Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Chacha-kahini is full of music. For example, in ‘Tirthahina’ (‘The unrequited pilgrimage’), we find:

Chacha closed his eyes, lost in thought. Then, turning to Gosain, he said ‘Gosain, sing that song by Rabi-thakur, will you?

Showers of peace, drench the land
In the hope of grace With upturned face
Dry-hearted mortals stand.’

Gosain hummed the tune. After he finished, Chacha said, ‘I’m sure you’ve all heard Catholic hymns in church but I don’t know if you have paid attention to its more melancholic vein.’ [My translation, forthcoming.]

Most of the stories in Chacha-kahini begin in Hindustan Haus, which stood at the intersection of Kurfürstendamm and Uhlandstrasse in Berlin. Founded in 1929 to cater to those starved of Indian meals, the Hindustan Haus seems to have quickly turned into the proverbial melting pot.

One finds traces of the Hindustan Haus in memoirs, newspapers and archival documents, but I had struggled to visualize the space. (You can read more about it here.) Until, that is, I came across an old postcard captioned ‘Hindustan-Haus Tea-Room.’ I was struck by its sparseness. The babble of voices, the rustle of newspapers, the soft music of cutlery, the whistles of kettles—it all seemed eerily quiet. Almost a provocation that, by erasing all signs of life, invites us to populate it as we will.

In the photograph, we see a keyboard instrument on the far left. For some reason, when I imagined the background score to all the conversations Mujtaba Ali relates in Chacha-kahini, I had imagined the tinkling of a piano. It wasn’t something I actively imagined—more like an assumption I had not really thought through. Recently, while trying to research the details in the image, I ran it through ChatGPT—yeah, I know—and it pointed out the instrument was likely a reed or pump organ, which would sound closer to a harmonium.

When I read stories that have a lot of music in them, I tend to get swept away by the soundscape of the fictive world. This happens particularly with James Joyce—the street-organ in ‘Eveline’, for example, or the many, many allusions in Ulysses. The texture of the story changes so much when I can immerse myself in the same aural ambience as the characters. With Chacha-kahini, the realization that the instrumental background was likely the drone of a harmonium rather than the tinkling of a piano, really changed my imagination of the space, its mood, the tone of conversations. Does that happen to most of us?