BENGALURU: If life is worth living, death is worth the wait! For in death people are immortalised and time is frozen. So long as one is alive, there is always time. And time waits for none.
So, it did happen yet again with me. In the last week of December, I lost two friends – one was an activist-filmmaker and the other was my neighbour in whose company I have spent many memorable evenings listening to his vinyl records – the Long Plays (LPs) – of the world’s most well-known composers of western classical music. Kumar, his wife Asha and friend Zubin – their four-year-old dachshund of deep tan coat with gentlest and naughty eyes have played host to me on umpteen occasions in their beautiful bungalow down the road where I live.
That was a chance meeting that turned into a friendship. I had met Asha during my morning walks some years ago. Music was the common bond. Though I confess that I am neither a student of music nor do I understand the nuances of Western classical music, I simply enjoy it. There’s something hypnotic, soulful, consoling and meditative about it that settles me down and remains with me.
And so, on some evenings that I would finish early from work I would call Asha and ask her if I could come over. I would walk down the lane to get into Sreenivasans’ house – the beautiful bungalow surrounded with Bangalore’s erstwhile green wealth that is still preserved by some old Bengalureans like a priceless heirloom.
We would settle down with an evening drink and Kumar would play the music. He had special speakers made for his music that are aesthetically placed in the wall of the sit out that opens to the quadrangle open-to-sky veranda, where Asha grows her beautiful orchids. There would be three humans, one dog and a world of joy and calm surrounding us all as Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Beethoven’s quartets and symphonies, Brahms’s cello sonata, Mozart’s compositions, Schubert’s harmonies and Zubin Mehta’s Philharmonic Orchestra among other compositions played from the vinyl LPs, which almost all his visitors mistook as his library of old files.
In fact, the first time I visited the Sreenivasans, I remember holding my heart as it pounded hard with joy and nostalgia and zipped past the five decades of memory remembering the LPs that my mother would play on her precious HMV gramophone. Hers was a collection of Hindustani classical music and in those days of childhood, none of us siblings would find it endearing. Kumar was thrilled that I recognised the neat files of hundreds of his records, which he preserved as a passionate collector. “People think they are files or old magazines. They don’t know that these are records,” he used to lament.
He would narrate their days in Germany in the ’80s and recounted the times that he stood in the queue to listen to Zubin Mehta’s compositions. The couple’s love for music was timeless, gentle and immense. I often asked them if I could interview them on their music collection and the two would smile. My diffidence stemmed from the fact that I don’t have the vaguest grasp of Western classical music structures and I just didn’t want to do a clumsy piece on something so ethereal, soul-stirring and precious. I wanted to understand Western classical music before I could interview them.
Kumar was a narrator of life’s anecdotes, most of them were about his love for music. Those cold winter evenings in Berlin and his meeting with Zubin Mehta, where the veteran signed his record for Kumar and told him that he should not buy the tickets for his next show and that he would pay for them, were among his many other narrations with music in the background.
Kumar and Asha are years elder to me but in friendship age is no bar. He left us on December 29. I did not have the faintest notion that my promise of doing an interview with them and their music would be written as a tribute to Kumar. But here I am doing just that. I’m sure he is tuned in wherever he is with Asha and Zubin, whom he endearingly addressed as Zubin papa (child) this side!