Two Disappearances - Part I

Plough through this part. It will get more exciting...
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Front Page, The Hindu, 26 December, 2009
NV Mani passes away
CHENNAI: Noted Carnatic vocalist, N. V. Sivasubramanian, ailing for more than three months, passed away yesterday. He was 79. He is survived by two daughters and a son. Hundreds of his admirers and musicians thronged his Mylapore residence to mourn his death. (See Page 16)
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Page 16, The Hindu, 26 December 2009
Genius breathes his last
CHENNAI: Carnatic vocalist, N. V. Mani passed away last night of an acute heart attack. He was bedridden with multiple ailments for more than a month, and had resisted being shifted to a hospital. His children, all living abroad, will arrive in Chennai shortly for the last rites.

Born in Tiruvarur in 1930 to Vaidyanatha Iyer and Komalatammal, N. V. Mani grew up in Madras where his father worked as an accountant. The identity of the teachers who taught him music in his childhood have all vanished into obscurity, although it is rumoured that he learnt most of his manodharma music from T. N. Rajarathinam Pillai, the nagaswaram maestro, whom he used to accompany to numerous concerts. GNB's music, it is said, had a great impact on him. It would not, however, be inappropriate to state that he was largely self-taught.

Around 1943, much to his father's resentment, Mani quit his schooling to join a drama company for whom he acted and sang. Acting as Abhimanyu in a drama, the thirteen-year-old Mani achieved instant fame for his music. Singing at a striking 5-kattai, Mani unleashed an exhilarating Thodi, Kedaragowla and Ahiri amongst others on the audience. So popular was his singing, that for more than ten years, even after he was too old to be Abhimanyu, he acted in this role!

Simultaneously, Mani's popularity as a Carnatic vocalist was rising. His youthful, playful voice, his searing tarasthayi brigas, his supersonic swaraprastarams created resulted in a burgeoning fan base even before his voice had settled into adulthood. It was around this time, that he began to assimilate kritis just by listening to maestros sing them. An unhappy stint at the Music College ensued. He was admitted without basic schooling on Musiri Subramania Iyer's insistence. However, he felt the rigorous, academic atmosphere dampened his manodharmam. He felt his music was losing its spontaneity and quit within a year. After disappearing from the Madras music scene briefly, he resurfaced as the boy who sat behind Rajarathinam Pillai at all his concerts. Around 1958, N.V. Mani's name was heard in the music circles again. His music was still thrilling, it was still fast-paced, but it seemed to have lost the manic energy of his early years. It began acquiring the depth and stretches of contemplativeness that he came to be known for.

In this interim, Mani married Srividya, his neighbour in Triplicane. It was an alliance forced on him by his brothers who were worried he would lose his way as a musician. Surprisingly, it was a happy marriage and they had two sons and a daughter.

In 1963, after making peace with the Carnatic establishment, he first performed at the Music Academy during the December season to a sellout audience. Since that year, until 1986, he was a permanent fixture at the Academy - on the 25th of December. In that period, he rose from a young cavalier to a senior statesman in the most dignified manner, being accompanied by stalwarts of three generations on the mridangam and the violin. His playback singing for the popular movie Mohanagaanam starring Gemini Ganesan as an alcoholic musician made him a household name and face.

However, a vague illness in 1986 waylaid him for two years. Again, nobody knew where he was. When he came back, he looked ten years older, and his music acquired sobriety to the extent of being almost melancholic. In the next ten years, his music remained highly inward looking and probing. The frenzy of the first phase of his career had disappeared completely. It was like a different musician had emerged. He lost his popularity to a cult status.

In 1997, he suffered a major double-blow. He lost his ancestral Triplicane house in a litigation to his cousin, and Srividya passed away. Unable to deal with the latter, and forced out of his home, Mani moved to the US where he lived with his son for three years. Harsh weather and a dislike for the States' lonely environs brought Mani back to his beloved Chennai. His brother, who passed away two months before Mani moved back, left Mani with his house in Mylapore where Mani lived with various students till his death.

With his passing, Carnatic Music has lost one of its most original and unique voices. It has lost a man who is responsible for ideas that musicians will play with for generations. It has lost its mad scientist.
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Page 9, The Indian Express, Chennai Edition, 26 December, 2009
Reclusive, obscure, magical
Forty years ago, I was at a wedding of a distant relative when I heard the most magnificent Thodi raga alapana of my life. My uncle was marrying a movie actress. The superstar singer explored the contours of this most mysterious raga for more than an hour, probing each note, each level, each turn. Every now and then, he'd go quiet, focus on the drone of the tambura, and unleash ecstatic phrases of incomparable genius. The Thodi had everything - those traditional stamp-like gamakas, weird combinations of swaras and uncharacteristic plain notes. The crowd at the wedding milled around, as ever, listening to snatches of the concert when they got too tired of talking to one another or gawking at the stars that came to the wedding. I don't know what about that setting inspired him to sing that Thodi. It was noisy, the sound system was highly primitive. It was a Madras summer, and fans were turned off around the stage so as to not disturb the tambura. He was drenched in sweat even before he began. But he sang like he was in a universe of his own, and that unearthly Thodi, like it is said about the music of the Gandharvas, did not stand on the strength of the swaras, but on the microtones in between those swaras. It was music for the Gods.

His last concert was at the Vinayakar temple in Besant Nagar on a Thursday November evening. A small crowd, undaunted by the rain, was treated to a lovely ragam-taanam-pallavi in Kedaragowla. The concert also consisted of Gowla, Mayamalavagowla, Ritigowla and Kannadagowla! He finished the concert in a hurry and announced, "My wife is ailing. In the hospital... I shall sing more for you another day..." She passed away that night, and he never sang publicly again. When my uncle, a very close friend of his, asked him about it, he said, "I performed, all these years, knowing she was listening. She would tell me exactly how good or bad the concert was. I sang for her. I can't anymore..."

Many fans, since, have gone to his house to listen to private concerts. He obliged most people who came to hear him. Sometimes, he called his friends for private concerts. He would sing with two students, accompanied by two tamburas, for hours together. The biggest musicians of our times found themselves at these concerts. The concerts had no structure, no limits, no plan. Often, he would launch into a raga alapana after the kriti, neraval would happen on three or four lines, and pallavis composed on the spot! And at the centre of it all was the man himself - lost in his music, striving to understand his art better.

N. V. Mani, NVM to his fans, Mani to his friends, Mama to his students, passed away last evening, almost twelve years after he last performed on stage. Yet, there was a huge gathering at his house - fans, many of whom looked too young to have actually heard him live; students, some of whom barely learnt a song from him; musicians, many of whom he'd fought with; and relatives, who hadn't cared for him for years. Such was the power of his music. He might have left us, but his music, like that Thodi, will linger for years.

(The Sunday Express tomorrow will carry the last interview of N. V. Mani - a conversation over four days in November 2009 with Ajith Ramachandran.)
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Ajith stood nervously at the door, waiting for it to open. He had rung the bell four times now. The doors, the windows on the ground floor, were all shut. The house looked like it was under litigation, and no one had lived in it for years. There was a cycle in the verandah, but even that looked unusable. He decided that the man had forgotten the appointment, or that he'd given Ajith the wrong address, and started to leave. He barely reached the gate when a voice called him, "Hello! Sir!" Ajith turned around to find a young man, around his age, with a moustache and thick glasses standing at the balcony on the first floor.

"Indian Express?" the man asked.
"Yeah..."
"Wait!" he called out, and disappeared from the balcony, only to appear at the door open it. He was wearing only a towel, and his hair was still wet. "I'm so sorry. I was in the bathroom, and Mama can't walk to the door."
"Oh, no issue..."
"Come in. Mama's been waiting."
They walked into a sparse house. There was a wooden bench in the front room, three plastic chairs in the drawing room, and two more in the dining room. "I'm Shankar, Mama's student..."
"Ajith Ramachandran."
"Hello," he paused, and took off again, "This house is unused. Mama and I live upstairs. He's not well at all... Doesn't even have the energy to make trips to the toilet. But he's very enthusiastic. When T.V. Sankaranarayanan came last evening, they both sang Bhairavi!"
They smiled politely. Shankar led Ajith into a bedroom, where, on a creaking bed, Mani lay, wrapped in a blanket, a smile pasted on his face. Shankar left, presumably to wear some clothes.

"So. You are the kid they've sent?"
"Sir, I'm Ajith..."
"They must've sent you so that they can get one last interview before I pop it?" he said, still smiling. Ajith turned more nervous than he already was. He managed to mumble, "Sir... No... I was genuinely interested..."
He laughed. Then he said, "Pull up that chair, sit down... I'm being such a bad host. Shankar!"
"I think he is changing," Ajith said, placing an old wooden chair by the bed.
"I'm so sorry for doing this - could you just open the curtains a bit? So dingy in here..." Ajith got up to open the curtains. Mani spoke again, "What does the Indian Express want to know about me now? Everything is known..."
"Actually, the Express was not too keen on this story. I wanted to interview you," Ajith replied, the open curtains letting mid-morning sunlight into the room.
"Let me guess. You've heard some old recordings from some website, and you're a fan or something."
"No. I read a couple of articles in Ananda Vikatan on your two disappearances. That interested me."
Mani laughed. "You're frank. I like you."
Ajith seated himself on the chair, and said, "The interview might take a few days..."
Mani was still giggling, "I'll call you whenever I'm feeling up to it. You'll get everything you want before I die. Don't worry."
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(To continue)