Qawwalis

Since this is supposed to be showcasing for my beleaguered faraway family what exactly it is that I'm doing, here is an actual event that I actually attended, albeit unwillingly at first, as I would have much rather gone home after class and taken my customary two- or even three-hour nap. When the days are so hot that you can't work, you sleep instead, and use up your night doing the work you might have been doing had it not been so incredibly hot in the first place. Today it rained beautifully -- steadily and lightly for several hours, instead of the twenty-minute downpours that we've been getting, which, ten minutes after they stop, turn roads into churned up and muddy puddles, give trash heaps the strength to be festering and fetid with renewed vigour, and transform the air from merely blazing to sauna-like. Not tonight. Tonight is breezy and cool, and the slow rain actually washed away much of the dust on the streets instead of creating impassable mud puddles. It smells like the plumeria tree outside my window.

At any rate, the event in question was a qawwali majlis at school. After classes were over last Wednesday, we were all enjoined to get out of the main room where we usually eat lunch, as men from some Tent House or another laid mattresses covered in white sheets end to end, side to side, until the whole floor was one big white pillow. In ideal conditions, almost all Indian music is performed seated on the floor. Sometimes the performers are seated on a kind of raised platform, but for our informal performance, the qawwals (that is, the guys who perform qawwali) simply sat facing us, just a few feet away. The floor-sitting is much more accomodating of scooting around, changing positions, or even laying down and going to sleep. All of these are very useful attributes for concerts that often start at 8 or 9 in the evening and go on until dawn, with the best and most famous musicians having later slots.

Our own majlis -- basically meaning 'get-together,' yet somehow more formal -- was not of the ten-hour variety. Nevertheless, the white-cushioned floor was comforting and soft enough to sleep on. With everyone sitting on the floor, suddenly the available seats mushroomed from an anti-social fifteen to a much more crammed together, yet somehow happier, 45 or so.

The qawwals themselves arrived soon after the pillows and mattresses and sheets. I adored them. From the feisty and passionate main singer to the quiet-looking fellow playing the harmonium and singing, well, backup, they all pleased me immensely. The main singer's throaty voice was ideal: strained-sounding but deft runs down and then impossibly up the scale are part of qawwali's fabulousness. Listen to even Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who's considered to have an amazing voice, and you'll know what I mean. Even he sings as though he's pulling at his vocal cords with his hands.

Qawwali is a type of Sufi devotional music, and as such hits all the best double-entendres that address God as a lover, refer to devotional ecstasy as drunkenness, and make many references to wine and very, very beautiful people (women? men? it's almost always ambiguous). These guys performed several qawwals (including the fabulous "Mast Qalandar," which, literally translated, means "drunk wandering religious guy"), in addition to a few ghazals, and told a number of actually funny jokes in Urdu. Most of these last were simple enough for most of us to follow, but funny enough for some of our teachers to be giggling helplessly too. At one point, Ahtesham Sahib, our director, got up to attend to something or another, and the qawwal immediately quoted several lines of famous, embarrassing poetry: why does the beautiful one run away, or some such...his beetlike face was brilliant.

The moral of this particular story is that I indeed like events, even when they are school-sponsered. I took my nap later that day, and all was well.