No man is an island
No man can forget
No man can believe in
What by right is his not to forget
It is a song that mourns what we've all been mourning, condemns what is vile and universally condemnable, shines a light on our dark city, but also celebrates the spirit of togetherness this grave tragedy has spawned. Maybe, it even looks at a way forward.
"And there she lay dying on the cold bloody floor, and the streets were a crying, have mercy no more. She lay all alone, twisted and torn. The sun was weeping, it was just before dawn..." That's Bertram ‘Bertie’ Da Silva, Calcutta's favourite professor of English Literature, strumming the guitar gently, laying it out for us all, having found music in his long-quiet voice once again.
Bertie’s song is deeply moving in its choice of words, the gentle, almost harp-like quality of the acoustic guitar, and his voice that is back -- or is it? He’s still under doctors’ orders not to sing. He’s definitely mellower than before, although he still retains his characteristic razor-sharp delivery, drawing as he is wont to from his heart to chronicle the events of the past few months.
His song comes at a time when Tilottama’s death has awakened our dying city, the RG Kar rape and murder of the doctor forcing us out of our deadened stupor. It got thousands back on the streets, crying enough is enough. It got the highest court of the land to take cognisance. And it got the powers that be to bend, albeit a little, in full view of a nation that stood by the aggrieved students as they marched for what is right against a grievous wrong.
Taking off from John Donne's poem that talks of no man being an island, ‘Just in Her Name’ is a retelling of the story of Tilottama sans embellishments, a story that should not have had to be told, but is now upon us to live with and learn from.
“No man,” he says, “can forget; no man can believe in what by right is his not to forget.” He mentions the police, asking if they had the “courage to look at her face”; he reaches out to her parents, holds their hand even to feel the “cold in their hearts which were warm just before”. The song moves on to the “murky” stories, none of which holds; talks of the corruption that festers and warns of living with “a conscience deadened by greed and the hammer of pelf”.
If this is not Dylan-esque then what is, although Bertie’s loyalties are known to lie squarely with Neil Young. Exalted lineage apart, it is as though ‘Just in Her Name’ wrote itself. And it is not in the least surprising that it found Bertie to be its sutradhar. “I have nothing more to say other than the words of the song,” he tells The Telegraph Online.
Bertie, a key singer-songwriter presence in the Calcutta of the mid-’70s and ’80s, has, by now, an endless catalogue of originals. These are odes to joy and sadness, framed by lived-in experiences that mirror reality; like, say, ‘La Dolce Vita’, about a Calcutta music pub, or ‘Working Man’s Blues (And the Reds and Greens)’ that references a land agitation and a resultant police firing in Bengal circa 2000.
Many would recall the two songs even today, performed as they were by Bertie and his band at a concert at GD Birla Sabhaghar sometime in November 2009. In short, Bertie Da Silva’s music has always been about life itself, as in that salutation to the River in which he paints a picture of the times when shadows fall, memories rise: “River of darkness in my eyes, river running to the sea, river run in me.”
That RG Kar Songs is the label under which his latest song has been nestled in his YouTube channel perhaps signals there are more. Is that correct? Yes, he confirms. It’s kind of inevitable though, given the manner in which Calcutta has been through an overwhelming churn in which people have spontaneously expressed solidarity with the aggrieved doctors who have lost one of them. Many joined their protests, others helped with food and logistics, day after day during the stir that went on for over a month.
The movement has been documented in street art, giving birth to new slogans, poems and songs, one of which was by the crowd puller from Murshidabad, Bengal, Arijit Singh. Much like these artistic outpourings, Bertie’s ‘Just in Her Name’ is perched on contemporary history too, as great songs always do.
It is, as it quietly emphasises, about the “girl with no name” and how her mother and father have been left to “burn in memory’s flame”, the invoking of anonymity bestowing on it the universal burden of the others who have gone before her. “Her death was not forgotten in a day, like so many others before her, broken and beaten they lay.”
It is, therefore, moot to note how the song seeks to open a new window, that of atonement leading to redressal and reform. Amid the wrath of the righteous and the wronged, Bertie turns to the flash that has led to an awakening, prescribing as it were a search for a new beginning that can only happen if we collectively pledge to never forget Tilottama’s passing.
