The Long Road: Musings on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and the enigma of Yudhishtira’s father
Jun 28th, 2005 by Ashok
What have I been listening to lately?
The late great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan mostly.
Not really his pop hits, although those are very good too.
Even his more ‘commercial’ hits like Kinna Sonna and Afreen Afreen have the same intoxicating quality as his more serious classical work.
But the tracks that have really got me hooked these days are the recordings he did for the Dead Man Walking soundtrack.
In particular, there are two tracks: The Long Road. And The Face of Love.
I remember watching Dead Man Walking on LD years ago and more than the film itself, which was very good, the soundtrack blew me away.
I still remember that beautiful shot of the Susan Sarandon character just driving her car down a long highway with vast empty fields on either side, and the track The Long Road playing.
It’s basically one long alaap with almost no melody or lyrics to speak of. And like all western-recorded tracks, it’s pretty short, less than 4 minutes.
But the impact is immense.
The late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice wafts over you like a cool breeze from the Arabian sea on a hot summer afternoon in Mumbai.
The contrast of the Hindustani classical style vocal and instrumentation with the American landscape and subject is so beautiful, it needs to be seen to be appreciated fully.
Eddie Vedder joins the late Khan-saab on my other favourite track, The Face of Love.
This one’s much easier to embrace: the lyrics are simple, evocative and offered in both Urdu and English.
For some reason, it kept reminding me of those images that were circulating after 911.
The ones showing the WTC towers right after the planes had crashed, where the impact craters look like a giant face, captioned, obviously, The Face of God.
I remember thinking that God would never have anything to do with such an act.
But this song, The Face of Love, now this is the Face of God.
Because what else is God if not pure unadulterated Love.
Death is a subject that I find endlessly liberating to explore.
Not because I’m morbid. I’m probably the most ‘hasmukh’ person you’ll ever meet, or so everybody tells me.
But because we can learn so much from it.
Most of what we do, we do because we die.
Because we are not immortal.
We won’t live for centuries or millennia, perhaps not even the few decades more that life expectancy lulls us into taking for granted.
A thousand different things could conspire, or act erratically independently, to cut short our lifespans.
Which is why, what we do now, here, today, is so important.
Call it karma, call it duty, call it passion.
It matters. We matter.
Death gives us that purpose.
It makes our achievements epic, our little triumphs great victories.
Because if we all lived forever, nothing we did would really matter. We would have endless opportunities to try again, and likely succeed - a million times over.
But because we don’t live forever, even the smallest new word learned by a little toddler sounds so inspiring.
This song, The Face of Love, captures some of that beautiful sadness of life, always covered by the inevitable umbrella of death. Offering us protection from meaninglessness, and overshadowing us as well.
Excuse my rambling on the subject: In the Mahabharata, Yudhishtira, the protagonist (in a story that has many protagonists) comes to know that his father was in fact the God Yama, lord of Death.
This preoccupies him a great deal, wondering how, if his father is in fact the God of Death, he can possibly exist as a mortal and live a normal life.
The answer is so childishly simple, he laughs when he realizes it through a simple incident that occurs: Life and death are not separate, they are not even causal, nor are they linear. They co-exist, brother and sister, father and son, mother and child.
Eternally entwined, like the snake eating its own tail that Nordic mythology depicts as a symbol of infinity: the worm Ouroboros.
Of all the art forms, music comes the closest to capturing that eternally sad, eternally beautiful message: That life doesn’t last.
But love does.
Celebrate it.
I do.
And the fact that I’m doing so right now through the music of a composer-musician-performer who happens to be lately departed, only richens the irony and beauty of the experience.
Good listening to you too.
