I was growing restless. Things were better than before, ever since I had made a few friends and had my weekends planned out - movies till late at night, cooking dinner together which usually meant that I did all the cooking and the guys would dutifully say everything tasted wonderful and eat loads of the food, going out to some place nearby, going to the Indian stores, going to the Indian temple as a result of a sudden burst of conscience etc. What I missed a lot was singing. I had joined TaeKwonDo classes, but I wanted to do something related to art.
I lived in a tiny state - so tiny that most US maps would have an arrow originating from a dot to show the state. I was talking to an old friend Vina (the friendship was old, not the friend) who lived in NJ. She seemed to be hesitant about telling me about someone. She mentioned another friend a couple of times and that she was not very sure if I would want to be associated with a person like her (the friend). One day, she told me about her and said that she lived in CT which was about 2 hours away from where I lived. My friend also told me that this friend (let’s call her Meena) was planning to start an amateur music troupe and was looking for a lead female singer. This lady supposedly was an average singer with a very limited range and my friend asked me to speak with her if I was interested. She kept warning me though, that if I did not feel comfortable with Meena, I could always opt out without fear of offending my friend.
So I called this woman and she asked me to sing something. I was made to feel that this song was going to make or break my musical career. So while my roommate was looking on strangely wondering what was wrong with me, I sang a song over the telephone and Meena asked me to come down for the first jamming session to a certain address in CT.
I had a loyal friend Navin who would accompany me everywhere since he was alone and bored too. So, the two of us set off and reached this place. There were about 6-7 people there and Meena told me that we would have to prepare for 2 programmes - one was a new year celebration programme by the local Tamil association and the other at her university.
Having heard from my friend that she had been in college with Meena, I spoke to her with a familiarity which she found irritating (I later learnt). She introduced me to her husband - a cheerful man and daughter - a sad looking toddler. We started the practice soon afterwards. I was asked to sing a fairly complex Carnatic music based film song.
The practice sessions were planned for every weekend and I used to look forward to those sessions with excitement and dread. Excitement, because all the members there were very friendly and dread because Meena was extremely critical of most things I did. Right in the beginning, she told me that she was an extremely sensitive person and that she got hurt very easily. So I was extra-careful in dealing with her comments. I mostly smiled and said I would try to do better.
The good thing that happened as a result of her meanness was that all the others in the group started treating me extremely well. They would go out of their way to be nice to me and became very protective of me. Our practice was always at a friend’s house, who used to be Meena’s junior in college. This guy Harsh became a very close friend and Meena would often tell me that he was like a brother to her (and when I asked him about it, he would laugh like it was be biggest joke he had ever heard).
In between, another thing happened. My friend and her husband started attending these sessions too. For the programme in the university, we were supposed to sing 3 songs in Hindi, of which my friend’s husband and I were to sing a duet. It was the first time my friend’s husband was singing on stage and he was fairly nervous and I would constantly encourage him to make small changes and appreciated him for his effort. Meena was of a less forgiving nature and would call his voice ‘raw’ and would keep giving sarcastic smiles throughout the song.
Anyway, the program for the Tamil association went off without too many issues. Meena had invited all of us for dinner at her place the following weekend. I called her and offered to help out with the cooking and she readily agreed. My friend and I went in the afternoon. She gave me a large cabbage and asked me to chop it. While I was doing that, she came over to inspect and said that they usually liked their cabbage to be chopped finer than this!! I did not know how to react and simply apologized.
Next she asked to come into the kitchen and clean up the drawers and racks. She went to the extent of saying that she had never had any time to do it and was waiting for me to come and clean it up. My mother has never asked me to do it and here I was, at a stranger’s place cleaning up her kitchen.
We started talking about the programme and she said ‘Karthik (our lead guitarist) seems to be very impressed with you. He said you were very cool and fun to be around’. I smiled in acknowledgement. The smile did not last a second before she hastily added ‘I told him - What is the use of being cool? She ruined the entire show. She went off-key a couple of times’!! I was too shocked to react. My friend was seething with anger. No one in the audience or in the group had said that I had sung badly and this lady went out of her way to be mean.
The rest of the evening went as badly as the beginning. Whenever I appreciated someone, she brushed my comments away with - ‘He is ok, but.. ‘ followed by a lame excuse. She did not forget to add that the audience had requested for an encore of her song (although none of us had heard it).
We were forced to stay the night in her place and she was full of stories of Meena the great - the supreme sacrifices of her life, how noble she was and how much she was misunderstood etc. But the clincher of the evening came when I was going gaga over a song by SPB and she said that it was not that great a song and that SPB had recited it more than sung it. That was it !! Whatever little respect I had for this woman went for a complete toss!! She, who could not sustain a note for more than a second, had the audacity to comment on SPB, in spite of the fact that I kept warning her not to talk about him !!
After the 2nd program in the university, there were no major complaints on my singing, since people appreciated it before she could say anything. So that evening she called me and said that I should have worn a dupatta over my dress and that it was not good to appear on stage without one. Instead of asking her to mind her own business, like an idiot I was telling her that the model of the dress I wore would not have looked good without a dupatta.
In the coming weeks, she got more and more irritated because her ‘brother’ and I were becoming very close friends and all the other members of the troupe visibly preferred me (as a person) over her (not that she had set a very high standard)!! She started acting in a more and more bizarre manner - calling up my friend and telling her that I should not be talking to her ‘brother’, calling up the ‘brother’ and telling him that I was dangerous and finally telling him that I was a bad singer.
My friends Navin and Harsh would constantly chide me for remaining silent when this lady insulted me unnecessarily. I finally decided that enough was enough and was all set to confront her when I got a great news. I was given an option to return to India and I jumped at the opportunity.
Ever since this incident, I am wary of people who call themselves sensitive, since they usually mean that they are quick to take offence, but are equally quick to give offence too. These self-proclaimed sensitive people have totally misunderstood the term ’sensitive’ since it also means to be aware of and respond to others’ feelings too.
‘Every cloud has a silver lining’, the saying goes. In my case, I think most silver linings have a cloud inside. After 5-6 years, I can think of these experiences and this woman with more compassion. I feel for the poor woman, for I now realize that all she wanted was (all) the attention of people around her. She wanted to be loved, appreciated and recognized and thought she could get it by demanding it. The days in the amateur troupe gave me a few friends, helped me while away my time doing something I loved and also made realize that being polite is not the same as tolerating nonsense.
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