The year was 1986. I just entered into REC (now NIT) Rourkela loaded with dreams. Being fund of music from childhood, I perennially murmer music on my lips and inside my mind, occasionally in my dream too.
On a November day that year, close to noon the ward boy of our hostel delivered me a letter sent by mail. Those were the days handwriten letters was the most common mode of communication when cell phones were strictly fantasy. The only phone we had in our hostel was an internal in-campus landline in the Superintendent's room downstairs. Face and Book were two separate words with distinct meanings, juxtaposing them to form a social media platform was still a greater fantasy, until Mark Zuckerberg made it a reality decades later.
I opened the letter in a flash with excitement, singing this song from an ongoing hit movie at the theaters at that time named "NAAM" -
CHITTHI AYEE HAI CHITTHI AYEE HAI,CHITTHI AYEE HAI WATAN KI MITTI LAYEE HAI"
Roughly transliterated.....
"Letter has arrived, letter has arrived,
Carrying soil from homeland it has arrived".
Though Rourkela was hardly very far from Bhubaneswar by today's standard, for the somesick in me who never ventured out of Bhubaneswar all his life, Rourkela was a city in a faraway land. A letter from family and friends was like Manna Dew, a breath of fresh air, the petrichor of a scent after fresh rains on a parched land.
A senior walking by just heard me singing and rudely interrupted my reverie laced mood by handing me a tight slap on my cheek. I was unlucky for not wearing glasses those days, for at least my classmates those who wore spectacles were asked to remove their glasses before getting slapped, a la, a rattlesnake rattles its tail or a Cobra hisses raising its hood to give prior warning. I wasn't so lucky. Though not entirely unexpected from Seniors those days, his slap came like a bolt from the blue without any warning, like the bite of a Russel's viper or a Cottonmouth. I had to silently bear it with a mix of fear and anger.
My only fault was singing the song too loud for the Senior's ears. He told me to finish the song. I had no other option but to acquiesce and oblige. After listening to the song the Senior said - "You have a decent voice and a good memory. Practice it well and sing it during the upcoming Spring Festival", as he melted away jumping downstairs. That's all the compliment I got from him in lieu of the slap and my impromptu song.
Today earlier this morning when I heard the news of the death of this great Ghazal singer Pankaj Udhas earlier this morning at a relatively young age of 72, it instantly propelled me on a time machine back to the halcyon days of my college life, the slap I got singing one of the maestro's better known songs. Akin to the slap I received that noon, the news was like a slap on a Monday morning to shugg off my jaded nerves. Not a great connoisseur of Ghazals, but when I ever listen to a Grazal, two faces invariably come to my mind - Jagjit Singh and the smiling, cherubic Pankaj Udhas. Jagjit Singh passed away more than a decade ago. Pankaj Udhas's demise marks end of an era. Mortal men, immortal melodies...
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