I have been part of that noticeable minority in urban spaces that does NOT walk their iPods for their daily constitutional. Until this last week, I did not own a contraption that would blare out rhythm and blues into aural space at will and at random (if one so wished, of course). Well, all that was disrupted with finality last week when I received a present from a friend in the form of a iPod Shuffle. I know, I know – but really, for a newbie like me, it was even better than the real thing, and for once I could not care less about the absence of baselines.
And so, I prepared it for its first outing. I tucked away the little blue thing in the front pocket of my satchel, and boarded a bus to central London on a Friday evening in anticipation of friendly chatter and romcom distraction. It would take the bus roughly 40 minutes to reach the destination. I made myself comfortable on the upper deck, and with the latest issue of the LRB upright in front of my eyes, I gingerly proceeded to extricate my earplugs. Earlier that afternoon I had delegated all responsibility to iTunes to upload a random selection of music on this little creature – which could potentially be anything from Bryn Terfel to Bhupinder to Blur, from Cecilia Bartoli to Chaka Khan, from Handel to Hasrat Jaipuri!
So here I was, on route 19, and cruising along Roseberry Avenue when the first note accosted my ear-canal. FATTY!!!! Plus plus plus I went on the volume. Mann kunto maula, went the old boy’s incantation and Exmouth Market looked like I had never seen it before. In all my years in this city I had never experienced its visual with an aural other than the one it already offered in the noise of human and non-human traffic. Background music. It was as if my long bus ride in annoying Friday evening traffic had been transported on to a giant 70mm WITH Dolby!!!
Fifteen minutes and two traffic signals later we were standing still at Holborn, and Nusrat had been nudged out by an upbeat beat. I looked a bit embarrassed. I glanced around. My neighbour did not seem to have noticed the difference. Really? I was in naff space. The Pointer Sisters were asking us all to JUMP. JUMP, FOR MY LOVE. And all I could visualise was Hugh Grant as if in a repeat of Love Actually, dancing in a hall of mirrors. Except that there was nothing moving. We waited patiently for the traffic signal to turn to green. And whilst I felt obliged to lower the volume, I could not bring myself to disrupt Hugh Grant’s gig with the mirrors. And of course Perry Anderson read well against the cadence.
Soon it was Kishore Kumar (Dev Anand in my head) cavorting to Waheeda Rehman (in my head, of course) in Prem Pujari. The most familiar bits of London had been rendered strange in its new aural envelope. And when Farida Khannum pleaded, Aaj jaane ki zidd na karo just as the Number 19 glided past Foyles, I really could not take it any more.
It was violent – this intrusion, collision. My midnight crashing against my broad daylight whilst I sat nonplussed right where the whole world was sectioned off making way for the denouement of this privation.
Let me sing you a waltz, urged Julie Delpy. No, I said, resolutely. Scholl’s Orfeo begged Eurydice, at which point Curzon Soho seemed like a good excuse for a finishing line. I switched it off. Hastily. 19, Wardour Street, announced the automated PAS. It was comforting to revert to type, to hear the noise of human and non-human traffic once again.
London had been transformed, in some ways forever. As Doris Day crooned on the way back– Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps!
