Soundtracks for a Wandering Soul : From the Temple to the Tavern

 

In October 2023, when I landed in Kerala — full of  a stubborn resolve, uncertainty, and a suitcase full of confusion — I promised myself a spiritually uplifting start to each day. My chosen ritual? Listening to MS Subbulakshmi’s Sri Venkateswara Suprabhatam every morning. A prayer composed by Prathivadhi Bhayankaram Annangaracharya, this pre-dawn chant is traditionally sung to awaken Lord Venkateswara in Thirupati. So while the divine lord was being lovingly nudged awake in temples and homes across South India, I too stirred under the soft glow of coconut and banana trees and the ethereal blue of the Travancore sky.

The rendition is so powerful that, willingly or not, you picture the deity slowly rising to the mellifluous, almost maternal voice of MS. But a few months in, as the exotic thrill faded and the realisation dawned that banana trees can’t make up for friends and familiarity, I started feeling homesick.

One morning, in a move that surprised even me — and might’ve scandalised my inner aspirant of ascetic calm — I abandoned the predictably serene strains of the Suprabhatam and queued up Pandit Jasraj’s soul-stirring bhajans instead. As his voice soared, slow and reverent like incense rising in temple air, I felt something shift. A few minutes later, almost instinctively, I followed it up with Ajay Pohankar’s Shri Krishan Govind Hare Murare in Raag Bhoop, a melody soaked in bhakti but grounded in something far more familiar: memory.This wasn’t a spiritual upgrade. It was more like finding your comfort shawl in a new house — suddenly, the air felt less foreign. It wasn’t that I was ascending toward divine consciousness; if anything, I was tumbling backwards into the comforting echo chambers of my past .

Raag Bhoop, with its pentatonic simplicity and upward lilt, somehow held all my dislocation gently. It didn’t ask me to transcend. It just helped me stay — with my yearning, my loneliness, my reluctant hope — and hum along. This wasn’t music that lifted me out of the world. It was music that let me belong to it again, if only for the length of a morning.

It was just that the familiar strains made the still-unfamiliar place feel more like home. And so I woke up on humid mornings waiting for monsoon and finally sailed into the lush, green rains of Kerala — less as a spiritual seeker and more like someone finding comfort in the radio of memory.

And then came the rains in full glory. With raindrops weaving a gauzy, silvery curtain across my windows and frogs launching unsolicited monsoon symphonies outside, my mornings shifted in texture. The devotional tracks, like seasoned stage actors knowing when to exit, stepped gracefully aside. In their place emerged the soft, contemplative poetry of Tagore — verses that carried the scent of wet earth and the melancholy of waiting. Megh boleche jabo jabo, the clouds said they would leave, and yet they stayed, just like my moods. Neelo Anjono Ghono, with its indigo thunderclouds and slow-building longing, became the soundtrack to my monsoon reveries.

The music no longer needed to uplift or anchor me. It simply needed to mirror me. Some mornings, the raag in my ear matched the gentle nool-mazha — the threadlike drizzle that stitched the world in silk. Other times, the thunder would roll like timpani, and the skies would host a tula-mazha storm — dramatic, theatrical, and best set to a Tagorean crescendo. I found myself not listening to music for comfort, but with it — like an old friend who didn’t fill the silence but respected it.

By November, Kerala’s version of winter arrived — not with frost or fog, but with a faint breeze that occasionally remembered to show up. It was less of a season and more of a suggestion, like someone whispering “winter” across a steaming cup of chai. But with it came a slump I hadn’t seen coming. My romantic affair with solitude, once poetic and Insta-worthy solo travels, began to simmer into something less palatable — an overcooked stew of loneliness and unwanted introspection and procrastination. The bhajans quietly receded. Even Tagore, with all his rain-drenched wisdom, couldn’t keep me afloat. I needed music that didn’t pretend to console — I needed music that sat with me in my gloom and nodded in solidarity.

And so entered the gentle melancholy of Judy Collins, the wistful resilience of Pete Seeger, the velvet baritone of Dean Martin, and the tender ache of John Denver. Both Sides Now played like a lullaby for grown-up disappointment. Send in the Clowns waltzed in with mascara-streaked irony. Turn! Turn! Turn! felt like a cosmic shrug to everything that had and hadn’t happened. Even on mornings when the sky wore its brightest blue, these songs somehow found the shade beneath. I had officially entered my existential playlist phase — where melodies didn’t lift you up but wrapped you in a soft, flannel-lined sorrow and said, “It’s okay, you’re not alone in feeling a little lost.”

Christmas rolled in with vacations, plum cake, and an unmistakable whiff of nostalgia. The world outside sparkled modestly — just enough to remind me of carol nights and school nativity plays. And just like that, my playlist too found its way back to the pews. Gregorian chants and hymns took over my mornings. Ave Maria and Amazing Grace played as the sun filtered softly through the curtains, evoking school assemblies minus the scratchy uniform and the well-timed nudge from a best friend during silent prayer. It was less devotion, more déjà vu — a gentle revisiting of some inner sanctum lined with memory.

By late January something shifted. Kerala’s version of spring arrived — not with daffodils and cherry blossoms, but in more grounded, tropical metaphors. The hibiscus everywhere bloomed like red punctuation marks in the green paragraph of landscape. Mangoes began appearing on trees with quiet confidence, and the koel, that seasoned herald of Indian summer, cleared its throat and began practising its solo. Butterflies performed delicate choreography across the yard, and kingfishers sat like royalty on electric lines, tossing glints of blue into the air like confetti. And so, my mornings bloomed too — with the elegance of Vivaldi’s Spring, the whimsy of Carnival of the Animals, the floral swirl of Waltz of the Flowers, and Debussy’s dreamy fauns dancing somewhere between my coffee and my consciousness. Life, in those moments, felt like a meadow in a French painting — but with a distinctly Malayalam

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Then came summer — hot, reflective, and restlessly existential. The air hung heavy with unanswered questions, and so did I. Living alone, once a thrilling badge of independence, had lost its charm and was now a slow-burning ache. The wait for change felt endless, like a buffering wheel spinning in the middle of my life. Thoughts of my faraway family weighed down on my chest in the early hours, and I sought solace not in music, but in monologues — TED Talks on AI, gender dynamics, mental health, and Stoic philosophy. If Socrates had curated a Spotify playlist, I think we’d have been algorithmic besties, matching notes on the futility of desires.

But as my mornings grew more abstract and my inner world more unruly, I realised I needed something gentler — something that didn’t dissect my brain but wrapped it in silk. And so, I turned to Studio Ghibli. I needed that world of meandering rivers, rustling trees, noodle bowls, and floating spirits — where life unfolded in its own quiet rhythm and the stakes, though high, never screamed. Always With Me and The Name of Life — became my morning companions, in all their avatars — vocal, piano, flute. Their gentle melancholy and quiet hope transported me straight into an anime universe, where even loneliness looks like a hand-drawn masterpiece.  Their delicate sorrow and childlike wonder offered a kind of invisible hand to hold. Mornings began to feel like painted scrolls: I wandered through them slowly, eyes wide, heart open, as if I too were a character in a Ghibli film — wistful, a little lost, but beautifully scored.

And just when I thought I’d run the full circle of sonic self-discovery, the rains returned. The scent of the earth made me long for Malhaars and Kajris, for music soaked in monsoon. But even Kishori Amonkar's Barsan Ghan Aayo Rangilo and Shubha Gurtu’s Kajris didn’t quite satisfy.

Until this morning. When Manna Dey began singing Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s Madhushala, I smiled — this was it. This was the frequency I had been searching for.

As I write this, I’m humming:

छोटे-से जीवन में कितना प्यार करूँ, पी लूँ हाला,
आने के ही साथ जगत में कहलाया ‘जानेवाला’,
स्वागत के ही साथ विदा की होती देखी तैयारी,
बंद होने लगी खुलते ही मेरी जीवन-मधुशाला !

"In this brief life, how much love can I give, how much wine can I drink?
No sooner had I arrived in this world than I was called 'the one who must leave'.
Even as I was being welcomed, preparations for my farewell began.
No sooner did my life’s tavern open than it began to shut."

What a year and a half it’s been — not just a chronicle of shifting weather and evolving playlists, but a quiet cartography of the soul. My mornings have been chapters in a private novel — each song, each note, a footnote to my state of being. I began this journey hoping for spiritual discipline and found, instead, the sprawling, shapeshifting terrain of inner life.

Music, I’ve come to realise, is less of a background score and more of a portal. A certain raga can transport you to a courtyard you’ve never visited, with rustling neem leaves and the sound of anklets in the dusk. A Ghibli piano piece can drop you into an animated landscape where silence speaks and even sorrow glows. Judy Collins can make you believe that everything — your choices, your doubts, your longing — is part of some vast, tender pattern.

Sometimes, music gives you strength — not the marching-band kind, but the quiet steel that lets you fold the blanket and face another uncertain day. Sometimes it wraps around you like your mother's saree, smelling faintly of nostalgia, offering no solutions but plenty of company. And sometimes, it simply says, “I know.”

In its mysterious way, music holds space for all versions of you — the hopeful seeker, the weary thinker, the wide-eyed child, the homesick adult. It doesn’t demand answers. It doesn’t hand out prescriptions. It just plays — gently tuning your heart to the frequency of the day.

If Spotify Wrapped could capture soul-searching, mine would be a tangle of chants and cello suites, rainsongs and revolutions. It would be confusing, yes. But it would also be a story — and a beautiful one at that.