I am not sure why this passing is touching so deeply. I want to pass it off as just my being that kind of an emotional person.

I have been reading all the eulogies and the occasional – what about. All the ways she touched people’s lives that they held latent in their memories, in the recalling of their own life events that her singing marked, of how their own relationship with music changed over the seven decades she colored – all erupt, flood and overwhelm in this moment of a global outpouring.

Just that aspect of how she reached and touched so many is itself suggestive of the possibility of our collective emancipation, the possibility of the surrendering of our difference for something larger.

I know – I am conflicted. How could someone I so detest also be close to her? How much should I let her politics matter to how I feel now?

But then, I realize, everyone will find something in their lives that connects – a photograph here, a piece of writing there, a sighting. Everyone will stake a claim today – such is a revered life perhaps.

I am musically illiterate in the formal sense. I know that as her career stretched, and her voice aged, there came a time when I did not quite like her work. But at this moment, I have nothing to say, other than how she was a deeply enmeshed part of mine.

So, this is what I realized today.

She reminded me throughout my life of my mother. She was a little older than my mother. My mother had a very nice voice – a very Marathi womans’s voice.

In the repressive and oppressive world that was my mother’s life mostly, she found occasion to keep a ear on music and she picked up what she fleetingly heard on the radio, to memorize songs and develop enough sharpness of ear to know who was singing from listening to just some tiny fragment of a song.

Her only lament used to be, and often in reference to Lataji, was how she wished she too had an opportunity to sing. Anyway – perhaps her singing Lataji’s songs had something to do with my own developing a fondness for music.

Today, as more and more of my life is spent away from home, there are times in a deep ‘tanhai’, a feeling of aloneness and isolation now and then, that listening to old songs of my childhood, restore a sense of well-being. So many of those songs are Lataji’s songs. I have learned to appreciate more musical nuance over time – but that has nothing to do with the direct connection to the heart that they are.
Today in her passing, I not only feel connected to all those who celebrated her and grieve her, but also my mother in some strange way more intensely – anyone who gifts music must be like that.

Like her, my mother too was unlettered – but that did not stop her from becoming literate, or developing a progressive outlook, or developing a sense for the finer.

Was she sometimes different from my ‘modernity’? Of course! But what matters I guess is the course of one’s life and how one shapes it.
This is not about my mother – but this grief is so interwoven that it is difficult to hold this falling apart in the face of a huge node that held so much together.