I was then a student of class four. I was travelling in a bus with my dada, masi (next to my mother, in the line of eleven siblings of my didu and dadu) and her daughter – my sister. We were going to Maniktala in a Calcutta transport bus. The weather-beaten bus staggered along the pot-holed road. It was over-crowded.
“Jodi kichhu paro more dao,” someone sang. I looked around; only found the sweat-soaked backs of passengers standing acrobatically like us. The voice came near. I saw the singer, a boy, blind. He sang his way to everyone, stopping only by few moments, extending his open palm. Paisa was dropped one by one. His song earned him fistful in moments. The raga Ashavari, which the song was composed in, might have appealed to the busy passengers on a rainy morning, in a crowded bus.
My mind now goes back to that unknown late-morning invoker; that Ashavari singer. The passengers might not know Ashavari. But the blind boy, perhaps, made them feel the light pensive notes of it. My salute to the unsung artiste of Ashavari in a chock-a-block dilapidated public transport bus, in the hazed-out past, on a Calcutta road, on the eve of World Music Day.