Music & I

(Published in First City magazine, November 2012.)

“I’m not a musicy person,” you’ll often hear me say, flatly. So flatly, it’s almost snobbish in a let’s-shut-up-this-conversation way. I say it so often that now there’s a growing secret catalogue in my head, where I file the various incredulous ‘huh?’ looks the line brings to people’s faces.

Nah, that’s not what I’m really doing when I say that line. What I’m doing, is engaging in my favourite sport: preventing conversations that could put me in an embarrassing, ego-deflating, one-down spot. The kind of conversation that can possibly compel me to fake much music-y knowledge, and eventually create a situation whereby in an inflated state of metaphor, my foot needs surgical extraction from my mouth. Truth is that I just dread musicy conversations and how they eventually lead to so many specifics: talk of rare albums and riffs and hooks and some live concert in the era-before-I-was-born and other braggity-brag things. They make me want to reach out for my iPod and bury it before its uncool contents are exposed to the world.

So no, that’s not the musicy person I am. Not the kind who has loyalties. Not the kind who thinks the music has anything to do with its singer’s wondrous life or ironic death. Not the kind who actively hunts out new music or collates vastly: genre-wise, chronology-wise, plain Musically-Wise. I am that horrid philistine who collects songs like random flowers plucked absentmindedly during a stroll in the park. Some of these turn out to be rather nice, and slip out of a book or two a few years later, their beauty whittled down to new grace.  Others get sniffed up, wrapped around, held to the chest, crushed due to obsessive affection, and then forgotten very suddenly. 

They do return sometimes, as crazy fragments in brain-damaging vengeance mode. They’re the real meaning of that cryptic English phrase ‘wake up with a song on your lips’. An earworm, that’s what it’s called: darn sliver of a song that’s slithered into your brain for the day. You have no choice but to go through an entire day’s To Do while it sings itself silently, cyclically, maddeningly (especially on days when the tune for the day is “Aao hum chalein lekar apni Tobu cyclein”, and there’s nothing you can do without being suicidal all day). The day progresses, said earworm goes from Sweet Date to Psychotic Ex, following you around like a sticky wad of chewed gum under your slipper. You get that wack, desparate look on your face. People stroke your arm and say, “Are you okay?”, to which all you can (hopefully silently) say is “Hey! That rhymes with ‘Aao hum chalein…’!”. Follow that up with a little tear-my-hair jig, in last valiant effort to get earworm out. Days go by, life goes on pretty normally, until the next earworm strikes.

Over the years, I have become so accustomed to this earworm-ness, that on some days I exhibit my incredible sado-masochistic tendencies by trying to induce it. I listen to a song obsessively on repeat - until the day ends, my eyes are glazed, and I am incapable of sane conversation. I fill up my car with the song, and enjoy how that makes it sidle up and croon in my ear. We pass under the full-flowered shower of an Amaltas just as the best line of the song hits; for a moment life is wondrous and magical (not so however for fellow in car behind me who’s screaming “ladiej driver!” and tearing hair in confusion over the drunk-possessed swerve of my car). I make one-song playlists and bask in their simulation of constant company; I revel in being lonely in the crowd of the Metro. I feel so snug in fact, that for a change I pick my gaze from the floor and notice all the women with earplugs and smiles-for-no-reason - mirror-images of me - and wonder, “What is she listening to?”

Maybe that’s why we all need music in this city, this Dilli dense with sounds, smells, people, words. This Dilli that threatens to swallow us whole, in a showy display of cruel, magnetic gravity. We need music so we can smudge open an imaginary space amidst the chaos. So we can taste the thrill of limbo, of momentary suspension as thought-inducing as the swaying Metro coach. So we can hypnotise ourselves with all those refrains; let the music be the stuff of our unaddressed memories. That’s what music must be really: the weird algorithm that fuels the Memory Filing System of our chaotic city lives.

 

So that’s why I like music - it is a crack to slip into when Dilliwali me can’t stand the heavy breathing of her Dilli love. It’s how I drown my muse, this viscous world of sound - with more sound. A trick, an escape, sometimes refuge, from my unceasing Writerly Inner Voiceover: so I can feel unquantifiable emotion in a moment, as opposed to my days carefully measured in the coffeespoons called words. It’s where I stop stringing every moment in a suitable prose passage, and just bobble over words. ‘Cuz  in a song, words are just beautiful sounds that float about in a languorous sea of ever-colour-changing waves; once in a while a tsunami of realisation occurs, throws random lyric-fragments at me, and half the song and many lifetimes are over before I’ve recovered from that. It’s the only time I feel that I can, possibly, do the impossible: evade Delhi, evade Time. And then return.  

In all my Dilli-obsessed life, there has perhaps been only one instance when my memory of Dilli, and with it the spools of associations of belonging, memories, my very me-ness that I carry, were instinctively obliterated. It was - not surprisingly - a moment of silence. Plunged into a world the colour of the sky, feet not touching the ground, eyes wide, and gaze never falling to the floor, I moved through fields of brown roses edged with gold, met creatures as wondrous as they were magnificent; they passed me by in hoards, ignored me. For once, I was invisible, and it wasn’t terrifying at all. I was not alone in a crowd, I was simply solitary. There were no sounds to drown; it was me who was submerged. I’d have thought I’d died and gone to heaven, except for that deep whirring rhythm of my breath that I could really hear, vividly, for the first time ever. I came up; the sky was now where it had always been; the touch on my arm lighter; air and sun. There was warmth; there was sound melting into my ears; there was word, memory, chaos and madness; there was the world I knew. I thought of Dilli, so far from the beaches of Sri Lanka where I’d been snorkelling; my hand reached slowly for the iPod in my bag. And just for the duration of that one song, all the worlds within me lay next to each other, content.  

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

Mixing two of her many favourite worlds: books and music. When you’ve done a lot of reading, and a lot of listening, let the two collide by reading the New York Times’ series ‘Living With Music’. It’s got authors drawing up their favourite playlists: Anthony Doerr writes a playlist that starts at 8 pm with doing the dishes, and ends at 4 am with the slow music of dawn. Pico Iyer draws a playlist for a funeral, and then writes such incredibly fun and wise things about all the songs, I feel like I totally know even the ones I’ve never heard. Jon McGregor gives me hope for my novel-dreams when he says “Often, the mood or tone or some stray lyric of a particular song has informed a whole novel”, and Nick Hornby gives me big, snorty laughter-style pleasure when he says in his playlist for 2008, “Adele and I still have a private relationship.”

Gobble it all up at http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/living-with-music/. But choose wisely – they allow you to read only 10 articles a month for free!

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).