Image of painting by Sudhir Patwardhan
Mrinalini Harchandrai
“Once the band starts, everybody starts swaying from one side of the street to the other, especially those who drop in and follow the ones who have been to the funeral. These people are known as “the second line” and they may be anyone passing along the street who wants to hear the music. The spirit hits them and they follow along to see what’s happening. Some follow only a few blocks, but others follow the band until the whole affair is over.”
– Satchmo, My Life in New Orleans, by Louis Armstrong (Signet Books, 1955)
Prelude
In Sanskrit, ‘anahata’, means unstruck or contactless sound. In Hindu Vedic and Buddhist traditions it refers to a soul-force that forms the matrix of the universe; a subtle, pervasive dimension of sound usually only accessed by mystics who have managed to subdue the turbulence of their minds and evolve their consciousness. For all the rest, there is mundane ‘struck’ sound, created by blowing into a trumpet or drumsticking on a cymbal, etc. A distant, second-cousin to the ever-reverbing frequencies of the spirit, and that reminds humankind, down here on this earthy realm of car honks and scratchy blackboards, of their divinely blissful origins.
At home, my jazz-loving father’s CD player provided transcendence quite often and loud. Tony Meehan’s drum solo in Take Five was played on loop. “Do you want to hear it again?” went Dad’s rhetorical refrain. The canvas of this struck sound became a meditation in perfection, striking all the right chords in the heart plexus to lift existence from mundanity. There were others he favoured too – Armstrong, Ella, Buddy, BB, Coltrane, Miles… All their notes seeped into the cells of his family members creating acoustic patterns. You can actually see these patterns. At least outside the body. In the study of cymatics, plates with a layer of sand on them, form geometric shapes when exposed to different sounds. Imagine if your cells formed nodal patterns unique to the sound of baritone scatting or a blues riff. Each pattern morphing kaleidoscopically before your eyes to changes in vibration.
I imagine the city I inhabit, Bombay, as a harbour of ground beats and polytonality, its life exuberance manifested in all its struck sounds. When each Bombay note strikes my cells, it creates its own cymatics that goes marrow-deep. Mingling with the jazz tracks already laid out in my nucleii. Sometimes my emotions can be a thousand dhobis thwacking their washing in my blood or, at other times, a koel-call in a leaf-lined neighbourhood. My thoughts can flush back and forth on junction tracks or (albeit rarely) lose their signal at the Parsi Tower of Silence. The beat, somehow, is always there, informing the pulse rate, hitting the spirit and striking mandalas in mitochondria. A beat that’s full of Bombayness.
**
BELLY BOP
He pushed it further
down in the viscera
of undigested matter
occasionally it tromboned
from his wrenched gut
“The stars went out and so did the moon *
The singer stopped playing and went to bed”
the man had replaced
his taste, for a dictated diet
wife, kids, extended
family, were force-fed
he silenced the drums
in the line of duty
clogging the veins
the breathing drains, of his heart
“While the Weary Blues echoed through his head *
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead”.
*‘The Weary Blues’, Langston Hughes.
MALABAR HILL SIXTO
The gulmohur was soprano
with temple bells
past the Malabar Hill Club,
a crane crunched
in iron tones
raising real estate
at the post office
the telegram’s red grave
a thunder single-deckered
through a scratchy road
tourists yakkety-yak
over lost signals in 4G
outside the Towers of Silence
a koel ululated its lament
to the plastic chair ghost
of Café Naaz
where once we climbed up on its music
but it slipped away like the sugarman.
*Song references ‘Climb Up On My Music’, ‘I’ll Slip Away’, ‘Sugar Man’, Sixto Rodrigues.
SURGERY WITH SATCHMO
“Right to the end
just like a friend”
The tank played oxygen
a whooshing track
like blood slushing through valves
cellphone on the pillow
is an iTunes stethoscope
an old friend, Louis Armstrong
his dark-nutty voice
was thick with buried treasure
digging up la vie en rose
like the lump knotted
within a veiny network
of dad’s liver.
Ella joined in with summertime flashbacks
saying “one of these mornings
you’re gonna rise up singing”
they rolled the pneumatic bed
down the elevator
and Louis said “what a wonderful world”
all the way to the OT
an opera theatre
where cells store memories
of life jazz under anaesthesia.
Dad rose up
half an organ lighter
warbling “who’s sorry now”
channelling bandstand spirit
with ventilator intubation vocals
the ECG beeped and pulsed
flanking each pause
like a life extension
in rhythm
and blues time.
* Song references ‘Who’s Sorry Now’, Ted Snyder, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (Louis Armstrong version); ‘What A Wonderful World’, Bob Thiele and George David Weiss (Louis Armstrong version); ‘Summertime’, George Gershwin and Edwin DuBose Heyward (Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong version).
ROPE TRICKS
We sickening smacks
to fleshblood selfdom
we carry our whip lashes
like the Potraj
roaming theatres
of self-flagellation
we pull rawly
at peeling skin
appealing the goddess
to refill the pot
blister bags grow
we learn false histories
in yawning classrooms
and strip away reality
along with survival instincts
we compete as benched hostages
of benchmark ambitions
rusting from propaganda, lesions
of conditioned apprenticeship
we enslave ourselves
and teach the young
with whomping ease
to wear ankle-bell degrees
we wear gaudy hats
and delicate waist-chains
like short-leash monkeys
imitating dancing bears
and geriatric men to revving
drums of rudderless instruction
we lose sight
our marks of distinction
lost in the sea
of monophone.
TAXIWALLAH
It can get free
that poetry inside you
it tends to be held down
in the fears of others
who claim you for theirs
it can be hard to hear
especially through
the counsels and opinions
that lie like traffic jams
on your highway
and cause buildings to swing
around their foundations
leaving you
neither here nor there
but it just happens
you cannot ignore it
this voice within that scares you
with its meter up
its unreasonable requests
quite out of sync
with otherly love
yet you recognize yourself
within it
it takes over
like an expert cabbie
navigating Mumbai roadblocks
and intersections
overtaking jittery Bollywood crooning
from a faded radio in the next car
taking you deeper
into the mill lands
while saving you
and pushing you through
like a green signal.
SINGING THE GREENS
At lasting
in a slow sax breath
deeply like Etta
pressing her beautiful bones
to a dream
Mine at last
you blossomed
before the transluscence of my eyes
we see emerald swaying
for miles, Porgy and Bess
play the happiness we seek
while cheek to cheek we sweep
the azulejos
the city packed its bags
and left us like a gambler’s streak
as the firefly night
pulled the spectrum
over its sensual curves
tinkling its stories to us
nature found her children
once more glistening
with dewy rapture
under gauzy webs
and sheets from the clouds
our home was built from
the seed of four chambers
and the oxygen of dawns
running free as rivers
curious butterflies with time limits
flecked around
to examine the wide verandah
chiming mezzo in the breeze
— you know what I mean —
ready to sip on our tranquil nectar
of new life and all that jazz.
* Song references: ‘At Last’, songwriters Mack Gordon and Harry Warren (Etta James version); ‘Cheek To Cheek’, songwriter Irving Berlin (Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong version);
‘Feeling Good’, Nina Simone.
*******
Notes --Poems excerpted from A Bombay In My Beat, Bombaykala (2018). --Prelude written specially for The Beacon
Mrinalini Harchandrai is the author of 'A Bombay in My Beat' (Bombaykala Books, 2018), a collection of poetry. Her poem won first prize in The Barre (2017) and she was a finalist for the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize 2019 and received an Honourable Mention for the CID Pearlman Performance Project 2021. Her unpublished novel manuscript is longlisted for the McKitterick Prize 2021 and was selected as Notable Entry for the Disquiet International Literary Prize 2019. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2018 and shortlisted for Columbia Journal Spring 2020 Contest. Her work has been anthologized in RLFPA Editions’ Best Indian Poetry 2018, The Brave New World of Goan Writing (2018, 2020) and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry 2020-2021.
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