A balm for troubled minds

THE EDITOR: Whitney Houston would have sung about One Moment in Time to mean an experience with no equal, touching the “very heart of you.” In her case “that all of my dreams are a heartbeat away…to be more than I thought I could be...to feel eternity...to be free...,” which, in essence, is no different from that special moment that you yourself will have been experiencing but only in the theatre of your dreams, the reality a virtual impossibility.

Ruby Gupta’s voice in her tribute to her now deceased brother, Nazimool Khan, on the night of August 28 on TV, was my “moment in time,” for her voice was that of the nightingale that John Keats used in his Ode to a Nightingale to find solace away from the ravages of the Industrial Revolution on nature which the nightingale symbolised, his senses “pained” as if of “hemlock” (wine) I had drunk, “being too happy in thine happiness” as the bird sang.

In my case, Gupta’s voice was the balm for a mind like mine, and that of others, troubled by the “Area of Darkness” in which we now live, making you forget for a fleeting moment that the one knocking on your door could be there to snuff out your life in an instant, or violate your beloved flesh and blood in front of your very eyes with no remorse, as recently, much like, but not with equal intensity, Martin Carter’s lament in This is the Dark Time, My Love to his beloved, that the “the stranger invader “(the British occupation of Guyana) “is striking at (their) dreams.”

We wish that Gupta won’t ever stop, for even with the uninitiated, her resonance and melody are certain to impact, much like the rose, the mystical beauty of which you do not quite understand but which you find difficult to resist. But for those familiar with melodies such as Chaud avay Ka Chand and Jah Ho Ga Mai Tumsay and others of her wide-ranging repertoire, they seem for a moment to touch on that soft sentimentality which we all long to experience as an unforgettable moment in time but which now seems a distant memory because of the times in which we live.

For me, in particular, Gupta’s voice brings back beautiful memories of the days of my youth in the sugar estate barracks at Golconda when my old lady would be sakaying the sada roti in the chulha with the wooden fire, which we subsequently enjoyed with tomato choka, as the voice of Mohammed Rafi from the small radio perched on the wooden shelf would resonate much like Nazimool’s and now Gupta’s, in perfect symphony with the pitter-patter of the raindrops on the galvanized roof.

So sing on Gupta while you can and let us at least enjoy the illusion of what is beautiful in this little land we call home for a little while longer. Soon the programme will come to an end. But waxing philosophical, what is life’s journey but the sum total of moments like these, beautiful like a rose or the rainbow, soon to disappear, but remaining in our hearts forever?

DR ERROL N BENJAMIN

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