Suman’s Longings

by Shom Biswas

I grew up in an industry-town, one which acted a lot smaller than it actually was. It was, in its mind, a simple place, people there lived simple, spoke simple, and thought simple. It was the kind of place where your neighbor would invite you over to their house at 9 AM every Sunday, because you only had a black-and-white television in your house, and Mahabharat looks better in colour. The kind of place where book fairs and football grounds were never empty. It was a place which had not yet lost its innocence.

I had a simple life, an easy life, a predictable life. You go to school in the morning. You go to the playground at 4 PM. And you sit to study at 7 PM. I used to play hard. I used to study hard. And if anyone would irritate me too much, I used to punch hard. It was a life I could understand. It was a life anyone could understand.

When I was about thirteen or so, I remember I had just started in the eighth standard, my mother brought in a cassette of a music album by Suman Chatterjee (now Kabir Suman), called Tomake Chai. We were a somewhat musical, somewhat bookish, and somewhat arty family, but not excessively so, and I was somewhat exposed to new music and new literature (but never new cinema. Movies were a complete no-no). But anyway, to Tomake Chai. We used to have two rooms other than the dining room in our house, and my grandma and I used to share the smaller of those. While studying that evening I remember half-listening to the music while it was playing in the other room.

It was unlike any other music I had ever heard. I was used to Tagore songs and modern Bengali songs, which were a staple at almost any Bengali home. I was surreptitiously starting to make myself familiar with Hindi film songs — Bollywood was making a kind of a back-door entry to our house, but this was unlike any music I had ever heard. The songs seemed to have only some mild background music. And it seemed that Suman, the singer, was not really singing, but just throwing words at that background music. What kind of music was this then?

Grandma and I had a brief conversation about it. And we were both unequivocal that naah, this is not our cup of Horlicks. The greatest trait of the great Karunamoyee Biswas, though, was that she was completely in the know that there are many things in this world that she did not like, many ways of life that she was not familiar or comfortable with, which were nonetheless perfectly acceptable to many other people, and that it was foolish to object to someone else’s likes and dislikes. I remember her mentioning to me to ‘but, listen. Listen before you decide. Some people must be liking this kind of music too’.

And I did. A week or so later. My mother had a bit of a PG-mania, and she made sure she listened to the entire album, in great detail, before deciding if it was suitable for a thirteen-year old (Yes I know. My small town was not so small and so backward that any reasonably social thirteen-year old would not be introduced to porn). But how will Ma know? So the cassette was listened to on the Walkman, or in my absence for a week.

What happened, therefore, was that by the time I was given Tomake Chai to listen, Ma was already in the rabid fangirl stage. Even before I had heard anything beyond the muffled tones from the other room, I was told that this is music that one has never heard earlier, this is music that will change everything, and that the world of Bengali music will never be the same again. Which it truly did, in time. But such glowing review even before you have experienced the object of the review, is generally the recipe for an underwhelming experience.

This wasn’t. Oh God this wasn’t. It was a slap on the face, an order to think deeper about the human condition. It was a reproach — you are a reasonably intelligent and somewhat well-read young man, where have your feelings been all this while?

I was in a daze. I remember going to school and feeling like I was bursting at the seams — how do these people not think the way I do? How do people not see things the way I do? I was hungover with the music. It was like I had suddenly become very different from my milieu. I cannot say I understood everything from the get-go, in fact every time I listened to the tape, I used to find nuances that I hadn’t earlier. Every time I listened to the tape, which was not as often as I’d have liked. Ma was a fangirl as I told you, it was HER tape, and a ‘go and study’ admonishment was always a hanging thread of conversation, threatening to be unleashed to end all negotiation. And I was a rather obedient boy.

Much, much later, probably a decade later, I read an article where Bruce Springsteen described his feelings on listening to Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone. He mentioned the experience as ‘like someone kicked open the door to your mind’. I remember nodding vigorously, because The Boss had put into words exactly how I had felt all those years ago when I heard Suman for the first time.

You know, people’s musical tastes change. When I heard Suman for the first time, I hadn’t listened to so many things that I like today — Forget bluegrass, forget jazz, I hadn’t listened to rock, I hadn’t listened to classical (neither Indian nor Western), heck, I hadn’t listened to Rafi or Mukesh! Normally, I go through phases with music. A piece of music goes away and comes back and goes away again from the mind — and truth to be said, I am much more of a books person or a movies person or a sports person than a music person. But Tomake Chai stayed on.

There are other memorable songs in the album, Tomake Chai is a complete, exceptional album in itself. Mon kharap kora bikel, a picture-book of a song describing an evening in the city, visits me often on my very infrequent visits to Kolkata; Kokhono Shomoy Aashe, a soft, pensive hymn about hope was, once about ten years ago, my go-to song for a full month, playing on a continuous loop on my computer; and without sounding too maudlin, the inspiration for this essay comes from a YouTube-revisit to Haal Chherona Bondhu, a supremely uplifting, muscular song about getting older (I am thirty-six). But these songs wax-and-wane about in the conscience. Tomake Chai, the song, is always there somewhere in the background, but never out of the mind.

The song remains a cultural phenomenon in my mother language, and will probably be that way forever — There is a before-and-after Tomake Chai, for Bengali music. I know of few other places in India where musicians have a prominent and separate existence from movies and playback, the way they do in Bengal, and Tomake Chai has often been cited as the reason and the tipping point for that.

Tomake Chai — is translated to ‘I want you’. This song, then, is a love song. Someone asked, isn’t it ‘I need you’, though? I don’t think so. This song isn’t a plea, it is not strident or desperate. Suman murmurs — Look around, it’s wonderful. Wouldn’t it be so nice if you were here too?

And it’s personal. At various points in my life, I have directed this song, in my mind, to a city, then a woman, another city, a language, and then another woman. Never voiced — I am a pitifully poor singer. And I know of other people to whom this song meant other things. I remember coming across an article once — not too long ago, discussing this song in depth and what it meant — and I was not interested in reading it at all. How is it important to know how others have perceived a song when I’ve lived in and lived with it for the last twenty years?

It remains my song.

Soumyadipta ‘Shom’ Biswas is a management consultant and short fiction writer who splits his time between Chicago, New York and Bangalore. His short stories and opinion pieces have been published or are forthcoming in The Affair, The Bombay Review, Kitaab.org, Out of Print, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), Reading Hour, and Spark. In a different life, he used to be a quizzer, notably having been a semi-finalist at the “University Challenge” Quiz (2003–04) televised on BBC World, and the ‘Sports Ka Superstar’ (2010) on DD National. He collects antique sports books, and is consistently one of the best EPL fantasy football players in the world. Shom is also an active community member of the Bangalore Writers Workshop.