Luis Dias
The Christmas season is a time of memories, thinking of old ones and making new ones. This Christmas season is a poignant one for me, as it is the first one where I am bereft of both my parents.
Before other technology superseded it, all our Christmas music was on vinyl records. Christmastime became an excuse to give the old record-player a good workout. The bulk of the record collection was classical music (bought by my dad), some Portuguese music predating our return in 1970, German and English popular music (bought by my mum in Germany), a collection of worn-out 78s in Konkani and Hindi, and a few additions bought after our return.
We had just three Hindi 45-rpms: ‘Haathi mere Saathi’(1971), the first film my brother and I saw in the cinema in Goa, and the first and last time in Dias family history we bought tickets in ‘black’ because our mum couldn’t bear to see our disappointed faces when the box office closed despite patiently queuing up; ‘Silsila’ (1981) which we won it in some contest, I still haven’t seen the whole film; and lastly, the subject of today’s column: ‘Patita’ (1953).
My parents met in the late 1940s in Nowrosjee Wadia College Poona, as Portuguese Goa had virtually no higher education avenues after Matriculation. Mum would have been a teenager, Dad in his 20s. When one hears tales of “many a falter before and after the altar” in today’s relationships, their prem kahani is quite remarkable in comparison.
Their relationship survived long absences, years apart in the mid-to-late 1950s, Dad in West Germany, Mum by then in Bombay, with only letters taking weeks one-way as a means of staying in touch, no phone (trunk) calls or telegrams. The letters remained stiffly formal (“Dear Mr. Dias”; “Dear Ms De Sousa”) almost throughout the correspondence. Dad’s letters have the most unromantic content possible, all about Nehru or Gandhi, Marx or Lenin, or whatever he was reading at the time. Mum’s letters describe working conditions in Bombay, and updates on mutual friends, much more interesting. No mushy greeting cards for birthdays or Christmas, just very business-like letters.
It's funny; to the end, Mum (and her family and their Wadia college ‘gang’) always pronounced my Dad’s name Manuel the ‘Indian’ Anglophone way (Man-new-whorl), whereas his own friends and family in Goa used the Lusophone option.
They would have a twinkle in their eye as they described their halcyon college days, and Poona as a university town dotted with cafes with jukeboxes, connected by cyclable lanes.
In the 1970s, hearing about a coin-operated “music machine” was something quite outlandish. To my knowledge there wasn’t one in Goa then. The idea of inserting a coin, pressing a “button” for one’s desired song/track, and having a mechanised arm on cue select and flip the relevant record on the turntable seemed magical. By the time I discovered the jukebox in Café Mondegar Colaba, it was no longer playing records.
Their song was from ‘Patita’ (starring Usha Kiron and Dev Anand in the lead roles): ‘Yaad kiya Dil ne,’ sung by Hemant Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar. Apparently, they’d go to a coffee-shop (probably somewhere in Bombay, as by 1953, Mum had begun working there while Dad continued studying in Poona), put a few annas in the juke-box and wallow in the romance conjured up by the song.
The accounts of the Bombay-Poona train journey were also hilarious. If I remember right, Dad insisted on Mum meeting up with him literally at the half-way point between the two cities (I can’t remember the name of the station), so that both of them made an equal attempt to keep the relationship going!
I bought the ‘Patia’ 45 rpm on one of my frequent visits to V.P. Sinaris. They don’t write songs like that anymore. The music is implied just reading out Hasrat Jaipuri’s lyrics. Also, I am obviously biased, but although the music is attributed to Shankar-Jaikishan, I think I hear Goan input in the interludes and orchestration.
For the longest time, I had no idea what ‘Patita’ was about, or even what the word meant. Wikipedia translates it to “fallen woman.” The film must have been a potboiler in its day. Any misfortune that could possibly befall a poverty-stricken young woman happens to our ‘heroine’, but in the end, after all manner of twists and turns, typical of the patriarchy in Indian cinema, the ‘hero’ swoops in, saves the day and everyone lives happily ever after. But at the time its director Amiya Chakravarty was hailed for the film’s “empathetic look at the sufferings of women in society.”
Watching it today is a strain, and frankly the soundtrack is its only redeeming feature, as its other songs that also became hits then. The 45-rpm record also had ‘Andhe Jahaan Ke, Andhe Raste (sung by Talat Mahmood); ‘Kisine apna Banaa ke mujhko’ and ‘Mitti se khelte ho baar-baar’ (both sung by Lata Mangeshkar).
Reading up on the song’s lyricist-poet Hasrat Jaipuri (1922-1999), his writing career took off after he wrote a love letter (although it is uncertain if he ever delivered it) around the age of twenty to a girl named Radha (coincidentally Usha Kiron’s character’s name in ‘Patita’). Years later, the text of that letter would become a hit song ‘Yeh Mera Prem Patra Padhkar’ (sung by Mohammad Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar) in Raj Kapoor’s 1964 film ‘Sangam.’ Such a beautiful love-poetry-music cascade!
Music was a good ice-breaker when my Dad and I had got into some sort of impasse. When I got tired of the “silent treatment” and wanted to patch up, I knew which tracks I could play on the record-player for him to come over and start talking again. ‘Yaad kiya Dil ne’ was one of those tracks, which often brought tears to his eyes.
Today, listening to ‘Yaad kiya Dil ne’, or even thinking about the song reminds me of my parents and brings tears to my own eyes.
(Dr Luis Dias is a physician, musician, writer and founder
of Child’s Play India
Foundation. He blogs at luisdias.wordpress.com)