Thursday 19 April 2018

Songs and Windows - Sanwaar Loon



After a long time, there’s a contemporary song that makes me tap my feet to it. It almost makes me dance in my chair as my typing speed increases on its own. The playfulness, the snippets of the story, the snippets of the conversation in the original video almost makes one crave it.

Unlike the stereotypical zero-figure model-type actresses, here we have a full-bodied, curvy lady who can make us go ‘pak-paka-pak-pa-pa’ as the song plays. I am looking at so many dance performances on the song and all I see is folk dances, and such convention pepped up by the so-called contemporary. On the other hand, the song reminds me of of the legends of the industry. In fact, funny as it is this song reminds me of:

  • Kanchi re
  • Khil rahi hai kali kali
  • Maine poochha chand se ki dekha hai kahin?

And even,

  • Mera mulk Mera desh
  • Pukarta Chala hun main, to a certain extent.

What is more interesting is that I ran into the song when I was watching coke studio and landed on a youtube video that showed Amit Trivedi’s ‘Sounds of Nation’ performance and heard a brief snippet of the song by the choir. Result – I deep dive and hunt for the song and it wasn’t too much effort to be honest.

Result, I have Sonakshi Sinha on loop for three days now. Just like the old times when I used to record audio cassettes on the tape recorder during 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm as old songs played on Jaipur Radio. Mom used to love the show and I enjoyed her humming. Now that I think of it I was not as fond of the show as I was of my mom moving around our one-room home and humming and occasionally smiling at me as I recorded cassettes after cassettes, sitting on the side window slab.







Today if you ask me that window slab was the one unique feature of that small home which forms 25 years of my memories. A perfect spot for mom to sit and look out for dad in the evenings after putting me to sleep and having finished cooking. A perfect spot for us kids to sit and watch funeral pre-preps and the lifting of the dead body in the open area, when an old neighbour died.

Sometimes I wonder how just 11 years of being in Delhi and 9 years of being in a different home in a different area has faded my memories that were so strong at one point that I seemed to almost want rid of them.

That perfect spot that hosted our computer accessories till the computer was in that room, rather than our rented room. That perfect spot seems to have faded from my memories. I crave for those memories at some level and this song seemed to invoke those memories, all of them. At some deeper level the song triggered more responses in me than I had imagined.



It looked something like this:



Now, I almost crave to go back there, for us to be young again, for me to watch my mom move around the household, for me to identify her by the sound of her anklets. I mean she still walks the same way, still wears the same kind of anklets but she moves slowly and softly. The house is larger so the sounds of the anklet bells are softer.

Similarly, I would give anything to trade for the times when we would wait for dad to return and we wouldn’t be waiting for him waiting at the door but instead at the window from the perfect spot. He wouldn’t ring the doorbell but instead we would rush off to him yelling ‘papa aa gaye’ (Dad’s home).

All we had to do to call my brother from his playground, was yell at the top of our voice and someone or the other in the ‘mohalla’ would listen to it and within 3 minutes he’d be home. There were no mobile phones and no need for them either. Oh, I am not saying by any means that they are not needed or shouldn’t exist. Just that we belong to a generation where we didn’t need them at one point in our lives.

I crave for how the youngest one and I would create drawings sitting in the sun in the windows, just outside the perfect spot. Oh, the perfect spot was our window not just out of the home but also inwards. That window has impacted more than I can imagine apparently. It’s only in retrospect do I realize the amount and the intensity of the impact on our lives. I am planning to discuss with my brothers if they feel the same way About the window or did I hog all the space, including theirs too. Sometimes I wish there was so much I could do differently about my childhood but that’s a subject for a different post.

Tab tak ke liye, wo khidki nahi to uski yaad sahi. Yadon ki khidkiya sundar lagti hain mujhe.


© Anupama 2018

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