Prem Throws Your Heart to the Ground

Notes on a Monday

I began today with John Mayer and Prem Panicker.

I had to get up early in the morning and go to Karjat for a shoot of Everything is Everything. As I went to make coffee, I decided it was a John Mayer kind of day. I put on my trusty bluetooth headphones, went to YouTube, started listening.

Prem throws your heart to the ground.
Love turns the whole thing around.

Somehow, whenever I hear Heart of Life, I hear these words and I think of Prem.

This is possibly because Prem is the only Prem I know, so who else would I think of? The mishearing itself is not unusual — in fact, there’s a term for this: Mondegreen. The term originated in a Sylvia Wright essay in which she misheard the lyrics of a ballad, The Bonnie Earl of Moray. The lyrics go:

Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands,
Oh where have you been?
They have slain the Earl o' Moray
And layd him on the green.

Wright heard this last line as:

And Lady Mondegreen.

I’m sure there are lyrics that you have heard one way and then realised something else was being said. In a sense, this is a version of the phenomenon I spoke of in my last post: we try to make sense of the complex world by telling simple stories. If there are lyrics we don’t immediately understand, our brain fills in whatever seems to make sense.

A classic example of such lyrical complexity is Pearl Jam’s Yellow Ledbetter:

Ona wheelahn
Ona whizzit ona whaya
ana calldnana saya,
nana whoa wanna saym,
anna coldouta gnnn.

I’m not even sure this qualifies as a Mondegreen, because there doesn’t seem to be any wrong way to identify these lyrics, and even Eddie Vedder may not know what they are. See the comments on this performance, for example: half of them are raving about Mike McCready’s guitar performance, and the other half is joking about the words. They’re not angry; they love it. I love it. It’s a feature, not a bug.

That’s what love does. Prem throws your heart to the ground.

Friendship is Music

Whenever we have to shoot in Karjat, it has become a custom for me to head to Bandra and pick up our crew, Nomsita and Vaishnav. Nomsita is our brilliant editor: this video captures her editing our show; and this one, from when she was 15, captures her spirit. (She’s 19 now.) She also shoots the show, along with Vaishnav, who’s a ripe old 22. He recently wrote an amazing musical play called The Magic Fruit. It’s staggering. Watch out for the next show on their Instagram page.

We have developed two charming customs on our drives to and from Karjat. One is that Vaishnav drives. He loves driving, I’m a lazy Bengali, and this is a perfect confluence.

The second is that we play music for each other.

This is a bigger deal than it seems. Is there a greater offering of friendship than to introduce someone to music you love? Vaishnav sent me into a phase where I listened to only Khruangbin for a couple of weeks. I introduced them to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and they sunk into that for a few days. And into another of my favourites, Yo La Tengo.

Perhaps most important of all, Vaishnav introduced me to The Peter Cat Recording Co with the great song Remain in Me. It moved me so much that I sent it to a friend also known as Daddu. He replied:

I don’t think we cry enough. This feels like a therapy session where everyone who likes the song is holding hands and reaching out to the next one. All crying.

Listen to it on Spotify with lyrics. It is about parents. If it doesn’t move you, you have failed the Turing Test.

On that note, here’s one of my favourite poems:

SELF-PORTRAIT
by AK Ramanujan

I resemble everyone
but myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows
  despite the well-known laws
  of optics,
the portrait of a stranger,
date unknown,
often signed in a corner
by my father.

And this masterpiece by Dilip Chitre, the first of my Facebook friends to die:

FATHER RETURNING HOME
by Dilip Chitre

My father travels on the late evening train
Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light
Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes
His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat
Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books
Is falling apart. His eyes dimmed by age
fade homeward through the humid monsoon night.
Now I can see him getting off the train
Like a word dropped from a long sentence.
He hurries across the length of the grey platform,
Crosses the railway line, enters the lane,
His chappals are sticky with mud, but he hurries onward.
Home again, I see him drinking weak tea,
Eating a stale chapati, reading a book.
He goes into the toilet to contemplate
Man's estrangement from a man-made world.
Coming out he trembles at the sink,
The cold water running over his brown hands,
A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists.
His sullen children have often refused to share
Jokes and secrets with him. He will now go to sleep
Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming
Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking
Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.

‘Man's estrangement from a man-made world.’

Only poetry does this.

Through a Narrow Pass

Nomsita and Vaishnav live in a lane so narrow that if a middle-aged Bengali exhales there, he will be stuck. The last time I picked them up, they conned me into driving into that lane. It was stressful; my dinky little car just about made it in and out, but I cannot imagine an SUV managing.

Today, I told them that they better give a location on a proper street, and so they did.

The problem was not the destination but the journey. Google Maps took me through some backlane in Juhu, towards Bandra, which got narrower and narrower, till it seemed only wide enough to accomodate two thin people side by side. (Me and the pre-masturbation Ryan, for example.) So I turned left at one point, and then right, imagining that as I was going in the same broad direction, I would be fine. Maps disapproved, and wanted me to go back to die.

The new road I was on was also narrow. At one point, half of it got cut off due to construction work. Only half of the other half — a quarter of the original narrow road — was drivable. The rest was rubble. There was a mad flow of traffic from the opposite direction, so I got pushed onto the rubble. And at one point, we were stuck — me on the rubble, a gigantic SUV besides me, and no space for either car to move.

The elderly lady driving the SUV was shouting at me. I rolled down my window and said to her with the most disarming smile I could manage:

‘I’m sorry, but look around me, what can I do?’

She softened. “I understand. But this is a one-way street, you know.”

“Oh damn,” I said. “I was just following Google maps.”

This was a blatant lie, but she felt the human connection.

“Maps is horrible! You know what happened to me one time? I was…”

She was interrupted by honking behind her, or we could have shared a cup of tea and samosas in our cars, side by side, chatting about this cruel world. I reversed a bit, then turned further into the rubble, and she moved past. The rear-view mirror on the left of my car hit something and shut. Now, when I turned to see who was behind me, I could only see my own bewildered face.

Eventually I reached my destination. Topmost Wines. Vaishnav and Nomsita got there, and Vaishnav said, “Can I drive?” I wanted to hug him.

***

So we reach the friend’s farm in Karjat where we shoot, stopping on the way for a wada pav. I have three or four more diary items I can write about — but I shouldn’t. We shoot five episodes over the next two days, and I haven’t prepped at all. My co-host Ajay is a mad genius who doesn’t need to prep — but I am a mere mortal. Low-grade panic is setting in. I must step away from this post. See you soon, but first — let me leave you with one of my favourite love songs.

Nowhere Near — Yo La Tengo

Illlustrations by Simahina.