The Statesman, 27 October 2003
Funny how the most unlikely object can transport one to a faraway world from the past, not physically but through an uncanny presence. It happened with me that, one day, tired of hearing the same, monotonous answering “tone” on my mobile phone, I wanted to change it to something else. I listened to several pieces of music before choosing a soft and pleasing melody. It sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it immediately.
That evening, as I lay on the sofa in a colourless mood, the ring of the mobile startled me. The shock was not because of the suddenness of the ring but because of the jolt to my memory sparked off by that particular musical tone. Suddenly its familiarity came flooding back, almost a decade after I had left London.
My 10-year-old daughter, a fluffy, innocent lamb then, had just started practising on the recorder. In London schools, playing an instrument was an integral part of the curriculum and my daughter selected the recorder because she liked it. She had to carry out regular practice on the recorder as part of her homework and, as our house was small, I spent the evenings trying to drown her off-key notes, short of putting offending cotton in my ears! That would have hurt her delicate sensibility. I couldn’t also just get up and go for an evening stroll in the London winter when she practised. She would have guessed that I was trying to avoid her musical sessions and burst into tears. An indulgent parent myself, I could not bear to see her cry. So I suffered her screeching sounds in silence, as she blew on her instrument in the next room.
I don’t know exactly when it happened. One evening, at the end of her lesson, it suddenly dawned on me that I actually liked what she played! Practice may not have made her perfect, but it had certainly helped her in honing her musical skills. It became a treat for me to listen to her mellow notes on the recorder, though her short breath still made her play it haltingly.
The high-water mark in her career was when she was selected to represent her school on an all-schools orchestra that was to play in London’s Royal Symphony Hall. We were her proud parents that evening, sitting in the audience, as she took her place in the 40-odd strong band.
But she could not go far in that direction. After a year or so, we had to wing our way back to India, with bag and baggage. The demands and equations of school life in India were vastly different for our daughter, and so the poor recorder was neglected.
Her favourite tune, as long as she had played the recorder, was “Lara’s Theme”, which was also my favourite. When she played it, with her own genteel strain, the entire house became quiet. The crisp notes of the stirring tune would pierce right through my senses, like dewdrops from tree leaves cracking the still surface of a stagnant pond at the break of dawn. It was this tune that I had, unwittingly, “fed” into my mobile phone’s answering service. So when the phone rang, it melted the frozen image of my 10-year-old girl from its hibernation in the recesses of my mind. I could hear, and actually see, my little one intently blowing on her recorder. The little recorder had been irretrievably lost in the corridors of time, along with my daughter’s childhood and her brief romance with music.