The souvenir that I couldn't return...

It was an October afternoon in 2001 I walked into the house of violin maestro Lalgudi G Jayaraman with a ‘sorry’. I was late by almost an hour for the interview that I had fixed with him over phone a week ago. But there was no problem. With his trademark humility, he invited me to his house.

“Music is like a painting. The seven swaras denote seven colours...” He began the conversation with music. “A violinist should be a vocalist,” he explained, “Otherwise he can’t play the lyrics correctly.” Lalgudi Jayaraman was trained in Carnatic vocal, but he later chose violin because he was fond of the instrument. “Violin gives an extension of my imaginations. It’s a part of me. I can’t see it separately,” he said. When I asked him about the violin that renowned American violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin presented to him while attending the Edinburgh Music Festival in 1965, he smiled and started talking about Menuhin. “He loved our music, art and culture. He was a good friend.”

When he handed me a copy of “On our Heart Strings”, he said, “This is the only copy that I have. You may return it after use.” It was a commemorative souvenir on Lalgudi Jayaraman brought out by Sri Krishna Gana Sabha on the occasion of the artist’s 50th solo concert at the Sabha on 21st December 1986. Besides a number of write-ups about Lalgudi Jayaraman by veterans in the field, the souvenir had a fantastic collection of rare photographs reflecting the artist’s eventful life. The most touching was a B&W photograph that appeared on the back of the cover which showed a bare-chested Lalgudi Jayaraman among others performing before HH Paramacharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam at Suruttapalli on December 1, 1972. Wrapped himself in a long white cloth, Paramacharya was seen listening to the concert sitting on the floor. There were many: with Lata Mangeshkar, Menuhin, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. It has been more than two hours, and when he decided to wind up the conversation, he said: “There is nothing equal to music. If I get another life, I would still like to be a musician.”

When I was about to leave, Lalgudi Jayaraman’s daughter Vijayalakshmi gave me a cassette of the maestro’s latest record. The profile “Solo or not, He’s a king” was published on the Arts page of The New Sunday Express on 14, October, 2001.

More than 12 years have passed now. The sad part is that I couldn’t return the souvenir to him as promised. Even though I still keep it safely with the cassette, I feel sad for not returning it to him when he was alive. SORRY.