Carnatic Music and the Seduction Game

Carnatic Music and the Seduction Game
by V.Lakshman

The story of my marriage begins with my love of Carnatic music. Actually, it has less to do with my love for the music than with my awe of its performers and hatred of its afficionados. Everything has a beginning and my marriage has its beginnings with Krishnaswamy.
Krishnaswamy infuriates me whenever I go to Carnatic music concerts. He is one of those intolerable people one always finds tapping their thighs trying to keep beat with the music. Classical music being rather abstruse and esoteric, keeping beat -- usually in cycles of sixteen beats -- is a rather difficult thing to do. Of course, it being so hard also ensures that no one really knows whether you are keeping the correct beat or not. Personally, I find such people infuriating because, although I love the music, I can recognize neither the {\it raga} nor the {\it tala} in any given piece. You can say that what I hate is my incompetence being brought home to me.
Whenever I return from a concert, therefore, it is never with the satisfaction of having listened to an hour of exemplary music. I usually come back gritting my teeth in sheer impotence. So many people, it seems to me at such times, can relish the ingredients of an impeccable musical tradition while I am an onlooker, awed by the grandeur of the music but not competent enough to understand it. True to form, I take out my infuriation on the people who bring that point home to me -- the blokes who attend Carnatic concerts and keep beat with the music through all the waxing and all the waning. I hate them all. Krishnaswamy, I hate more than anyone else because I know him.
Actually, I know him only because I go to concerts regularly during the December season when I am in Madras. I first saw Krishnaswamy at one of those classical music concerts. I was, at the time, a college student who attended concerts because I enjoyed the music. The people with half-closed eyes and slightly open lips irritated me even then. Krishnaswamy, however was no dilettante; he was one of the regulars. He was about two hundred pounds and less than five foot five. With a dhoti tied in the traditional style and a {\it kudumi} to boot, his was an unmistakable presence. I saw him at every one of the concerts and he never failed to bring out all the vileness within me. He would sit somewhere in the third or fourth row and tilting his head slightly backward so that his {\it kudumi} touched the back of his seat, he would slowly sway his head from side to side using his {\it kudumi} as a fulcrum. As if such a performance weren't enough, he would tap his thigh with his right hand bringing his hand down hard and striking the air with command. I hated him.
I would have merely hated the sight of him and never come to meet him had he stayed away from me. At one rather crowded concert (a well-known artiste who also sang film songs, was singing that day), Krishnaswamy rolled in about five minutes before the concert was scheduled to start. He strolled all the way to the front and slowly walked back searching each row of seats for a vacant seat. There were none in the first ten or fifteen rows and as luck would have it, there was one to my right. He squeezed his way in and then, looking sternly at me, asked whether there was someone occupying the seat. Flustered by his presence, I blurted out a "no." He proceeded to take the seat. It involved some unseemly wiggling to get his rear aligned with the back of the seat but he made it. He must have felt that his question to me was an introduction of sorts because he then proceeded to talk to me.
Rather, he proceeded to question me. "Are you a student?," he asked. Then, "Where do you study?" I told him. "Do you always come to katcheris?," he asked chewing a roll of betel leaf and spraying red betel juice over my face each time he asked me a question. "I try to," I replied keeping my voice as neutral as possible. "That is good," he told me as if I needed his approval to come to concerts, "young people should learn our traditions." "Yes, they should," I answered and pointedly looked back at the stage. The artiste entered at that moment to thunderous applause. I got up with the rest of the audience to give him an ovation. Krishnaswamy didn't stir -- he couldn't budge out of that seat without an effort. Any way, my movement shut him up for a while.
The concert started and I was gratified to see that he was neither rolling his head in admiration nor was he patting his thighs in beat with the music. I wasn't gratified for too long. "He is playing to the gallery," he told me hoarsely, "he has gone straight to the {\it pallavi}." The {\it pallavi} is the meat of the concert and the part that I (and most of the crowd there that day, I am sure) enjoy the most -- at least the lyrics are recognizable. Krishnaswamy apparently wanted more of the preceding portions -- where the "mood" of the concert is set by improvisations that I can't even recognize. "Yes, he has gone straight to the {\it pallavi}," I told him rather rudely and settled back to enjoy the concert. That was not to be. "He is killing Carnatic music," Krishnaswamy told me, "he is killing it by going against all the traditions." "We can talk later," I told him quietly, "I want to listen to the katcheri." "This is not a katcheri. This is a farce," he said fiercely and then, thankfully, shut up.
The audience by now had really warmed up to the singer. He'd gauged his audience perfectly and had started with very familiar songs. He now began to sing lesser known songs in rather abstruse {\it ragas} but the audience stayed with him, so effortless and light did he make them seem. He had a powerful, melodious voice and was traversing nearly three octaves. It was a wonderful concert. Every one was enjoying it -- at least every one, save Krishnaswamy sitting beside me and shaking his head ruefully.
After the concert, he felt that it was his duty to put me straight on classical music. "It isn't really this way, you know," he told me, "Carnatic music is a wonderful tradition. You should attend --'s concerts, then you will know how great it is. This guy here, he is a film singer and all. That is why he was singing like that today."
"Actually, Sir," I told him rather formally, "I liked the concert. I really liked the way he arranged the selections."
Krishnaswamy looked at me as if at a heretic. "Telling you about classical music is like throwing pearls in front of swine," he told me harshly and left hastily.
I would have been glad if those were the last words he ever spoke to me. Instead of ignoring me as he would undoubtedly have ignored other swine that crossed his path, Krishnaswamy took it into his head to cast pearls in front of me. He collared me at every concert after that and sitting beside me, commented on the technical merits of each artist. "This young lad," he once said about the person on stage, "he has great talent but he seems to avoid the second {\it Ga}." "Wonder why," I muttered in reply. I had not yet gotten around to ignoring him completely. Then followed a discussion of the {\it ragas} that used the second {\it Ga} and those that didn't. I missed the second half of that concert having to listen to the merits and demerits of the second {\it Ga}.
I hated him and his overly-technical mind. While I just wanted to listen to the music, he insisted on bothering me that entire season with technical and mundane stuff. I tried my best to avoid him but he seemed oblivious to all my hints. He was such a regular fixture around me that one of my father's friends, himself a regular at the concerts, thought that Krishnaswamy was a close friend of ours and gave the bloke a contract he wouldn't have got otherwise. So, not only did Krishnaswamy bore me to death, he actually profited by it.
It was in April that year that I got to know of the contract. Krishnaswamy apparently carried over his technical mind even to the less concrete world of trading. He'd sat on a garment export order so long that my father's friend had had to re-route the order and pay through his nose to meet his deadlines. The court system being what it is, he'd wanted to know if my father'd help him collect from Krishnaswamy. He was shocked to hear that we knew next to nothing about the fat fellow with the {\it kudumi}.
I graduated from college that June and wanting to get away from Madras to prove, at least to myself, that I could survive without my father's connections, I left for Bombay. All the time I was in Bombay, Dalal Street took the place of the Music Academy and the BSE Index the place of the veena's strains. Three years and a few lakhs later, I returned to Madras as chief of one of my father's new ventures. This involved the sale of computer parts. My father'd lured me with talk of how my experience in Dalal Street would help the new enterprise succeed. It was all bull-shit of course; my mother merely wanted me close home so she could do some match-making. But the new business was successful; we went into leasing computers as well and started making a good deal of money. I stuck on.
So, four years after that season's acquaintance with Krishnaswamy, I was in Madras again. Of course, I was no longer a student now; I had made some money of my own and that gave me the confidence to call a piece of music crap if it did nothing to me. My success had given me the confidence to build a ego-centric standard of entertainment evaluation. Music, now, was just that -- entertainment. I expected that the sight of people tapping their thighs away would leave me unmoved. They were idiots, caught in their boring middle class lives. I was, I felt, successful enough to dare to call out that the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes. It was with this attitude, therefore, that I started attending Carnatic concerts again.
The music season started in December; this was just four months after I returned to Madras. My mother hadn't yet given up on finding me a wife. To each concert, therefore, I went with a different girl -- a scion of some wealthy Madras family that didn't know of any better way to spend its money than to countenance my mother's ludicrous dowry demands. The girls by my side, sophisticated and smelling of money, must have kept Krishnaswamy off. He recognized me; he'd wave from far away but would never ever take a seat close to me. I was relieved; I'd made up in my mind several retorts to Krishnaswamy's usual mumbo-jumbo and was happy that I didn't have to use them. I am, at heart, a rather peace-loving fellow.
A year went by and the next December season rolled around. Either my mother'd given up or there were no rich families willing to sacrifice their young daughters to me. I had no girls on my arm when I went to the concerts this time. Krishnaswamy had avoided me throughout the previous season but I'd never thought about the reason why. I'd just been glad about it. I was surprised, therefore, when on the second concert of the season, he found a seat next to mine.
"So you have finished college, eh?," he asked by way of preamble. I nodded in reply, trying desperately to remember the one-liners I'd prepared a year before. "You are a rich boy," he said in a matter-of-fact manner, "you are running around with all those young girls. You should settle down." He'd assumed the mentor's role that he'd assigned to himself five years before. In his mind, he was probably just telling me what was good for me. "Don't get dazzled by women, young man," he went on, "keep them at an arm's reach. Now, music. That is something to get attracted to. It is civilized, it builds on its past and doesn't pester you for saris." He smiled at his humor; I smiled just to be polite. His advice on life was worse than his rambling on music. The Krishnaswamys, I felt, were the scum of the earth. They were the punishment for our past sins.
I desperately wanted to change the topic. "She plays rather well," I said referring to the veena player on stage. This was the first time I'd heard of her. She was from one of the southern temple towns; that day's performance at the Krishna Gana Sabha during the traditionally busy December season was, without doubt, her breakthrough. She was doing rather well for a new comer but I wouldn't have said anything if it hadn't been that I wanted to change the topic. As a rule, I do not comment on music in the presence of some one who knows the stuff.
"My niece," said Krishnaswamy proudly, "she is my niece, my brother's daughter from Madurai. I got her to play here." "Pulled a lot of strings, hee hee," he neighed and laughed raucously. His niece?, I remember thinking in disbelief and glancing at the stage. She was about twenty years old and in spite of the make-up she was wearing on stage, it was obvious that she was from the country-side and not from Madras.
My mind started working overtime. She knew music, I remember thinking. She could probably teach me something. I have always been attracted to women I perceive as being more intelligent or more knowledgeable than I am. Also, his niece's obvious country-girl looks struck a responsive chord in me. "May be then, I can meet her," I said to him with a smile, "can you take me backstage after the concert?"
Krishnaswamy was thrown off momentarily. "You are a rich boy," he told me ruefully, "you play around with too many girls and my niece is an ignorant girl." "Leave her alone," he said, "I will not take you backstage either today or any time else."
I had already dreamt of the conquest and an old man's protests weren't going to dissuade me. "I am not a playboy," I told him in a saccharine voice, "and besides, I am not interested that way in your niece. It is just that she plays very well and may be I can be of help to her."
He still was not convinced. I went out on a limb. "Well, you know better than I do that my name has helped a number of people in this city," I hinted. I didn't know for sure whether he'd realized that the contract four years back had come to him because he was thought of as being our family friend. But he had realized it perfectly well and knew a subtlety when he saw one. "Not tonight," he said to me, "this is a big day for her and I don't want her to face you today but she is giving a performance at the Agastyar temple next Wednesday evening. After that concert, if you will come to it, I will introduce you to her."
I met her after the Wednesday evening concert and presented her with a bouquet and told her how much I enjoyed her performance. I made it a point after that to attend all her concerts and to meet her backstage afterwards. It was obvious she'd never been the center of a man's attention before. She'd blush and try to make small talk with me. Of course, the fact that I am young and rich must have contributed to her awkwardness. Around March, I asked her out for lunch. She agreed and soon we were going on dinner dates to Krishnaswamy's obvious displeasure. But he needn't have worried. His niece was profoundly distrustful of men. I could never as much as kiss her all the time I was dating her. But I was enjoying the seduction game all the same. I knew it was only a matter of time and felt that the longer the chase, the sweeter the final reward would seem.
What I didn't realize was that all the time I thought I was seducing her, the "naive" country girl was also casting her net at me. She found out early that I didn't know much about music. She used her knowledge against me judiciously, launching forth about musical technique at times and at other times, barely concealing her contempt at my ignorance. She had me by my nose whenever the subject was music. She would let me order for her, claiming the privilege of being unfamiliar with such things as Arab kebabs and Chinese chowmein. She would, at times, hang on to every word I said about my work, about the highly technical world of computer parts. She made herself out to be better than me in the things that she implied mattered most -- in music, in art and in morality. By pleading the advantage of a country girl unfamiliar with the sophistication of city life, she made me out to be some kind of a bestial protector of her virtue.
By June, I was in love with her. Of course, we had our disagreements. My emperor-and-his-last-clothes theory of Carnatic music appreciation hadn't exactly vanished under the carpet. It still surfaced once in a while. I would argue at such times that a musician's first duty was to his audience; that he had to entertain. She however felt that the general public was a mob of pigs. She felt that musical theory and the strict formats of concerts were what elevated the mob to something approaching decorum. In this, she echoed the words of her uncle that music was a civilizing element. She too possessed an overly technical mind in such matters. Once in an angry retort, she said my appreciation of music was a sham inasmuch as I couldn't ascertain even the {\it tala} of a piece.
She held on to her virtue and by July, had almost convinced me that I was not worthy of her. I began to hint so darkly, still playing my seduction game. She reacted as I knew she would. She melted but she too was playing a game. She melted just enough to give me hope. In September, not even knowing what I was doing, I proposed. She accepted after leading me through a rigmarole of how much I had to change in my "playboy" ways. I had dated no one but her for the past six months.
My mother screamed out in outrage when I told her. I know how to handle my mother. "You are mad only because she will bring in no dowry," I told her. She had no reply to that. It was the truth.
My father was not to be so easily dismissed. He wanted to meet the girl I had proposed to. The three of us met over lunch at his office. At home that evening, he offered rational arguments for why it was a stupid, impulsive decision. I had to argue with him. I had to use logic to explain a situation which was, even to me, irrational.
"She is a narrow minded young woman," he told me, "she will not be able to adjust easily to our way of living. She will want to count every paisa that enters and leaves and will not understand it if we invest half our money in some scheme that fails." I had no answer to that except that my mother had never interfered with the way we -- my father and I -- handled the finances. "Oh, this girl will," my father said wearily, "she isn't wise enough to know that for every venture that succeeds, three will fail. She will interfere all right. I know the type. She is the kind who'll want to keep an eye on us." There was no argument to that because I knew she was the type who would definitely want to keep tabs. "She will learn," I muttered.
"Even on a personal basis," my father continued, "she is going to be jealous of every one of your secretaries. She will be a lousy hostess; she will act prim if a guest to our house walks in drunk." "It is going to be difficult, my son," he said . "She will learn," I replied.
My father didn't argue any further. Her family didn't have any objections whatsoever. Surprisingly, Krishnaswamy mentioned nothing about playboys. He seemed rather pleased with the way things had turned out. We were married that November.
That December season, we went to the concerts together. She continued to play the veena although she cut her engagements in half. It was fun going to concerts with her although at times, her comments reminded me of her much hated uncle. That December season, looking back now, was our honeymoon.
Come June, she was pregnant. My father had come to tolerate her frequent questions about money and even managed to joke about it when she expressed frustration at his losing money in some enterprise or the other. The pregnancy and the possibility of a grandchild to fuss over brought even my mother around. Things seemed to have worked out for the better.
That December season, she was too visibly pregnant to accompany me to the concerts. I consequently told her that I would be going alone. "Why are you going?," she asked me.
"Because I like the music," I told her.
"I know why a man like you goes to concerts," she said with a jeer, "I was not born yesterday. You will not be going alone. Or if you go alone, you will carry a bouquet of flowers. You don't know the first thing about music. I know why a man like you goes to Carnatic music concerts."
I looked at her square accusatory face and saw the contempt in her dark eyes and possessive color rising in her cheeks. I noticed those things but it was Krishnaswamy I saw in her face.

V Lakshmanan can be reached at:
lakshman@nssl.noaa.gov