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Finding My Language of Healing in Indian Classical Music

To cope with pain, and prepare for parenthood, I had to learn how to breathe. To breathe, I needed more than air.

“You need to learn to breathe through your stomach.”

My teacher, Revathi, was a young woman who had recently moved to the US from India. As I sat opposite her, cross-legged on the floor, I felt my shoulders relax and my stomach swell. When I first walked into the center, I didn’t know what to expect. The studio was in a community center tucked away in a parking lot in Sterling, Virginia, between service stores and a floor ware company. I’d signed up for Hindustani classical singing lessons two months into my pregnancy, still trying to recover from a burn out. The nausea worsened every evening, yet here I was, breathless with anxiety.

I watched her sing the first notes, and repeated after her, self-conscious of how hollow and sad I sounded. But Revathi persisted, smiling. “It’s okay, sing loud. Sing as loud as you can.”

My heart racing with dread, I tapped my hands on my knees, calculating the rhythm as she played the harmonium. The melody reminded me of my childhood; filled with Tamil bhajans (hymns) sung by MS Subbulakshmi and DK Pattamal. I closed my eyes and thought of my grandmother’s courtyard in Sivakasi, playing under the shade of neem trees with my cousins.

I was so overwhelmed, I couldn’t breathe.

*

Growing up, I handled trauma through music. In high school, I played the recorder for the school orchestra, and practiced reading sheet music. I took exams. I sang in the school choir. The focus that music required helped me deal with my deep loathing for my skinny body, petty heartbreaks, bad grades. There was no room to discuss or navigate pain through conversation in Indian families. Indian women endured. It’s their vidhi (fate). Persevering through pain was seen as a sign of strength. I was the oldest of four daughters, so letting my guard down meant wading against a tide of accusations about being difficult, disobedient, and selfish.

Silence gave me a sense of security.

I didn’t ask for help when I was sexually assaulted, bullied at work, or when I was sick. Even when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, I swallowed the crippling fear and anxiety I felt without a second thought.

There was no room to discuss or navigate pain through conversation in Indian families. Indian women endured.

It never helped, of course, but it did contain the seething rage I couldn’t express. I turned to music for release: I wrote down lyrics of songs I could relate to. I listened to hymns that my aunts used to sing in my grandmother’s home. It helped me write, work long hours, comforted me through breakups, and later eased the pain while I lay in bed, unable to walk after I was diagnosed with small vessel vasculitis. But by the time I turned twenty-three, I burned out six months into my first job.

The general Indian attitude towards this is that ‘it’s a part of life’. So, emotional trauma was written off as a woman’s rite of passage. For me, it became a lonely story to unravel and re-write.

*

At first, my husband and I were non-committal about parenthood. We both wanted a baby badly, but these decisions weren’t ours to make. In four years, I’d been diagnosed with Lyme, cervical dystonia, PTSD, and chronic pain. And yet another diagnosis was looming. When a lab test with a rheumatologist came back positive for HLA-B27 in my blood, my history—my family’s legacy with arthritis—made sense. I was ushered off to a specialist OB-GYN because my pregnancy was now considered high-risk. If my anxiety didn’t go down, I was warned, I could have a miscarriage.

Our doctor’s message was direct: You need to relax. For your baby’s sake.

I signed up for singing lessons the way I made most of my career choices—torn between the feeling of promise and desperation. After failing to make friends on Bumble, or meet people on Meet Ups, I walked through the doors of a community center after a weekend of googling and was suddenly enthralled at the idea of being among people I didn’t have to explain myself to. People who looked like me, dressed like me, spoke the languages I did. By the first week, when Revathi and I met once a week at the center, we locked ourselves in a room, and sang until my voice turned coarse and I could sing no more.

Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Da, Ni, Sa.

Sa, Ni, Da, Pa, Ma, Ga, Re, Sa.

With each exercise in octaves, she would tell me a story.

“Remember,” she said, “the sounds originate from our natural environment. From animals. The chirping of birds, the bellowing of cows, the dance of peacocks . . . ”

I would drift, becoming a child again, each time singing louder and louder. In the hour that I spent in the class, the loneliness lifted in song. I memorized lines and lyrics that I could relate to and sang them over and over. There was always a melody that worked. A tune for pain, for sorrow, for happiness, for hope.

When the first month of class was over, I began to sing without shame. I sang in the shower; I sang when I went out walking, I even sang to my cat.

I didn’t even care how I sounded.

*

The process of breathing in Indian music—both Hindustani and Carnatic—is like learning how to breathe underwater. It requires un-doing. To learn to pause, inhale, exhale, all over again meant to return to the womb, the original water body, where everything around me became void except the sound of my heartbeat.

Every stanza I sung, I ran out of breath. I started and stopped. Over and over. How did I have no more air left in my lungs?

“Focus on your breathing through your stomach,” she said, tuning the harmonium, “Only then, you will use the power of your whole body.”

It didn’t make sense. The lessons turned grueling, exhausting. I drank water, nursed a dry throat with lozenges and warm tea. Nothing worked. It reminded me of my last conversation with my boss.

The process of breathing in Indian music—both Hindustani and Carnatic—is like learning how to breathe underwater.

“I don’t know. Something isn’t working.”

Six weeks later, when I sat perspiring on the floor of an elementary school classroom for a quick evening lesson, my voice broke. I sounded raw, pained, exhausted. I couldn’t reach the pitch. Desperation and anxiety surfaced like an angry tide. I felt nauseous, my moods oscillating recklessly. I wondered if it was normal to fail this much, to have absolutely nothing left to give.

I’d held my breath in all my life, now I couldn’t find a way to exhale.

Revathi said calmly: “Everyone’s voice is different. Focus on your voice.”

*

Preparing for parenthood required energy. Mental energy. So, I began by cleaning my desk. I wanted no memory of the work I’d done the past ten years. No memories of the late nights, the glare of the computer screen, the emails. The files were filling up head space, lingering like dark monsoon clouds that never rained. As I threw them into the recycle bin, one by one, I sang Vaishnava Janato the first hymn Revathi taught me. Goodbye, presentations. Goodbye, photographs. Goodbye, drafts. I began bursting rain clouds.

Pain clouds.

That winter when my husband and I flew to Canada to spend Christmas with my family, I finally gathered the courage to sing a melody over the table for my sisters. I searched for the lyrics of Malandhum Malaratha—an old Tamil song from the movie Pasamalar—and began to sing. My eyes darted as I read Kannadasan’s lyrics in Tamil, something I have never done before. English is my literary language—that is, it is the language we spoke at home, the language I was taught to think in. It is a post-colonial affliction. Tamil is my mother tongue, a language that I reserved for spirituality, solace, and familial connections. In Tamil lyrics, the poetry unraveled. I came home.

The words flowed surprisingly easily. This time, when my baby kicked, I felt my shoulders slump, my stomach expand, my heart slow. I slowly filled with calm.

Early one morning when I joined my father in the living room, sleepless and tired, he asked me if I played the bhajans he played for me as a child to my daughter. I rubbed my swelling stomach and told him I sing to her constantly. She would be a mixed-race American-Canadian of Indian heritage. Would she understand these words? I didn’t know. What I knew was that she would know my voice, our solitary journey.

I knew that I wanted her to listen to the music that saved me. I want her to listen to the music of her ancestors.

Before the studio closed for winter, Revathi handed me sheets with notes on the swaras that we’d learned together. I tucked away these notes in a yellow folder and threw them into a cabinet.

Suddenly, the notes themselves didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to sing. Nothing more.

*

Indian music is an oral tradition, passed down centuries through song. It’s a language that has survived solely through the harmony of tongues and peoples of the sub-continent. Breath is the first language of life. It is an art, a science, an experience, a gift. Pranayama—the practice of controlling one’s breath—is central to yoga.

In Revathi’s words, central to understanding myself.

Since I didn’t have a vocabulary for mental health, I struggled. The Tamil words of my childhood for women who experience emotional instability were cruel, biting: paithiyam (lunatic), kirukkachi (crazy woman), loosu-pombalai (mad woman).

For five whole months, when I looked into toilet bowls—vomiting in airport restrooms, at home, in our friends’ homes—what I saw was an expulsion of my past. It reminded me that my body was transforming from the inside out. My uterus was expanding, my lungs were short of room, my stomach sac was being pushed to its limit, my bladder was exploding. As another life took form inside me, I was reviving my own.

“You should sing to the baby,” the doctor told me matter-of-factly right before my third trimester. “It’s good for the baby and you.”

She could now hear my voice, recognize sounds.

The doctor didn’t know that I was singing all the time. In the silence of my apartment. In the dark to fight my own despair. Through tears when I woke up from nightmares that seem so real that I scheduled a visit with a sleep specialist to score out narcolepsy. I compiled two playlists to continuously sing to when I stepped into the shower. It helped me find release in the warmth of running water and soap lather.

On a Saturday morning, when my husband dropped me off at the studio in the New Year, I sat cross-legged on the floor again, tapping my hands to the sounds of the harmonium, singing along with Revathi. We practiced pitch and sound. I was breathless, but I kept going.

Sa Sa Re Re Ga Ga Ma Ma Pa Pa Da Da Ni Ni Sa Sa

Feeling a renewed sense of hope, I turned on old Bollywood hits from my childhood and tried translating the lyrics to my husband. I explained to him that these songs are not just sweet talk between lovers or serenades, not just songs of angst and longing. I was listening to poetry. But my husband, who is white, and Canadian, couldn’t understand their meaning. In an instant, I realized this music didn’t bring us together, it captured our distance. Worlds apart.

I had found a language for healing that he couldn’t understand.

I hoped my baby could.

*

In music, I’ve found there is no real failure. With depression, there is nothing but. In music, I lived purely in my imagination, a world where dreams came true, and my body was free. When I listened to Beyoncé, I became her. When I listened to odd renditions of the Carpenters or covers of ‘What a Feeling’, I became Karen Carpenter with killer bangs and Jennifer Beals in black leg-warmers. With depression, I was a tree in the desert, exposed to the elements, with dying roots and rotting branches.

There was no harmony, no song, and no life. I was withering every day.

I dealt with pain all my life was in silence—and medication—the way trees did. When I was twenty-three, I quit my first job and stayed at home bed-ridden with small vessel vasculitis. My feet swelled like melons and my skin erupted with bloody spots. At twenty-six, I lay on the floor in the fetal position trying to breathe through back spasms that were racking my body. That same year, I spent countless hours crying in my office garage. Five days after I gave birth to my daughter, six months after I quit my last job, I collapsed in the emergency room reeling in postpartum pain.

I was only a week away from turning thirty-three.

Will the pain go away? The doctor looked at me sympathetically and told me that I’d have to manage. I would eventually get better. In time.

I now look back at the time I spent in Revathi’s class and pause to focus on the rhythmic variations in songs I listen to, the mood in the melody. Her lessons were simple. Notes are ornaments. Sound is essential. Music is harmony. I try to remember the little things. Like how a song sounds to my ears when I tune everything out.

Komal ga, Shuddha dha, Tivra ma, Shuddha ni.

I look at myself in the mirror. My stomach, once the size of a watermelon, has shrunk to its pre-pregnancy size, my skin etched with stretch marks and dark lines. My breasts are swollen with milk. I sway and sing. My daughter is asleep in my arms. I try to focus on the pitch, the tone, the tenor of the melody.

When the spasms start to intensify, I sit down and breathe.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Repeat.