The minstrels of midnight
I wish the grownups could be kids again, even for a moment, to realise how we have forgotten to be amazed by the little wonders of life
Hisham M Nazer
Drunk on the dew when nature retired to sleep in silence, the winter late-nights of Dhaka back in the early 1990s often used to come alive with baul songs on harmonium and khanjani somewhere away from the typical life of K. M. Das lane. And the nights, dancing in those incomprehensible tunes, travelled some distances through the veil of mists and poured down mystic echoes in ears that wished for more than lullabies and fairy tales. I did not understand a word the singers in their sonorous voices freed in the fantastic darkness. That was not the age to understand baul songs.
But perhaps the words understood me, because they played me like an instrument, and what came out, was a vision, that warmed me more than my red duvet. So in the woollen-warmth, drugged with a strong dose of fancy, I used to discover myself under the simple yellowish light and among simple folks wrapped in brown shawls that had more bobbles than some of the heads there had hairs heads that swayed with the music over shoulders that submitted to the night and the notes of the harmonium. The songs were unpretentious, and so were the audience. And the singers sang maddened by some strange passion. There was no urge to entertain. The songs were for the soul.
I still could not comprehend the lyrics, so I made up my own, with just impressions of familiar words. And then the songs ran in my blood. I closed my eyes and I was one with the night. And the night took me to the ancient lands of Bengal, and sometimes to a house that looked awfully like ours. In one such tour I once fell in love with Madhubala, in a place that resembled the world created by Ramsay brothers. That night, I became Dilip Kumar, or some hero I saw in Doordarshan, maybe from Mahabharata. It was all phantasmagorical.
Everything got blurred after that, until a voice from a distant Masjid crept through the lone harmonium, through the sack-cloths now decorated with beads of dew, through the cold light-bulbs now subdued to the faint light of the dawn, and woke me up to listen to the announcement that to me, in that age, had more melody than meaning- Allahu Akbar! I did not completely know then what it meant. But I knew the words were beautiful, or at least the atmosphere they created was. In that pure moment, the head felt lighter and the heart wanted to cherish the music of the morn. Dhaka has this reputation to be known as the city of Masjids. So when one by one the muezzins used to join the chorus, history and prayers and dreams together they all had strange effects even on me, a kid without a clue. I thought how something this melodious can be anything but beautiful!
Since I was just a little boy, I was spared the trouble of waking up and saying the Fajr namaz. I could only hear my father in the other room, saying his morning prayer in muffled voice, our thakuma from the ground floor jingling her bells, my mother snoring like an old trumpet and some morning birds. Comforted by these intimate sounds and by the thought that I do not have to wake up early because there is no school today, I again took a journey to unknown lands, sometimes becoming Tipu Sultan, sometimes MacGyver, only to wake up late in the morning by a pile of parched duvets thrown over me by my sister. Ah, one could almost smell the sun in those warmers, simply take a sniff, close their eyes and see the brightly shining sun that used to give our veranda a new reputation. All gathered there for their morning tea. Winter became our own poor potpourri- the smell of the tea, muri mixed with mustard oil and murki, smell of naphthalene from the cardigans, the parched duvets, the petroleum jelly on our lips and elbows, Nivea cream from that blue round tin container, and the rich tongue-tingling smell from a jar of mango pickles sunk in old mustard oil. The ecstasy was often unbearable!
Unlike sound, smells do not have echoes, but the way things were back then, aromas in the afternoon filled all the corners of our typical life in K. M. Das lane, especially in the time of Deepavali, when our potpourri got richer with the scents of agarbatti, dhoop, nadu, mowa and rose-water. Ours was a colony that knew how to share, and we shared values, our festivals, our songs, our prayers and our aromas with smiles. Deepavali for us kids was all about sweetmeats, about lights and thakumas incessant chants that used to attract little feet with those small bells that we believed had magical powers. With the verandas getting decorated with lights one by one, those winter nights used to get brighter and our hearts used to get warmer. As we rushed to our friends houses to light those earthen lamps with kerosene and a little ghee, the tranquillity of the night, the flickering lights and the smell of the burning wicks, they all possessed us and covered us with a kind of warmth I cannot narrate now. Our eyes glistened and we became the minstrels of midnight, singing songs that have become incomprehensible for me today in a reality where we worship walls and celebrate divisions. As a little boy I always wanted to grow up early. As a grown man now, I want to be little again, and go back in a time when religious cultures made our life richer, offering songs and suras and shloks for the hearts that were less troubled by the dictation of dichotomies. I wish the grownups could be kids again, even for a moment, to realise how we have forgotten to be amazed by the little wonders of life.
The writer is Assistant Professor Department of English,
Varendra University
