------------------------------------------------------------------------
* G * O * A * N * E * T **** C * L * A * S * S * I * F * I * E * D * S *
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Renew your wedding vows in Goa,
or gift a Ceremony Package to a close couple
Multiple options to make your day extra special!
http://www.renewalsetc.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cotton world
Deepanjana Pal chases down the story behind 'I Went to See My Darling'.
The nights were awfully silent when Fleur D'Souza was growing up in the East
Indian village of Cherai in Thane in the the 1960s. In the era before
television, the hours after sunset were broken only occasionally, by the odd
wail of a beggar or the call of a wandering salesman. On some nights, however,
a burst of song would fill the neighbourhood. A woman in a dress would belt out
a tune that began, "I went to see my darling last Saturday night." D'Souza's
mother would often join in and finish the song.
D'Souza, who is now the Vice Principal of St Xavier's College, and her mother
didn't know that the tune was actually called "I Ain't Nobody's Darling" and
had been composed in 1921 by an American named Robert King. They had even less
idea that the same song was frequently heard in Christian neighbourhoods all
across the city or that it would still be sung 40 years later, presumably by a
relative of the woman D'Souza had heard.
Over the years, the mysterious woman of D'Souza's childhood has become the
stuff of urban mythology. Thousands of people who know nothing about her have
heard her singing "Daisy, Daisy", "Irene Goodnight" and "You Are My Sunshine",
the melody clear and true even though most of the words apart from the first
line of the refrain are gibberish.
In an internet posting, a Toronto resident named Roland Francis recalls a woman
whom he knew as Cotton Mary wandering through Byculla in the 1960s, "cupping
her hands for the bullhorn effect, turning her face towards the sky and singing
in a loud and raspy voice". In his novel Afternoon Raag, novelist Amit
Chaudhuri writes of a "Christian woman who, wearing the same tattered white
dress, stood outside the building gates [on St Cyril Road in Bandra] every week
and sang a tuneless song in disjointed English" in the mid-'80s. More recently,
a blog titled Bandra Buggers reports that the woman who sang "I Went to See My
Darling" has been replaced by a man with a harmonium. "Where did he learn his
signature tune?" the blog asks. "Where did he learn to play the harmonium?
Where does he come from? Where does he go? And for how many years more will we
see him?"
It took Time Out more than four months to obtain some answers. We called dozens
of people across Mumbai to ask for help. At the end of October, a staffer's
mother called from Kurla late one night and we finally had a date with Cotton
Mary. Only, when we met up with her, she insisted that her name was actually
Carol Lollipop. Wearing a cheap, shiny sari instead of her trademark dress,
Lollipop said she'd learnt the songs from her mother, Mary.
It soon became clear, though, that Lollipop's stories about herself are as hazy
as her listeners' memories of her. Speaking in a curious pidgin of English and
Hindi that bordered on the incomprehensible, she was unclear about where
exactly she lived, indicating only that she lived on the seashore in Bandra.
She supplements her income by working as a labourer on construction sites. She
didn't even seem to be sure of her name: on the phone the previous day, she'd
said that her name was Carol Anthony. Lollipop said her mother was Anglo-Indian
and that her father was "Madrasi". Later she said her mother was Goan. She
insisted she was Cotton Mary's child and that her mother would wear skirts and
dresses – sometimes even lipstick – before heading out to sing with her in tow.
Lollipop looks like any other homeless person until she breaks into song. When
she does, her strong voice filling the street, there's no mistaking her for
anyone else. In addition to the songs we'd heard before, she sang several
bhajan-esque Hindi hymns, including a bouncy tune with a chorus that went,
"Byculla mein hallelujah".
Some of these tunes have been familiar on Mumbai's streets for at least five
decades. The woman who many knew as Cotton Mary would appear around Christmas
and Easter in Bandra, Parel, Byculla and other Christian neighbourhoods,
singing ditties that were popular with the city's English-speaking Christian
and Anglo-Indian communities. Songs like "Irene Goodnight", "Daisy, Daisy" and
"It's a Long Way to Tipperary" are thought to have originally come to Mumbai
with homesick Allied soldiers stationed here during the Second World War. While
many of them continue to be sung (and are enshrined in Pop Hits, a 1970s book
with lyrics and guitar chords for "singsong" sessions at Christian parties),
almost no Mumbaikars have heard any other version of "I Went to See My Darling"
except for the ones by Cotton Mary and Carol Lollipop.
Patricia Nath, who grew up in Bandra in the early 1960s, remembers her entire
family joining Cotton Mary in singalongs. "My father played the harmonica, my
mother and my sisters, we'd all join in," she said. Nath says that "the
original Cotton Mary" performed tunes with perfectly correct lyrics. "She told
my mother and older sister that she had learnt them while working as a domestic
help with an English family," said Nath. When the family left India, Mary was
abandoned by her husband and forced to take up singing for her supper,
literally. "In Bandra, I know many people would invite her to come up and have
a meal, depending upon what time of day it was," said Nath. "So she would begin
at about 10 in the morning and start going from street to street, taking
whatever she got whether it was food, clothes or money."
Carol Lollipop told us that the songs she performs were taught to her by her
mother, Mary. But it seems likely that by the late 1960s and '70s, other street
performers were also singing these tunes. They looked similar – the women wore
dresses; the men carried harmoniums; both genders were accompanied by young
children – and sang the same songs. The difference lay in the lyrics. The
duplicates sang gibberish. The Cotton Mary seen in Thane singing nonsensical
lyrics was clearly different from the English-speaking woman heard in Bandra
and Mazagon.
Nath said that the original Cotton Mary disappeared in the late 1960s. But
after a few years, the familiar tunes wafted in one day and the Naths saw
Cotton Mary outside the window, dressed as before in a skirt, blouse and hat.
They called her up and when she was at their doorstep, they realised it was a
man in women's clothes. "He said his name was Anthony," recalled Nath. "She
apparently said she had earned lots of money singing, so when she didn't show
up for a couple of years, it seems this boy decided to try his hand." Why he
did so in drag remains unexplained. But it does offer a connection to the
sari-clad Lollipop, whose body language is distinctly masculine.
While Lollipop's recollections are a cocktail of memory and delusions, she's
the inheritor of a street singing tradition that's fast disappearing in the
roar of city traffic. When asked how she remembers her lyrics, she said, "My
mother Mary left me these. How can I forget?" With that, she picked up two
pieces of broken tiles, fashioned them into cymbals and began to sing "I Went
to See My Darling". With inputs by Rosalyn D'Mello.
