Of fathers, sons and jukeboxes
I am at my vulnerable most when I sing.
And yet, time and again, I consciously allow myself to lay bare the inability of my vocal chords to produce sound waves that don’t have an uncanny resemblance to the racket made by a furious mathematics professor, with an unkempt beard, on a worn out board with a half broken jagged piece of chalk, trying to drill home the intricacies of differential calculus into a few receptive minds and numerous others not so attuned.
The only reason I’m more than willing to do that is because till about a few years ago, my son used to make me feel as if I am the favourite disciple of Goddess Saraswati. He would sleep only to the sound of my singing, and had me worried for a while about him growing up to be tone deaf. He’s older now, and knows better. But we’ve brought him up well; he’s not mean about it and knows how to keep up a pretence. And my attempts always make him smile. He’s not irritated by them. For now. Love and time are all the ingredients you need when cooking up something special with your kids. And I try and make up for my lack of ability with a truckload of enthusiasm, and continue to croak, reasonably sure that he would look back on these days with fondness.
Because I do. The only difference was that my Dad could sing; Oh, could he sing! Some genes skip a generation!
And whenever he sang, it would be another deft touch, a slight nudge, amongst numerous others, that would end up moulding the overall personalities of his kids. An otherwise reserved and introverted personality, the expressiveness that accompanied his singing was perhaps my first introduction to the magic that ensues when you find a way to satiate your passion. And to the euphoric high that invariably accompanies.
Every song collection has a long unheard melody. Sometimes, it’s a masterpiece you’d somehow managed to grow away from as new ones found their way into your realm of collected treasures. But it’s there. Always.
Sometimes, the juke box is the medial temporal lobe of your cranial mass where memories are being stacked up as an anthology. Waiting for you to stumble upon the one as you shuffle through the collection. You do. And you smile.
