The last cassette I remember wasn’t mine. It was Taal, Subhash Ghai’s film from 1999, and it lived in the glove compartment of somebody else’s car in a city I’d never been to. I was thirteen and not especially interested in music.
In my first twenty years I think I left the state four or five times, so when my father planned a proper holiday in the winter of 1999 it was a significant thing. Hyderabad first, then Tirupati, Bangalore and Chennai before going back to Bhilai. I may have the order wrong. What I know is that it was the first holiday I remember properly and that almost everything on it was something I hadn’t done before. My first burger, my first go-karting, my first film city, my first museum. I also refused to give my hair at Tirupati, which was probably the earliest evidence of a rebellious streak that has never entirely gone away.
We stayed with my father’s cousin and his family, in a flat, which was itself new to me. Nobody in Bhilai lived in flats in the 90s. You had a house and the house had a garden. I found the whole arrangement exciting and spent a fair amount of that visit riding the lift up and down for no reason beyond the fact that there was one. My uncle worked for Pepsi or Coca-Cola, I’ve never been sure which, and the job came with a company car and a driver. The car was a white Ambassador and it became our sightseeing vehicle for the next few days. There were five or six cassettes in the glove compartment, most of them in Telugu or Tamil. The only Hindi one was Taal.
My parents both listened to a lot of music and my father is a Rahman fan, partly for the music and partly because Rahman is from Tamil Nadu, where my father is from, and was making that kind of mark on Hindi cinema. I’d heard some of the songs on television already. The Taal cassette went into the player when we set off on the first morning and more or less stayed there. One side would finish, I’d press the button, it would come out, I’d turn it over and push it back in, and the other side would play. That was the routine for the three or four days we spent driving around the city. I couldn’t tell you now whether I was really listening. But it was playing every time we got into that car.
I remember the city far better than the songs. The Charminar had until then been a photograph in a history textbook, and there’s something disorienting about a monument you’ve only read about turning up in front of you at full size. The Buddha standing out in the middle of Hussain Sagar. And the Salar Jung Museum, which I liked enough that we went back the next day and did it again.
I’d always liked history but never got to study it properly at school. That museum was the first time I understood it wasn’t only a thing printed in books. Paintings large enough to take up a whole wall on their own. Stone carved finely enough that it stopped behaving like stone, including the Veiled Rebecca, a white marble woman whose veil has been cut so thin it looks like you could see through it. I stood in front of that one for a while. Almost every city I’ve been to since has involved finding the museum if I could manage it, Moscow and Mumbai and Kolkata among them, and I think the habit started on the second morning in Salar Jung.
The cassette turned into a memory on the day we left. Everyone was in the Ambassador and ready to go when my father asked where the Taal cassette was. The driver said somebody had carried it up to the flat the previous evening. My father turned round and told me to go and get it. I remember being pleased about it. It was a job, and at thirteen a job of that kind is a quest. I went up, found it, brought it down, and that is the clearest single image I have from the entire holiday.
It wasn’t ours. It went back into my uncle’s glove compartment when we left and I never saw it again. One of the first things my father did once we were home in Bhilai was buy his own copy, and it went into the Philips player we’d had since the early 90s. I listened to it when it was on but never put it on myself, because I was thirteen and cricket was considerably more interesting than music. My favourite was Nahin Saamne Yeh Alag Baat Hai, and it still is, though it took me years to work that out.
If you’d asked me at the time what I would remember from that holiday twenty-seven years later, I wouldn’t have said the cassette. I doubt I’d have mentioned it at all. It was the soundtrack to that holiday, and the music was almost beside the point. What stayed was everything around it, the white Ambassador and Hyderabad going past the windows, the Charminar, the museum, the novelty of a flat with a lift in it, the endless flipping from one side to the other, and being sent back upstairs to fetch it.
Memory doesn’t keep what you’d expect it to. It holds on to small things and lets go of the rest, and you get no say in which is which. The things it keeps are often objects, which is one reason I’ve always been attached to them. The other is control. Most of what shapes a day is out of my hands, so I’ve filled the edges of it with things that aren’t. I brew coffee in a moka pot or a French press rather than buying a machine that takes pods, and I reach for the mechanical watches far more often than the quartz one, which would keep going whether I turned up or not. Press the button and a cassette plays. Press it again and it stops. Pull the crown on the Mido Ocean Star and it stops, which in some strange way feels like stopping time even though nothing else has. The object waits for me.
We had a record player at home when I was small, with a large collection to go with it, and it was played so rarely that I’ve forgotten what it sounded like. The needle for that model wasn’t available anywhere, so it sat there while music systems arrived in every other house and made it less worth fixing every year. A few years after my grandmother died my father gave the player away along with every record in it. I’ve been thinking about buying a turntable for a while now, which makes very little sense in a world of streaming and lossless files. The reason is that I’d like the choosing back. A playlist assembled for me by something that has been watching what I listen to is not the same as building one myself, a record at a time, and paying for each one.
My parents are the same about their machines. The Philips cassette player outlived all of it. It’s still in that house, working as a radio, and my mother carries a small transistor around with her as well, which usually ends up on the windowsill by her bed playing Vividh Bharati while she scrolls through Facebook. She has kept boxes of things for reasons my brother and I have never established, and my father’s copy of Taal is almost certainly in one of them. Watching these things survive, and in some cases outlast the digital equipment that was supposed to replace them, is a good part of why I keep leaning back towards objects that do one thing and nothing else.
None of all this makes 1999 a better year to be alive. It was a simpler one, and everything in it had a mechanism you could see between wanting something and getting it. Now there’s a program in the middle of most of it, with opinions about what I should eat, wear, buy and where I should go. The Taal cassette in one of those boxes will still play if you put it in the Philips, without asking for my date of birth, my email address or anything else it has no business knowing.
