Master always started off a major piece just by having me sing it "plain". Or the "base of the song" as he called it. He would sing the first two lines over and over again without any ornamentation whatsoever, and I would just repeat.
Then I would go away and practice that a thousand times - and on the following trip I would sing those lines back to him, he would then teach me up to the end of the first half. With the second half, which are mostly swara melodies, he would finish that off at the end rather quickly.
Usually on trip three, he would sit with me singing those same two first lines, for 2 hours each day in the morning, and have me sing and correct, sing and correct, over and over again. Trip three (counting from the first time he introduced the "base of the song") was always the most exciting because that's when he'd teach me all the possibilities. They're usually called "neraval" but he didn't like that term either. He would use some word that sounded like "jaarvai", I suppose it means something like stretching or pulling. He'd say "brigas and neravals are not really important in our style of singing" - this is how you should "pull" that song. It would just be a vowel and to me it sounded like sliding. One long slide.
I loved singing like this for him. He was of course a very critical listener and would go on correcting. Just imagine spending 10 to noon singing the word "saami" over and over again six days a week and having someone correct it. Once he got into teaching a particular line of a varnam, he wouldn't let go. I liked variety. So in the morning, for those 2 or 3 hours, I would be enthusiastic. But in the evening lesson, from 4-6, or from 5-8, I would just be in shreds. My mind and voice just exhausted. We would sing on the terrace in the evening. In the morning, it was in the class room. After 2001, there were no more students coming to dance, he had either retired or they had stopped. He had stopped all his beginner classes even during the previous year. So it was mostly just him and I.
Once in a bluemoon someone would come and dance, but mostly it was just empty. How sad I felt sometimes looking at the box full of thatu kazhis in the corner. This room where so many people had danced for so long. Of course, he had it built only in the early 90s. One of his students' father offered to build it for him on the terrace of his house when he stopped teaching at the school in Kilpauk. The very next year - 94- was when I visited with my sister (who had been his student for a few years in the Kilpauk school). That's how I got in. Using her as my connection. I believe he taught in the Kilpauk school for a long time: from 68 till either 91 or 92. I can't even imagine what that must have been like. So many years and years of teaching.
Anyway, the first time I heard Kamas I thought it was too sweet, too sugary. But after hearing it a few days I began to appreciate it. It was a very sentimental and sweet varnam. It is like seeing families at railway stations saying goodbye's and hello's to their loved ones. All that affection.
Master had a pile of papers with notes scrawled all over them. Some were in his father's handwriting. There were a few notebooks falling apart which had all sorts of "tirmanam" and the correct "edupu" written down. There were a couple of notebooks filled with descriptions of "kais" for a varnam. It would say things like "yemaguva" and then there would be a list of 5 or 7 "kais" each with a 2 sentence description. Things like "what did she say to you? Did she cover her face with a veil? Did she walk in the moonlight? Did she do blackmagic and bewitch you?" - etc. etc.
So, Master was looking for the one little bit of paper that had the "kai"-s for the kamas varnam. Alas, he couldn't find it. So he said to me, "I don't want to mix it up with anything else. I have to keep looking for the right sequence of 'kai' so I have to keep searching". Oh no! I thought. He pulled two boxes out of some old suitcases and spread a pile of tattered folded-over papers and we opened them all up and looked. But no ... no kamas. Then two years later, I came back and his son found it. It was in a bag with a bunch of other things and it was just this little sheet that said "kamas" on it. It wasn't Master's handwriting. I wonder whose it was? His father's?
But now, it's 2007, and as Master and I rehearse the hands, he says to me regretfully, "These 3 hands I just don't remember". After all these years of rehearsing the song, finding this paper, learning all the choreography for the second half. For these crucial hands in the first half, he's just forgotten. I was so upset. There is no one he's taught this to - not in a very long time - and back then they weren't even recording anything. so it's just gone, gone, gone with the wind.
One of his students said to me: "but you have the meaning, you know the gestures for all the other varnams, why can't you just choreograph it?". But I know that it just wouldn't be the same. I've seen others do that and I know the difference immediately. It would just be a parody of the real thing. No, that is just not the way to go. It would be an insult to this piece and to what it once was. This will just be one of those unfinished varnams. It will just be there in my mind.
