Unutterable Loss for the Silent Nightingale

 This Sunday, the world woke up to an unimaginable world, especially the world of South Asia and its wandering heirs, the unimaginable loss of Lata Mangeshkar.

I will not bore my patient reader with details and achievements of Lataji's life; those are easily googled. 

This news came to me on Monday, as I was getting dressed and checking on the world on my phone. I remain shocked. I could not believe it on Monday, and I don't believe it now. How can we endure a world with her singing? 

Lata Mangeshkar's voice was among the first I heard with the cacophonies that drown us at birth. We all grew up trying to emulate that sustained pitch, those true notes, that clear, clear voice and predictably, failed. That pure voice formed the background music for our lives, our moods, and expressed the way we felt the only way our feelings could be expressed. We have no greater language for who we are. 

Lataji lent her voice to the poetries of patriotism, of intense and self-erasing devotions, of the playful nature of the cosmos and its solemn rhythms, of clear nights and stormy seasons, of dreams, of apocalypse and heartbreak. Language was no barrier: Lataji sang in over 30 languages. Her voice is ubiquitous throughout the Indian subcontinent. She sang late into her life, beyond natural expectation, her voice untiring and true through decades. Hers is one of the first names children learn to lisp as they chant names. Her name needs no compacting into cute diminutives; if anything, one adds the honorific -ji to her first name to render her recognizable. 

Today, I look around me and know that I need all those poetries to anchor my world. Lataji's voice is the axis. I mourn that when I hear that voice now, it will be an echo from the past. Our life-giving nightingale is silent forever and, like the grieving emperor in the tale, we yearn for the lost voice as we yearn for life. 

This is no tale and so, unlike the emperor in the tale, we trudge on, deprived, searching the heavens, beseeching them to return the lost voice, and weeping at their stubborn silence. Our unspeakable grief is fed by the fact that the only expressions we can use remain the songs of immense loss that lost voices breathed life into. 

For the world left behind, there is to be no relief, no solace from this impoverishment.     

Willing Gods, Gods Willing!

 "Let Kanha-ji answer that!" one of my favorite Hindi serial protagonists exclaims, as the episode fades out to a prequel. 

Will the invoked divinity oblige? 

Knowing the terrain of these plots, there is little doubt that he most definitely will and without undue delay, lest the audience forget the invocation. 

Now, even the gods of all faiths seem to have found the very lucrative terrain of Hindi serials. They are the newest immigrants to this land. Previously, if a divinity were to directly affect the plot of the story, it would be in a serial specially dedicated to that deity or one with a mythological theme. The god's partiality for the protagonist and willingness to play Deus Ex Machina would be no surprise. 

Since these gods are often stock characters, it would also be easy to predict their reactions and extend of involvement. Krishna would discuss the issue with his consort in Vaikunth, his particular paradise and trace plot events to the evil intentions of a seemingly-unrelated character. Shiv could be manipulated, though his anger is to be avoided at all costs. Brahma would grant anything to almost anyone, provided they performed adequate yoga. Vishnu is the problem solver, fixing what the others mess up. Narad is the ultimate trickster, who teaches through his jests and taunts. Indra is the coward, forever afraid of his throne being usurped. The list goes on. 

Now, the gods have expanded their prowess to include the daily life of characters. No longer do we see Kanha (Krishna's diminutive name) playing the divine roundel with his milkmaids when a character invokes him. We only see what the character sees: the idol in a home temple, perhaps with a spotlight shining from behind the screen, to hint at halos. Of course, the audience sometimes needs more than just a hint and we hear temple bells clanging, an inexplicable wind hinting at apocalypse, strewing dead leaves around, circular rainbows flashing with glitter within, even the idol's eyes and face flashing and zooming large. It really depends on the desperation of the story-teller and the budget allocated to that section of the tale.

It is enough for me to invoke the gods, mimicking the characters, on the off-chance that some of this mercy and attention might spill over into my world. Of course, what I seek is nothing like what is necessary for the characters, no matter how closely I relate to them. It is the ease that solves all problems that has me glued to these plots and characters.

I can hardly wait to reach home. I am sure Kanha-ji would have answered by now and my character would have assigned another task to her favorite deity. How wonderful! No yoga needed; no horde of merit to be accumulated; no sacrifices, no pujas, no yagnas, no oblations, no offerings required. Merely the premise of being a "good" person suffices to have the world arranged according to one's preferences. 

Who wouldn't long for a world wherein gods wait upon people convinced of their "goodness," and one need only assign frequent tasks to a particular deity to show favoritism? 

I, too, shall invoke a god or perhaps a goddess and assign the task of ensuring that all feline beings be safe and well fed for the night. Let the gods prove their merit to me!