Unforgettable voice

Why do you do what you do? Why have you chosen writing as your life’s pursuit? I keep being asked these questions — or variations of the same — over and over and I tell people I love words and books and writing and I can’t imagine doing anything else. This question pops up in everyday conversations, in job interviews and in tiresome interactions on social networks.

What I haven’t told anyone — due to a lack of time and because it’s a bit convoluted — is that I learned words could be powerful and beautiful and life-changing because of Maya Angelou.

It was January 1993 and Bill Clinton was going to be sworn in as the forty-second president of the United States. I had turned 12 just a few months before. My parents and practically the whole population of Oman and wider West Asia, who’d just gone through two years of the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent economic doldrums, were happy to see the last of George Bush and maybe the beginning of something better in the form of Clinton. This wave of optimism infected me and my older sister and, fed by a daily dose of editorials in various Gulf newspapers about American presidential inaugurations and Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You madness, we determined to hear Clinton’s inaugural speech live.

Now this was before cable news was bringing live events to our analog TVs (except for a brief period during Operation Desert Storm when CNN strangely appeared on our push-button NEC TV set). After scouring TV listings and finding that Oman TV wouldn’t carry the event, my sister and I were sure that we’d be missing a potentially inspiring JFK-like speech from Clinton.

Our parents, much wiser about the dark arts of US propaganda channels, suggested that we try to get Voice of America on the radio.

So on the evening of January 20, we tuned the AM radio to Voice of America and our living room in cool and dusty Muscat filled with the sounds of a presidential inauguration.

I don’t remember anything about Clinton’s speech. But I remember the woman who spoke after him. That voice. That cadence. That rhythm. How could I forget? On the pulse of morning, she announced.

Then: A rock, a river, a tree.

This was poetry?

My 12-year-old ears were thrilled to hear it. No Romantics and their daffodils here, good as they were on the musty pages of CBSE textbooks. But this was different: this was urgent and quickening and so now. Who knew language could make your pulse race so?

Muscat in those days was not much of a booklover’s paradise — buying a book was hideously expensive and even when we went back to India it was difficult to find anything written by Maya Angelou. But we had figured out how to record programmes on our cassette-cum-radio set, so we had the audio recording of that inauguration on tape long afterwards.

Even when Clinton’s star dimmed and Somalia and Srebrenica and the sordidness of political sex scandals sanded off the optimism in the years that followed, that tape with that voice talking about dinosaur fossils and commanding one to say good morning was still a source of wonder.

I lost that tape long ago in moving between countries. And Maya Angelou has now passed. But that voice? It stays on in memory. And the love for words it raised up? It’s only getting stronger.

The writer is a communications professional based in Bangalore

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