This piece originated during a collaborative ideation to compose a lullaby for the short film Bhor Bator, which haunts a young bereaved daughter in a village by the Ganga. Her mother hums for her this last song that she remembers from her own mother’s home across the river, which she could never return to after marriage. While the song never made it into the film, the lyric I penned evolved into a literary exploration of intimate and social inheritance; of how sound, meaning, advice and tenderness are passed down as forms of ritual. The motif of the river in this fictional wedding song passed down the generations gathers the residues of migration, grief, farewell and (improbable) return, flowing through women like an unbroken refrain. Can one cross the threshold from silence to sound, celebration to mourning, maaike to sasuraal, and hope to return? ‘A Composed Parting’ transforms a product of the shared creative process into an act of listening across time and a gentle undoing of distance, inhabiting a liminal space between speculative witnessing and ancestral recall.
The night has fallen early, and up from the fields wafts a steady chirrup of insects, filling the wintry darkness. We walk along the scant pools of light from the village streetlamps, following the faint sound of singing voices. It emanates from the big house by the water. A yellow glow washes its baramdas, wraps around its plastered pillars, and diffuses into the soft purple shadows in the yard’s shrubbery. We part the fog and enter the courtyard, leaving our chappals with the crowd of the other pairs. Men stand in clumps and chatter by the compound wall. Women wearing gauzy red and vermillion and turmeric-yellow sarees that cover their heads sit on the floor of the porch surrounding the decked-up bride-to-be. The ones with white hair and stiff knees sit on the wood-and-fabric khaat lined against the wall. All their voices rise and mingle in a trembling tenor to form that rustic melody we heard all those years ago. Where one drops off, another rushes in to pick up the tune; their notes are approximate and uncomplex; their hands clap along to its crude rhythm; the volume sways and gushes as they shift their weights to let others walk past them to the frail little girl to swing a rupee-note around her head and mutter a blessing; its lilt is keening, stranded between a lament a lullaby, and yet, they sing it with an unpractised optimism. Here is the song that sent us away, and then brought us back across these plains, across these ages and lifetimes. This time, we can make out the words.
See this river, oh daughter?
She took birth far, far away,
Sprung from the mountains,
Fed by the virgin snows,
She flows and flows.
At times she thrives, at times she dries, She swells
sometimes, and other times, trickles by Through
feasts and through sorrows,
She flows and flows.
See this river, oh daughter?
She feeds the grain and moves the silt,
Gives new life and washes away guilt
Though I may not be here tomorrow,
Onward, she flows and flows.
The day you cross her, do remember:
The river is fated to join the sea.
Try as she might to return to her source,
She only flows and flows.
After Bhor Bator (Dir. Anshika Raj)