Krishna Shastri Devulapalli | A Melody That Knows No Borders

I saw S.P. Balasubrahmanyam for the first time in the late ’60s, when he came to visit my grandfather. We had just moved from Hyderabad to Madras. He had come in a yellow-and-black taxi that he had kept waiting, I distinctly remember — a trim young man, little more than a boy, really, come to think of it, with big eyes and little bunny teeth. I was four or five then. I don’t remember what the visit was about. But I remember the buzz in the house. He had by then sung Grandfather’s “Medante Meda Kaadu” in Sukha Dukhalu and many of the songs in K. Viswanath’s Undamma Bottu Pedata, which we would play constantly on the gramophone.

I saw SPB — or Balu as he was popularly known — next in the ’70s. He was standing in the singers’ booth of the recording theatre at Vijaya Gardens. Being the lyricist’s grandson, I was allowed to sit in the big soundproof room which housed the large orchestra, a bewildering mix of Indian and Western instruments, on the promise that I wouldn’t so much as breathe. As the rehearsals were in progress, turning around in my chair, I wondered why I couldn’t hear (the by now slightly larger) Balu singing, while I could hear all the instruments.

Soon, thanks to my good behaviour, my dissatisfaction was noticed by an assistant who allowed me to alternate unobtrusively between the orchestra hall and the control room (separated by double doors), where I could hear it all, Balu and instruments. (The singers’ booth was still off-limits, of course.) Thus, I ended up being among the very first people in all of Telugu-land to listen to “Kusalama” (Bali Peetham) and “Cheekati Velugulu” (Cheekati Velugulu) before they became the hits they did.

My third encounter with a live Balu was in 1979, when my school decided to have a concert to raise funds for a new block. The ’70s being the ’70s, the school authorities permitted an elite gang of insane, unsupervised schoolboys to run amok on the streets of Madras. Unleashed on the general public, we rode our cycles madly, stopping to ring random doorbells in the Boat Club and Poes Gardens neighbourhoods — with the goal of selling tickets to the moneyed Madrasi but finding their bewildered house help instead. (That the lot of us survived to actually see the concert proves that those were relatively safer times.)

On concert day, in the packed Music Academy auditorium, Balu and his troupe belted out his many hits to a wild (by ’70s Madras standards) audience of moms, dads, and random folks from the posher localities of the city who had been persuaded to buy tickets by delinquent schoolboys.

SPB had saved the best for last. He said that he was going to present a song from an unreleased K. Balachander movie called Ninaithale Inikkum. He sang, for the first time to a live audience, what was to become the cult hit “Engeyum Eppodum”. And did an encore.

The next day, along with a bunch of older kids, I was summoned to the headmaster’s room (never a good thing) and threatened with suspension.

“Are you all country fellows?” he said with a perfunctory show of disgust (the concert had been a sell-out). “What kind of boys dance in the aisles?”

My final meeting with Balu was in the late ’80s. I had graduated from dancing in the aisles to going to big boy parties. And it was at such a gathering, in a private cottage in a Madras hotel, that I met him with a small group of Telugu film types. All of them much bigger boys than me.

Balu, at the behest of a famous Telugu film director, sang “Pibare Rama Rasam”. At 1 a.m. To a small and intoxicated (entirely by his voice) audience.

Later, I naively asked him, “Sir, in that song (I was referring to an Ilaiyaraaja composition from the film Sri Kanaka Mahalakshmi Recording Dance Troupe), how did you insert, you know, that effortless little laugh into that line?”

He showed me. Effortlessly. I remember seeing him leave in a Premier 118 NE.

The point is, while I may have had a few chance personal encounters with the great man at different stages in my life — as a child, adolescent and young man — so has every south Indian. Not meeting him personally doesn’t make any of those encounters any less personal.

We’ve all met Balu. In our childhood, youth and adulthood. We will continue meeting him. Into our old age. Constantly. Irrespective of which part of India (or the world) our feet are planted on. And he’ll always be there. With the perfect song. And though we’ve heard it a hundred times, it’ll feel like the first time.

Last year, in this space, in a piece featuring Keats, Shelley, and my grandfather, the poet Krishna Sastri, I remember writing “How naive of me to think poets need visas, planes and entry passes to meet when they already possess the greatest vehicle of all, one unfettered by time and distance — imagination.”

How futile, therefore, to squabble over a statue — something so immovable — that attempts to contain someone who moves us so.