[Author’s note: It is with great sorrow I learned yesterday that Lata Mangeshkar has passed. February 6, 2022. She was ninety-two years old and shall remain a significant part of the soundscape of our species for ever. She gave the greatest comfort to me at a crucial time in my young life by her songs, her emotional purity and the balm of her voice. I can honestly say I that love her. She will remain in my life through her recorded voice, lead me through tropical forests, up into blue mountains, across parching sand, along the shores of love and longing and up to the doors of temples. Lillooet, Feb. 7, 2022.]
The first time I came to Canada, it hit me like a rogue wave. The circumstances were as unusual as was our route. Within a day or so of first learning of the impending relocation and being required to give away most of my eleven year old boy possessions, I was looking at Baton Rouge in the rear-view mirror of a four-door sedan as we crossed the Mississippi River. My two sisters and a Chow-Chow dog accompanied me in the back seat. We proceeded West to Texas and when we backed out of my grandmother's driveway in Beaumont, I left pieces of myself behind, emotionally and culturally. I returned with my wife and two sons in 2007 and got them back.
My mother phoned my grandmother from a gas-station in Oklahoma later that first day on the road and was told that the FBI had been asking around and that she had told them she didn't know where we were headed. I knew my Dad was running but I was never told what from. Up in Oregon, my sister and I met a talking crow at a gas station and that lightened my mood a little bit. Temporarily. We got stuck in a blizzard for three days and I figured the cops would get us at the motel in Oregon.
We rented an apartment in Lynn Valley and the snow was about a foot and a half deep. I remember one song in particular from those six months, Glen Campbell’s rendition of Galveston. The song was like a cruel joke and made me awful lonesome for my grandparent's beach cabin on the Gulf of Mexico only a few miles away from Galveston. I missed my Boy Scout Troop, my school mates and the South. We next moved to an upper-floor rental suite off Marine Drive near Mosquito Creek.
I made friends with a Yugoslavian boy and his family next door. In the basement of our rental suite, I found human company for my own blues. Our landlord, I had heard was an Indian. I had glanced him once or twice through the window and I was mighty curious as to what tribe he was from. I hoped it was Cherokee but that was a long-shot even to an eleven year old boy.
I decided to find out one Saturday. His door was open to the garage and I knocked at the open frame. There was no answer so I tip-toed inside a few steps to where I could see him. He was slumped in a broken chair at a small scratched-up round wooden table. There was a bottle, nearly empty, of Seagram's Whisky, a small portable red and tan leather bound record player just like the one I had left in Baton Rouge, an ashtray, a deck of Player's cigarettes and an empty glass. On the wall was a calendar with a likeness of Guru Gobindsingh and a picture of Ganesh, the elephant god.
He roused slightly as I approached the table and offered me a chair. He asked if I'd come to visit and I replied in the affirmative. He smiled like people do when a waiter plonks down their favourite dish after a long wait. Then he winced and began to rub his forehead. He smoothed his oiled hair back into place with a comb produced from the front his white linen shirt. He banged the back of his head with a mahogany-coloured fist and began to adjust his trousers, his socks, his shirt, his belt and even re-rolled his sleeves until the folds were perfect, just like my Dad always did.
He regarded the bottle, clucked his tongue and polished it off in one quaff. Then he spoke, “Mikalala, do you bant tea?”
I stared, not understanding his dialect.
He smiled broadly and tried again, “Mikalala, do you like drink chai? British tea? Red Rose?"
He mimed taking a sip of tea with his little finger protruding.
Although we only drank iced-tea down South, I instantly knew what he meant and I answered in the affirmative.
“Mikalala. Du bil hav to gut it for us two. Go to cubbort for cups and for tea. Kuttle is on stove. Choogar is by sink and also spoons. Milik is in fridge. I bil take four. OK?”
I stared again. I asked if he really wanted four cups.
“Mikalala, no, no, no. Not four cups. Du bil put four baks tea in my cup. OK. Du understan bat I mean?”
“Yes Sir. Four tea bags.”
“Good boy. Berry good boy. I bil put choogar and I bil put milik. Bring to table, OK?”
I did so and soon as the water had boiled we were busy fixing up our respective mugs. He took milk and more sugar than I would have believed possible and I had mine with sugar only. After he had squeezed out the last drop of caffeine out of the four bags and set them in the ashtray, we began to chat.
I told him about Louisiana and Texas and he told me about India. It was then I realized that he was a different kind of Indian. I had a good grasp of geography but had never encountered an East Indian person in my whole life and when my Dad had told me our landlord was an Indian man, I figured he looked a bit like an Apache.
He told me he was from the Northern part of his country and his language was called Punjabi. The province bore the name Punjab and it meant “Five Rivers” It was those five rivers that made that place such a good agricultural land. He told me his last name was Singh which meant “lion” and that he was of the Sikh Faith. He said he was supposed to wear an iron bracelet, never cut his hair, carry a knife, carry a comb and wrap his head in a turban. He smiled broadly and said that did none of those things, however.
Mr. Singh had a son, a daughter, a wife and a mother in North Vancouver. They all lived in another house he had bought for them from money he had earned working at a nearby lumber mill on the Fraser River. He added that he had also bought them yet another house which was rented out and the money from the rents helped to feed and educate his brood. I asked him why he stayed alone in the small basement. He smiled and pointed to the empty bottle.
”My bife beri angry obry time before. I am bad boy. Abry day I go Abalon Hotel and drink beri much busky. My son and my dotter beri angry. My mum beri angry. My bife hut me wit bottle ban I sleep on table. Bloody no good! I am safe here but Mikalala I am bloody bad boy. Du understan bat I mean? Abry day, abry day I go Abalon Hotel drink bloody bad boy busky until I can sleep.”
He lit a smoke and turned on the record player. It was the first time I had heard Lata Mangeshkar sing and something absolutely magical happened. I closed my eyes within a few seconds and did not open them until the record had played through one whole side. Mr. Singh had done the same. The look on his face when I opened my eyes was the same as the look on my face. We both smiled our understanding. A sixth-grade bayou boy and a forty-something alcoholic sawmill worker from the foothills of the Hindu Kush.
I discovered the real reason for the human need for music and the power behind the ability of certain of us to fill this noblest of tasks for our stricken fellows. I understood not a word of what I'd heard but I did understand with perfect clarity every note and the pictures they described. I saw the landscape, the animals, the costumes of the people, I felt the weather and I tasted the food. That was all in the instruments.
The really important thing I learned that day was that through certain voices and through music, the universal spirit can heal, encourage, soothe, challenge, tease, educate and entertain. It is this pure yielding nature which draws a person’s inherent potential to the fore. I knew this power to be feminine in aspect whether it is radiating from a male or a female.
Like a benign Xtabay, she calls a boy into the adventure of exploring unknown wilderness and when he is taller, she sings that he may forget his wounds and know rest without vigilance like certain bird songs which tell a sleeper in the forest that no harm yet approaches. They both know that they'll never get out of the woods.
I visited Mr. Singh every chance I got and he just left the door open most days. We drank brutal tea and listened to Lata records until I could sing some of them myself. I learned how to count to ten and some common phrases. I learned how to make a drink from tamarinds that tasted like a bottle of Coca Cola married a glass of iced tea and they both got drunk on lemonade. It was so good it made your teeth hurt. He talked about growing okra which he called bindi and I told him about how we turned that bindi into gumbo.
One rainy night there was a big commotion downstairs. My father called me to accompany him and we went down to Mr. Singh's suite.
“Mr. Mike! Mr. Mike! Mikalala! God dammut helup me please, Sir! My bloody bife bil kull me bun hunded pertant!”
We rushed into the room. A big young man in a turquoise turban, a young woman in a saree and an elderly woman in a saree were huddled together by the kitchen counter watching a middle-aged woman, also in a saree, repeatedly striking Mr. Singh about the head and neck with a quarter-full fifth of whisky. There was a massive goose-egg above his left temple. I believe it was the hair oil that saved him from a torn scalp. As the woman yelled and screamed in Punjabi she neglected to aim her blows properly and they all glanced off the slick surface.
My father walked between the victim and the attacker and raised his arms to the sides with palms out. The woman dropped the bottle and like a broken steam hose, the bitter venom of her personal anguish poured forth in an ever weakening stream and she staggered back to her family group after spitting in her husband's direction. They left the scene and my father checked Mr. Singh's noggin and then went upstairs. I stayed behind to make an ice-bag and brew some tea. Mr. Singh asked for the bottle his wife had dropped on the floor and I gave it to him. He unscrewed the cap and poured it down in one luxurious draught. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and adjusted all his clothes.
As I brought the tea, he put on a Lata record and lit a cigarette. Within minutes we were both on a spiritual jungle road walking behind some bullocks carrying the harvest to a market town. Water drums and flutes put purpose in our gait and a lovely young girl riding on one of the carts began to sing. We both knew we were going to a wonderful place and that we wouldn't be coming back down the hazardous road we had travelled. To have the distilled starlight of a maiden's voice like audible incense along the way, although we might not posses her, was enough. To a reasoning man, it was even fair.
With the sonic, melodic and emotive fidelity only found in the autist brain, I internalized Mr. Singh's record album collection of Lata's songs and countless were the nights she helped me sleep during the tumultuous years of my tattered adolescence in a dysfunctional family situation. I played those tunes from memory with my head, heart and marrow.
Within six months, life took me away from North Vancouver. Again with no forewarning, no plan nor possessions beyond a small suitcase of clothes. This time without my father. I found myself in Beaumont, Texas at my grandparent’s with my sisters and mother. We were told to beware of our father and that he may try to harm us. We were not to get in his car if we saw him. He had threatened to kill us all.
With the sonic, melodic and emotive fidelity only found in the autist brain, Lata Mangeshkar helped me to sleep during the tumultuous years of my tattered adolescence in a dysfunctional family situation. I played her tunes from memory with my head, heart and marrow.
A few days later, to my utter gobsmacked terrified amazement, my father appeared and we all went to Houston for several very strange years. I remember a song by Jackson Browne called Doctor My Eyes from that time in my life and it really matched how I felt. I was singing it when my family moved back to North Vancouver the second time. That was a daytime song.
But at night, Lata Mangeshkar helped me to sleep during the tumultuous years of my tattered adolescence in a dysfunctional family situation. I played her tunes from memory with my head, heart and marrow.
After my family returned to Canada, domestic things got worse and I lived as I thought best and took my medicine, just like Mr. Singh had taken his. Mine was tobacco, alcohol, hashish and mushrooms. I hunted up some of the friends that I had begun to make from grade six and although we attended the same high school, the bonds of friendship forged in six months of childhood were weakened by those interim years of absence.
I remember that a Vancouver radio station set up a booth at a strip-mall parking-lot during that second stint in Lynn Valley and played Alone Again Naturally until the platter melted. Gilbert O'Sullivan's song was like a balm to me because misery loves company. I enjoyed it no matter how many times they plugged it per day.
We moved up Mountain Highway to Kilmer Road in Lynn Valley and I fell out of touch with Mr. Singh during my high school years in North Vancouver and Squamish. Our family, literally fell apart. My father committed suicide. A subsequent step-family disintegrated. My first two marriages evaporated.
In my twenties, I sought out Mr. Singh and learned from his son that he had sold the house and had moved away. I was told that the old man had said I could come to stay in India on his farm near Rawalpindi any time I wanted. I never did make that trip.
When I was in my forties, I made friends with a janitor at one of the Post Office Depots where I worked as a letter-carrier. He traded me two Lata Mangeshkar cassettes in return for an astrological birth-chart which I computed and drew up for his new born daughter. Some time later, I met another man, a Postal Supervisor, who had a small music store in Vancouver's little India as a sideline. He sold me two cassettes of Lata Mangeshkar singing duets of ancient ghazzals with Jagjit Singh, who well may be her male equal.
Now, older than the man who introduced me to her music, I still listen to that beautiful woman sing me a little bit further down my road. And like an Irish song says, “I still haven't found what I'm looking for.”
As I go forward with my siblings, my mother, my children and my grandchild; there is a comfort in knowing that through certain voices and through music, the universal spirit can heal, encourage, soothe, challenge, tease, educate and entertain. It is this pure yielding nature which draws our inherent potential to the fore. I know this power to be feminine in aspect whether it is radiating from a male or a female.
Like a benign Xtabay, she calls a man into the adventure of re-exploring an imperfectly known wilderness and when he is ready, she sings that he may forget his wounds and know rest without vigilance, like certain bird songs which tell a sleeper in the forest that no harm yet approaches. They both know that their home is the woods.
fin