Ek TARA BOLEY TUN TUN...

Amongst the early recollections of my childhood ,one surfaces very prominently …that of the ‘bajeywala’ . I was perhaps 5yrs old. Those days we used to live in one of the government houses on Baba Kharak Singh Marg erstwhile Irwin Road, one of the radials of Connaught Circus. Today ,those houses do not exist . The State Emporia have come up in their place.


Men on foot or on bicycles, selling vegetables , sweets ,toys, even utensils were a common sight then. Mothers could buy things at their very doorstep .How simple and convenient life was !


The bajeywala would come by once a week. I still remember his tall gaunt frame, a colourful ‘bandhni’ turban wrapped around his head, clad in a white dhoti and kurta , coming down our back lane fiddling on a single- stringed musical instrument. ..nothing as sophisticated as the toy synthesizers that kids play with today. It was crudely made with a earthenware pot at one end sporting a foot long bamboo with a wire tightly drawn along its length and wrapped around a small knob…what one would call ‘ek tara’. He would play melodious tunes on it ,the most popular one being a hit song of those days …”Mera man doley mera tan doley..”This was his way of announcing his presence in the neighbourhood . No sooner did the kids hear him they would rush out and flock around him . Being a little shy ,I would watch from a distance while he would regale us with popular movie tunes , in the hope of selling his ‘ek taraas’.


Once, after much persuasion , my mother bought me one . I settled down happily to play it. It was after all very simple . All one I had to do was run the fiddle over the wire…and the music should pour out. But no matter how hard I tried I could not get a single melodious note out of it! Certain that mine was a bad piece ,I insisted on having the one that he was playing. The bajeywala indulgently replaced mine with his and walked away fiddling another popular song on it...’raja ki ayegi baraat ,rangili hogi raat… while I was left making scratchy noises on mine.