow and reproduce, how close are we to playing god? Or rather, how far? Can we, as a megalomaniac race, wait that long?

I take out my daughter’s Play-Doh. I make a clay man similar to our gingerbread man, with shining black eyes, a red nose, and a wide grin. I even make two buttons for the coat. I make him stand up and I sit back. I am waiting for him to run.

Being Janus-Faced (also a tag)

Another year has started. Time to start brewing new wine in my old bottle, inside my drab little cellar, using the same old recipe, with a bunch of sour grapes, sweet sugar, and fermenting yeast. Come, taste my wine. Smell it, sip it, roll it around your tongue. Call it light, full, round, or flat. Call it woody, earthy, soft, or complex. It might be sweet, bitter, sour, or just insipid to you. I brew it to lighten my days, and yes, I admit, for that little bit of intoxication, where reality gets smudged with illusions. But foremost, I brew it to keep you happy.

Let me start my year by playing Janus, that two-faced god who forgets to live in the present because he is always looking backward and forward – the past and future. And let me start by doing an almost-forgotten tag (tagged by Usha) about yesterdays and tomorrows.

Your oldest memories

It is a formless landscape out there in the corner of my mind. Fuzzy and hazy. More tangible are those first impressions rather than concrete memories – of stories told and fables recounted by loving voices and fertile imagination – of an ekadashi kakka (the crow that fasted during the eleventh lunar day) who fell into a well and found treasure, of a kunjattakili (a small bird?) who learnt it the tough way that only hard work pays, of Cinderella who ate dosa sandwich and who went thrice to a ball dance, or of an onion that was crowned the king among vegetables. It was a happy childhood where loneliness was a strange word impossible to relate to.

I did have a bout of nostalgia about four months ago when I raked the dried leaves in my mind and lit a bonfire. If you haven’t seen it already and would care to, you can find it here.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Ten years ago – the beginning of 1999 – when I was in what I would call the prime of my life, when time still laughed at wrinkles and gray hair – I was in Pune, working as an English Language Trainer for a company. Living in my uncle’s spacious bungalow, relishing my aunt’s exemplary culinary skills, I was getting plumper. It was probably the first time in my life when I had fun – fun of the immediate, spontaneous, unthinking kind. There were four girls and four guys in our group, and we picnicked and danced and drank and gossiped and laughed those five months away. Many among us fell in and out of love. And when one of the trainees proclaimed that he had fallen in love with my eyes and thus excused himself for being the dumbest in my class, I was young and gullible enough to blush. Thinking about that life, it has a dream-like quality now. When I left Pune, my friends gave me a gold ring with a clover embossed – for love and luck. I still wear it.

Today

I don’t look at today. Remember, I am Janus. I can only reminisce and predict, I cannot just be.

What do you see yourself doing 14 years from now?

I look into that crystal ball and see a little turbulence, a little sorrow, a little boredom, amidst all that happiness and contentment that I would predict for myself. Perhaps it is a yearning rather than a prediction to let life live its course steadily and surely. It is an anticipatory bail against any forces of nature or man that might bring a disaster. I do not resist change or the passage of time. But let it just flow by slowly, unobtrusively.

If you build a time capsule what would it contain?

I would have a Noah’s Ark and a Library of Congress installed in the capsule. And put myself in too for good measure. When I finally disembark from it to a new civilization and a new culture, I would remake the whole world just as I know it and be the new-age Noah, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Galileo all rolled into one. That is a dream worth dreaming about :).

The tag is now done. It is open to any and all readers, whosoever wants to share his or her past, present, and future.