Ode To The Radio

Fatima a senior citizen remembers her teenage days which were spent in a heavily veiled paternal home. She studied in the local government girls school in fifteenth cross Malleswaram up to the fifth standard and knew a smattering of English and Kannada. Though she could not read much she remembers having a fondness for the Illustrated Weekly of India which used to have blow-ups on the center page. Though she could not read the magazine she remembers spending a good deal of time looking at the glossy pictures till the next weekly edition came along. Then she would save some pictures for her personal treasury and use some double sheets to wrap the books of her school-going siblings. Her only window to the world was aborted when she tied the knot early and left her paternal home at the tender age of fifteen. Her husband worked as a tinker in a garage and had a small transistor which gave him company for most of the day. Somehow the elders in the household did not encourage playing the radio at home for they thought it was a veritable distraction. Fatima distinctly remembers how she found ever so many excuses which were far and few to go to the garage which was only next door to her home to call her husband for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the hope of listening to a snatch of a song.

It was after a span of two years and one child, her husband realized the claustrophobic existence his wife was leading and took the bold step of bringing the transistor home and allowing his wife to listen to Vividh Bharathi in the privacy of their room during late evenings. Even this small pleasure could not be savored in full measure because Fatima had to attend to cooking dinner and various household chores. Yet she would drop into the room intermittently and catch up with whatever she could Just when she resigned herself to the life of a thorough homemaker without any window to the world, her husband’s penchant for listening to film music breezed some enthusiasm in her life. In spite of all the restrictions, she worked out away with the help of her husband to listen to the famous Binaca Geet Mala broadcast by radio Ceylon on Wednesdays. Each Wednesday she would come up with a creative idea to keep her rendezvous with Ameen Sayani even if only for ten or fifteen minutes for the next few years. Then she would spend the rest of the week trying to associate some of the names he dropped over the show with the pictures at random she had seen long ago.

Today her home is filled with electronic gadgets, she has ready access to all varieties of media and absolutely no restrictions laid by her family members but they do not appeal to her anymore. Her zeal for film music has dwindled over the years. She admits that whenever she hears the strains of some old melody which she managed to listen to crossing great obstacles bring back a flood of memories in her which leave her cheeks wet.