Bhagirathi Aunty And Her Harmonium

Cheeniya · Jun 16, 2017

@Viswamitra
My dear Viswa

Viswamitra said: ↑

We are not Goldie Hawn to remain young forever.
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You may be wondering why I have taken your last line first to respond. The answer is simple. Goldie is my all-time favorite. She is about three years younger to me but she looks like my granddaughter! No one has mastered the art of defying aging better than her. May her tribe increase!

Viswamitra said: ↑

Harmonium is my favorite instrument
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Harmonium is the favourite of more than 50% of the Indian population probably because it is the easiest musical instrument to play. It is the favourite of all Bajan groups because it smoothly merges with the chorus.

Viswamitra said: ↑

I am wondering what was going to be your response when that elderly lady asked you, "Is this your wife?"
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More than me, my wife was certain what my answer would be. To tell you the truth, I myself had no clue about what reply to give. My wife, of course, knows me better than I do!
Sri

SCSusila · Aug 14, 2017

Nice post , both funny and making me think ayyo pavame .
Feeling sorry for both . Ayyo pavam ,the dead man who had no peace when alive , so what use of harmonium getting tbrown out after hes dead and gone !
. And Ayyo pavam for the lady , troubled by guilt, to throw off her precious possession . No use for both .
Life is very complicated and nonsensical . Cannot understand why some things happen like they do , why people behave like they do . Someone sitting up there is having fun pulling the puppet strings !

Cheeniya · Aug 14, 2017

@SCSusila
Harmonium as you may be knowing is the principal instrument in Bajan groups. Even if you do not know how to play that instrument, you can still carry it in a Bajan group and keep pumping air into it! The Bajan groups are usually a medley of the most incompatible voices and the resultant noise can absorb any sound, let alone that of an harmonium. This instrument has a major role in Katha Kalakshepam when the artist breaks into a song in between his story telling! I know one of them who used to shed tears moved by his own singing!
Bhagirathi aunty must be thankful to be able to throw away her harmonium as she is struck with acute arthritis now. But her poor husband tried all gimmicks to get rid of it but could accomplish it only through his death!

Jeeves · Nov 18, 2017

Cheeniya said: ↑

Last week a friend of mine who lived with me in Triplicane during my childhood informed me that Bhagirathi aunty who lived in the ten-tenement apartment with us is in a suburb of Chennai now. When my friend met her in some function, she was making earnest enquiries about me. He gave me her address communicating her desire to meet me and I visited her last Sunday with my wife. Before I could introduce my wife to her, she asked me ‘Is that your wife?’ I was about to give her a naughty reply, when my wife knowing me well pinched me from behind and I quickly sobered down to say ‘Yes, yes, of course’. Bhagirathi, who is now in her early nineties, is over 15 years my senior. When she moved into our tenement, I was around ten. She was proficient in harmonium which Jawaharlal Nehru hated from the bottom of his heart and even banned its entry in All India Radio. Her husband, who was a strong nationalist and a worshipper of Gandhi and Nehru, wanted her to stop playing harmonium and switch over to some other instrument, but she flatly refused and that caused quite a rupture in the family. Despite this rupture and periodic flare up, she became a mother of five children.

When I met her last week, she was a shrivelled lady and I just couldn’t believe that the passage of time could affect the physical appearance of a person so drastically. As I was wondering how to put it to her in a nice un-hurting way, she remarked how old I had become! ‘You look almost my age!’ she added. I swallowed the growing lump in my throat and told her that she herself bore a look that would leave no one in doubt about her age. My wife started grinding her teeth and I ignored it. After the exchange of the initial niceties, she started recalling the young days. When I asked about each friend of mine, she would say that he had kicked the bucket. As she rattled on the names of all my friends who kicked the bucket, I could not help feeling that there should have been a terrible shortage of buckets to kick. She remembered how and when each one passed away. At one stage, I was scared to enquire about any more friends of mine and switched over to her family. ‘You know my younger brother in Coonoor whom you have met when you were Bank Agent there in the seventies?’ she asked me and when I said of course I remembered him so well, she told me that he passed away last month!

You know what a buoyant person I am and she made me feel like a professional pallbearer within the first half an hour of our meeting. I asked if she still kept her harmonium, she said she threw it away after her husband’s death as a mark of respect to his memory. I could not help thinking how many quarrels they would have had about that harmonium when he was alive. He would even plea with her with folded hands to throw away the instrument in the name of Nehruji but she would not budge. This made me wonder why we respect a person’s wishes more after he is dead than when he was alive. I know a man who kept his parents in a small room in the rear side of his palatial house when they were alive and hardly talked to them even once a week. After their demise, he performs the annual obsequies with such fanfare that people would say that the parents were lucky to have a son like him! When I discussed this with some friends, they were of the uniform opinion that it was due to their fear that the parents who were badly treated when alive could hit them back after they were dead.

There is a serial in a Tamil channel in which the son kills the father for money and stands everyday in front of the dead man’s photo and cries buckets. The dead father is not coming as a ghost to torture his son as it is the prerogative of women treated badly and killed. This is happening in four serials today! My wife has been complaining of insomnia and wants me to take her to a sleep therapist. I tell her that there is no need for it and all that she needs to do is to stop watching the ghost serials at night!
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Jeeves · Nov 18, 2017

I loved the sense of humour in this !!!May be the sounds( the musical strains) will keep away her ex husband's spirit...ha! One of the reasons she threw away the harmonium ? I wonder

Cheeniya · Nov 19, 2017

@Jeeves
Thank you for your maiden response to my thread. Bhagirathi Mami has more obituaries up her sleeves to report than The Hindu! She mentions them all without any emotion and that makes me wonder if the age makes death an ordinary event in life. If dying is a part of living, that realisations comes only in the evening of our life.

Jeeves · Nov 20, 2017

It is very true Cheeniya
Old age or maturity, in fact, makes death " an event " in one's perception ! Unless it is the death of a youngster, nothing shocks a normal senior citize. May be the Geethacharya's words make a great impact on the souls of these individuals ! Death is just an event !

Cheeniya · Nov 21, 2017

@Jeeves

Jeeves said: ↑

Death is just an event !
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Of course it is. It happens to everyone. It is the finality of all that we worked for and cherished that gives us the fear of death. Woody Allen makes his hallmark statement saying “I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.” It is because of all the drama put up by the survivors of the dead, we get scared of it. Even the Avathars of God could not escape death. That is to say that even if God takes a human form , He needs to die.