An East-Indian Dulpod

 

AN EAST-INDIAN DULPOD

            “Ivan, I need your help.” Mark, my jaam tree friend sounded more than a little excited. “My son is marrying a Goan girl. In Goa.”

            “That’s glad tidings, man!” I said. “Tell me, what can I do for you?”

            “The Umbracha Paani,” he said. “I need your help. Do you know if I can get a pimperi band in Goa?”

            Mark, to me was the quintessential East-Indian, a true-blue son of the soil -- the soil being all that land from the three hills of mango trees stretching from Oshiwara, across acres of rice fields, right up to Caesar Road and beyond, a place called Kevni Village in Andheri. This was in the late 1940s. 

            East-Indians owned every inch of land in Kevni and neighbouring Amboli, all the pretty cottages and the new bamboo-and-mud ‘chawls’, opportunistically constructed to house the new Goan and Mangalorean migrants; they owned too the free-roaming chickens, ducks, pigs and a few guinea fowl, the First Class graves in the porch of St. Blaise’s Church, and to all appearances, the very church itself. Before Bal Thackeray could mouth his famous “Mumbai amchi”, one could pick up faint strains of “Amboli amchi” from these sons and daughters of Amboli and Kevni.

            Mark’s family however was among the more socially inclusive; their doors open to ‘outsiders’ like me, giving me my first taste of mutton kuddi and East-Indian sorpotel, his grandmother even sharing with me stories of the plague and fascinating tales of Kevni’s often-vicious property intrigues.

            He was my first, closest and most durable friend after our family came to live in Kevni; Mark barely six and I, just six months his junior. We would climb up Mark’s jaam tree, perch ourselves on two adjacent branches and chat for hours, discussing in our teenage years, girls, teachers, the books we shared: from Erle Stanley Gardner, Edgar Wallace and Somerset Maugham to a later phase of Aldous Huxley, John Updike and the radical theology of Hans Küng.

            Until marriage did us part. We moved to other cities, other countries. A chasm of nearly forty years; guilt for losing touch and a longing to catch up. We did that catching up a couple of years ago in Goa.

            And now he, an East-Indian was asking me, a ruddy Mangalorean if I could help him with this very East-Indian wedding tradition of the Umbracha Paani in Goa!

            The Umbracha Paani is a ritual, celebrated in mock solemnity a day before the wedding, separately for bride and groom. The word derives from umber, the local wild fig tree, the roots of which give off a cooling and therapeutic sap. This was supposed to be used in the water with which the bride and groom would be given their cosmetic bath. Later, with not many umber trees to be found, the water was fetched from the village wells. The family danced all the way to the well, singing traditional wedding songs, accompanied on a gumat.

            Today, with not many people knowing the words of the songs, brass brands are hired to substitute the words with deafeningly loud trumpeted tunes. We used to call them pimperi bands, because of the raw tones they produced, rather like the pimperi flutes which children made from big, brittle leaves.

            “Can you find me a pimperi band in Goa?” Mark asked, sounding doubtful.

            “I’ll try.” I promised. “Should be possible. Scratch a Goan and you’ll hear music, you know.”

            “But a pimperi band playing East-Indian traditional songs?”

            “I’ll try.”

            I called my friend, Prof. Christo Fernandes of the Goa Institute of Management, an accomplished violinist and choir conductor. Christo put me on to a friend, who put me on to a friend, who put me on to Futusch.

            “Talk to Futusch,” he told me.

            “Futusch?” I asked this friend of a friend of Christo’s.

            “Futusch, re. Futusch. Francis. Futusch. Same thing. You don’t know?” He wondered how anybody could be so dumb.

            I spoke to Futusch, who turned out to be one of those “no problem” Goans.

            “No problem,” he said.

            “Can you play East-Indian wedding songs?”

            “No problem,” he reiterated. I was not quite reassured.

            “Do you know the songs?” I asked.

            “East-Indian songs, no, no, no. I am Goan, re.”

            “Then how will you play them?” I asked, confused. I sang him a couple of bars of Maaza Combda and Yeh garawari to give him an idea.

            “Ah! Just like dulpod, re. Six/eight tempo. No problem.”

            Nicely confused now, I asked him if it would be OK if I wrote out the songs and sent it to him. “No problem,” he assured me. And so, on hand ruled staves, I wrote out the music of a dozen or so East-Indian tunes and e-mailed the sheets to Futusch. For convenience I wrote them all in two/four time with instruction to play them in six/eight.

            There were six bandsmen at the Paani: Futusch on the cornet, a trumpet, two saxophones, a bass drum and kettledrums. That was no pimperi band. They sounded more like a refined chamber group. What I had written was the first melody. What they played was improvised counterpoint around the melody, their Goan musical instincts embellishing the tunes with impromptu triads and flowing obligato, an accidental fusion of musical styles. Yeh garawari melded with Undeer mujhea mama and I could swear that I could hear Cecilia mujhe naum in between the Ee pori konachee, the sound of mando and Chopin minuet in one. This was East-Indian music as I had never heard before. Fascinating.

            The dancers too caught my fancy. Ladies, married and unmarried, young and old moved their hips and feet to Futusch’s polyphonic East-Indian dulpod. Unfamiliar with the traditional half-pirouette of the kunbi-koli dance, they stepped across salsa, hip-hop, the twist and gangnam style. It was an exhilarating and creative performance – all stimulated by that improvised East-Indian dulpod. Brilliant!

            So, now. The next time you know someone who wants to do an Umbracha Paani in Goa, no problem. Just talk to Futusch.