A Lesson in Listening to Music From the Eleven year Old me To the Twenty Five Year Old me
Tags: Growing Up, Jagjit Singh, Indian, Robert Miles, Music

A Lesson in Listening to Music From the Eleven year Old me To the Twenty Five Year Old me

‘Koi Fariyaad’ is playing in the background. No, it is actually just near my head. My room is dark, save a few lights of the night outside seeping through the curtains. I am so used to this hour that I can visualize the roads outside- the LED streetlights falling over the tall trees of the neighbourhood, the leaves almost an odd shade of green as if, some sort of luminescence has been planted into their veins. But I am in my room, with not even a dim light on- I like to sleep in total darkness. I feel safe from the occasional distant barks of the dogs outside, and from the random sounds of night which we all know but don’t know anything much about.

‘Koi fariyaad’ by Jagjit Singh, from the movie ‘Tum Bin’ is playing, just near my head. The speaker has been placed just on the side of my pillow. This might seem odd, but if you know anything about makeshift arrangements, you know what I am talking about. You know, those arrangements where a mundha works as a bedside table; a random old box works as a storage unit; simple plate works as a palette. This speaker near my head, on the right side of my pillow works as a what though, I wonder.

Tonight, it is acting as a comforter. The fact that I am listening to a song like Koi Fariyaad plays a role in this drama this setting has created in my head. Drama is such a badly used word. Those who have ever actually attended a drama know it’s one of the most enriching experiences ever. There is something about just sitting back in the darkness, with only the stage lights on, and listening to and watching the story. A paid, and a more grown up version of listening to that storytelling sessions the good teachers gave us the privilege of.

This drama in my head is from a memory.

I have grown up with boomboxes. My household called them tape. Or radio. A convenient and relatively harmless conflation to have, since the radio then usually played good songs, and the tape, the cassette player also played those songs, just that you exercised your choice in the latter. In all the experiences of my childhood before the age of four which I remember vaguely, the one that stands out is me jumping as high as a I could, which was two inches from the ground, to the music blaring out of the tape.

Actually, I must correct myself. I would not know if the radio played good songs in the 90s. I was barely a kid of five in 2000. But I can tell you things about a few years later. In early 2000s, the radio played great songs. At night. Post midnight.

When I look back, it is an odd habit for a kid to have but I listened to the radio at night a lot.

That is where this memory is coming from.

I had a radio/tape/boombox in all the rooms I shared with family members. At around 11, I got a room of my own when we moved to a bigger house. In that room, I had a radio of my own. I love this conflation that has been taking place in my household, and I suspect in most Indian households. When we play the radio, the gadget becomes the radio. When we play a cassette, it becomes a tape, and maybe in some households, it becomes a cassette player. When we grow up and acquire the correct vocabulary, that is, when we become conscious of our Indian English, it becomes a boombox.

The radio in my room had been placed at different locations. But the location I remember the most was near my head, on the side of my pillow. A makeshift arrangement. Maybe, that arrangement taught me the meaning of comfort.

It is a strange experience when I look back, for an eleven year old. But eleven year olds are generally quite open-minded in different ways than their older teenage and later adult versions.

Here I am, as a twenty five year old writing this at three thirty five am during this already strange year of pandemic, wondering and marveling at this experience of listening to music past midnight with the sound coming from near my head, on the side of the pillow.

It feels surreal when I look back at all these songs I heard back then. And I cannot help and draw a comparison to what I would do if I had to have a similar experience now. The twenty five year old would just not rest because she would want to know what song is that. She would Shazam the battery out of her phone.

But the eleven year old me just laid there on her bed, listening to all these songs. They were not familiar to her. She had heard of Jagjit Singh, but had no idea about his corpus of Ghazals. Maybe the few popular ones like ‘Hoothon se Chhu lu.’ Radio past midnight had, and hopefully still has a great a collection. She did not bother about the names of the songs. She just wanted to listen to music. And maybe, she had a trust in her ear that she would remember the tunes. She did have a keen ear for music. She had never heard of Robert Miles, but years later when she heard One Love One Heart, she instantly recognized the voice of that girl in love.

Sometimes I wonder why I can’t listen to music like the eleven year old me. Carefree, with not a thought crossing to check who the artist is, nor panicking at the thought that a song will be lost forever. I don’t remember the last time I watched a music channel without keenly waiting for a song (I found relatively bearable) to finish. I want to know who the artist is after all! I want to hoard that marvelous song in my playlist, and make it my favourite, no matter for how short a while.

I guess, the eleven year old me wasn’t looking to establish favourites. She was just trying to get over her math homework which had sapped the life out of her. In other words, she was just trying to chill. She wasn’t trying to establish favourites, nor was she constantly trying to add to her repertoire of the list of artists she could listen to based on her mood. She was just being and flowing in the movement. To say she was trying to escape or distract herself feels oddly wrong. More than an escape or a distraction it was her attempt to ground herself, to live in the moment. It was her makeshift attempt to relax when the vocabulary of chillin’ and vibin’ hadn’t found its way into her consciousness.