Joy in the Morning

Joy in the Morning

Posted by Rajdeep on Sunday April 23, @09:31AM

How I almost became a musician, but my best laid plans were meant to gang aft agley, and I lived to remember that day

Since I was up with the lark this morning, the first rays of the morning sun brought back to my mind an episode from the distant past, and I thought I would share it with someone who would recognise its utter lack of worth, but still not shower curses on me for the same.

I was brought up in a large joint family (which probably explains why I am so terrified of people). There was one time when two men and one lady in the family were entering the state of holy matrimony (not with one another, obviously) within a period of two weeks. As a result, there had been a conglomeration of all of my relatives, in all shapes and sizes, jostling to fill up all available space. One of my relatives - a nice young man who had spent his entire childhood taking in the smell of tea leaves every morning, his father being a manager in a tea garden - allowed himself to succumb to the norms of civilization, and gifted each one of the young 'uns in the family a strange and wonderful musical instrument. Have you ever seen a "taanpura"? Well, these were designed along similar lines, but were miniature versions.

So long as each one of us had our own mini-taanpura, the object was no novelty, and two hundred and forty-three (not sure about the number, but that order of magnitude, surely) bored housewives used to be woken up from their beauty sleeps in the afternoon by the cacophony of distorted do-re-mi's emanating from the wrong ends of those three-stringed wonders. Well, as it was supposed to happen, laws of physics (which predict that brittle substances shall follow the Biblical oracle of "Dust thou art, to dust returnest" once dropped to the ground from a certain altitude), coupled with the natural inability of precocious kids to stop throwing every available object at one another, meant that I was the only person who was left with the whole instrument, two days since the largess had taken place. (Whether we can infer from this that I was not precocious, or that I was more restrained in capitulating to such temptations, I cannot say).

Terrified that my cousins would try to enforce the laws of socialism (which govern that all goods be equally shared across the citizenry), thereby denying me the services of this wonderful instrument which gave expression to every sound that I could conjure in my mind, I devised a scheme whereby the safety of my only true possession could be ensured. A truckful of sand had been recently dumped near my house, no doubt with the intent of being used for some ugly building which some enterprising businessman was planning to construct in the neighbourhood. I distinctly remember the evening when I dug up a hole in that dump, and hid my mini-taan in the burrow so created, and covered it up with sand again. Since the sand dump was in a place which was right at the corner of our cricket pitch, this obviously meant that the frequency with which I could practise my hand at the instrument was diminished. (That probably explains why I have absolutely no sense of music, and now you know who to blame!).

My surreptitious date with music continued for a few days, till that fateful evening when I discovered that some unidentified ugly son-of-a-what-not had stepped on the exact spot where my booty lay disintered, and had made 37 pieces of mini-taanpuras where only one existed, thereby reducing the utility of the object by a substantial margin.

Since that day, I decided that Fate had conspired against me, and that music was best left to those who were born with talents in that direction, and that I should just stick to letting my fingers tap the keyboard and churn out reams of verbiage which I can thrust upon unsuspecting members of the gentry and make them spend a good seventeen minutes in reading the same.