The Internet Personified: Notes on karaoke
And I, I must confess, I still believe (still believe!)
(Editorial note: Oh my god, those election results! I spent all day Tuesday and Wednesday just ABSORBED. I’m happy with the outcome, I thought the BJP would win again and then what? This coalition government that we’re heading for might be the only way to keep Modi and his minions in check.)
You live in Bandra. Bandra East, you correct people sometimes, when you’re feeling specific. Bandra East and Bandra West are very different spaces. Their section has sushi and all the nicest bars and women dressed in shorts and bohemian mirrorwork tops, hailing autos with flair, one polished arm extended. Theirs sometimes has movie star sightings, you’d see Salman Khan’s hand extended out of a car with windows so tinted that they were almost like black holes, extended and a Barista worked scurries to pass the coffee to him. Theirs also has this Barista on Bandstand, overlooking the sea, you sometimes sit there and watch the waves but more often you watch other people, young people like you in this city where if you tell them you’re a writer, they ask politely, “Which film?”
Your section is called MIG Colony, MIG for middle income group, it’s a government flat which your landlord is renting out to you and a series of flatmates. It took you a week to stop feeling homesick, three weeks to get a kitten, six weeks to have the sort of friends you felt like you’d known forever. Your side of Bandra has crows and coconut trees, the only two restaurants serve Maharashtrian food which now, in your forties, in Berlin, you realise was actually really good but then you just wanted a pizza. Or a snack. Not oily dry Kohlapuri chicken whenever you didn’t feel like eating the cook’s offerings, which was often because you weren’t domestic then and you didn’t know how to instruct her, just assumed she’d divine your appetite. After nine pm there are no autos going to the West, and coming back home after midnight requires trickery where you tell the auto driver you’re going someplace else and then add halfway there, “Actually, I’ve changed my mind, Bandra East ok?”
It’s one of your close girl friends—actually perhaps your only girl friend at this point, unusual for you, but men are easier to make new friends with in your twenties—who takes you to karaoke. The venue is another seafood restaurant, but this is a hip seafood restaurant, it’s got a catchy name (Soul Fry, get it, like Sole?) and cocktails and events like this karaoke night. Your friend met her boyfriend at this event, he was at an adjoining table. A few years later, when they get married, she invites the owner of Soul Fry. Or does he do the catering? I forget, but he’s involved in some way. You wear the blue strapless dress you bought for your book launch. There’s no karaoke but your friend’s new husband sings for her. You don’t catch the bouquet, it’s a Christian wedding and familiar to you from the films, but you don’t catch it perhaps on purpose because you’re dating a man who you’ve been with for longer than you know why and you don’t want to marry him although when he asks, you say yes but by that point you’re saying yes because it’s easier than saying no.
But you know none of this when you go to Soul Fry with your friend. You’re still new enough to karaoke to not have a song, so you try everything. You become a regular. Once you go with a friend of a friend who is a professional singer, you choose Bohemian Rhapsody as you will always do when the night has worn on long enough and the drinks inside you make you want to do a fandango yourself. The way Soul Fry is laid out is that all the tables face the back where there is a screen and you stand amongst the tables and sing along. The Singer is obscured by a pillar, but her voice is beautiful, much more than yours so you sing softly and let her take over. People come up to you later and tell you how amazing you were and you say, “Thanks!” because you believe you’re not a terrible singer, not amazing but you can carry a tune, and then on your way home you realise they meant her not you, but they could only see you. You feel like you cheated them a little bit.
You go to Goa with two of your friends, you share a train compartment and a hotel room. It’s a nice hotel but with a middle aged clientele. You three are the youngest there. You and your friend have left boyfriends behind in Bombay, yours terrible, hers lovely. You feel like you’re always aware of this, how you both went from single to double at approximately the same time, how quickly you both fell into cohabiting, how yours wanted to put you in a box and close the lid and hers wanted her to be free. You don’t tell your friends, because you are nothing if not loyal, but as soon as you get out of Bombay and are in Goa and away from him you feel a weight lift off your shoulders. You don’t think about him for the rest of the weekend.
Instead you get drunk. Roaringly, stupendously, seven shots of tequila drunk. Projectile vomiting into a bush (the waiters at your hotel look on disapprovingly while your friends drag you away) drunk. No memories of the night before drunk. You spend the next two days barely being able to move, you are so hungover even your teeth hurt, one of your friends has inexplicable gravel on her knees in the morning, at some point they walked you back to the room and locked you in and went out again but no one remembers more than a fraction of the night.
At the end of the third evening, your last night, you all decide to go out after all. Gently you lower yourself into wicker chairs by the beach, gently you sip the cocktails you have ordered as though they’re going to explode. But they work, colour rushes back into all your faces and while you won’t be able to match the energy of that first night (even thinking about it makes your stomach roll so you ignore it. The beachside bar you’re at has a karaoke night on, you wobble to the front of the stage and sing. Suddenly, you’ve all three recovered in a way you’ll never be able to do again in the following decades. You’re singing, you’re laughing, you don’t know this but all three of you won’t be on holiday together alone again, it just never happens. This time was special, it was magic.
You don’t know that the hotel owner has called the friend of your boyfriend who recommended the place to you and snitched on you. “Drunk and disorderly,” he’s said and she sneaked to your boyfriend and everyone is very ashamed of you when you get back.
At least, that’s the story she told you. Later, when you realise she doesn’t like you, actively dislikes you in fact, you wonder if she called the hotel owner who is her friend and asked him to report on you. She is a troubled woman. She dies by suicide a few years after this but you don’t know that now, you just wonder at your life, a butterfly under a glass jar. You feel glad you had a good time with your friends. You feel resentful of everyone else.
You also never drink a tequila shot again.
Of course Berlin karaoke has to lean in to its campiness, its utter kitsch. You’ve only been karaoking once in the city since you moved and that was with a group you found on Facebook. The bar you pick then is called Poison and it has a large stage on top of which everyone stands and sings nervously. Poison is small and busy. You’re not enjoying yourself much. You ask the bartender to pass on a request to the KJ behind him and he, a young man, looks at you and says, “Don’t be so lazy, bitch.” You are so shocked you stand back. He too looks like maybe he said too much, maybe he tried to banter and it came out more aggressive than he intended. Either way, you pay for your drink and avoid eye contact. And then you go home, Poison is not for you.
You have a whole collection of bars around Berlin known to you just as “rude bars.” At one of them, when you ask to taste the wine before you buy it, the bartender, who is a young, sulky girl, says, “We have lots, do you want me to pour out all of them?” She doesn’t put her fists on her hips as she says this but she might as well. It’s too bad, it’s a nice bar, walking distance from the station.
At your favourite bar, the owner who is also the bartender calls you “treasure,” as in “How nice to see you again, my treasure.” She knows your drink. Her bar is not fashionable, but she is lovely, and in the summer, old folks in the neighbourhood sit outside and nurse their drinks. She is nice to everyone, that’s just the way she is.
But you still want to karaoke in Berlin, it would make this city feel even more like home. You find a place nearby which dedicates itself to karaoke, that’s its whole schtick. They have several cabins which people rent in groups and sing privately to each other. On Mondays, this place lets you box hop, for a flat fee you can go from cabin to cabin, singing with strangers. You cobble together a group, half of whom are skeptical but you all wind up enjoying yourselves more than you expected to.
Once a year, this karaoke bar, called Monster Ronson, has a naked night, where not only do you sing in front of strangers, you also do it without any clothes on. You do not go for this, but you consider it. You decide on your birthday which is in December, a terrible month for the city, you will rent a cabin, ask all your friends. Meanwhile you have taken to asking new friends about karaoke, just “how do you feel about karaoke?” You’re making a list for the next time you go.
The bartenders at Monster Ronson are nice too. That’s all you really need from a bar, for people to not be actively rude to you. It seems like such a simple ask. You don’t mind if they are businesslike, but you like best when they take a minute to exchange a few words. Being a bartender isn’t easy, especially on crowded nights, but you like to think they can see beyond your disguise as just a punter on a Friday night, lining up for drinks, and into your face, which is nice. Pleasant. Smiling. It’s a lot to ask of a bartender, that they see everyone’s humanity, but it’s what you want.
Your friend’s brother bought a bar in Delhi when you moved back there from Bombay. It was called Urban… something. Urban Experience? It was in the market close to the house you had just rented, not really a house, not really a flat. Two rooms and a strip of corridor that doubled up as the kitchen. But you had a terrace that overlooked the newly built metro line and you had parties up there and the landlords who lived in the main building of which you were the annexe, the servant’s quarters, more savvy friends told you, never said anything, didn’t even seem to notice all the people coming and going.
You were happy in this flat, in the small rooms. You learned to cook in that tiny kitchen, your cat prowled around the two rooms like he had a kingdom. You had a maid all to yourself, the press-wallah’s wife who cooked and cleaned for you and respected you as a single working woman, and took over so gently, that before you realised it, she was looking after you while all you had to do was exist. You hosted more dinner parties in your tiny second room than you ever had before, all your guests crowded around the coffee table that doubled as a dining table, sitting on the floor. You served them fancy things, things you read about online: lamb burgers with halloumi cheese, ripe mango and bellpepper chicken. You were freelancing full time and because the rent was so cheap, you felt rich for the first time in your life.
Your friend’s brother had this bar and it’s where you went in the evenings. Often, you had it to yourself, which felt a bit sad because it was a nice place. Good drinks, good snacks, a foosball table. Your friend’s brother gave you a hefty discount which he shouldn’t have, but you appreciated it. It’s where you encouraged your friend to join Tinder a few years later, which is where she met her husband. It’s where another friend brought along her date, who swiftly became her only date sitting on your floor eating your burgers, and now they have two children. It’s where they put up a karaoke screen one day, and a person to run it and you wore a short skirt and sang Britney Spears and decided you would only sing Britney Spears at karaoke.
You moved to other houses, other Delhis. You go to other karaoke nights, but by now the people who accompany you are good singers, not just people who like singing but people who are also good at it. You were in a choir in high school, in college but singing is not something you’d say you were good at. You let it fall by the wayside.
But every time you hold that mic, and every time you stare up at that screen and every time you sing, it feels like something is loosening in your chest. You feel happy. Even if you’re butchering the song, even then. Dopamine floods your brain, you are loopy with joy and your heart is beating hard from the performance of it all. Now when you ask people, “How do you feel about karaoke?” they feel the need to tell you that they’re terrible singers. “Me too!” you say, and they look skeptical because how can someone love something and still be terrible at it? But you are not a gifted singer, but you can hold a tune, and your taste is dated and stuck in the 90s and you sometimes cup the mic with your fist and you close your eyes and you belt out a song, and it’s the least cynical part of you, it’s so sincere that you feel the need to wink and add irony to the situation but your brain won’t let you, you love it, you love it all.
Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
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