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PodCastle 640: Mist Songs of Delhi







* Author : Sid Jain
* Narrator : Amal Singh
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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PodCastle 640: Mist Songs of Delhi is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG-13.
Mist Songs of Delhi
By Sid Jain
Rajaji had listened to three songs of the deceased that morning. He couldn’t help himself. Whenever he walked past a flickering portrait floating in the air — static, sanguine, and phosphorescent — the urge to reach out and touch the cloud with his fingers was more than he could resist. The cloud portrait would unspool itself into the departed’s soul song and fill the air around Rajaji with the lilting music of their lives.
The last of those three songs had left Rajaji in a heavy stupor. The voice of the departed sang but three lines in Urdu. The translation into Hindi seized some beauty as tax, but the words thundered in Rajaji’s heart in all the seven languages he knew:
I tolerated his passing as he had taken Hindustan as his second wife,
But my hummingbird had not yet learnt to fly when you clipped her wings.
O Tyrant, what sin did I commit that you saved me for last?
They rarely told the life’s story of the subject as if they were epic poems. No, most soulsongs captured a sliver of the lives, a representative snippet that encapsulated the life and times of those lucky enough to be turned into song by the Goddesses of Raagas.
And they were lucky. Seekers made pilgrimage from around the world to the temples of music in Delhi and Ajanta and even the little one in Calcutta. Germanic Persians, Frankish Egyptians, and some even traveling over ocean and continent from the Americas, hoping — praying — that they reach the temples still alive and with stories remarkable enough to be granted the gift of eternal music.
The Goddesses did not require rigid devotion, did not demand purity of belief and did not spurn those who bowed to other divinities — or no divinity at all. She only required a full life.
Which made it all the more frustrating when Rajaji’s own mother — now on the wrong side of seventy years strong — refused to accept the golden opportunity of musical enspooling that Rajaji had worked so hard to achieve. For today was the day he had become the junior caretaker of the Temple of Bhairavi, the arbiter of whose applications were processed to be enspooled by the Goddess.
Sighing, he pulled up the folds of his dhoti at his feet and walked through the windswept streets of Old Delhi to the bus stop.
He could never get the dust and soot of Delhi’s air off his exposed arms. He’d given up trying long ago. By the time he reached his mother’s house in Hauz-e-Khas, after taking the rickety coach bus from the narrow shopping streets of Chandni Chowk, he was ready for his second bath of the day.
He found Ma in the verandah, creaking noisily on the swinging chair and solving a word puzzle in the newspaper with a half-chewed pencil on her lips.
She regarded him with spectacle-covered eyes, sparkling like the sunlight filtering through the stained-glass windows in front of her. “Hungry, Raja beta?”
Rajaji sidestepped her swing’s pendulum arc and reached down to plant a kiss on her forehead. “Always.”
Ma nodded and put away her newspaper. “I’m glad you don’t rely on the alms to subsist.”
Rajaji smiled indulgently. Catching Mother while solving her word puzzles meant she’d use words like subsist in ordinary conversation.


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 August 18, 2020  37m