Pritam: Music In My Head

The composer was bald. A song cured it.

‘Alopecia Universalis,’ the rapidly-blinking doctor announced, chafing his front teeth over his lower lip, as if waiting for a solution from the people he was talking to.

Across him, Pritam, seated with his father, looked lost in the doctor’s choice of words.

Prabodh Chakraborty petted his boy’s glistening well-oiled head one more time, and darted a glance at the doctor, ‘Abaar key ta hobay, bolun toh dada (what will happen now, pray tell brother),’ he raised his left hand in the air, curling his fingers to shape a question mark of uncertain fate.

Doctor Sen drew his shoulders to his ears and resigned, ‘There is no standard treatment but I will prescribe and we can see results from time to time. This situation could be a short-term body change, condition can come back to normal, but when, that is the question!’ he said.

At age fifteen, Pritam realised something was different about him. One day, when he was peeing in the stalls in the school’s toilet, some boys his age ambushed him and laughed at his genitals.

One of the boys shouted in a fit of hysteria, ‘The crackpot must be shaving his dick too, what’s he thinking, he wants a smooth pussy maybe!’

There was a huge uproar of consent in the disinfected environment. The boys had pulled at his trousers and interrupted his relief time. He puttered as he buckled and escaped further humiliation.

Unlike the growing boys at school, he had no use for a razor.

He was a hairless wonder whom the children at his father’s music school often teased for looking like an alien. He didn’t mind them, he taught them how to play the guitar, hoping someday he would make it big as a musician and then it wouldn’t matter how he looked. Girls, he knew would come, once the money poured out of the hollow in his guitar, to the strum of his sore fingers.

When Aditya Chopra, heading Yashraj Productions, signed Pritam for Dhoom’s score, the grand old man of romance, Yash Chopra flipped, ‘Kya Adi, iss bacche se music, abhi toh iske sarr par baal bhi nahi ugge hain.’

Adi offered Yash a lopsided grin that the paparazzi waiting outside the fortified studio had been praying to capture for years.

It is when the track Dhoom Machale was being composed that there was a paranormal activity Pritam began to notice in his body. Each time the music boomed on the sound system in the recording studio, he would begin scratching his baldpate and would feel a strange sting in his groin.

Since Sunidhi Chauhan was singing the song on his cue, he thought her voice was stirring his loins; her gruff throw, her westernised accent, her squeaky clean good looks across the glass pane from his mixing board.

He fingers began to fidget over the arranger, synthesiser going out of control.

Sunidhi predicted the number would be the chartbuster of the year. She patted his cheeks, smiled, and gave him a friendly peck on her way out. He couldn’t understand what he had made of the music that night; his fingers had not worked in sync with his mind as they performed on their own free-wheeling accord, while all he wanted them to do was scratch his head and balls.

He woke up next morning to find a single jet black strand of hair on his head, right in the centre, like a wisp of smoke zigzagging its way out of a brown chimney.

He laughed, he laughed so hard he thought the mirror would crack in fright as he kept beating on it to alarm himself. He pulled the band of his pyjamas away from him to check if there was a growth down there too. He touched himself as he shunted wild thoughts in his mind.

Was it the music? That song? Dhoom Machale?

Could music be the cure for Alopecia Universalis?

Yes, some plants are known to respond, but does that mean his body so long was in a vegetative state to his talent as a musician?

‘This is something original,’ he skidded.

‘Original as my music,’ he beamed.

He called up the studio that morning and cancelled his sittings. He roamed the house, naked, downing blinds and pirouetting to his original composition, hopeful that with each replay Dhoom Machale would sprout new wonders on his hairless body.

There was no instant cure.

Pritam got back to work, disheartened and even more busy churning music to ward off all therapy from it. Tunes were being shuffled in minutes, films being signed in card packs. Hit songs were being churned out like fast-food burgers.

Pritam had no time to even look at himself in the mirror, last of all face the dejection that he was in his image, a personality he wanted to shatter with his success.

Dhoom Machale became a rage.

Such was its impact that everywhere Pritam went, it was the only song being blasted; at weddings, at Ganpati immersions, Diwali crackers whistled the tune, ring tones screamed the song, vehicles had replaced their horns with it. Pritam’s music was in the ether as well as reaching into his nether.

But he wanted so much to get away from Dhoom Machale’s spectre following him around like his shadow, a macabre presence he wanted to shirk, too much play had rubbed the novelty of the song.

Dhoom Machale had become anathema to his ears.

After appearing as a judge on a singing competition reality show, Pritam took a break on the weekend and headed to Mahabaleshwar for a weekend trip of some peace and quiet.

Sunday morning, lazing in bed, he switched on the telly in his cosy room overlooking Sunrise Point, and began watching with no particular interest when flipping through channels he came upon the show he had recently shot for.

As the compere announced his name and the camera panned to the flowered entrance on the stage, in walked Pritam, hands folded in a namaskar.

‘Grinning like a bear’ he thought, but wait, there was more — hair was oozing out of every pore of his body. He was covered in it from head, to covered toe.

‘There is more hair on me than snow left on Everest’s peak,’ he blurted at the irony.

He swore he could see spurts of hair fizzing out of his ears. It was that much music to take.

Dhoom boom it was.

‘Success,’ he wryly thumped on a pillow and muttered, ‘has made me unrecognisable.’

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