Of love, longing, and music that make us

My mother's house is beside a lake that separates the rich and mighty of the city from a little isle of people who work for them. Every morning, these working people come from the other side of the lake in groups, often in hand-rowed manual boats, and disappear into the belly of the big bad city. It gets dark when they return to their little isle, so we don't see them. Once every week though, in the heart of the night, we hear faint music coming from across the lake. The deep and gravelly voice of a man keeps singing a Bicchedi tune "And then you left never to come back, my stone-hearted lover/ My love for you remained incomplete". Thus once every week, the unmistakable soundscape of rural Bengal walks the mean streets of the metropolis, stands tall at the guarded gates of the rich and mighty, and graciously offers a balm for the broken-hearted.

Hearts are often soothed by such traveling tunes. I remember how, years ago, a Bluegrass song about a tree gave solace to my lonely heart. I lived in Duluth in those days. It is a small American town next to Lake Superior, the biggest natural lake in the world. I was fresh out of graduate school and had just relocated as a young faculty member at a university. Since my teaching load was light and my heart was heavy from homesickness, most afternoons of the week I would put on a down-jacket and walk about to explore the town in the dead of winter. I never expected to find what my heart needed in such a frozen snowy winterland. But I did.

But songs not only travel through space, they also travel through time to be rediscovered in unforeseen ways. Remember the famous lullaby by Tagore, "Phule phule, dhole dhole?" I learned it from my music teacher as a child, like all children who took music lessons in Dhaka in the 90's did.

On one such exploratory walk, I heard a faint tune coming from far away. I followed it in a trance. The singers wailed in harmony "I am so lonesome, I will never know why/ I must stand alone till the day I die/ I'll never get over this sorrow of mine/ The evergreen sorrow of the lonesome pine."  The words became clearer as the tune guided me to the hearty warmth of an old wooden pub called St. Benedict's Tavern, where senior musicians gathered every Wednesday afternoon to play folk music. They were unexpectedly kind to the clueless foreigner and offered me a seat in the music circle. They sang me iron-ore miners songs of sorrow, I sang them a Bhatiali song, "To find you my beloved, I have left my home/ I have searched the depth of the oceans to find the one who is not to be found."  We became friends bound by the tunes of universal longing. My new life in Duluth became bearable in the company of that group of old folk musicians. I met them every Wednesday till I left about a year later. Their tunes traveled with me back to Dhaka; my tunes found a home in those old miners' hearts in northern Minnesota.

But songs not only travel through space, they also travel through time to be rediscovered in unforeseen ways. Remember the famous lullaby by Tagore, "Phule phule, dhole dhole?" I learned it from my music teacher as a child, like all children who took music lessons in Dhaka in the 90's did. Throughout my life, I thought it was a children's song. When my father was laid to rest for his eternal journey in 2014, I rediscovered it. It was a time when my adulthood, along with my siblings', was put to a real test. We found it very difficult to grapple with the new reality of relatives who all wanted a share of farmland, jackfruit trees, and other ancestral belongings. My mother was in a state of shock, my brother was dealing with the relatives, and my sister had gone completely silent. I don't know why but all I could do sitting in the crowded courtyard of our village home was hum this children's song—"the birds sing kuhu in the flowering branches/ while I do not know what my heart pines for." It was then I discovered that "Phule phule" was actually a song about loss. Quietly in my heart, I decided to say goodbye to abba through that song.

If you want to put it poetically, the sweetest songs do indeed tell of the saddest thoughts. Maybe that's why music defies all borders. When the cries of a lover float under the Dhaka smog, when the sadness of the lonesome tree touches the heart of a foreigner, or when a heart pines for the unknown—we join them in a collective longing. We find an invisible companion in each other's tale of sadness. Just as beautiful flowers bloom in the most insignificant corners, music also surprises us and holds us captive in strange and unexpected places. Then they travel through infinite space and time tucked in our hearts. This is one of life's greatest magic tricks, and this is how it will always be.

Sharmee Hossain teaches English at North South University. She can be reached at sharmeehossain28@gmail.com.