by Ghalib Islam
Look: she runs along the dolly track until all the cars have disappeared, dispirited weeping as she waves, though we cannot be sure this is not another part she has been rehearsing and with which she is familiar, regard the twists and entrechats, no doubt expressions of a trained shadow dancer.
The journey is long, and eventually Mamun Ben Jaloun falls asleep to the rhythm of the miniature train, whose tight quarters force him to pull his knees up to his chest, and which moves across the dolly tracks jhigjhig-takrtakr, jhigjhig-takrtakr. (Note that the engine car is sufficiently larger even for a grown individual with very large pants and nine or eight munchkins hiding in his clothing, enough to fit all and with ample room to spare.) A jar of marmalade and thin, tasteless wafers, some nearly rotten tomatoes, a jerrycan of water: these proffered in a bag are to last him one week, at the end of which he finds his legs so weakened from their constrained unmitigated pose that up with you, his captor with the wide-legged pants drags him into the right place: Mamun Ben Jaloun finds himself sitting in an enormous wooden chair in a room with many photographs of heroes of the silver screens and pillars not unlike those in a courthouse.
My name is Soni Aadam. I am the staff sergeant of studio security, the light falls on a man’s face as he introduces himself. I am also a notable producer, he lists over one hundred short films, documentaries and features, few of which we would be acquainted with. Why have you come here.
I was brought here, my father replied.
Who brought you into the studio, the man thundered.
Please, Mamun Ben Jaloun responded, with shivering knocking feet that pressed against each other underneath the desk separating the two characters: I have no wish to bother anyone.
And yet there is the remaining charge of your illicit drunkenness in Sharmilla’s dressing room, the theft of her father’s gifted bottle of austerlitz, beiman bettomiz, where from you are, and then khattash: a thappar-slap across the face after all the gaalis. The staff sergeant and producer chewed on the cigar on which he puffed in between words, and Mamun Ben Jaloun noticed flecks of paan had collected around his mouth from some earlier bout of mastication. The ceiling fan overhead sucked up all the smoke in swirls. For three moments the official appeared to be engulfed in a tornado.
Then two frail characters, a very old man and a hunching and equally senescent woman, gained our hero’s attention; they appeared from the open door leading out to a dark vestibule, bearing two trays, one with a steaming cup of tea with milk and another bearing the contents of a dinner: hot rice, several curries in tiffin containers, and a decanter filled with daal.
The woman surveyed Mamun Ben Jaloun with her left eye, which roamed while the right eye was focused on serving. With her left hand she held the tray while also pouring the tea. With her right she poked my father’s shoulder, What do you mean, she asked.
Excuse me, Mamun replied, but I haven’t said anything.
The hag mumbled something with the left side of her mouth while with the right side she clearly asked the producer whether she should bring out the dessert now or wait.
My father was confused by her multiplicity, her ability to speak to two people at once with a single mouth, and he was about to ask how she performed her trick, was it an act of ventriloquism, but before he had a chance, she yessirred the staff sergeant producer, picked up the empty containers, and departed.
Meanwhile, the second character, the very old man, was combing the official’s hair with his fingers, possibly scanning for nits, while the producer ate. With every bite he seemed to grow more self-assured, and in the light he seemed indefeasible.
Tell me, what class of individual are you: dancer, singer, key grip, or what, cinematographer, et cetera and so forth, do you practise a meaningful trade.
Singer, my father said, since out of the options provided it seemed most reasonable to choose.
And what do you sing.
My own songs mostly, or just fragments, melodies that seemingly appear and disappear at their own will.
So a composer, the staff sergeant producer grew interested, which is probably why Lady Jerusalem took an interest in you. Generally, I would have a trespasser thrown out of the studio at once or force him to take a charwoman’s role if you truly wanted to work, but seeing that your manners aren’t so bad, he looked my father up and down, and you are not so terribly groomed—which is important, as you can tell I have an assistant make sure I am always presentable, he indicated with his brow to the old man who had finished combing the official’s hair and had now moved on to closely inspect his shirt—I will allow you an audition. Mmm, a singer, he continued, raising a drumstick from his plate, biting through flesh and into the bone crac-crac, we’ll see about that. My father was about to ask a question about the nature of the audition but the staff sergeant producer waved it off and kicked the small old man, who had begun purring and nuzzling up against his legs under the table.
My clipboard, Ben Jaloun, he kicked him again, and the little man leapt three feet into the air, screaming incomprehensibly. My father laughed into his shirt-collar while the secretary stared down his frail employee from a great height.
Midget, you listen, he began.
I am neither midget, excusesir, nor a dwarf, the man winced, rubbing his back and shoulders, my stature is the result of advanced age only.
Ben Jaloun, I am weary of your constant amendments to my speech; and if you will, please, unless you wish to suffer several more kicks, retrieve my clipboard from there over there. He pointed off into the distant reaches of the office, which appeared difficult to navigate, replete with an obstacle course of filing cabinets and stacks of paper that reached the height of two grown men, and that were covered all over by knotted and ancient cobwebs.
Retrieving a kerosene lamp from a table close at reach, little Ben Jaloun looked pensively into the darkness.
Just what are you waiting for, the official thundered.
Please, my lord, the little man begged, it’s just that this particular corner is quite resistant to light.
And this was true. The little flame from the lamp trembled as if daunted by the sheer opacity of the items that lay ahead or out of fear that some unaccountable evil would emerge at any moment. And when it went out altogether, the old man had no matches.
You’ll have to see with your hands, now, won’t you, oh ho, said the official, laughing.
For the next hour, while my father’s stomach grumbled and he sat in place without a complaint, while the official licked the bowl of daal round and round, picked every grain of rice off the table, even stealing one back from an ant, the old fragile man could be heard rummaging through the endless pile of corrugated boxes, opening and shutting filing cabinets, and rifling through papers and folders.
And let not a single item be disturbed, the staff sergeant warned, ringing for Ben Jaloun’s counterpart, the two-faced old woman who had served him earlier. She lurched out from behind the door as if she had been waiting there all the while.
Take him to the green room, Sangeeta, he ordered. I’ll mark it down on the clipboard when that idiot returns from there over there, but you know the way: it’s a day’s journey by dolly-car, so make sure to pack enough provisions; tell Omar Omar I sent him.
In fact, the journey stretched on for a day more than expected, and while for a withered old woman a gondola car is the perfect size, Mamun Ben Jaloun feared that this time the contortions would deal his body lasting damage. (In fact, they wouldn’t, but in a strange twist of fate, his son, your humble narrator Hedayat, would for the first six years of his life be afflicted by nightmarish rides on a tiny toy train and would awake from them limping.) The lunar terrain was unchanging all the way there, every leaf of grass, stalk of foliage removed for miles to make way for the filming of a science fiction film by Satyajit Ray rejected by Universal Pictures, a lifeless landscape except for the glistening koi moving about in a man-made pond on which the alien first lands.
Once again he would have to be re
moved from the gondola car and hauled to the appropriate location. This time he found himself in a pitch-black room that sizzled for a moment before being lit up by a single prick of light: someone was smoking. Another pinprick of fire somewhere nearby. Something like a bodiless head bobbing. The shadows on the walls confused my father, for in the dim light they seemed not at all correspondent to possible objects in an enclosed space: there appeared silhouettes of gnarled boughs, or perhaps these were only very long fingers.
Sing, someone commanded. Mamun Ben Jaloun found it absurd that some people had gathered at the exact moment of his arrival in a darkened room to hear him sing, that singing for any reason except to sing from one’s heart and for no one’s pleasure but one’s own held any meaning. He found it equally absurd that he would probably abide by their request, only he could not think of even one song. Meanwhile, all the cigarette smoke was choking him. More and more little pricks of light gathered in the room, they revealed little nimbus clouds while he was choking and coughing. He unbuttoned his shirt to the middle and this helped to a degree, but he continued to cough; requesting that they did not smoke would probably do nothing, but he asked anyway. As if they had not heard, they demanded to know what he would perform.
So as to ease the tension, perhaps, some lights turned on from above, and by their aid he saw a woman who appeared like Lady Jerusalem but who was probably Sharmilla or another of her shadow dancers, who stood watching while stroking a small grinning animal. There were others, but he could not tell how many. My father recognized he was standing on a raised platform, which was probably a stage but which felt like the gallows.
Sing, shouted the man who must have been the music director, and merrily, he commanded, but nothing emerged from my father’s throat.
If I hiccup now, he began wishing against the inevitable, but when he opened his lips a sweet warble emerged instead, the notes wafted up his throat smoothly, uninterrupted by the smoke. He sang as does a picaresque troubadour, of his own story, what else: I vaulted here on a miscreant wind, he sang, I turned into a reed in the fleshy arms of a baker woman whose dogs bit me, he exaggerated, a woman who never sang but turned on her toes so lovely. There were other verses, of course, to fill out the details, including descriptions of the two-throated old lady who brought him here and had disappeared, and at the end of which everything was still. Finally, it was they who began to cough, one after another, and finally in unison, as if the coughing was substitute for applause.
He may be awarded a room in a flat in the songwriters’ district, Apartment 1-B on St. Catherine’s, said the man who must have been Omar Omar, the double-name giver of apartments in those parts of the studio at that time. Rent is free for the first month but he must produce consistently to stay subsequent months. Next, he cried loudly, as a door opened and fresh air poured in and Mamun Ben Jaloun could finally breathe. He looked where the light was abundant. From behind the door it was plain to see the beginning of a long winding animal stretching possibly for miles, constituting no doubt others who too wanted to be playback singers.
My father’s shyness exceeds his desire to impress or to earn his keep, and producers realize he can only introduce or record his ideas in pitch-blackness; note that in La Maga Studios, auditions are traditionally held in the dark, but recordings require the sound engineer to see the appropriate dials and switches, and as a compromise someone suggests he wear a pair of blinding dark shades, which simulates the total absence of objects and people.
For the rest of Mamun Ben Jaloun’s singing career, he would be known as Blind Man Mamun, a cognomen he rejects until realizing years later many women interpreted his handicap as a mysterious and attractive condition. He does not prefer the moniker of Mamun M either, mind you, he simply stumbled hiccupping onto it the first time he was asked and never had the heart to correct the studio heads after the cheques began to arrive correctly under that name.
At first, my father’s output is slight, and he manages barely to write one song per month, belaboured forced creations that lyrically and structurally reflect his inexperience, and only several of which are admitted into films. These hardly dragnet enough to pay for the room in the cramped flat in the songwriters’ district of the studio, which he shares with six others also attempting the same craft, each with his own failings: one young man is too didactic with his melodies, another so avant-garde he usually loses the thread of his songs, others with limited ranges, and all of them raising a caterwaul to high hell night and day with the intention of writing the one song whose payback would be the tenure singer’s role in which Mamun M found himself so easily.
But shhhh listen carefully, as my father eventually learns to do: realize that since the walls are thin, the compositions of all seven musicians are in fact tethered inseparable, fragments and rehearsals of one and the same song, and it is possible, by choosing the rhythmical shift from one attempt and the major-minor change from another, to sew together a track that stands up much better than any single attempt. Thusly, he manages by bricoleur’s feat to write his first winning tracks and to gather the confidence to shut out the cacophony of his peers and housemates, to move into a small flat of his own and finally to open up his own vault of melodies.
His matured style impresses Soni Aadam, the chief of security we met earlier, who is also the producer of a dozen films simultaneously, and who therefore requires a perpetual supply of songs to develop their scores. He prefers my father over other songsters and gives him ample opportunity to develop his craft, and the pictures prove it. A photograph of my father in front of a large ribbon microphone, large shades preventing us from seeing the expression in his eyes when he hits a G over middle C, a photograph in front of a piano with three fingers poised over white keys black keys, a photograph where he shakes hands with Mohammed Rafi, another one while recording with a hundred-man Wall of Sound string and woodwind orchestra. A song about the clinking of chains in a nameless ministry of arid corridors and dusty offices, or of working in the potash mines or labouring in the citrus groves: the nature of my father’s songs changes drastically over his career. Like his father, he tries to avoid politics and would desperately edit his lyrics, but the melodies would always return the words to their original course.
Sometime around his third year in the trade as a songwriter, he discovered the hidden strength of raisins and things began to fall apart. It is arguable what part the Black Organs had to play, whether they introduced the drug slowly and habituated him to its daily use; such machinations were not uncommon in La Maga Studios. (Understand that all the vital fluids of his memory of Qismis had by then been dried and sucked out by Lady Jerusalem’s embraces and her vacuumincinerating kisses, so the memory of raisin wrinkled fingertips and palms, the past, cannot be blamed.) The change, in any case, was immediate and absolute. Observe: it was always a fistful in the morning and then another at mid-morning before recording, some more alongside the afternoon coffee; nobody suspected a thing, you see, who cares how many raisins a man eats on a given day, who has ever become sick or overdosed on raisins, how many friends would insist on rehabilitation or therapy if one is a raisin addict.
Still more and more raisins, in the cakes and the rice, the salads and meat dishes, with the food, but more often as a standalone drug. People differ in their capacity to handle chemical substances. And raisins for Mamun M proved to be highly addictive. Past their initial impact on the nervous system as an upper, they dragged him into a two-kilogram-a-day habit of dried gutrot and grape, paroxysm high epileptic flashes, come synesthesia ochre rotted flutes, come rot ejaculate fainting slumber, and raisins raisins your pockets full, sell your mother for a sack of raisins. And with the raisins came the accompanying symptoms of decay: mix it with the butter: a too-tall pair of naked legs moves past, like this, a female voice asks amidst the sound of mortar and pestle, the rustle of hands on cloth, her skirt slips and our camera-eye moves to reveal another naked body in the room, two more behind her on top. His lyrics at that time grew so
junkydrenched and his voice so shaky, aged so far beyond his twenty-six years, that Soni Aadam gave him an ultimatum: replace your life or we will replace you. Secretly, he began employing Mimic Mamuns, trying to pass these off as the original himself in screenplays, but the audience would not have it. My father’s populist observations in song were inimitable.
There were riots, believe it or not: we will not tolerate, shouted the placards and the crowd. Can’t fool won’t fool all the people, they chorused. Soni Aadam was forced to apologize publicly and even compensated the real Mamun for the songs he did not sing in efforts to cajole him into resuming his ordinary rate of production, but Mamun Ben Jaloun would not budge from his sandlot. He had the finest silica brought to him in bags and became a connoisseur of the stuff. He loved letting it trickle through his fingers, perhaps as much as he loved women or that wrinkled saccharine familiar.
Eventually, Soni Aadam brought the mountain to Muhammad: a full studio outfit arrived in several trucks along with a top-notch roundtheclock producer, just in case Mamun awoke from a succour binge with an idea. For several years, it worked. Lying on his back, with a microphone suspended from the ceiling, my father would sing, somehow capable in the horizontal of accomplishing what he could no longer manage vertically, the notes rising, pausing, before resuming their climb up the scales; never had his voice been sweeter, more melancholic. Audiences were satisfied once again though the famous playback singer never appeared in public, and the only stories of his personal life were so rancid they must have been concocted by enemy publicists.