A confession in four humiliations and one glorious moment
I.
The headmaster made the announcement during morning prayers, the way headmasters always deliver news that will change the course of someone’s life — flatly, between the attendance register and the lunch break schedule.
“There is an inter-school song competition. All interested participants must go through a screen test. If you qualify, you will represent the school.”
The words floated over the courtyard, past the serious students already calculating their chances, past the talented ones already rehearsing in their heads, and landed — somehow — in mine.
I am not entirely sure what possessed me. I had no training. No particular talent that anyone, including myself, had ever noticed. I didn’t even have a song picked out. But there has always lived inside me a creature that perks up at the word competition the way a stray dog perks up at the smell of food — not because it has a plan, but because it simply cannot help itself.
So I went.
II.
The room was full of hopefuls. I sat among them, listening to each one step up, sing their piece, and step off — and I was still thinking about what I would sing. There is a particular kind of person who decides to improvise at a singing audition. I was that person.
When they called my name, I walked to the stage with the confidence of someone who has not yet understood what is about to happen to them.
The microphone looked simple enough. I leaned into it.
It shrieked.
The teacher looked up. “Keep some distance between the microphone and your mouth.”
I nodded and stepped back. And in that single, clumsy moment — the feedback, the correction, the entire room watching — I forgot the song. Every song. Every word of every song I had ever known in my entire life simply vacated my mind like passengers abandoning a sinking ship.
I stood there. Seconds passed. The kind of seconds that feel like they’ve been specially manufactured to be longer than normal.
“You can’t stand there forever,” my teacher said, not unkindly, though it did not feel that way. “There are others waiting.”
The only thing that surfaced from the wreckage of my memory was the school prayer. Which I then sang — with, I must say, considerable soul — until the teacher raised his hand to stop me.
He was quiet for a moment. Then:
“Sa-re-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni — all coming together at the same time. Has nobody ever told you not to sing in public?” He paused for dramatic effect. “If nobody has, I am telling you now: never try singing ever. It is going to be hazardous for mankind.”
The room erupted. And I — because what else do you do when you are the punchline — laughed with them. Loudly. So they would think I was in on the joke, and not notice that some small part of me had just been quietly folded up and put away.
III.
Here is the strange thing. I never stopped.
Not on stages — I had learned my lessons about stages — but everywhere else. On window seats of buses and trains, with the landscape rolling past and nobody able to escape me. In quiet offices during slow afternoons. In rooms where people were too polite to say anything and simply pretended I wasn’t there, hoping the silence of their disapproval would extinguish me.
It never did.
I began to fancy that I sang with emotion, at least. I used to console myself with this privately: the notes may be wrong, but the feeling is right. Tolerant souls occasionally confirmed the first half of that theory. The second half, they left alone.
But the hunger — the specific, unreasonable hunger to sing on a stage, in front of real people, with a real microphone — that never went away. It just waited. The way all unreasonable hungers do.
IV. The Night of Helious
Engineering college brings with it many gifts. Freedom. Chaos. The terrifying discovery of who you actually are when nobody from your childhood is watching.
And for me — unexpectedly, beautifully — it brought Helious.
Helious was our college cultural festival. One of those annual explosions of colour, noise, terrible sound systems, and genuine joy that engineering colleges somehow produce better than anyone else. And in my final year, through a combination of persistence and the kind of enthusiastic volunteering that people mistake for competence, I found myself on the organizing committee.
I had the stage. I had the access. I had, for perhaps the first and last time in my life, control.
The poet in me had been writing in Odia for years — private lines, quiet verses that I kept mostly to myself. That year, I had set one of them to the melody of a popular Odia tune that everyone in the audience would recognize. I had been carrying this arrangement in my head for weeks, the way you carry something fragile, not quite believing it will survive the journey.
The night of the festival arrived. A thousand students filled the ground.
I walked to the microphone during a gap in the programme — calm the way only the truly deluded are calm — and I sang my poem. My words. My melody. My moment, finally, after all those years of bus windows and empty corridors and teachers telling me I was a hazard to mankind.
The stage lights were in my eyes. Bright, warm, absolute. Beyond them: darkness. A thousand people dissolved into a single, breathing shadow that I could hear but not see.
I finished.
Silence.
Not scattered applause, not the embarrassed murmuring of an audience unsure what they had witnessed. Silence. Complete and total.
Now, there are several explanations for this. The uncharitable ones involve acoustics, pitch, and the general welfare of the assembled crowd. But I prefer my own interpretation, which I have held onto carefully for many years now:
They were mesmerized.
A thousand engineers, the kinds of people trained to analyse, critique, and argue about everything — rendered speechless. By my poetry. By my voice. By the sheer unexpected audacity of a boy who had been told he was a hazard to mankind standing under the lights and singing his own words into the dark.
They simply forgot to clap.
It is, I think, the most likely explanation.
V.
Then came the colleague.
He approached me one afternoon with the careful expression of someone delivering difficult news to a child. “Sakti,” he said, “why don’t you try recording your songs? Or even — a radio station?”
Something inside me soared. I was milliseconds away from saying you know, I never had any formal training, but I always felt the music— when he finished his sentence.
“At least then I can switch off the radio.”
The room laughed. I laughed. We all laughed together, which is the great social mercy extended to those of us who are perpetually, lovably wrong about ourselves.
Coda
I still ask people, sometimes, “Don’t you feel the pain in the song when I sing?”
They always say yes. Always.
“Yes — in our ears.”
And we all laugh again.
I have been laughed at for this for more years than I care to count. I have been advised, warned, gently discouraged, loudly discouraged, and once — memorably — described as a hazard to mankind by a qualified music teacher.
The singer in me has heard all of this and found it completely irrelevant.
Because I know something most people don’t. I know what it feels like to stand under stage lights with a thousand souls in the dark in front of you, and sing your own words into that silence.
It doesn’t matter what they thought. What matters is that for one night, the stray dog had a stage.
And he sang.
— Stray Dog
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