Old things

I get excited about old things the way some folks like new things. Feeling like a winner to score this boom box that a neighbour spring cleaned out of their life. I enjoy listening to the radio. I listen to it in the car or by streaming online radio stations.I had given away my music system more than a decade ago when I gave away my TV too. I had hoped to buy a flat screen TV but never missed it so never replaced the music system either. Now it feels like I am enjoying a luxury just to be able to listen to the radio without web algorithms eavesdropping or interrupting.

This is how my son must have felt when he discovered vinyl records in his college library and my friend Sriram Balasubramanian delivered a turntable to his dorm room to enjoy them.

Also reminds me of how my first music box was a windup gramophone that belonged to my grandfather. As a teenager, I found it in my grandma’s attic (du-shatti). They were planning to sell it to the kabadi (junk collector) As part of cleaning up and I insisted that I wanted to keep it. Mohan mama, another sentimental one who didn’t care for the racing pace of the world, decided to help me make it functional. We both went to the chor bazaar (flea market) near Jama Masjid in old Delhi to see if we could find a junk reseller who might have the missing parts like fresh needles that could be attached to the arm that sat on the two old records that we still had. We found enough bits and also learned how to make it work again by seeing some other old ones there. One of the records I inherited with it was a recording of different kinds of laughs with a commentary on how some giggle while others sound like a horse. The other one was all about the big earthquake that had happened in my grandfather’s time in Quetta, Sindh. If my grandpa had music albums, they probably were not carried from Pakistan to India as they relocated as those might have been easier to repurchase, if needed. Old things carry memories and stories that I have enjoyed ever since I was a kid.