One of the boys is a famed dancer of the mohalla and everyone urges him to do his Mithun routine. I don’t rate him highly. It is his white leather boots that, I feel, have prejudiced the jury in his favour. After much coaxing, he gets up, throws his arms in the air, and starts disco dancing. With Mithunda, you don’t move around much. You just stand and deliver with hand movements and bent-knee hip gyrations.
Decades later, I can still see the white leather boots with 2-inch heels and side zippers I coveted every time I listen to Bappi Lahiri sing that song. Lahiri’s special genius was that he sang Hindi songs as if they were a foreign language. More often than not, like a slightly campy Welshman. Wardat was Mithunda’s second coming as Gunmaster G-9, our own dancing James Bond. Though not as successful as Suraksha (1980), the soundtrack of Wardat is memorable.
For a long time in his youth, my father carried a torch for Gina Lollobrigida. Even now, whenever the theme from Come September (1961) is playing on the stereo or YouTube, a wry smile comes to his still-handsome features. I know then he is back with his Gina.
It is said that whenever BS Chandrasekhar heard the song ‘Yeh Mera Diwanapan Hai’ from Yahudi (1958), playing in the stands from the Garware end, he would go into a trance, fluff his luxuriant Pushpa-like beard, meticulously mark his run-up and then even Viv Richards would start quaking in his boots while taking guard. ‘Dil Ko Teri Hi Tamanna/Dil Ko Hai Tujhse Hi Pyaar.’
The first music cassette I bought on my own was the soundtrack of Top Gun (1986) in early 1990. I remember cycling 4 km from my home to a paan shop that sold bootlegged cassettes. Over tins of Rajnigandha, cartons of Wills Navy Cut, Charms, Gold Flake cigarettes, and sachets of Baltic prophylactics, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, A-ha, and Wet Wet Wet jostled for space and attention in a sliding glass case.While our town had several large music shops, one would be hard-pressed to find a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album over there, which I magically did one evening at my paan shop. Over the next couple of years before I decamped for Delhi University, the paan shop became the cornerstone of my rock ‘n’ roll education.At home, I listened to Kenny Loggins singing Highway to the Danger Zone on a loop. It was as if I had a premonition of my impending doom. No wonder when the Class 10 results were announced, I found that I had crashed and burned. Even now, when I hear that song, I find myself transported to that corner shop and instructing the paanwallah: ‘Give me a meetha paan and Slippery When Wet. That’s right, third from the bottom. Bhai, Popped in Souled Out ke neeche.’
After patiently hearing my laddish ruminations about music and memory for an hour, my wife, who lately had been watching Ziddi Girls on Amazon Prime, said: ‘It is not always the song that transports you to a specific place; sometimes the reverse is also true. Whenever I walk past the Miranda House hostel, at my back I always hear Madonna affirming for me, ‘This used to be my playground/This used to be the place where I ran to’.’
‘Me too,’ I agreed in a flash. My wife then gave me a look one usually saves for a recalcitrant boxer. The canine, mind you, not the pugilist kind.
