These days, much to my surprise, I am finding great solace in cine music. A diehard Carnatic music fan, I wonder why I am deriving so much comfort and zing from old Tamil Cine music, especially the late ’70s and ’80s hits of Illayaraja’s.
I think as close kin and friends are moving away spatially and mentally and as old familiar landscapes are giving way to malls and apartments, these songs are the only intact remnants from the past that are still endowed with energy to connect me to that lost way of life. A single note from an old Tamil song is able to catapult me back to that forgotten atmosphere!
As a young girl, sitting in the terrace of my grandmother’s house, I remember listening to the love song Bhoopalam Isaikkum. It was a cold evening and I tried to nestle into the branches of the beautiful coral tree for warmth. The song came wafting in the air, while I sat rubbing the seeds of the tree (familiarly known with children as soodu kottai) and applying on my skin for warmth. For one thing I couldn’t understand why “Bhoopalam” a morning raga was being played in the evening and secondly the song was not even cast in Bhoopalam raga. Yet there was a lilt in the song, which soothed me in my aloneness. Somewhere in its lyrics, was the line about “two minds finding sukam (comfort/joy)” and indeed I felt one with the tree. The coral tree (which no longer stands) springs in my mind and the warmth of its seed pervades my skin when I listen to that song even today.
In my eleventh year or so, for Pillayar Chathurthi, Amma got new anklets for me. Wearing it I went to a shop nearby, when a boy from a nearby slum gave a wolf whistle and sang “Thanga changili minnum paingili” (glowing lass with golden chain). Typically I was not offended (even at that age!). I smiled. I can never forget the song which I have forever associated with my first
acknowledgment of the male gaze.
The haunting song “Thendral vandu theendumbodu” (When the breeze caresses…) from Avataram invariably makes me cry— possibly because it speaks of the naive love between a blind girl and the village idiot, probably because the song explores the notion of “colours of love” and possibly because the song came at a time when I was standing on the peak of a Himalayan relationship blunder, with a “You are so stupid” flag aloft. One word, one note from that song is sufficient to unlock buried gates in my consciousness and let the tears gush through. This more recent song is of course dedicated to all my failed and failing relationships.
There is something extraordinarily tranquil about listening to these old Tamil songs from a transistor late in the night. The voices of SPB, Malaysia Vasudevan, Illayaraja, Jency (my favourite), S Janaki, spark off
a flutter of memories. They remind me of card games, eating under the moonlight, climbing trees, stealing mangoes, petty skirmishes with boys, feeding the cows, chasing the crows hovering over vadams, red-coloured buses, water pumps, swaying gooseberry and guava trees, staircases littered with damp leaves, grandmother’s rasam and mother’s lap.
Songs like “Ore naal”, “Ilaya nila”, “Kadal oviyam,” “Illamai enum poongatru”, songs from films Nizhalgal, Ninaivellam Nithya, Johnny, heat my blood as adolescent memories course through my mind. I can literally feel the brush of my cotton sungudi skirts against my thighs, the smell of coconut oil and jasmine on my long-thick hair, the fragility of the compulsory glass bangles on my wrists, the stain of Bril ink on my forefinger, my love for the forbidden lipstick, the hidden Kamal Hassan poster amidst school notebooks, Nancy Drew novels, bad marks in maths… ah! Life!