The Way We Were

Hearing Paul McCartney sing “Yesterday” recently, I was surprised to find my eyes moist. It’s a long time since any song has really moved me, but that used to be My Song. I threw heart, soul and whatever else I could summon up into those melodic verses, took the final ‘yesterday, love was such an easy game to play….’ into a high register ending with a low, mournful ‘yes, I believe in yesterday….’ I remember singing it when I was sixteen at an impromptu family dinner, and someone remarking, “Why are you singing about yesterday? At your age it should be all about tomorrow!”

The songs I sing now are muted, less full-throated, certainly no less sorrowful, still straight from the heart. Soul, but with a touch of irony, a rueful self-knowledge, perhaps. And the women singers I listen to have this same quality, and date right back to the forties, fifties, with stirring, full-blooded voices that can still send shivers down my back.

Recently, I picked up a CD of Lotte Lenya, at an incredible bargain, singing Kurt Weill; her rendition of ‘September Song’ is almost unbearably beautiful. I remember listening to Frank Sinatra’s version around the time when I was sixteen, and weeping at it’s autumnal beauty. It took very little to make me weep when I was sixteen. What did I know then? Now I think Lotte Lenya with that bitter-sweet European sophistication, as she sings, “One hasn’t got time for the waiting game….” beats Sinatra’s version hollow.

Listening a while back to Prof. Prabodh Parikh speaking with such affectionate reminiscence about literature and jazz at the American Centre, hearing the old names, Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Brubeck, Buddy Bolton, Gene Krupa, it felt for a brief moment as if one were back in that intense and vivid time. All kinds of music swirled around as we grew up in the friendly, familiar streets of South Bombay. We’d listen as much to Rafi and Talat, to Subbalakshmi’s Meera bhajans as to jazz singers of another generation.

Most of the jazz spoke of experiences far removed from one’s own, of love, loss and betrayal, smoke-thickened voices that spoke of adult experience that we could barely imagine… The ladies sang the blues with as much passion and pain as any disillusion-soaked male voices.

And as Prof. Parikh spoke of the Kalbadevi beat and the Bhuleshwar blues, I felt I could have added the Churchgate chukker; my sisters and I, listening to Radio Ceylon and VOA, buying 78’s at Rhythm House, walking with friends at tea-time to Alibaba at the Gateway or to Moka Bar which had the city’s first waitresses, or Bistro’s, or Bombelli’s at Churchgate, to listen to live bands and singing whenever we had the chance. Standing at the mike in the musty studios of AIR, belting out Caterina Valente’s ‘Siboney’, Sarah Vaughn’s “Misty’, or Peggy Lee’s ‘Hey There,’ or that other anthem of our generation, ‘Summer Time.’

I recall competing with Asha Puthli at a Time and Talents club competition at the Green’s Hotel (where the Taj Intercontinental now stands), and how she walked off with first prize into a dazzling future, with her brilliant rendition of ‘Malaguena.’

Then there was the band leader Chic Chocolate whose daughter Ursula was in my class at school, and we used to pass each other the lyrics of songs like ‘These Foolish Things’ and ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,’ during the interminable science and maths classes.
Prof. Parikh said something which rang absolutely true: listening to jazz, listening to those great musicians and their instruments, the trumpet or saxophone, or the alto-sax, or just their voices, improvising or singing with gut-wrenching immediacy, brought instant recognition. Our own lives may have lacked the implied self-destructiveness, the enduring of the unendurable, the flirting with disaster (we actually had normal, healthy, happy girl lives), then why that glad, unrestrained reaching out? Of course it had something to do with the books we read, the movies we watched but it felt as if the music we listened to had all the answers to the secrets of adulthood.

I remember my older sister getting smacked when she was about seventeen, on my mother’s discovering an almost illegible scribble tucked away under her panties, believing some oaf had inscribed a love note to her precious darling. “I touch your lips and all at once the sparks go flying…,” copied hurriedly from the radio before rushing off to school one morning.

If I were to name My Song at this point in time, it would be September Song with Lotte Lenya saying the words, “When you meet with a young man early in spring, they court you in song and rhyme, but if you examine the goods they bring, they’ve little to offer but the words they sing, and the plentiful waste of time of day, the plentiful waste of time…” and the counterpoint: “Oh the days dwindle down to a precious few, September, November…and these few precious days I’ll spend with you, these precious days I’ll spend with you.”