O kokila

There was a piper on the train today.

So what, you’ll ask me. There are so many who sing and play on the local trains everyday for charity. It’s their livelihood. They are operated by gangs who mutilate them. Or they fake blindness. Put out sob stories of how they lost their jobs when the jute mills closed down. And try their luck on crowded local trains.

You are right, I’d say. As a rule, I only give to the old people who have clearly not been part of a racket, but who would have a tough chance of survival if not for us. But this piper was not just another beggar.

I caught the tune even as I was boarding the train. The uninitiated will probably miss the significance of the last statement. You have to be adequately skilled at spotting a gap in the thick crowd jostling to get in the train, and you have to be adequately agile to manoeuvre yourself into that half gap, all the while clutching your bag and clothes so they don’t get torn off. It is a challenge revelled in by the newbies and paraded as an art form by daily passengers, who love to make up horror stories for mere bus-commuters at work.

I caught the tune as I was sliding expertly into a gap. Probably a phone ringing, I dismissed first. But as it continued loud and clear, I noticed the player. He was standing a little away, behind groups of loud train-friends bandying weekend experiences across the compartment and a hawker selling hairclips and earrings and scrubbers. Just a reed pipe he was playing, the kind children buy at fairs and forget within a week. And – I don’t know if you have ever experienced this yourself – I could feel the noise recede. It was as if the entire screaming compartment, the clanging train, the whirring fans overhead, the wind whooshing by outside, all, all, had been switched to mute till only the piper and his haunting strains remained. There were only strains of ‘O kokila torey shudhai re’ – a song about the lonely black bird who has unearthly melody in her veins. So much of melody that she cannot stop long enough to build her own home, instead laying her eggs in the crow’s nest where her fledglings grow till their music sets them apart from the cawing of their nestmates, and they become outcasts too.

When I finally came out of my trance, I inched up to the piper. It is not accepted for me to simply go and say I revered him for what he had just played. A little introduction is expected.

‘Where do you come from? Where is your house?’

‘The Bangladesh border,’ came a laconic reply.

‘Bongaon?’ Bongaon was the last station on the route, and next to the border.

‘Village’s an hour from the Bongaon station. On foot. Half hour by a cycle van.’

‘You don’t come frequently? I haven’t seen you earlier.’

‘No. Need a lot of money for my medicines. Come on a collection when funds run out.’

I had noticed that he was shaking violently all through. Probably some neurological disorder. Strangely enough, it hadn’t affected his playing. Yet.

It is difficult to describe what I felt. Awed. Humbled. In a trance. Close to tears. Frustrated. All of it together. The frail piper’s skill will go unnoticed. Our music directors, when scouring the country for fresh talent, will never get to know or bother. And there will come a day when he will no longer be able to hold his pipe still. Perhaps I could have done more. The money I had given him hadn’t felt like charity; it had been my acknowledgement of the music he had offered me. Perhaps I should have done more. Perhaps I too am hiding behind excuses. But he got off in the next station, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what else I could have done. He was no beggar, I could sense that. He wasn’t looking for sympathy or guilt-money, his responses to my queries had been nonchalant, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. It was only when I said how awed I was by his rendition of ‘O kokila’ that his face had brightened and he looked up at me. At that moment, it seemed the player and the songbird had blended into one – the music and the loneliness, the pleasure and the careless anonymity. The piper and the kokila do not stop for charity, their music is for themselves.