| |
| Arindam's drumming lesson |
| |
In the summer after the second year I learned how to play the drums. A friend at school owned a drumset. “It’s all improvisation,” he’d say. “All you need to know is a basic four by four. Everything else you just make up.” Mitch Mitchell was the example he always gave. “Totally self taught, man. What stuff he plays! Hey Joe is like one long drum solo going on in the background.”
I had never learnt anything without being taught. After a few sessions with my friend I decided I needed a proper teacher. Someone gave me Paul Fonseca’s phone number and one summer afternoon I found myself parking my scooter outside his house in East of Kailash.
The door opened slightly, it was chained. A fair, light-eyed woman was on the other side.
“What you want? ” she said.
“I had talked to Mr Fonseca about drumming classes. My name is Arindam Chatterjee.”
She stepped back and shut the door before opening it. I walked into the room as she walked into the house, calling out “Paul, some student has come” in a loud screech. It was early afternoon but she was wearing a faded white robe over a nightie. It dragged along the ground behind her like a queen’s train.
The living room was crowded with furniture. On one side near the long windows sat a large piano. Above it was a framed painting depicting what seemed like a European town square in the middle ages. Near the main door was a dining table. There were two little boys sitting at the table with their textbooks and notebooks open. They got off their chairs and came up to me. One of them reached for my helmet.
“This your helmet, eh? ” he said.
I gave it to him. He immediately put it on and started bouncing around the room. His smaller brother ran after him, hitting him on the helmet whenever he caught up. They jumped onto the sofa simultaneously. The smaller one tried to take the helmet off the other’s head. In the scuffle they helmet hit the wall really hard causing an explosion of whitewashed plaster.
“Delzad! Aman! ” came the shrieking wail from the other room. “I’ll beat you so hard your teeth will fall out.”
The boys didn’t seem overly affected by the injunction. When the nightie sailed into the room they were still fighting over the helmet, Delzad, as I later learned the older one was called, at a distinct visual disadvantage because Aman had managed to pull the helmet over his eyes.
Phat! Phat! That was Aman’s quota. Then the helmet was taken off and handed to me, “You hold this,” and Delzad was given his due. The boys didn’t seem too upset by this turn of events although I could see their cheeks were turning red.
“Now sit quietly and do your homework.”
Paul Fonseca, when he finally emerged, was a lean dark Goan with curly hair and a nervous demeanour.
“Sit men, sit. I’m sorry eh, just some work and all I’m doing behind. Couldn’t hear. Where you come from? ”
I found it difficult to believe that anyone within a mile of this place hadn’t heard what had gone on in the last ten minutes but I didn’t point that out.
“I’m Arindam. From IIT.”
“Yes, yes. We talked on the phone, yeah? So, you want to take classes? Can you play? ”
“A little.”
“Hmmm. A little, haan? Well, I think then we will say, I mean, you know, like hundred rupees one class. Okay? ”
I agreed.
“Just wait here, okay, I’ll just set up inside and call you.”
I sat down. Aman and Delzad were busy near the piano. They seemed to be looking up at something. Delzad came up to me.
“You quite tall, men.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. “Uh huh.”
“Can you kill that? ” he said pointing at a moth perched near the light fixture above the piano.
“Kill it? ” I said.
“Ya men, can you reach it.”
It seemed to be within my reach and I did feel the urge to show these little people what my full extension was. But instead I decided to moralize.
“It’s not good to kill living things,” I told my audience which had now multiplied to two. “They are all God’s creatures,” I said, happy at this opportunity to display my knowledge of Christian cosmology. They didn’t seem impressed.
Once I got inside I saw that Fonseca had put together what was clearly a practice set. Even then it was much better than anything I had played on in college or at my friend’s place. I learned later that his mother-in-law lived in the US from where she sent him drum equipment. He made a living by renting out the equipment for rock shows. This drum kit set up for my class was put together from bits and pieces that people would not want to hire at the rate of a few thousand rupees per show. But they were good enough to provide what seemed to me to be a tight, crisp sound, a distinct contrast from the bucket and stainless steel sound of the sets I had played on; they were good enough to make me feel like a real drummer.
That the distant mother-in-law was a dominant figure in the Fonseca household had become clear to me soon enough. “Maybe you heard of her, Anna Braganza, very famous pianist in Delhi.” I hadn’t. The house belonged to her; the nameplate at the gate said Braganza with Paul Fonseca below it in smaller letters “It’s actually Paulo Fonseca but I said just put Paul otherwise the neighbours will think some foreigners are living here.” On one occasion she had called from America while my lesson was on. “Aman, Delzad, Paul. Granny on the phone.” They had disappeared post haste and I had heard them raise their voice to talk to her on the phone much like my own parents were to raise their voice a few years later when I would call them from Baltimore. I never had the heart to tell them that I could hear them clearly even if they spoke normally.
The mother-in-law’s daughter, Mrs Fonseca, was obviously the one in charge. She signed the receipts for the fees I paid. Kartik told me later that she conducted all negotiations for equipment rentals as well although it was Fonseca who came to the venue to help set it up. There were rumours that he was a recovered alcoholic. His health had been affected so badly people said that now he couldn’t even hold a steady beat. That was why she controlled all the money, he couldn’t be trusted with it. I found it hard to believe that his sense of time was destroyed but in the several hours I spent there I never saw him play a steady beat for more than a few bars though he often showed me bits of skill which left me breathless.
“See do it like this,” he’d say and show me some simple pattern. He would play it a few times and then he would speed it up, adding in more and more variations till his hands were a blur over the drumset. His wife and the boys would sometimes come into the practice room when he launched on one of these demonstrations. I would feel my face take on an expression of awe and they would all smile, both with pride at his skill and amusement at my amazement.
It was at these times that I doubted my own impression, buttressed by rumours from other sources, of his wife as a shrewish, controlling woman. When she stood by the door as he treated me to these brief flashes of brilliance I could see that she admired his talent. And the one time when I came to the house and saw her playing the piano with the tenderest of expressions on her face, I forgot all the screaming and shouting and found myself imagining her much younger and slimmer, in a satin gown rather than in her old nightie, playing the piano at someone’s wedding at the Diocesan Centre near the Gol Dak Khana church. “That Anna Braganza’s girl. So beautifully she plays the piano, no? And such an angel she looks like. Don’t know what she sees in that no good drummer.”
I was waiting in the living room after my first lesson. Mrs Fonseca had gone to get her receipt book. Aman came up to me. He had a broad smile on his face and his eyes were gleaming. He pointed up to the lamp. Delzad was bouncing on the sofa. There was a brown-black smudge on the wall where the moth had been. Aman gestured with his fingers like he was climbing stairs: floor to sofa, sofa to table, table to piano, splat. They were still laughing when their mother came in.
“What are you rascals up to now? ” she said.
“Nothing, mummy,” said Aman, as he went to the table, picked up his pencil and started work on his holiday homework sums.
|
| |
