Music Room , livre ebook

Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Namita Devidayal

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110 pages

English

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When Namita is ten, her mother takes her to Dhondutai, a respected Mumbai music teacher from the great Jaipur Gharana. Dhondutai has dedicated herself to music and her antecedents are rich. She is the only remaining student of the legendary Alladiya Khan, the founder of the gharana and of its most famous singer, the tempestuous songbird, Kesarbai Kerkar. Namita begins to learn singing from Dhondutai, at first reluctantly and then, as the years pass, with growing passion. Dhondutai sees in her a second Kesar, but does Namita have the dedication to give herself up completely to music-or will there always be too many late nights and cigarettes? Beautifully written, full of anecdotes, gossip and legend, The Music Room is perhaps the most intimate book to be written about Indian classical music yet.

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	20 novembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184002362
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0480€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2011
Copyright Namita Devidayal 2007
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B, A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, U.P.
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184002362
To baiji, with love
Contents
Prologue Bhairavi
Part One Kennedy Bridge
Part Two Shivaji Park
Part Three The Khansahibs
Part Four Kesarbai
Part Five Kolhapur
Epilogue Borivli
Prologue Bhairavi

A raga should be performed such that, within a few minutes, both the performer and the audience should be able to see it standing in front of them
Vilayat Khan, sitar player
It was a little before five. Dhondutai shivered as a breeze wafted in through the window. She lay in bed for a few minutes, mouthing a silent prayer, and flexed her stiff, aching leg. She tried to slip back into sleep so she could resume her favorite dream of sitting on a swing near the goddess temple by the river. When the rooster crowed a second time, she roused herself and shuffled towards the bathroom.
Dhondutai walked into the music room and picked up the tanpura, wincing slightly at the pain in her leg as she sat down to tune it. She ran her fingers over its taut strings and adjusted the ivory beads at the end, where the instrument s slender stem ballooned into a gleaming gourd. When the pitch was perfect, she began to strum the four strings in a regular motion. The notes swirled into the air around her and she forgot her pain, the cold room, the milkman who always delivered late, and melted into the timeless drone.
She started with the lower notes, chanting them one at a time like in a guttural prayer. Then, gradually, as a sliver of morning light slipped into the room, illuminating a square on the faded paisley-patterned carpet, she started moving higher up the scale. She was singing Bhairavi, an early morning raga filled with plaintive half notes.
Bhairavi is the wife of the cosmic dancer-destroyer Shiva. The raga is moody, like the mythical goddess. She is sometimes a pining lover, at other times a devotee, sometimes a seductress and, always, the mysterious female force which overpowers evil.
Dhondutai sang with her eyes closed, touching each note with tenderness, as if she was slowly wrapping herself into a great cocoon of sound. Sensing an unnatural source of light, her eyes opened, but she continued to sing while her vision followed the trail of light to the corner of the room. As she reached the raga s highest and most sublime note, she heard a sigh of pleasure and the goddess appeared before her, smiling. Startled, Dhondutai shut her eyes, and when she opened them, the vision was gone.
She put down her tanpura and went to the door to pick up her milk bottle. Her day had begun well.
Part I Kennedy Bridge
One
I was dragged into the world of music as a reluctant ten-year-old. One summer evening, while my friends went off to swim at the Willingdon Club, my mother packed me into a car and said we were going to meet a music teacher.
The music teacher lived in an old building under Kennedy Bridge, ten minutes away from the tree-lined streets of Cumballa Hill where we lived. Kennedy Bridge was a neighbourhood known for prostitutes and gentlemen s clubs, but not for musicians. The only other time I had heard of Kennedy Bridge was when my parents joked about their adventurous evening in a mujrah dance parlor many years ago. They recalled the night vividly-the pimp with a red kerchief around his neck who negotiated with them on the curbside under the bridge; the walk up to room number 88 on the second floor of a building which smelled of urine; the green windows which shielded its inhabitants from any prying eyes on the bridge that heaved with traffic just a few feet away; and a woman called Chandni, draped in a sequined nylon sari, who gyrated under faux chandeliers and leaned forward so far under my father s nose that he bursts into giggles every time he describes the moment.
But, like in most neighbourhoods in Bombay, daylight masked what went on after hours. During the day, the area under Kennedy Bridge was like any other crowded street, throbbing with people hawking their wares or hurrying along. Across the street from the whore houses stood an old stone convent called Queen Mary School. Next to it was a row of auto parts stores. And, at the end of the road, deep inside a residential colony called Congress House, lived a great musician.
It was five in the evening when my mother and I got there. We parked along the curb and walked past the storefronts displaying lubes and spanners to get to the grey disconsolate building. There was no lift, so we trudged up the stairs to a tiny apartment on the third floor. A family of three lived on one side of the kitchen. The music teacher lived on the other side as a paying guest, in a room with pale, pistachio-colored walls. Her solitary companion in this room was her mother, whom she called Ayi.
My teacher-to-be was waiting for us with a cherubic smile. She was about five feet tall and was clad in a white sari, starched crisp. Her black hair was liberally oiled. I was delighted to note that her tiny bun was a ponytail in disguise. She was remarkably youthful for a fifty-year-old which, I later learned, she firmly attributed to never having married.
Sequestered in her tiny apartment, with her two gleaming tanpuras that stood against the wall, she seemed oblivious to the men who loitered below her window next to the brothels, spitting betel juice on the filthy walls of the buildings that housed their fantasies. It was like wading through a dirty pond to get to a beautiful lotus in the center.
The walls of her room were bare except for three portraits. There was a technicolor Ganesh, torn off an old pharmaceutical company calendar. Next to it, a portrait of her teacher, the legendary Kesarbai Kerkar; head covered with a white sari, hair parted on the side, and a string of pearls around her neck. On the adjoining wall was a faded sepia photograph of Dhondutai s parents soon after they were married-her father, a stiff Brahmin in a coat and dhoti, sitting upright with his knees apart, and her mother, a frail, beautiful woman in a nine-yard sari pulled tightly around her shoulders, sitting pigeon-toed, her feet pointing towards each other, acutely self-conscious.
My attention was drawn to a dollhouse-like altar, tucked away in a corner of the room. Inside, was the entire cast of the Hindu pantheon-tiny silver and brass idols of baby Krishna, Ganesh, Saraswati, Laxmi, a couple of silver coins, and a picture of an almost naked holy man sitting in meditation. The gods had been polished and decorated with a touch of kumkum. In front of each lay a sprinkling of fresh jasmine flowers whose fragrance lingered faintly. On top of the temple flickered an orange bulb, fashioned to simulate a live flame. It instantly amused me.
As I learnt later, the room was a semblance of another home-her ancestral bungalow in Kolhapur, the town she had left behind, where temple chimes wafted in with the evening breeze and jasmine grew in abundance. This is the kind of compromise Bombay forces on those who come to her, the price they must pay for her pleasures.
Say namaste to her, my mother nudged me.
She can call me baiji. Dhondutai beamed.
Baap re, she is quite tall for her age, Dhondutai continued, holding my chin, and peering down at my face affectionately.
Yes, both of us are tall. Hopefully, art runs in the family too, my mother joked, as usual getting straight to the point.
She s still quite young. Let s start with twice a week- Tuesday and Thursday? From five to six? That will give her enough time to freshen up when she gets back from school. Then, depending on how she progresses, we ll firm up the days.
While my fate was being decided, I was intrigued by an old bald lady with a few wisps of grey hair pulled into a tiny bun, who was pouting at the visitors from a corner of the room. It was Dhondutai s mother, Ayi, a wizened vestige of the woman in the photograph. She must have been at least eighty. I grinned at her and got a lovely, toothless smile in return.
As I was leaving the room, my eyes wandered once more to the shrine with the flickering lamp. Catching my gaze, Dhondutai laughed and beckoned to me to come closer for a peek. I sat in front of the gods awkwardly, conscious of her behind me, of my mother hovering impatiently at the door, of Ayi staring into space, and of the strange new room that was going to be a recurring space in my life. I turned to leave and thought I heard her whisper something into my ear. It sounded like, You will be my little goddess my Bhairavi.
My musical memories began before Dhondutai, with a woman called Sita-behn who came home to teach my mother light ragas and melodic bhajans when I was very young. I also remember a man coming over to teach my father how to play the tabla, before business worries took over and the rhythms of his life changed.
Both my parents belonged to business backgrounds. Sons were trained to take over the family business and daughters were groomed to find husbands. Girls were taught music or dance to enhance their marriage prospects. So, when Sita-behn, my mother s old music teacher, recommended a music school for me, I was promptly sent across.
I spent several tortured months at Sangeet Vidyal