Music and Loneliness

While returning home today after having my sumptuous dinner at Subway, I chanced upon a Folk Music concert going on beside the fish market in Keshtopur. Organised by the Viswakarma Puja Committee, Keshtopur, the concert featured little known singers singing Bangla folk music. The audience gathered seemed pretty familiar with the music. Although I am a complete stranger to Bangla folk music, I was attracted by the song. The singer was not extraordinarily gifted and you could feel the roughness in his voice; but the music – it had an enticing quality. I don’t know but that song aroused a strong sensation of loneliness within me. It had that haunting quality, so characteristic of folk music. I believe that folk music, if it is really good, has the capacity to linger on for a long time in your head and heart. And this song, that the singer was singing did stay behind in my mind. The song had a visual quality to it that made me envisage a lonely person walking down the dirt-ridden lanes of Kolkata and that song playing in the background. He was lost, bereaved of his friends and his family. Altogether alone. And the music – as if all thoughts from the farthest corners of his mind had taken the form of words and melody and beats and had surrounded him, lamenting upon his loss. It was a powerful image; I feel I could write a whole script or story around it. In the same way, as the image of a plastic bag, flying round and round in an alley, compelled Sam Mendes to create ‘American Beauty’. Or as Gulzar had said about that scene in Kamleshwar’s ‘Kitne Pakistan’ where the handkerchief of the heroine is falling down in a rotational motion from the foot-bridge, that he could write a complete novel out of that one scene. It was an image as powerful as that. I wish someday I would be able to include that scene and song in a movie that I’ll make.