Baby Soda

After making a trip to Manhattan only to be baulked out of watching John Cassavetes' Love Streams (1984) when a screening was cancelled at the last minute, I decided to take the train back from Union Square, in the hope that the general liveliness of the milieu might enliven me. I was all the more disappointed because I had braved a big snowstorm that was forecast for later in the evening. And Union Square did live up to expectation, for there was the Baby Soda band playing lively jazz. So I stopped to take pictures on my mobile, and gave to myself one of their CDs up for sale. In the picture above, they are playing a soulful number.

Fête de la musique, le juin 20 2009

It is a sultry June afternoon in Calcutta—untypical of Calcutta though, for the monsoons having been waylaid by Aila, the city is gasping for a drop of rain—and as I find my way to the right corner of the Tolly Club lawns I spot a vibrant group of Alliance Française students belting out a lively French number. I get into the mood before I know and join in every time they sing in chorus. As the choir and soloists rehearse their numbers—French songs bien sûr, and also French translations of Bengali songs, and a popular Hollywood track—I inevitably wander off into thinking about colliding colonialisms...

What must I italicize as I write this piece? The French? The English? I don’t think in italics. I am hopelessly caught in between. I am attending this concert as a student of Alliance, after attending classes where le français is the only language one must speak, and I am trying to do that conscientiously now, for I am coming back to a French classroom after four years. But all other parts of me begin to exercise their weight(s?). Would it be status-quoist to italicize? Would it be honest not to italicize for someone interested broadly in the problematic of translation?

To take a long view of things, as Scout Finch would have said, the reason the compères for the evening are speaking ‘mainly’ in English for the benefit of the audience is nothing less than the outcome of the Seven Years War, and what it meant for Anglo-French colonialist rivalry in the Indian context. And then to think of the continuing cultural impact of colonialism. Even if the game has morphed from the five-day format to one-day to T20, cricket determined the scheduling of the event—the celebrations were advanced by a day, to ensure that the programme did not clash with the Twenty-twenty World Cup Final. The present bears so many tags for the postcolonially-minded, that I must tag this post with cricket, however un-French it might be.

Chandrika Kanade

When she jerked her grey locks yelling “Begin!” to forty of us in her deep though wavering voice, and we commenced on singing “We three kings…” she seemed a formidable high-priestess of good taste. I can spell it out only now, from the vantage point of adult recollection, for what she inspired was a jumble of reactions ranging from admiration to fear during that weekly ritual called “Singing” class. When she played “Whisper a prayer in the morning…” on the upright piano, she seemed elegance personified, and the elegance and yelling seemed irreconcilable traits even to a four-year-old. And as she hurried through the corridors with her bunch of notations—some new, some tattered—I wondered if the beautiful signs on them would ever mean anything to me. They seemed attractive for they seemed to conceal all the pleasures that the sound of a piano could give. Her huge emerald ring...and then how one fine day all her hair turned jet black... those are my earliest memories of Miss Kanade, as we used to call her.

Those of us who had sisters or cousins for predecessors in school quickly learnt and told everyone else that she had been given the sobriquet “Princess Margaret” once upon a time. She had the same hairstyle as the princess in her youth, and had once performed before her. And then there was the other story of how being told “Miss, you are looking good today,” would invariably flatter her. M— told me the story, and once even greeted Miss Kanade like that as I stood by, to elicit a wave of the hand accompanied by, “ O, that’s an old compliment!” before she vanished into her room in the school building, outside which was a little board with “The Den” inscribed on it… so they say… for when I finally had the chance to check for the inscription, it was no longer there. Then there was the Sound of Music legend. Her stage-production of The Sound of Music was part of CGHS* lore, and as she taught us the songs from the film, one could tell they had a special place in her heart. As I watched her play with her heart and soul, the loose flesh of her arms jiggling at every movement, I could almost imagine her doing the same with the gracefulness of youth.

Other ‘public’ memories of Miss Kanade abound—memories of Investiture services and Founders’ Day services in the Thoburn Methodist Church on hot summer days. Who knew how one might miss the spirited intricacies of Miss Kanade’s rendition of the School Song, or the rousing notes of “Now thank we all our God” years afterwards?... And in other climes... Or even in the later years of school, when she had left. In her farewell speech she had said that people must retire and make way for others just the way furniture must be replaced from time to time. And so she went, and the pianos never sounded the same again.

Who knows with what courage, but I went to her to ask if she would teach me to play the piano. I was six years old then, and hadn’t even asked my parents. She said she would, if we bought a piano. I knew that that wasn’t possible. So I contented myself with watching Miss Kanade closely as she played while we sang, for she was grace itself on the piano. She taught me without my knowing then that piano-playing was truly as much to be watched as to be listened to.

As we kept taking singing lessons from her over the years, I sometimes wondered if she remembered the little girl, one of many little girls perhaps, who had asked her for piano lessons. It was her last year in school. We were lining up near the piano as usual in groups of four for the test in singing. The other three in my group had louder voices, and I was just recovering from a bout of pharyngitis and feared being drowned out. And I was. We had to sing her favourite from The Sound of Music, “The hills are alive…” When we finished, she said, without turning, “Sing again, Durba, you weren't yourself... maybe drink a little water first?” So she associated my name with a voice!

I had fallen in love with the piano when I was about two-and-a-half-years old, when I began attending the kindergarten school everyone in our extended family went to. At both schools I attended, I would tinkle at the pianos whenever I got half the chance. And then, literally dreamt of pianos for years. I dreamt the same dream till I was about 24, till I found a way to take piano lessons without buying a piano right away. Above all, it was bliss to be able to finally play La Paloma, that my fingers had itched to learn for years.

It was about the same time that I decided to go on a trekking trip to Darjeeling, and having heard that Miss Kanade was then teaching at Mount Hermon School, Darjeeling, made up my mind to meet her, and perhaps tell her I was finally learning, even if twenty years late. MHS was founded by Emma Knowles, after whom my ‘house’ in school was also named, so all the more reason for a pilgrimage. All I ended up seeing were the impressive school precincts, for with the school closed for some reason, there was no one at the gate whom I could ask about Miss Kanade’s whereabouts. The Queen of the Hills was still pretty, and it seemed as though postcards that survived in memory from my first visit when I was four (two years before I asked Miss Kanade for piano lessons:) were leaping into life all about me, and the trek in Rimbik, and the trip as a whole, were very enjoyable. Returning to the din of Calcutta, I inquired among old friends for news of Miss Kanade for naught, and after about a year, just after coming to New York, learnt that she had passed away. So the little girl shall never tell her that she is finally playing. Or that whatever vignettes of her survive in her memory are so vividly compelling that even if Miss Kanade never knew about it, she did teach her to play.


Gloss:
* CGHS: Calcutta Girls' High School

© Text: DURBA BASU 2009

Free piano music for a limited time...

Season's greetings! Here's a selection of piano music available for a limited time on Pianostreet, a holiday gift from the site. Enjoy! Click here to listen.

Beethoven's last piano piece found

Follow this link to the news at Pianostreet.com.

Quasi una fantasia

Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata or what I got looking for it

Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990)

A spring evening. A large room in an old house. A woman of a certain age, dressed in black, is speaking to a young man. They have not turned on the lights. Through both windows the moonlight shines relentlessly. I forgot to mention that the Woman in Black has published two or three interesting volumes of poetry with a religious flavor. So, the Woman in Black is speaking to the Young Man:


Let me come with you. What a moon there is tonight!
The moon is kind – it won’t show
that my hair turned white. The moon
will turn my hair to gold again. You wouldn’t understand.
Let me come with you.


When there’s a moon the shadows in the house grow larger,
invisible hands draw the curtains,
a ghostly finger writes forgotten words in the dust
on the piano – I don’t want to hear them. Hush.


Let me come with you
a little farther down, as far as the brickyard wall,
to the point where the road turns and the city appears
concrete and airy, whitewashed with moonlight, so indifferent and insubstantial
so positive, like metaphysics,
that finally you can believe you exist and do not exist,
that you never existed, that time with its destruction never existed.
Let me come with you.


We’ll sit for a little on the low wall, up on the hill,
and as the spring breeze blows around us
perhaps we’ll even imagine that we are flying,
because, often, and now especially, I hear the sound of my own dress
like the sound of two powerful wings opening and closing,
you feel the tight mesh of your throat, your ribs, your flesh,
and when you enclose yourself within the sound of that flight
you feel the tight mesh of your throat, your birds, your flesh,
and thus constricted amid the muscles of the azure air,
amid the strong nerves of the heavens,
it makes no difference whether you go or return
it makes no difference whether you go or return
and it makes no difference that my hair has turned white
(that is not my sorrow – my sorrow is
that my heart too does not turn white).
Let me come with you.


I know that each one of us travels to love alone,
alone to faith and to death.
I know it. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.
Let me come with you.


This house is haunted, it preys on me –
what I mean is, it has aged a great deal, the nails are working loose,
the portraits drop as though plunging into the void,
the plaster falls without a sound
as the dead man’s hat falls from the peg in the dark hallway
as the worn woolen glove falls from the knee of silence
or as moonbeam falls on the old, gutted armchair.


Once it too was new – not the photograph that you are starting at so dubiously –
I mean the armchair, very comfortable, you could sit in it for hours
with your eyes closed and dream whatever came into your head
– a sandy beach, smooth, wet, shining in the moonlight,
shining more than my old patent leather shoes that I send each month to the shoeshine shop on the corner,
or a fishing boat’s sail that sinks to the bottom rocked by its own breathing,
a three-cornered sail like a handkerchief folded slantwise in half only
as though it had nothing to shut up or hold fast
no reason to flutter open in farewell. I have always has a passion for handkerchiefs,
not to keep anything tied in them,
no flower seeds or camomile gathered in the fields at sunset,
nor to tie them with four knots like the caps the workers wear on the construction site across the street,
nor to dab my eyes – I’ve kept my eyesight good;
I’ve never worn glasses. A harmless idiosyncracy, handkerchiefs.


Now I fold them in quarters, in eighths, in sixteenths
to keep my fingers occupied. And now I remember
that this is how I counted the music when I went to the Odeion
with a blue pinafore and a white collar, with two blond braids
– 8,16,32,64 –
hand in hand with a small friend of mine, peachy, all light and picked flowers,
(forgive me such digressions – a bad habit) – 32, 64 – and my family rested
great hopes on my musical talent. But I was telling you about the armchair –
gutted – the rusted springs are showing, the stuffing –
I thought of sending it next door to the furniture shop,
but where’s the time and the money and the inclination – what to fix first?
I thought of throwing a sheet over it – I was afraid
of a white sheet in so much moonlight. People sat here
who dreamed great dreams, as you do and I too.
and now they rest under earth untroubled by rain or the moon.
Let me come with you.


We’ll pause for a little at the top of St. Nicholas’ marble steps,
and afterward you’ll descend and I will turn back,
having on my left side the warmth from a casual touch of your jacket
and some squares of light, too, from small neighborhood windows
and this pure white mist from the moon, like a great procession of silver swans –
and I do not fear this manifestation, for at another time
on many spring evenings I talked with God who appeared to me
clothed in the haze and glory of such a moonlight –
and many young men, more handsome even than you, I sacrificed to him –
I dissolved, so white, so unapproachable, amid my white flame, in the whiteness of moonlight, burnt up by men’s voracious eyes and the tentative rapture of youths,
besieged by splendid bronzed bodies,
strong limbs exercising at the pool, with oars, on the track, at soccer (I pretended not to see them),
foreheads, lips and throats, knees, fingers and eyes,
chests and arms and things (and truly I did not see them)
– you know, sometimes, when you’re entranced, you forget what entranced you, the entrancement
alone is enough –
my God, what star-bright eyes, and I was lifted up to an apotheosis of disavowed stars
because, besieged thus from without and from within,
no other road was left me save only the way up or the way down. – No, it is not enough.
Let me come with you.


I know it’s very late.
Let me, because for so many years – days, nights, and crimson noons – I’ve stayed alone,
unyielding, alone and immaculate,
even in my marriage bed immaculate and alone,
writing glorious verses to lay on the knees of God,
verses that, I assure you, will endure as if chiselled in flawless marble
beyond my life and your life, well beyond. It is not enough.
Let me come with you.


This house can’t bear me anymore.
I cannot endure to bear it on my back.
You must always be careful, be careful,
to hold up the wall with the large buffet
to hold up the table with the chairs
to hold up the chairs with your hands
to place your shoulder under the hanging beam.
And the piano, like a closed black coffin. You do not dare to open it.
You have to be so careful, so careful, lest they fall, lest you fall. I cannot bear it.
Let me come with you.


This house, despite all its dead, has no intention of dying.
It insists on living with its deadon living off its dead
on living off the certainty of its death
and on still keeping house for its dead, the rotting beds and shelves.
Let me come with you.


Here, however quietly I walk through the mist of evening,
whether in slippers or barefoot,
there will be some sound: a pane of glass cracks or a mirror,
some steps are heard – not my own.
Outside, in the street, perhaps these steps are not heard –
repentance, they say, wears wooden shoes –
and if you look into this or that other mirror,
behind the dust and the cracks,
you discern – darkened and more fragmented – your face,
your face, which all your life you sought only to keep clean and whole.


The lip of the glass gleams in the moonlight
like a round razor – how can I lift it to my lips?
however much I thirst – how can I lift it – Do you see?
I am already in a mood for similes – this at least is left me,
reassuring me still that my wits are not failing.
Let me come with you.


At times, when evening descends, I have the feeling
that outside the window the bear-keeper is going by with his old heavy she-bear,
her fur full of burns and thorns,
stirring dust in the neighborhood street
a desolate cloud of dust that censes the dusk,
and the children have gone home for supper and aren’t allowed outdoors again,
even though behind the walls they divine the old bear’s passing –
and the tired bear passes in the wisdom of her solitude, not knowing wherefore and why –
she’s grown heavy, can no longer dance on her hind legs,
can’t wear her lace cap to amuse the children, the idlers, the importunate,
and all she wants is to lie down on the ground
letting them trample on her belly, playing thus her final game,
showing her dreadful power for resignation,
her indifference to the interest of others, to the rings in her lips, the compulsion of her teeth,
her indifference to pain and to lifewith the sure complicity of death –
even a slow death – her final indifference to death with the continuity and knowledge of life
which transcends her enslavement with knowledge and with action.


But who can play this game to the end?
And the bear gets up again and moves on
obedient to her leash, her rings, her teeth,
smiling with torn lips at the pennies the beautiful and unsuspecting children toss
(beautiful precisely because unsuspecting)
and saying thank you. Because bears that have grown old
can say only one thing: thank you; thank you.
Let me come with you.


This house stifles me. The kitchen especially
is like the depths of the sea. The hanging coffeepots gleam
like round, huge eyes of improbable fish,
the plates undulate slowly like medusas,
seaweed and shells catch in my hair – later I can’t pull them loose –
I can’t get back to the surface –
the tray falls silently from my hands – I sink down
and I see the bubbles from my breath rising, rising
and I try to divert myself watching them
and I wonder what someone would say who happened to be above and saw these bubbles, perhaps that someone was drowning or a diver exploring the depths?


And in fact more than a few times I’ve discovered there, in the depths of drowning,
coral and pearls and treasures of shipwrecked vessels,
unexpected encounters, past, present, and yet to come,
a confirmation almost of eternity,
a certain respite, a certain smile of immortality, as they say,
a happiness, an intoxication, inspiration even,
coral and pearls and sapphires;
only I don’t know how to give them – no, I do give them;
only I don’t know if they can take them – but still, I give them.
Let me come with you.


One moment while I get my jacket.
The way this weather’s so changeable, I must be careful.
It’s damp in the evening, and doesn’t the moon
seem to you, honestly, as if it intensifies the cold?
Let me button your shirt – how strong your chest is
– how strong the moon – the armchair, I mean – and whenever I lift the cup from the table
a hole of silence is left underneath. I place my palm over it at once
so as not to see through it – I put the cup back in its place;
and the moon’s a hole in the skull of the world – don’t look through it,
it’s a magnetic force that draws you – don’t look, don’t any of you look,
listen to what I’m telling you – you’ll fall in. This giddiness,
beautiful, ethereal – you will fall in –
the moon’s marble well,
shadows stir and mute wings, mysterious voices – don’t you hear them?


Deep, deep the fall,
deep, deep the ascent,
the airy statue enmeshed in its open wings,
deep, deep the inexorable benevolence of the silence –
trembling lights on the opposite shore, so that you sway in your own wave,
the breathing of the ocean. Beautiful, ethereal
this giddiness – be careful, you’ll fall. Don’t look at me,
for me my place is this wavering – this splendid vertigo. And so every evening
I have little headache, some dizzy spells.


Often I slip out to the pharmacy across the street for a few aspirin,
but at times I’m too tired and I stay here with my headache
and listen to the hollow sound the pipes make in the walls,
or drink some coffee, and, absentminded as usual, I forget and make two – who’ll drink the other?
It’s really funny, I leave it on the window-sill to cool
or sometimes drink them both, looking out the window at the bright green globe of the pharmacy
that’s like the green light of a silent train coming to take me away
with my handkerchiefs, my run-down shoes, my black purse, my verses,
but no suitcases – what would one do with them?
Let my come with you.


Oh, are you going? Goodnight. No, I won’t come. Goodnight.
I’ll be going myself in a little. Thank you. Because, in the end, I must
get out of this broken-down house.
I must see a bit of the city – no, not the moon –
the city with its calloused hands, the city of daily work,
the city that swears by bread and by its fist,
the city that bears all of us on its back
with our pettiness, sins, and hatreds,
our ambitions, our ignorance and our senility.
I need to hear the great footsteps of the city,
and no longer to hear your footsteps
or God’s, or my own. Goodnight.


The room grows dark. It looks as though a cloud may have covered the moon. All at once, as if someone had turned up the radio in the nearby bar, a very familiar musical phrase can be heard. Then I realize that “The Moonlight Sonata”, just the first movement, has been playing very softly through this entire scene. The Young Man will go down the hill now with an ironic and perhaps sympathetic smile on his finely chiselled lips and with a feeling of release. Just as he reaches St. Nicolas, before he goes down the marble steps, he will laugh – a loud, uncontrollable laugh. His laughter will not sound at all unseemly beneath the moon. Perhaps the only unseemly thing will be that nothing is unseemly. Soon the Young Man will fall silent, become serious, and say: “The decline of an era.” So, thoroughly calm once more, he will unbutton his shirt again and go on his way. As for the woman in black, I don’t know whether she finally did get out of the house. The moon is shining again. And in the corners of the room the shadows intensify with an intolerable regret, almost fury, not so much for the life, as for the useless confession. Can you hear? The radio plays on:

ATHENS, JUNE 1956

Pianos from Scout's Town

Yamaha digital pianos from Scout's town: here is a link I'm posting only because it's about pianos from Mobile, Alabama.
At this site, you could listen to some short demo tracks on the piano.

Besame Mucho

Soon after I mused about the accordionist, I bumped into another very talented young Latino accordionist on the subway last Friday afternoon. He made a dramatic entry on the R train moments before it began hurtling past Prince Street station: even with half his body still outside the train, he played a loud chord all of a sudden, and seemed to revel in thus shocking commuters out of their reverie. He played a medley beginning with Besame Mucho and going on to a melody I know only from Klaus Wunderlich, and can't recall by title this instant (getting old!), one of those melodies eminently suited for the accordion. He played much little compared to what others do on the subway, no matter how skilled they are, and seemed very aware of his competence, looking around and asking for the appreciation that he was sure he deserved and would be given, not like my humble smiling hexagenarian accordionist who acknowledged even every twinkle of appreciation. I even wondered briefly if I should give him anything, before finally choosing to give because he was very obviously skilful, and easiliy belonged to the top bracket of performers I have come across in New York, and of course he was playing for money. I wonder if he played a little more and showed less awareness of his skill in his demeanour, he would have collected more money in the same compartment. Perhaps that is what New York will teach him.


© Text: DURBA BASU 2007

In a Station on the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

-Ezra Pound

[Disclaimer: Ezra Pound's famous poem has nothing to do with this post except that both have an association with the underground railway, though in different cities. My choice of epigraph, honestly, is inspired by Pound's title rather than his lines.]

Hexagenarian, chubby-cheeked and grinning widely, he sat on a small stool, enthralling all commuters present with the Latino melodies that he played effortlessly on his piano accordion. From Besame Mucho to El Condor Pasa to La Cucaracha, he played them all with equal panache, and once obliged New Yorkers with the theme from The Godfather. In my eight months in this Mammon's den, of all the 'musicians' I have given money to, perhaps only one other man who played Latino melodies on a Spanish guitar on 116th St could vye with this man for felicity. Both, incidentally acknowledged not just the money passers-by would give them, but also their appreciative glances and nods. I was dismayed to see a "For Sale" tag on the accordion. As I embarked on the train, I faintly hoped the accordion wouldn't find buyers too soon, so that I could hear more of him. And lo! Two days later, I chanced upon him at another station, but as luck would have it, I had no money on me this time. It has been two months since then, and I have not seen him again. I only hope the accordion has gone to good hands, and my nameless artist does have another to play on, though not for the mercy of commuters.