gifted when it came to music, and like many things in her life the blame lay squarely with her parents. As a kid, Aasha was made to stand at gatherings and sing or recite poems she had learned in school or Indian ones her father taught her – poems no adult understood or cared for.
“Aasha, beta, come sing Aunty a song!” her parents would urge with great enthusiasm. “Aasha, beta, recite that poem you learned last week for Uncle!”
There she stood in her frilly, stiff frock, with a neat bow behind, her hands clasped together, singing Bollywood hits, or reciting ancient poems, in front of an indifferent crowd. After each rendition, the adults who were polite enough to pay attention doled out fake praise, even as they secretly hoped the pushy Punjabi mother would call off the cute croaking child. Others, less polite but more honest, stared at her with lingering distaste, like she was chutney gone bad.
Aasha hated it. As she got older, she promised herself she’d have nothing to do with music or poetry, even if her life depended on it.
Her parents never saw it that way though. They spent a great amount of time and energy recording each performance.
“When Aasha has a family of her own, we will show them what a talent she was! Look at the applause she is getting”
“Haan bhai, even Mrs. Sharma was saying our Aasha is a most gifted child, and everyone knows Mrs. Sharma doesn’t give compliments like that easily.”
The videotapes had accumulated in a dusty box for years. In fact at one point, so much time had lapsed since the tapes were mentioned, Aasha dared to believe they were well-forgotten. That was till the day her brother came totting about a bunch of converted-from-VCRs CDs.
“Don’t you worry, beta, we’ll never let your childhood ka talent go to waste,” her father said with great pride. “I arranged for all those old tapes to be converted. Now we can watch them whenever we feel like. Which one should we start with? Aasha? Beta, kaunse wale se start karna hai?’”
Those CDs could bring a festival like this to its knees, she thought wrapping the spring jacket around herself as she stepped off the kerb to cross the street. She had arranged to meet with Jeff at the little bistro across the road for a quick working lunch. She was five minutes late. Her time in the tub had been put to good use; she had worked through her issues and had arrived at a solution: she’d complete this project, and yeah, she’d do a great job with it, then she’d issue Jenny an ultimatum: Move me or I’m moving.
Jeff was nowhere to be seen so Aasha found them a cosy corner table for two. The table itself was round, like a garden table, and was covered in a white lace tablecloth. It held a potted orange plant along with a salt and pepper shaker and a bottle of olive oil. It was, Aasha thought to herself, all very quaint. Soft piano notes came floating out from one of the many open windows along the street, probably a rehearsal underway. Aasha ordered a beer for herself and fired up her iPad to take a look at the festival programme and performing artistes. There were two lists – the actual list and her list; all the artistes vs. artistes from the Subcontinent, the festival vs. her work.
“Sorry, sorry am late!” Jeff called out to her ten minutes later, pulling her attention from the screen. Jeff had his hands full. Slowly he set about arranging his equipment, which was previously slung across his shoulders, on the floor, against the wall. He smoothened out his wrinkled forest green shirt but in vain. Aasha wasn’t surprised to see him in his trademark khaki cargo pants; each pocket was stuffed with work-related titbits – wires, batteries, SD cards, pen drives, super glue, and other last-minute fixes.
“Man! Luxury looks good on you, Aasha,” he quipped with a kind smile once he had settled down. Clearly he didn’t miss her flushed but relaxed complexion. “So I guess your room had the ridiculous tub as well, eh?” He reached out for her glass of beer and took a generous gulp, moving out of her reach as he did so.
“Sorry I’m late,” he offered once again as he set down her now-drained beer glass. “I kind of fell asleep. You know how it is with hotel pillows. Have you ordered already?”
“Would I dare order without you? I mean look at what happened to my beer,” she replied cheekily. Jeff snorted in return. “Good, I’m starving. Let’s get some food on this table.”
“How is this table even standing? And how are you not a cholesterol bomb yet?” she asked him over a mouthful. “This is ridiculous Jeff!”
“Ridiculously good! Stop talking and keep eating. Trust me it’s going to be a long day; I’d rather face it with a full stomach.” Jeff dug into a portion of his apple and arugula salad, alternating the green spoonfuls with generous portions of lasagne, grilled vegetables, mushrooms, garlic bread and French fries. Each bite was accompanied by gulps of beer, this time his own and not Aasha’s. In contrast, Aasha’s roast chicken sandwich and glass of lemonade seemed like a sparse meal.
“So, who do we have first up?”
Aasha had just taken a big bite of her sandwich so she waited to swallow the bite before answering, “The Crashing Waves Collective. I’ve interviewed them before. They have an amazing story. I think you’ll like them.”
“Really?” Jeff asked, except it came out sounding more like ‘weally’ thanks to all the lettuce blocking the words. He chewed his food quickly, ignoring Aasha’s crackle of laughter. “Who are they? And what kind of music do they make?”
“I interviewed them last year at the London Jazz Festival,” she told him. “They were performing at Ronnie Scott’s.”
“Holy moly!”
“Yeah, and they lived up to it too. They are two brothers, from Sri Lanka,” she took a sip of her lemonade remembering the two slight young men with the most polite manners she had ever come across. “They have an incredible story: they lost everything, including family, during the Asian Tsunami. They were in their early teens at the time,” Aasha told a now-attentive Jeff.
“For a while they bounced around from camp to camp till they were transported to a centre in Australia.
During the interview, Aravinda, the elder brother, admitted they really struggled in the early days. I guess it was more like PTSD, that and severe cultural alienation.”
But Australia was also where their story found a new narrative. It was where they were introduced to Jazz.
“They had a young and engaging therapist. She had tried to get through to the two boys for weeks but they wouldn’t speak. Finally she used music to draw them out of their shell. Romesh, the younger one, told me she tried a number of musical styles and nothing really worked till the day she played some Jazz – Miles Davis, it was. And that was it. It was the first time the brothers communicated with a staff member.”
Aasha had enjoyed talking to them; she was grateful to them for sharing their moving story. And she really looked forward to seeing them again.
“From there on they found their way back through Jazz. They’ve been performing together now for about four years, and their first song – they always start with it, is called Belinda’s Chasing Blues; it’s about that young therapist.”
Neither Jeff nor Aasha said anything when she finished the story. The both looked off at the horizon, lost in their own thoughts for a while.
“This is
