Shoghi symphony beats all

Maj Gen Raj Mehta (retd)

IT is about 4 am in the Shoghi Hills. The world around this part of the hemisphere is asleep; Shimla and adjoining Shoghi for sure. I look down with wonderment from my study’s plate-glass windows, watching the twinkling lights nearby and the distant 6,000-ft mist-shrouded hills and their deep valleys. This is when the ‘Shoghi orchestra’ begins unannounced, with its opening, seductive musical notes. The gentle swaying and sighing of blue pines, and slender silver firs can be heard, with stately deodars and sturdy oaks watching impassively. The tempo rises as the chill June breeze accelerates, becoming stronger. Keeping motherly watch above languorous Shoghi is the Tara Devi hill; its exposed transmission towers blinking a red-eye glare... And in the leaden skies sits the orchestra conductor in regal cosmic splendour.  

He clears his throat with thunderous gargles roll down the forested slopes, reverberating and re-echoing in the ancient Shiwalik Hills. The staccato, steady drumming of rain follows. The distant lights twinkle bravely in the gathering rain, then fade as insidious mist takes over, flirting with the streetlights below my window and on the terraced slopes, revealing, then concealing them with coquettish élan. Vehicle headlights struggle on the road below, groping their way out of the rain as the storm picks up in musical crescendo. It is as if Zubin Mehta was playing a high-energy Tchaikovsky or Bach, Beethoven or Mozart piece with deafening clashes of cymbals, drums, trumpets, clarinets. No classical music aficionado me, the heavenly symphony sounds a shade better than Zubin’s rare TV broadcasts of his New York Philharmonic....

I tip-toe past sleeping, tousled heads tucked into duvets; warmed by the dull red glow of tower-heaters to the iron-grill encased balcony and see, sense, feel the orchestra in its full splendour. The stinging, cold raindrops, the piercing wind that cuts through my tee, the heavenly smell of pine, fir, rhododendron, oak, jacaranda… wild flower pollen caught swirling in the gloam by drenched, incandescent tubelights... My heart swirls away too and my soul follows...I am part of the symphony…always was, always will be… From the distant recesses of my mind, the lyrics of Hal David’s Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head come wordlessly to mind. I am suddenly Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, lip-syncing an Academy Award winning ode to raindrops….

Like Zubin’s magical wand, the ending notes at Shoghi also fall into place in the same unobtrusive manner that the symphony had begun…from Kandaghat to Shimla, armistice returns...The dawn skies slowly light up, a volt of electricity at a time; the wind eases off and retreats into the lovely, dark and dark woods…The rain relents, easing into dew; into condensed water-drops rolling down water-drenched windowpanes. Dawn is at hand and the orchestra, after several raucous encores, takes its final bow... Zubin would join in the salute, as would New York Philharmonic. I am no music conductor nor was meant to be…am just a bystander lucky to see, sense, feel and hear the timeless Shoghi symphony broadcast in the Shimla Hills.