When it comes to ethnic folk music I find it really hard to
write much about the musical genius it embodies. I don’t find a spate of words
as much as I can feel. Craft eludes me so much that I often abandon speaking
about it entirely. Much like the love we hide, and know as we age that those
were the best ones we ever felt, or rather hit us and often become the only
flight we manage to take during our diurnal grime: as we think, ponder,
romance, amorously, and create a sort of dreamy conduit between time lost and
the time we have. Bipul Chettri’s composition ‘Asaar’ evokes such smouldering
stirrings inside me. Like the gyrating showers of rain during Asaar, monsoon,
in Kalimpong. It touches me so much that each time I listen to it, a dainty
batch of memories, which I'd until today, or for so long only regarded as being
the sundry details of past, conjure up into starry wisps of fancies, fables and
a fresh spring of such feelings I'd forgotten my sleepy town still has to
offer.
I can’t claim that the musician and I meet somewhere in
ether, but there’s certainly one space where our worlds collide and collapse at
the same time – a place where we long so much to go back home. The euphonic mix
is so reminiscent of the mist, the springs and the bustle, and so craftily
characteristic of the phonetic, auricular language we speak, Nepali, that it
leaves you with no other way but to slip and fall – back in time, in the spaces
that make the town, and to a string of sweet moments you may have had, once,
there, in that town, where you still live and look so young. Especially to me,
it is so special that it reminds me of all the oddities that make Kalimpong
what it is, things which I’ve stopped regarding ever since I started living in
the capital city, Delhi. I’m hoping this to be something we share in equal
measure, as he, like me, has been here since long, and was in pmany ways, I'm
assuming, reclaiming feelings lost in time.j
There’s a certain way in which I’d like to take you through
this song, to our tiny little town, as I write this. Before we begin you'll
have to turn on the ‘Sound Cloud’ link and let it stream - and get ready to run
in the rain, slip, fall and feel.
https://soundcloud.com/bchettri
It’s early in the morning and as I wake up I can hear the
sibilance, the hiss of the first showers of monsoon all around me: In the
leaves, the wooden walls of my room, and the corrugated sheets we call roof. My
house is surrounded by a tiny wood comprising giant ferns, geraniums, petunias,
orchids, a windy bamboo groove, towering tall trees and generous patches of
lush green underbrush. I slip out of my bed and walk into the kitchen where my
mother hands me a cup of tea. My father is making his morning offerings to the
Gods, and my brother is still asleep tucked inside the cloudy cotton of quilt.
I’m in my porch now already, all so keen and with a natural penchant for what
the day may have to offer. I can see Darjeeling hill far beyond the white and
pink blush of the cherry blossom tree, veiled behind sparse patches of cloud
wafting across like the giant but shy fishes of the sea. A translucent curtain
of water in forming in front of my eyes as it streams down the inclined end of
the roof. The air I breathe in is like the thin sheets of rejuvenation one
rightfully deserves in life and the atmosphere is clearing out gradually as it
pours, and as I reconcile from the shards of dream, from deep sleep, one I've
not had for years now.
It would turn into rueful wastage of time if I stayed home
today. Before my mother can convince me of her culinary prowess I pull the dry,
black umbrella from a corner and scamper out unfurling its rolled-up diaphragm
so anxious to breathe and get drenched, as it shelters me under its bat like
wings. I slip as I jump out but only skew a little and regain my balance I
almost lost in all that excitement. I am wearing a pair of white rubber
slippers with blue soles and as my feet forages into the wood like a floater it
gets soiled with muddy suspensions. I can hear rain patter incessantly on top
of my head creating a symphonic rhythm of droplets under my sheltering dome –
with brief interludes of my mother’s voice as she beckons me back for
breakfast. I’m young as a colt today and am carelessly hopping down the narrow
path that leads me down to my grandfather’s house, with the spring running
beside me in equal furtive mirth. Owing to the inclined notations of the
landscape it makes my foray into this day of deluge even easier. I arrive at a
fallow spot where I can see the terraced fields yet to be sown stretched down
on either sides till as far as my eyes can scale, after making my way through
the bowing boughs of old willows, sleek, upright Japanese bamboos and grounded
cardamoms lapping my shins like waves of green. I'm now standing at the edge of
the mossy, rectangular water reservoir and as I look down I'm wondering if I
should carefully clamber down or just jump. A mischievous impulse makes me leap
suddenly and I fall into the dug-out canal made to irrigate the fields. I'm
slipping and am being swept down by the slush and spring as I try and keep my
black umbrella aloft, like the mast of a boat. Bara, the old man who ploughs
our field is waving at me as he makes his pair of ox turn at the edge of one of
the terraces. Bhuwani, the woman who cuts grass for our cows points the curvy
sickle at me to mean, you batty boy. And Pusu, who is filling up a gagri of
water screams at me from afar. They all burst out in laughter as I slide down
through Nainey kaka's legs upending him, as the cans go flying off his hands
creating a white flash of milky veil in the sky above me. Stop.
