Umar Nizarudeen“ We shall meet again……
by the gates of the Villa of Peace, ‘’
Vidya who was researching in Leiden University had scribbled in my notebook, as I was about to return home to India. It was my second visit to Leiden. Once again the Uni doors had closed before me. Not just that, everything was expensive. Only wine was cheap. My poor debit card was drawing blanks from streetside ATMs. That was when a message arrived from Vidya, an old acquaintance from internship days in Bangalore.
Vidya had a university-owned residence. That too in the posh Harlammerstraat. The main shopping street of Leiden had always intimidated me. The rich, the hoi polloi floating by with happy shopping bags. `So, you stay here?’ I was suitably impressed. `The spare room is a bit dank, sorry about that’. I was truly dazed by the depth of our southern hospitality.
It was in Vidya’s home that I reconnected with Kannan Swamy, an old school mate from my home town. Swamy was a software programmer with this famous electronic firm in nearby Eindhoven. On weekends Swamy used to perform ghazals, some of them perpetrated by himself, at the Kabul Café near Amstel, where students and other migrants would congregate in large numbers in the evening, sipping cold beer. `Your history gets in the way of my memory. It rains in the streets …..I am witness to this till, the end of time,…’ thus went his poetic spiel.
I told Swamy that the spirit of some ghazal singer had possessed him. Because he’d studied technology all his life and only had a vague idea at best of art and literature. Swamy called himself a `freethinker’. He worshipped `freethinker’ gurus from Kerala. Ghazals came to him rather weirdly. Swamy was touring Amsterdam’s Chinatown in the company of a friend from Bangladesh when he got hooked by a Urdu couplet floating in from a Surinamese radio station. Rebellion was in his spirit, somehow: `has God’s vintage loneliness turned into vinegar? The wind blows softly as if it had pity on me…’
The tulip garden in Hague was Swamy’s favourite hangout. He would hold court, busking, while tourists and couples ambled all around him, some of them curious, others plainly amused by this weird Indian guy in church shoes. He sang Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali, Shahid Ali and what not…`Anything except Bollywood’, thus went his refrain. Someone with a music blog wrote a feature, comparing him with an a cappella band from the US.
On a whim, Swamy took long leave from his firm, to develop a software app, to popularize Ghazals. It was to be aptly named `Ghazals on Wheels’. The idea was to make street cyclists listen to Ghazals while they pedalled. Songs could be downloaded on demand. Vidya’s savings went on a brand new server to host the songs. Dutch men and women cycling in Amsterdam and the Hague were struck by Swamy’s sad bolts from the blue. It was not about to end peacefully. The dauntless Swamy also held open court in a hired caravan near the Rijksmuseum. The police arrived within minutes. It was while cooling his heels in prison that Swamy connived to develop this dream setup called `Project Arshinagar’. “Death comes, thin bureaucrat from the plains, the cold thickens the fat near his heart…This country rests on springs, that keep the waters out, let them in O lord of the seven skies’’ White policemen from downtown Amstelveen, listened with only mild scorn as Swamy ranted on thus in a saffron robe. They mistook him for Osho.
But improbable as it sounds, `Project Arshinagar’ took off, post Swamy’s release from Amstel prison. Gernot, a colleague who had arrived from Berlin on a Flixbus to munch on `herbal’ ice cream in Amsterdam also joined us. Gernot soon became Swamy’s boon companion and prime shishya. They reprised Shahid Ali songs in Utrecht University with a sizeable South Asian crowd. It went something like `my hands are crimson from the saffron, saffron my wages, I will die in October, to be taken in a Taxi, to buy flowers, and will shout, “Saffron, my wages’’, and hearing this he will cross borders, chase every rumour of me…..’ and so on. I was really getting exasperated by all this. There must be a limit to this madness!
“Arsh’ means the heavenly seat of the deity,’ Swamy expounded from the balcony to Roma singers beating their weekly retreat downstairs in Harlammerstraat. `In Deutsch, it means arse,’ Gernot commiserated from his cosy perch near the window. `Hitler’s language? Herr Hitler’s language?’ Swamy heated up at this, gesticulating wildly. `You know who is toxic? One whose story we don’t know is toxic, but this doesn’t apply to Hitler. Because his backstory is useless’.
There was this possibly apocryphal story being spread by some Malayali research students in Leiden that Swamy had scribbled some of the verses (`if only you could have been mine, what would not have been possible in the world?’)on the glass windows of a domina’s chamber in Utrecht and been mercilessly whipped for his troubles. Welts on his back bore witness to this. Even as they healed he had developed another addiction, to a certain cocktail this time. `A man would bury his house in the evening, to be excavated in the evening. I have no home, just a shadow’.
It was after much pleading that Swamy accompanied Vidya, Gernot and me to the Dam square. `Usually cities have amusement parks, but here in Amsterdam, the amusement park has a city,’ Vidya wisecracked, which we all enjoyed. There were magic tricks in the Plaza. The skyscraper giant wheel, screaming roller coasters, food trucks selling ice cream and kebabs, herrings with terrible thin bones, exhibition of Ming era vases at the museum, it all went on like a dream. In the nearby Amsterdam dungeon, entry was Euros twenty. Medieval tortures appalled our little group. Various forms of impalement, disembowelling, drawing and quartering, boiling, the sickness factor was crossing all limits with each passing show. Then we came to the Rembrandt picture with a corpse being dissected. An actor playing the role of a medieval Dutch medical student, cradled the corpse’s plastic bladder in her hands and playfully splashed us with the fake yellow liquid within. It was supposed to be hellish. We plodded on…
On another side of the dungeon were actors playing grave robbers with stolen skulls, poor victims of the black plague, dead spirits fleeing the earth etc. The mock executioner playfully left aside the big pliers in his hand for a scaled down version of the same, and mocked Gernot, `for you, that would suffice!’. He obviously was not pleased.
Another show in the dungeon featured the execution of the legendary Joan of Arc. Actors wearing the dark costumes of medieval times flitted in and out. The chamber reeked with the fake smell of rotting flesh and sulphur. On the table were laid out the instruments of death. Someone smilingly told us, `don’t forget, this is only an exhibition’. All of us were desperately wishing to get out of that space.
But there was to be no escape. The nearby stall had actors playing victims, accused of heresy and black magic, being burned at the stakes. A spectator who shivered the most at their antics got a crumpled kiss. After sipping some cheap drinks in the bar, included in the entry fee, we once again swung into action, training to be galley slaves in the ship VOC Batavia. The tinkling of chains was everywhere, the sonic underbelly of old Europe. There was someone in a habit at the base of a canon, feeding it with giant balls of metal. One came and fell near us with a crashing thud. The din was terrifying.
Our next stop was the stall showing the `thrills’ of inquisition in ghastly detail. There was also a giant figure of a man, fire-dancing in the dark. Hiding in a burrow nearby was Francesco de Goya cradling his painting of a countess, in that primordial darkness made visible.
Swamy had all this time been walking with our group, nonchalant and quiet. He seemed a bit like Milton’s Satan himself, someone quipped. There was this zen-like serenity about Swamy, unperturbed by what was going on around him. But suddenly the App in his hand exploded. The last song we heard on the app was `it rains as I write this, mad heart, be brave’.
