Some quiet afternoons, I go on a silent, solo trip though the various emotions that make the curse of being human both painfully apparent and wholly worthwhile. A journey that seems to the outside world silent, but one that for me is immensely enabled by music. Music that gladdens, music that tempers, and music in a different form that winds a melancholy path through the heart. And my constant companion - my humsafar - through all these travels to the places of the mind and the heart is a single person in various forms - Rafi.
It is Rafi that sings of a carefree time, the world a playground for one's aimless yet ultimately fulfilling meanderings. Main zindagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya - of going unopposed with the current, and living a life where cares and worries mean nought. It is wholly ironic then that this be the one Rafi song that I spent almost half my life searching out, before my father overlooked a rather shoddy session of humming and pointed me in the right direction.
The joyous abandon of youth and its nomadic whims satiated, Rafi now leads me to more pressing issues in the current; of whom to love, how to do it. And the sheer, blinding agony of having to choose, knowing fully well that at each choice lies the door to blame. Kisko pyaar karoon, kaise pyaar karoon; immortal lines, sung with the the assurance of one who has all he wants, yet knows that choosing is the worst possible decision open to him. Yet choose he must, the tempo building up and the options closing in on him ...
And then he makes a choice, for he knows Rafi will back him up. And how the man rises to the occasion! Singing the praises of his muse, using the hand of divinity to make her his and his only - Tareef karoon kya uski, jisne tumhe banaya. The praise is for the almighty, the vessel the object he pursues; and the comparisons how they flow, like the radiance of the moon at the height of its powers, revealing and highlighting her mystique in all its depth.
She deigns to cast her eye upon him now, and how Rafi entreats her to be gentle with this once carefree being. Aise toh na dekho - lest she blind him and make him go mad with sheer elation and commit some travesty of the heart, mind or being. And time itself, once a non-entity for this free being, seems to hasten its very passage in the presence of this divine creature. How he beseeches her with Rafi's voice - Abhi na jao chhodkar - that it seems like now that she became his, her very arrival in his life still in the blissful present and not a hazy past. Stay, stay till the dusk when he has had a chance to live the purpose of this life.
And yet she leaves, like everyone else and everything else. The sense of loss is immense, irredeemable; the youth, the riches, the foundation that she'd brought into his once incomplete life (he now realizes) - all gone. And here he is talking not just about her brief tryst with his life, but about the world itself - for to him, that was and remains the entire world. A place where one's being is a plaything to be toyed with for amusement, a place where death itself seems easier than the curse of soldiering on - that life, that world - Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaye toh kya hai.
The young man, for once in his life, is right about something entirely on his own. A world that gave us Rafi, that voice, that added emotion to all our beings - and the world that took him away from us forever, leaving just the voice as a final vestige of the man. Of what use that world without Rafi himself?
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