Songs in traffic

Illustration/Uday Mohite

I've learnt dozens of songs, thanks to mean rickshawallahs and cabbies. Let me explain.

A few years ago, I had what I call a ‘Mumbai moment.' I was in a rickshaw in heavy traffic, and every time the signal turned red, the rickshaw driver pulled out a book from under his bum, muttered to himself, and put the book back when the light turned green. I asked him what he was doing. "Madam, main English seekh raha hoon," (Madam, I'm learning English), he replied. I was so impressed! This man had taken one of the city's worst daily nightmares - being stuck in traffic - and turned it on its head. Every time his rickshaw stopped, he learnt a new word or phrase in English. I was dazzled at his resourcefulness in creating an opportunity from adversity.

I'm not that committed to using all my time productively - I also enjoy dawdling, I think dawdling is a greatly underappreciated joy. But I like to use frustrating time to pump up my mood - I learn new songs. This started when I lived in Delhi, over a decade ago, when I would forever be waiting for a cab or rickshaw to go home. Stupidly, the capital of India didn't always freely have cabs and rickshaws on the streets like Bombay does: you had to have the number of every colony taxi thekedar and tell him you want a cab - uff! Now of course, there's Uber, Ola. So I would be waiting endlessly on the main road for a cab or rickshaw in the rush hour - and you know how insulting they can be even when you're waving frantically like a semaphore: they won't even deign to say no, scores of empty cabs and rickshaws will just speed past, as if you were invisible. I would get increasingly furious and frustrated, so I soon started practising the songs I was trying to learn, to lighten my mood. Often, these were songs in Bengali, or in languages not my own, of which I knew only a smattering, or fluently or not at all.

By now I can sing songs in about 12 languages, including English, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew, and a few Hindustani classical songs my mother has taught me, in Brajbhasha. I've always had a tremendously greedy interest in languages. When I was a kid, I loved to curl up with the dictionary and study the etymology of words - that anaconda, the snake, came from the Sinhala hena kanda, meaning lightning stem. And like most Indians, I've always loved music too. We had regular music classes at St Teresa's Convent, then I was in the college choir at St Xavier's College, Mumbai, and later with Alfred D'Souza's Stop Gaps Choir for a bit. I'm totally smitten by the lyricism of Bengali, so I've learnt several Bengali songs, as a way of learning the language. Jeanne Coello, my college pianist friend, introduced me to pop and rock, the Beatles, Queen and Tom Lehrer. My uncle, whom we call Yeshwant Bappa, was in Kuwait for years, and always brought us cassettes of wonderful Western classical and pop music in different languages. When I worked as a journalist in Paris in the '90s and travelled all over Europe on work, my sense of European languages and music was keenly refined. But also, it was tremendous fun learning them. Once, I was spending Christmas with a German friend, Marc Loehrer, a big opera buff, in his tiny hometown, Würzburg. He threw a big Christmas party, and there was a mountain of dishes to be washed after. We took turns at it, and when it was my turn, he taught me an Italian aria, La donna e mobile (Woman is fickle) from Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, and by the time the dishes were done, I had learnt the aria as well.

A few years ago, I was curating a film project, The Die is Caste, with films and music on caste issues, for the Kochi Muziris Biennale. I was coordinating with a Malayali colleague, who was often busy, so I endlessly heard his caller tune, AR Rahman's Vellai Pookal (White Flowers, in Tamil) from Mani Ratnam's Kannathil Muthamittal (A Peck on the Cheek). Bas, I fell in love with the song, and by the time the film programme was ready, I knew the song as well. Now I rarely have trouble when friends keep me waiting or appointments are delayed: there are so many songs to learn.

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist.
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com