Reshma: Fragile to Music
The Lambi Judai melody that defied boundaries.
In 2006, popular Pakistan-based folk singer Reshma was amongst the first with her family of six to board the Lahore-Amritsar bus on her way to the Golden Temple.
It was the first bus service introduced as part of a peace process between Amritsar and Lahore. With a prayer on her lips stained with betel nut juice, her ears reddening, heartbeat pacing, her feet felt lighter. There was a spring in every step.
Reshma, the nomad woman hummed throughout the journey. She was returning home with a chant in her aching heart. The Sitara-E-Imtiaz of Pakistan was navigating her way through the broken landscape of the imagined state and mending it into the shape of her faith; it was in between these two lands where her wanderlust voice roamed.
On her way, she recalled the time she was flown into the country to sing a song in the film Hero in 1983. She had requested musicians Laxmikant–Pyarelal not to use their famed orchestra piece. She asked for minimal music, a matka preferably. She sat on the floor of the recording room, and with the mike on the ground, she drummed on the matka a languorous rhythm, singing Lambi Judai.
When she came to the line Hijr ki oonchi deewaar banayi in the lyrics, she would sing Hijr ki oonchi deewar girayi in a high octave.
Laxmikant would interrupt her and repeat the correct line to her and ask her to take it from the top. Eyes perpetually shut, Reshma sang in a trance Hijr ki oonchi deewar girayi. She never got it right. A miffed Laxmikant walked out.
Pyarelal, the gentler of the composer team somehow cajoled Laxmi to return to the recording, and to respect her feelings. Perhaps she was internalising the lyrics. Reshma kept babbling in her charming rustic Punjabi about her illiteracy.
Reshma, after hearing Pyarelal’s mithi-mithi gal as she rekindled, eventually picked up and sang in her dune voice Hijr ki oonchi deewar banayi with renewed vigour. And just as she stretched the last syllable of the word banayi on a top scale to the beat of her hand, the matka broke. As if to impugn a symbolic breaking of glass omen — walls, boundaries, borders, fragile to music.
Who has not heard the soulful Lambi Judai?
The song that gave us Reshma, the indisputable gypsy voice of our own wandering souls.
As the bus wound through the changing landscape, she could see the barren deserts, violent winds, panihari songs and makeshift tents that have been her way of living, never tiring of her long road home, and carrying her mournful mountain voice to her resting place. Ever since she was born in the year of the hijr (separation), the lambi judai of 1947.
https://medium.com/media/7fd0e91e3292fda7c7bd089274896ca9/href
