Mehr goes to sitar lessons twice a week. She has been
playing for six months on an ivory inlaid instrument that was once a gift from
her father to her mother. The body, bulbous and chocolate brown, used to be a
pumpkin.
Tonight there are four students, a tabla player, and the
Ustad. All sit cross legged on the floor. The sitar players rest the body of
their long necked instrument on one foot and brace with the right hand, which
also plucks the strings. The other moves quickly up and down, pressing, pausing,
wavering to find those notes so subtly between the frets.
The tabla player tunes with a small hammer, knocking pieces
of bamboo to tense and loosen the skins. Even now he teases the most complex
rhythms from his drums.
We pause for the muezzin's call and then begin. The Ustad
sings and the students play along.
The piece they are learning starts simply enough with a
double quaver crochet rhythm and an infectious melody we found ourselves
singing in the car on the way home. It repeats, and with each iteration grows
in complexity and subtlety until that original baba dee, baba dee is
transformed into cascades of rippling, shimmering sound.
The tabla player moves in and around the melody. His
fingers, lightning quick, at once respond to and anticipate the movements of
the sitar. It is sometimes conversation, sometimes lyrical and teasing, always
an exquisite dance.
After half an hour the Ustad takes Mehr's instrument and
begins to play. All except the tabla stop to listen. He begins as before but
with an absolute mathematical surety that builds and builds until we are lost
in the maze of sound. When he finishes there are smiles across the room and
clapping from down the corridor where artists sit and draw.
