"Life was so much easier, twenty years ago..."
So sang Kenny Rogers once and I used to love that song even before I turned 20. I never realised that song would hold more meanings to me as years pass by.
I don't know why but I suddenly took a fancy for songs in my native tongue tonight and I ended up listening to some of the sweetest melodies ever made in Malayalam. The year (or) rather years, were the late 1980s and the 90s. Just one song after the other...I couldn't stop listening. I drifted with each song, swung with the melody and at the end I caught myself crying pitifully like a child! I wonder what made me...why?
Perhaps those songs took me to the days when I and my sister were still with our dad, listening to him singing, sometimes humming songs while cooking, or even when he was out in the hot sun on Sunday mornings with us in our backyard, playing cricket with us. He was our first teacher in not just music but just about everything else. I do not know how much my sister recalls the memories about him but I do, vividly enough, curse my memory, or perhaps even sentimentality. My sis was too young (hardly 8 years old) when he passed away. But in the 12 years he managed to spend with me, he rather left me with a lot of things - his way of thinking, cricket, romanticism for life, love for music, literature, movies, love for finer things in life...I sometimes feel he left a part of himself in me.
Here I go - the romantic fool that I've always been!
But... The year is now 2012. It's been 17 long years since he left us - left me to become an Ekanthapadhikan (A lonely Wanderer), but I still listen to the same set of songs he left me with - all the Rafis, Kishoredas, Mukeshs, Latajis, Ashajis, Jim Reeves, Carpenters... The only thing different, or rather the thing I did not inherit from my dad is his taste for books - Lois Lamour, James Hardly Chase, Mario Puzo... And that's not because those were bad or poor tastes but just that I'm not as much a bookworm as my father use to be. I'm very choosy about my books and probably the only book (or) books that I would've shared with my dad would be Perry Mason.
Hm... Think i'm going on a tangent here... But that's how it always is. I try best to resist his memories 'coz somewhere it still hurts me that he left me without a warning or a proper "Goodbye." But the moment the doors of my memory is opened, one thing after the other just floods in, and that last day I saw my dad... Oh! It's not scary as it used to be for me but still... It all happened too soon and too unexpected. At least he could have told me that he wouldn't return when he was being taken to the hospital. After all, I was still nursing him when he was lying all sweating on the floor... Hm... Tangent again....
I don't know why I'm writing all this... No. I know! The songs - songs from the past. They just came from nowhere and dragged me through those memory lanes which I never wanted to trudge again...
Call me a romantic. Call me a sentimental fool. Call me anything, I don't care but... No one would ever understand what I'm going through now unless you're me, and no one would ever know how much I miss my Hero!
A song in his memory:
I don't know why but I suddenly took a fancy for songs in my native tongue tonight and I ended up listening to some of the sweetest melodies ever made in Malayalam. The year (or) rather years, were the late 1980s and the 90s. Just one song after the other...I couldn't stop listening. I drifted with each song, swung with the melody and at the end I caught myself crying pitifully like a child! I wonder what made me...why?
Perhaps those songs took me to the days when I and my sister were still with our dad, listening to him singing, sometimes humming songs while cooking, or even when he was out in the hot sun on Sunday mornings with us in our backyard, playing cricket with us. He was our first teacher in not just music but just about everything else. I do not know how much my sister recalls the memories about him but I do, vividly enough, curse my memory, or perhaps even sentimentality. My sis was too young (hardly 8 years old) when he passed away. But in the 12 years he managed to spend with me, he rather left me with a lot of things - his way of thinking, cricket, romanticism for life, love for music, literature, movies, love for finer things in life...I sometimes feel he left a part of himself in me.
Here I go - the romantic fool that I've always been!
But... The year is now 2012. It's been 17 long years since he left us - left me to become an Ekanthapadhikan (A lonely Wanderer), but I still listen to the same set of songs he left me with - all the Rafis, Kishoredas, Mukeshs, Latajis, Ashajis, Jim Reeves, Carpenters... The only thing different, or rather the thing I did not inherit from my dad is his taste for books - Lois Lamour, James Hardly Chase, Mario Puzo... And that's not because those were bad or poor tastes but just that I'm not as much a bookworm as my father use to be. I'm very choosy about my books and probably the only book (or) books that I would've shared with my dad would be Perry Mason.
Hm... Think i'm going on a tangent here... But that's how it always is. I try best to resist his memories 'coz somewhere it still hurts me that he left me without a warning or a proper "Goodbye." But the moment the doors of my memory is opened, one thing after the other just floods in, and that last day I saw my dad... Oh! It's not scary as it used to be for me but still... It all happened too soon and too unexpected. At least he could have told me that he wouldn't return when he was being taken to the hospital. After all, I was still nursing him when he was lying all sweating on the floor... Hm... Tangent again....
I don't know why I'm writing all this... No. I know! The songs - songs from the past. They just came from nowhere and dragged me through those memory lanes which I never wanted to trudge again...
Call me a romantic. Call me a sentimental fool. Call me anything, I don't care but... No one would ever understand what I'm going through now unless you're me, and no one would ever know how much I miss my Hero!
A song in his memory:
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