en goaded by envy, pettiness or prejudice. Against what, and against whom? I certainly couldn't picture her as a frustrated diva. It took me many more such instances to divine exactly what I was up against. From "what kind of family" do I come? A chosen family, a special family, a family gifted with music since three generations.
For people who -- after having ground away the stipulated years in university, higher studies, apprenticeships, etc -- trudge up and down the steep ladder of seniority, it must be extremely galling to see the seemingly uneducated, tasteless, loose-living, filthy-rich upstarts of the Indian film industry leave them yards behind in the rat-race. Predictably, the female singer was consigned to the bottom rung of their esteem. Depending upon the sensibilities of the person, and regardless of actualities, she was labelled bai-ji, gaayika, gaanewali, kothewali, devdasi, etc. The list is quite endless; I had to learn to cope with it.
The earliest memory I have of my mother, Mrs Asha Bhosle, is a fleeting montage of doorbells rung very late in the night, a sobbing woman hugging me back to sleep, the strains of strange, repetitive singing emanating from behind a closed door... I bang on the door wanting to go in, but am roughly pulled away by a man when the music threatens to cease. Later, I learned that that was a routine day in the life of my father: guarding Aai against all impediment which may have prevented her from singing for their supper. I have erased my father from my memory, and with him, some of my own childhood: a defence mechanism, people call it. From the sordid tales I hear from our old cook, I must have desperately needed to do it. Suffice to say that it is the stuff which has fed scriptwriters and novelists fr ..... |
