Memories of a forgotten love with turntable
Things have never been better for music lovers. A tiny pen drive put into a slot can go on belching hundreds of songs uninterruptedly while you travel in air-conditioned luxury. Earlier, you had music on CDs and cassettes which ruled the scene for a few decades. But until the seventies, for close to a hundred years, one had nothing but the good old gramophone invented as Phonograph by Edison and patented as Gramophone by Emile Berliner towards the end of the nineteenth century.
My romance with this machine started early when my family moved into a new house. Our neighbour had an original version of the gramophone with a large shiny brass horn from which all sorts of sounds emanated after the table was turned by cranking a handle.
No battery or electricity was required. Songs and instrumental music coming from a lifeless machine was, to my young mind, no less than a Djinn peeping out of Aladdin’s lamp.
The contemporaries of Edison must have felt likewise while initially they refused to believe that a machine could talk. One had to simply put a needle fixed on a twisted metal arm at the edge of a disc rotating at 78 RPM after cranking up the handle and the brass horn would spring to life instantly. If the speed got slower, funny sounds would come from the horn, requiring one to immediately crank up the machine again. Such problems cropped up in All India Radio broadcasts too and in the Dehati (rural) programme in the fifties one could hear the anchor exclaiming: “Munshi ji, lagda chaabi khatam ho gayi (it has stopped)” and his co-artiste Thunia Ram rushing to crank up the handle again.
When mom told me that they had a similar machine in their home in Pakistan, the thought of a shining brass horn jutting out of a polished wooden box, nicely kept in a corner of her room, intensified my desire to own such a contraption.
Upon joining a job in a faraway place in Vidarbha, I yearned to listen to the melodies of my choice. When I mentioned this to a newly made friend he smiled and lent me his HMV turntable and a few records.
From then on, my nights were spent in the company of Suraiya, KL Saigal and Talat Mahmood. The discs kept revolving till sleep overtook me. The rise and fall of the pick-up arm as the needle followed the crests and troughs of sound waves engraved on vinyl discs looked like the Adam’s apple moving up and down the singer’s throat. It seemed as if you were listening to the singer, live.
But the device had to be returned one day, leaving a void in my life.
The first bonus I got led me to the electronic shops at Delhi’s Chandni Chowk. The very next night, a Philips record player was playing on a small table beside my bed in the dim green light of an indication lamp on the machine. Confucius said, ‘With rice to eat, water to drink and my arm under my head to sleep, I need nothing more to live’. I modified it to say that with a job in hand and a turntable by my bed; I too needed nothing more from life.
However, things changed. Not satisfied with the limited collection, I wanted more records, and for years made it a point to walk into every record shop I spotted in every new city I went to.
Coming back to the present, a few days earlier, while cleaning the attic, I was in for a huge shock when I discovered my long-forgotten love gathering dust in a corner. It had made its exit from my life when its stylus became unavailable in the market. Even the Philips people sounded helpless as they had stopped manufacturing it. I could only contribute two tears for their helplessness, which dropped on their logo on the box.
MUSIC COMING FROM A LIFELESS MACHINE WAS, TO MY YOUNG MIND, NO LESS THAN A DJINN PEEPING OUT OF ALADDIN’S LAMP