Without music, life would be a mistake.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols”
I only knew afternoons that were indolent. Mothers had stopped scrubbing the dishes. Neighbors had paused their arguments for the day. Foul-mouthed husbands were yet to leave their offices. There was at least an hour left for the teens to quarrel over who would bat first.
In provincial towns, like the one where I grew up, we heard people’s lives—their chores, squabbles, adulations and arguments—sometimes even before we had seen their faces. The afternoon air had few sound waves to carry and sat silently like a lonely child on the terrace. The town held our lives like pebbles in a jar, submerged in water that made waves the way sounds did in the timid suburban air.
The sun dwindled farther west and the modest suburban homes had come to life again. For some, the ritual of bhaat-ghum or bengali-siesta had come to an end. They sipped afternoon tea in the company of their dear ones. The social butterflies gathered in the addas had their own sounds, vibrating to their own rhythm. The idle gossip and the slanderous slights to bonding over allegiances of ideology and tastes in the arts all had their own tune. Music was not just a metaphor though. It filled the rooms of those who wished to cherish the afternoon on their own.
The somber afternoon gave way to the tender twilight. The sun departed as if to make space for those returning home. The birds too found a home in this remote town; their songs would make the gray sky their own. The streets began to lose their silence. The rickshaw bells clinked at the turn of every corner, the tea stalls buzzed with everyday chatter of men in ill-fitted clothes. Those who proceeded towards home at the end of the workday placed themselves in front of the television, or TV as we had always called it at home. The news presenter’s monotonous voice bellowed out of the TV every evening when the family gathered in the living room. The commotions of the world stirred a few, bored many, and all were relieved when it was over.
Night had creeped inside the small town like an uninvited guest. The only sign of life that the night seemed to betray were the crickets chirping in desolate neighborhoods. The dimly lit neon signs of confectionery stores and pharmacies, and the few and far between street lights punctuated its darkness. It had flattened all shades of green in the leaves of mango, jackfruit or neem trees whose outlines could only be made from the light seeping out of tinted glass windows. Darkness had displaced life from public spaces to the confines and comforts of the secluded indoors. My mother would find Bengali singers like Subir Nandi, Abida Sultana or Papia Sarwar performing on television, turn the hushed volume up a notch and beam a little. But she knew television wouldn’t play these harmonious voices when she would want them. My impatient parents were irked by this. They perhaps expected obedience from all that was in the household, as they did from me, their only child. But a sly, smirky rectangular box defied them and this is probably why the television never became a dependable source of music for us at home.
Radio could be an odd spectacle in small towns. We hardly knew anyone who listened to it regularly but there were quite a few who were regular performers in shows at the local station. If you were too eager to listen to someone sing on a Tuesday evening program, there was a good possibility they were someone close to you. Mothers used to brag about their kids who had performed Rabindra or Nazrul Sangeet on the local radio. But we were a generation who thought of radio as a relic—an apparition of the past.
At home, we had a black aiwa cassette player—a graceless rectangular slab, the size of two bricks placed next to each other with knobs and double slots for the tapes on the front, and the speakers on the sides. It stood on top of the mahogany chest of drawers in the living room right next to a mickey mouse pencil stand, and if you have ever played music with a cassette player, you would know why. You could always listen to the whole album again. Listening to the same song on a loop, however, was not so easy. This was when the pencil came in: you rewind as though you were cheating the laws of physics and going back in time.
This was a time before the advent of the internet in our small corner of the world. If some of us were fortunate to be exposed to exotic tastes beyond our routine television and radio broadcasts, and developed a preference for any particular genre of music, it only signed us up for trouble. Such misadventures ran the risk of developing a hobby and eventually a fever. We began frequenting those dingy shops that once used to sell records to our grandparents. Then its shelves were stocked with cassettes and a few CDs. Our hopes were trifled by the limited collection, and the young who cared little for the ease of life in the suburbs, aspired to move to the big city where one could supposedly listen to all that they desired.
There were occasions when we did not have to rely on electronic devices for music. Sometimes, there was little standing between the performer and the beguiled listener. It was not only love that was in the air, but also the sound waves carrying the amorous songs of lovers. They walked along the edges of a playground near the graveyard and would pace their strides with the tune of the song. The shade of the banyan tree at the far end would invite them to recline and lower their inhibitions a little. The hum of the song grew louder and startled the recluse cat lounging nearby.
Love always was an ignominy in a small town. We were told only the shameless and the corrupt, the hotoccharas, would venture out to see a lover, or even had one in the first place. If an acquaintance, or god forbid, a relative caught you—not in an intimate moment, even thinking that was out of the question—just being seen with someone who was a potential receiver or provider of affection was supposed to drown you in shame.
Kolongko—the peculiar Bengali word was in the society’s arsenal to taint and maim you, especially if you were a girl or a woman. But the parents, relatives and neighbors who would be the primary enforcer of the society’s stringent norms heartily adored love songs—the classical songs, the modern ones or the scores from contemporary cinema—these were almost invariably about love. Your next door auntie or her creepy husband would haunt your mother if they saw you in another part of town with someone. The irony was that this very couple would savor a Bollywood musical score where the two lead actors played out their bizarre and flashy seduction. This incoherence had always baffled me. What happened on screen, the apparently lurid lyrics to songs, and tales of love preached by the poets and the weird novelists in books were in a different reality it seemed—you did not believe in them unless you were young, fool or even worse—a deviant.
We heard those fleeting lives around us, without realizing we too wished to be heard. But how could the world hear us, when we had not learnt how to give voice to our hearts? Grasping the intricacies of the heart was perhaps better left to the saints and the shirajs, we only hoped that someone would sing it on our behalf.
Having a word for an activity in a language validates its existence. It allows you to think and communicate about it, build upon the idea. I knew listening to songs when your beloved sang them was blissful. But Bengali, my mother tongue, had no word for it. It would be after many years that I would find a term for it in English—to serenade.
Affection for our beloved used to preoccupy us, but when I look back at those days, I can sense now that the impulse to defy the suffocating girdles of society must have been more pressing. There was also perhaps the thrill of indulging in the forbidden. When the sweet voice of our first love sang the lines of Mayabono biharini horini—the doe the wanderer of the enchanted woods, was that merely a pretense? Now I know why the young fervently swear their passions to be true though they can never be quite specific about what they mean. They perceive their perspective of the world free from the deceptions that cement and solidify the bitter garters of adulthood where you will hum the words of love in the shower, then later reproach your daughter for it.
Adhunik Bangla Gaan—which was regarded as contemporary Bengali music at that time was regularly featured in TV programs and became an anchor for the identity of the unadventurous Bengali middle class families. Listening to it was what distinguished us culturally from the working class masses—it was part of an exercise of building our self-image based on negation. We were careful not to wear those motifs that adored the clothes of our househelp. An intersection of taste in music across the unshakable barrier of social class was unthinkable for the suburban Bengali babus with their much cherished affinity for what they believed to be elegance.
The soft melodies never threatened a disruption like the raucous grit of metallic noise that the delinquent teens preferred. These songs, despite being termed adhunik—modern or contemporary, were almost always several decades old. Despite their merits as musical pieces, they stood in for the rigid inertia of their audiences.
Nazrul Sangeet—the songs composed by Kazi Nazrul Islam were still popular, and ironically blared chants of youth and revolution to ears that had their hearts set in stone. Rabindranath Tagore’s songs held the air in mythical awe for receptive audiences. Tagore’s tunes created a cultural bubble—admirers within it reveled in the cultural identity that it provided. For those outside, were either indifferent or perceived it like an anesthetic that could put them to sleep. Rabindranath’s paeans for love and the divine, his celebration of nature were reduced even by his most ardent devotees to a honeysack of sentiments devoid of substance.
The hum of late evening strains gave way to muffled snores in bedrooms. A few dogs outside barked at any hint of movement. They guarded the alley not only from intruders but also from any sound. Hush! It was night. Soon the night thawed like ice and the day began. Light from the horizon ushered the singing birds to the sleeping neighborhood. The ajan from the mosque splintered the silence at dawn. A lone pensioner jogged across the neighborhood and halted every few minutes for a screeching cough that never seemed to go away. A man with a weekend old stubble tended to his garden while he eyed a woman holding a basket near the blood-red hibiscus flowers. He screamed obscenities at the thought that flowers from his garden would be used in prayer of a deity that was not his own. The morning sun was perhaps the school going child’s greatest enemy. The parents struggled to get them up from bed while their sleepy voice groaned for five more minutes. The rush to prepare the kids for school, dish out the breakfasts and set off for their own livelihoods—it all sounded like an aberration, a surge in an otherwise tepid flow of life.
Suburban life had its comforts—it saved one from the bustling chaos in overpopulated cities, and relieved those who had little appetite for pastoral life. However, these conveniences were not cheap. Vernacular traditions flowed smoothly across generations in rural societies while the cities dominated as centers of art and literature. The cozy small towns stood in between as the diplomatic middle child, incorporating bits and pieces of tradition while absorbing the cultural trends set off in the cities. In this tug of war, the suburbs favored those who aspired to be nothing more than passive consumers.
Mothers hired music tutors, took their children to the local branch of Shilpakala Academy—the Academy of Arts which held a quiet facade in a neighborhood downtown. The prizes won in cultural competitions were proudly displayed in living rooms. The cultural capital thus earned, contributed in negotiating social respect even in this remote town. All was well as long as it was just a play. But anyone with an inclination for the arts soon faced the reality that their hometown had neither the ability nor the intention to harbor their pursuits. This was not just limited to music, one could not dream of prospering in literature or the arts from the suburbs. We had never thought twice about discarding the villagers as uncivilized, nothing short of barbarians. Chasha, the farmer was a commonly used term for ‘the uncultured’. The folks from small towns could only salvage themselves as ‘cultured and educated’ if only they made it to the big city.
I wonder how reliable adolescent memories of a small town can be. Are these recollections of my suburban upbringing colored by my current despair with city life? I once used to regard sensory experiences as mere sources of delight and whimsically believed that the virtue of pleasure lied in its spontaneity. Was it perhaps such naivete that led to the perspective through which I had registered my early years? This makes an attempt at comparison of city and suburban life rather tenuous. But when our intention is to explore the aesthetics of daily life, drawing comparisons might not even be an appropriate approach. This after all is neither a competition nor a fable akin to the country and city mice. How much of this world and its sensorium registers as memory depends on the attention we pay to it. This attention to life and its nuances, and the memories formed as a result enables us as individuals, and as collectives of various forms and nature to engage with the world through our taste and intellect. Memory, despite the concerns of accuracy, can be insightful: it can show us how we had guided our senses and perceived the world.
I left Rangpur, my quaint and sweet hometown when I was nineteen, in those tender days when I could feel my adolescence slip away like the sun setting on the west horizon. I moved to Dhaka, which then seemed like a grotesque metropolis where sounds were like a curse—my ears could only discern pain and pollution. The streets of Dhaka preferred little silence. The turbulent stream of metal and flesh clanked and roared, honked and yelled. All this commotion peddled more sounds and turned only a few wheels.
Dhaka’s deafening streets made me listen to music because of what they were not: a rumbling chaos. Stuck in the city’s doomed traffic for hours, I hardly ever was in the mood to savor music or find enjoyment in any merry tune. Earphones gave me respite for thousands of hours from nefarious city streets. The soft knobs probed inside the cartilaginous flesh, and made voices and sounds amenable for personal consumption. A device for escaping from the city soundscape had become essential for urban survival.
After a few years in Dhaka, my senses went numb from the honks on the motorways, the groans and yellings of passersby and the screeching hawkers in the afternoon. There were, and still are mikes from half a dozen mosques from all directions, blaring at dusk for the Maghrib prayer like an undisciplined platoon marching to chaos—out of sync with each other and the world. At one point, I realized the godhuli bela, the dusk that I was so fond of, was long dead. We are not taught to mourn for things that are not human, let alone that are not alive, biologically.
Afternoons in Dhaka feel like a blur and hardly sound different from any other time of the day. The colleagues groan till we leave work. The roads croak as it has always done. The tedious tunes in cafes attempt to muffle the continuous chatter of the regulars who it seems are there all the time. The close quarters that we now call home barely resonate any sound that we make. Life here has been drowned by a few statics that show no sign of leaving. I will perhaps never learn to adapt to it.
