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| Sama Concert - NCPA (Vocals - Rekha Bhardwaj) |
I'm sitting in a crowd, a million stray faces that seem familiar one way or another, giving me a wicked sense of deja vu. We’re all waiting, wrapped up in our own anticipations, with bated breaths, hoping to be swept away to our own quarantined havens; breaths intermingled, cosmically miles apart.
And then it all began. Mystical lights and whirling prayers appear on stage to guide you on a quest to find yourselves and lose sight of everything you've come to know in the physical realm.
I had never quite known what to expect of a Sufi concert. Honestly, I've listened to Sufi a lot of times before, with an impatience and dissonance that completely discredits its trippy, transcendental quality. As a child, when my dad would put on anything even remotely sounding like a qawwali on the car radio, I’d turn it off in disgust. “Oh God, that’s depressing!” were my words for anything that deviated from uptempo pop and love ballads. My dad would spring it back on and say, “You’re way too young to understand music.”
Over the years, somewhere in the adulting journey, I found that my playlist has grown. It had ushered in new definitions and artists, representing soul-searching genres that passed by like seasons, bringing in wind, rain and sunshine to my senses— essentially music that’d be heavily face-palmed by the 12-year old me. Sufi, however, still struggled to permeate. It just seemed so severely bluesy to me for reasons beyond my understanding.
So no one had expected me to see what was coming.
I am sitting in a concert, listening to shards of music tearing their way to my murky interior. Me, more of a cynic, liable to believe in the worst-possible outcome than in the possibility that things will magically fall in place — well, unless I'm four drinks down. But, I'm told, Sufi is not about either of those extremes. It’s neither hopeful nor despondent. Sufi music is about accepting things exactly the way they are, in that moment, in their magical realism. And I'm trying to decode that complex philosophy as I listen to fragments of soothing percussion and sensual saxophone and pained strings that come to life with whirling chants.
When comes a voice — a voice that I have heard so many times in chart-busters before. A voice that I've come to know of as multi-dimensional, one that sets poetry to fire and follows it through to its silent ashes. I don’t know if it was that voice that carried Sufi to me or the concerto effect that unfolded its inexplicable beauty. But I was gradually very calm, erasing every thought, watching it pass as it disappeared into a corner.
I was floating mid-air in her voice, shuffling me between desert sandstorms and green pastures, understanding for the very first time that Sufi is far from being dull and depressing.
It is a journey. It is an unadulterated joy of finding something that you — an inbetweener — have been waiting for, right where it always was.
You can now also listen to the Audio transcript of my Sufi experience on SoundCloud.
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