The food of love

After four weeks, I confess I’m not a tittle closer to mimicking the elegant, sensual moves of the enchanting Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. However, I’m now able to sing along to one of my favourite songs, the Sufi love ballad Tere Bina, from the award winning 2007 movie Guru and at least there is a small sense of triumph — shamelessly to be found in the misfortune of the beautiful, sexy star who reportedly fell off a bike during filming. She can sway hips, but I can ride!

Sufi, Bhangra, I love it all. And I’m thinking as I tune into Bally Sagoo, “Wait a minute, this is Diamond Vale, principally Afro-Trini. What must my neighbours think?” Here’s what I think they should think: how providential to live in a country where we have grown up to the sounds of music from countless continents, sometimes in their purest form, sometimes synthesised. And perhaps that explains my undying affection for Diego Martin: its diverse people combine to make the perfect Trini pelau.

As I am partial to Punjabi, I find pan irresistible. Which is why I don’t get the rationale for excluding the steelband in some schools and why we must dictate which instrument our kids should play. Give them a choice and a chance. Pan, sitar, whatever, people must find their own music — music comes from within, from the soul. To play an instrument it must first move us, stir us, and lift us. Children cannot or should not be force-fed, as if hunger striker, as if suffragette.

When I was in secondary school back in the day, I desperately wished to play an instrument. At that time, Afro and Indo culture were disparaged alike and in Form One we were handed recorders by a tyrant of a European nun, an instrument that greatly grated, as she drilled us. I dreaded her class.

And then suddenly, one day we came into the hall and there stood a bass drum. Had Sister been into the B?n?dictine?

After a coma-inducing lecture on clefs and keys or something of the kind — I was absent in spirit — she called me out and handed me the pan sticks. Perhaps she had spotted my apathy and thought I might be inspired. Or perhaps Sister was saying, “You were not paying attention? Now, we will see.”

But once the sticks were in my hand, they felt at home and on striking the first note, I was enamoured and though I had heard nothing of what Sister had said about tempos or chords or whatever, I had no difficulty understanding the bass drum’s role in the accompaniment of the recorder recital.

After that, that was that. Good convent girls didn’t play pan. They never limed in panyards. That was badjohn thing. It was only as an adult that I could and would climb the hill to Despers and spend every night there in Carnival season. I would always know the arrangement by heart. One night Clive Bradley jocularly remarked, “Don’t come back without sticks!”

I think however that had I also been handed a sitar in Form One, I would have been just as keen to learn. But in those times, the chafing, soulless recorder ruled.

Nowadays, though, there should be no contest between Afro and Indo and how selfish and self-serving of us to box our youths in, when they are so blessed to grow up in a multicultural society. Can the sitar not be the pan’s partner, its lover?

Music is not meant to divide and conquer, but to soothe and inspire. Every school should be stocked with a spectrum of instruments, children encouraged into exploring and experimenting as they wish. But through paranoia — Indian and African — we are tugging at the quilt, not plucking the strings and striking the steel in harmony. We have it all but we want to settle for less. It’s either a Sat or a Pan Trinbago (which has done little for the development and evolution of the steel pan) nagging us to choose.

Well I won’t. I still want to be a woman on the bass and I will not give up Bhangra or cease trying to dance and chant like I belong in Bollywood. It’s not either or; or neither nor for me. I want my life to be a symphony. Should we not desire that idyll for our kids?

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