Music & Ma

My earliest memory of a song is a snatch of a rhyme ' ghugu soi, shoilya koi......' This was being sung to me by my mother who was rocking me in her lap and I so clearly remember she was wearing something orange, and I remember Ma laughing and the sun on her face. I have absolutely no idea how old I was then.....may be a few months, maybe a year old. It's a photo frame in audio and video memory.

Ma has always been there in my music. Ma perhaps was not a hugely famous singer, but in our family we held her singing in high esteem. She always sang for me ...joy, anger, disappointment, love, all had special songs.

Once when I was about 3 years old and not getting sleep ( I have always been an insomniac of sort), Ma took me to the small garden of the Keyatala house, showed me the moon and sang

' chander hasi bandh bhengechhe uchhle pore aalo....'. I can still recall her voice, and whenever I am even slightly upset, this song in my mother's voice can calm me down. She has sung this song several times for me, whenever I wanted her to sing it. Calcutta, Patna, Darjeeling...over trunk call lines too.

I had diphtheria when I was about 4, and my sister was just a baby. My mother probably had a hard time with her job, the baby and me. More to the point, I had to be kept absolutely isolated, so that my baby sister did not catch the disease. Baba did a lot of the nursing and though Father was besura at his best, he used to carry me and sing ..'Ogo Ma tomay dekhe dekhe ankhi na bhore" (Bengalis nearly always call their daughters Ma, and to Baba I have always been "Ma"). Baba and this song is inseparable. As we grew up it was Baba who instilled his deep love for classical music in us. It was Baba who calmed my temper with a soft Beethoven, and it was he who dried my tears with Tchaikovsky. However, Baba rarely sang. Snatches yes, but never the way Ma sang to us and particularly to me and for me. I don't remember if I was a difficult child, but today I realise that Ma (who brought up, me, her first born on B. Spock) knew right from the beginning that the only thing that worked with me..... in illness, asthma, tantrums, sheer cussedness ... was her singing. She sang to me all the time. Even when I was far away, she would sing over a scratchy phone line and I alone know the joy and peace that her singing brought to me. When I would be very naughty she often sang '.....chotto naditi, pate anka chhobiti' In my mind, I can still hear her sing it. Her soft crooning voice taking away my wickedness. 'Kajla didi koi' was another song Ma would sing to me. This was when I would be unhappy. I would lie awake and be quiet and late into the night, Ma would sing me to sleep with this.

Ma sang everything. Rhymes, Vera Lynn,Cliff Richard, old IPTA songs, Beatles, Dean Martin, old WW II songs, Rabindra Sangeet, Bangla Adhunik, Burmese folk songs (I still remember the words....more or less correctly.... had a Burmese student of mine to listen to my terrible rendering of these songs). I loved her "na go, eije dhula". No one, repeat no one, ever sang it as well as she did. Even till last year she could and would sing to me. Sometimes over the phone....4pm sharp was her regular phone call time. In more recent years she would just sing to herself, and the few times I would visit her, I would sit quietly and listen.

She sang to her grandchildren too. I do not know if they remember, but all of them stopped crying when she sang to the baby who was wanting attention. In later years they would go to her to get tunes clarified, lyrics corrected......even from Goa and Gujarat.

There was a period (I think before my graduation Exams) when I would study late. And then go off to sleep on the drawing room divan. Ma, who always woke up early, would go about her work in the kitchen, humming softly. After a while she would bring her old Royal Albert tea cup and a brown tea pot, sit on the veranda (near the divan), and sing ever so softly. A short 5 to 10 minutes perhaps and two quick cups of tea, and her beautiful songs. She never learnt that I would be awake, at least I never told her, but the joy of sleeping on that old divan was Ma's early morning singing.

I can listen to music in my head. This may sound eccentric, but I really can. At times when there is no record player, or CD player, or Ma or Shantam or Sajani, I can listen to the music I want in my head.

I wish Ma could sing again.

ps. More about my custom made music in a later post.