An Unlikely Alchemy with Song and Butter
On a dawn like this one, my head on your lap, as you sit cross-legged, I tease you through the hole in your faded, nine-yard, turquoise silk sari, ant-burrow my finger deep into your belly button to seek its warm, sandalwood-scented, underground secrets.
At first light, unmindful of my mischief, you sing Shriman Narayana, Shriman Narayana, a suprabhata in Sanskrit, to wake the supreme Hindu deity Vishnu, his consort Lakshmi, to celebrate the completeness, all-inclusiveness, of their created cosmos. I, as your granddaughter, mimic the even-richness of your tone, its smoothness and vibrancy to rejoice with you, to keep our worlds strung.
You tell me a singer must be accomplished to render this morning bowli raaga, must have the finesse to balance carry its five notes in the ascending scale and six notes in the descending scale to a single point so that there is nothing that is not a part of it. This can only happen, you say, if the singer hears the music of the earth, not with the ear but spirit, in order to fuse the world inside and the one outside for the listener.
Then with your breath, arms and ropes, you create another melody, one with its own crescendo. Your hands work with two sets of ropes tied to a pillar in your stone courtyard. It is fixed to a wooden hand churner which in turn is moored to the middle of a large, open, steel whisking tub. You tug at the ropes, first clockwise then anti-clockwise, to a rhythmic whish-whish, so the thin yoghurt mixture within swirls, froths and rises as a single landscape of white, foamy butter. To me, it is a light-as-cloud exhilaration.
You look down at me, still secure in your lap, to tell me that you have left the yoghurt in a clay pot outside, with a muslin cloth as protection, to soak in the night’s moistness, the silvery brilliance of the moonlight and the dew at dawn. That, I, like this, will have to have the patience to live with the labor and churn in my life before it reveals its purpose.
At ten, the round blobs of butter you place in my cupped palms, your hypnotic songs and words, your round strobing diamond nose pin, your radiant bindi in its crimson light that espies the world through a third eye is my circle of reference for a full, complete, all-together, accepting world. One full of light.
Over the years, in search of the new, of outward ways to flourish, my thumb has undone our cocoon. Forgotten to plume the sunshine, song and spirit stockpiled within. Impatiently blends yoghurt for butter, whir, whir, rather than churn it.
My dawn today is false, my song out of tune, my butter flat.
At ninety-three, as you lean on me for physical support, as bequest, I will try and relive with you the moments of our life, listen to your suprabhata, and catch the whiff of your butter and see its billowing magnificence.
At first light, unmindful of my mischief, you sing Shriman Narayana, Shriman Narayana, a suprabhata in Sanskrit, to wake the supreme Hindu deity Vishnu, his consort Lakshmi, to celebrate the completeness, all-inclusiveness, of their created cosmos. I, as your granddaughter, mimic the even-richness of your tone, its smoothness and vibrancy to rejoice with you, to keep our worlds strung.
You tell me a singer must be accomplished to render this morning bowli raaga, must have the finesse to balance carry its five notes in the ascending scale and six notes in the descending scale to a single point so that there is nothing that is not a part of it. This can only happen, you say, if the singer hears the music of the earth, not with the ear but spirit, in order to fuse the world inside and the one outside for the listener.
Then with your breath, arms and ropes, you create another melody, one with its own crescendo. Your hands work with two sets of ropes tied to a pillar in your stone courtyard. It is fixed to a wooden hand churner which in turn is moored to the middle of a large, open, steel whisking tub. You tug at the ropes, first clockwise then anti-clockwise, to a rhythmic whish-whish, so the thin yoghurt mixture within swirls, froths and rises as a single landscape of white, foamy butter. To me, it is a light-as-cloud exhilaration.
You look down at me, still secure in your lap, to tell me that you have left the yoghurt in a clay pot outside, with a muslin cloth as protection, to soak in the night’s moistness, the silvery brilliance of the moonlight and the dew at dawn. That, I, like this, will have to have the patience to live with the labor and churn in my life before it reveals its purpose.
At ten, the round blobs of butter you place in my cupped palms, your hypnotic songs and words, your round strobing diamond nose pin, your radiant bindi in its crimson light that espies the world through a third eye is my circle of reference for a full, complete, all-together, accepting world. One full of light.
Over the years, in search of the new, of outward ways to flourish, my thumb has undone our cocoon. Forgotten to plume the sunshine, song and spirit stockpiled within. Impatiently blends yoghurt for butter, whir, whir, rather than churn it.
My dawn today is false, my song out of tune, my butter flat.
At ninety-three, as you lean on me for physical support, as bequest, I will try and relive with you the moments of our life, listen to your suprabhata, and catch the whiff of your butter and see its billowing magnificence.
Chitra Gopalakrishnan, a New Delhi-based journalist and a social development communications consultant uses her ardour for writing, wing to wing, to break firewalls between nonfiction and fiction, narratology and psychoanalysis, marginalia and manuscript and treeism and capitalism.
Art: Bell Peppers and Boleslawiec, oil on paper, Paulina Swietliczko