My cousin Harish and I visited our maternal grandparents to spend our summer holidays in a tiny village called ‘Sirsangi’ located in North of Karnataka and were part of the Belgaum district.

My father used to drop me there each year, an overnight journey by bus. I did this religiously until I was about eight years of age, and Harish used to join me over there.

Staying with grandparents for a period over two months was exciting to us. Sipped cartons of Frooti’s; ate unlimited supply of mangoes; sitting inside the official jeep imitating Sunny, our driver; playing in the house garden; visiting places of interest nearby, and of course, cricket.

Not to forget the wrath we faced from our maternal aunt for staying outside for long hours under the sun. We feared her though we loved her because she expressed angst; she used to place her teeth on her lips, holding a stick in her hand chasing us when we refused to come home. We eventually did end up at home at noon because of scorching heat and to have lunch.

Sirsangi being a village, had repeated problems with electricity back then. Although there were quite many historical sites, we seldom went out. Even if we did, I could not recall the importance of those places.

My grandmother was strict and never allowed us to venture outside the community boundary walls by ourselves. We were allowed to play in the vast open field that separated my grandpa’s office and home.

When staying out and playing became mundane (which used to happen each day), we pleaded with our maternal aunt to switch on the TV. And we begged her more when there was electricity. Apart from weekends, the television programmes during the daytime did not appeal to us.

There were no cartoons or no fights on TV. It was boring until one day we saw my grandfather bringing in a new piece of gadget and placed under the TV rack. It was a Video Cassette Recorder (VCR).

With the VCR came a video cassette sent from Bangalore, which played for an hour. It had songs from English, Kannada, Tamil, and cartoons.

If I remember correctly, the fifth song of the recording was a B/W video of a Hindi song. At first, it was boring, and we didn’t quite know how to operate the remote; moreover, my aunt would be away doing her household chores, and she knew where the remote was. Nevertheless, we committed ourselves each time to watch the tape end to end.

All I remember from the song is that – there is a small gathering of people, both kids, and adults, and behind them sat an elderly gentleman rocking the chair. His walking stick is visible beside him, and seen is him patting a young girl’s head seated below next to the chair. A lady is playing the piano, and within seconds, he starts to utter words in phrases that had a sense of melody. Not that we knew anything about it then.

He goes on singing, and the camera shifts to an idol to whom he is referring to in the song. The seated children also join him, forming a chorus that is used as a buffer between his lines and the theme music.

Next scene, I see a young lady away from this group in a room getting up, irritated by the song, decides to shut the windows and frenetically tries to open her room door, but in vain. She seemed unhappy, restless, and doesn’t quite know what to do. As kids looking at this video then, we too didn’t know what was happening.

The scene then shifts to the gentleman who continues to sing. At this point, it becomes unbearable to this young lady who is shown closing her ears, trying hard not just to hear what’s been sung. She is not a happy person from the looks of it. The song proceeds, and parallely this poor lady is shown with her tears locked in a room and unable to break free.

This is how I looked at the video, and each time (innumerable times) I have watched this video, I always wondered why she was crying. I would have asked my grandfather or my aunt about this or probably discussed it with Harish, but the conversation never went on for a long time.

In any case, how would they know; the only thing I remember my grandfather saying was that he had watched this movie before my mother was born.

As soon as this song finished, another music was playing, a new adventure of 4-5 minutes set in a different world with another set of actors, actresses, and scenarios.

And in between these songs from different genres came two episodes of Tom and Jerry and an episode of Goofy.

In 1993, my grandfather retired from the services, and he settled down in rural Bangalore (close to the international airport). The VCR was neatly packed, and I never saw it opened again since the shift.

Twenty years later, it is somewhere sealed in one of the storage cabinets, but no one knows where. It became redundant with each year since the advent of cable television, VCDs, DVDs, and now with YouTube.

Years later, sometime towards the end of the millennium, I heard this song again. The name of the movie ‘Seema’; the elderly gentleman in the video was Balraj Sahni, and the furious, frustrated young girl, so to speak, was none other than ex-Miss India of 1950’s Nutan.

The movie was released in the mid-1950s, and I have not watched this movie, and I do not know the story. My curiosity to know why she suffered during the song also died with time. And yet, even today, the song remains close to my heart.

It might not be the first old song I would have heard in my life, but I am quite sure ‘Tu Pyaar ka Saagar’ is not too far behind. I had watched the video of this song close to 50 times or more even before I turned ten. In that sense, it has been ingrained just like many other songs from that videocassette.

This was the only song in the movie which was sung by Manna Dey. He took his last breath today in Bangalore, and the first thing that came to my mind was this song.  Every time  Manna Dey was mentioned in any of my conversations, this song and the picturisation of the same flashes scene by scene.

Over the period, I have heard many of his other songs on the radio, tape recorder, CD player, and YouTube, but none came close to ‘Tu Pyaar ka Saagar.’