Moment:
June 30th at 8:37 pm IST
Broski: Is this a ding-a-chic-a song or a ding-a-ling-a song?
(scroll to the end for the video of our Telugu song!)
My family only goes back to Ongole about once every five years, but it is a very tight-knit community and I was amazed at how, in a city as large as Ongole, we could walk down the street and people would know our names and basically our entire genealogy. My dad’s brother’s family lives in an area of Ongole called Cloughpet, which was named after John Clough, a missionary who was born, raised, and died there. He used to stand on a hill where you could see all of Ongole and pray over the city that they would prosper, and did a lot of missionary work there, from starting orphanages to building churches, so as a result, a lot of the people in this particular area are now Christians.
A lot of those Christians from Ongole wound up attending our Indian fellowship back home in Austin, and there is definitely a kinship bond that results from being from the same hometown. My dad has the unique skill of identifying if someone is from Ongole just by looking at their face, which you wouldn’t believe is real unless you actually witness it in action. One time, my dad was at a conference and he randomly went up to this 9-year-old boy and asked him, “Are you from Ongole?” He said yes, his dad was, which is impressive on its own, but it’s even more proof that this is a real skill because the kid was half-Indian and didn’t look Indian to me at all.
One of the uncles at the church, Kiran Uncle, was also immediately identified by my dad as an Ongolian right when he started attending our church, and my baby pictures look identical to his daughter’s so this whole Ongole facial features thing is legit. He is also visiting India at the same time as us, and grew up right next door to the pastor of a church in Ongole, so he set up the amazing opportunity for my brother and I to lead a few songs in the Telugu and English services.
We were super excited when he told us, but quickly realized that we didn’t have a guitar for my brother to play. But this city never lets us down, and my uncle was able to procure a guitar for us. When we asked whose guitar it was so we could thank him or her, he just chuckled and said, “It’s a community guitar. Anyone can use it, no one knows who owns it, but everyone understands that if you break it, you fix it.”
On Sunday morning, we walked in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, prepared to only be joined by a drummer as we had practiced at rehearsal the night before. When we got to the stage, however, we saw that that there was a drummer, tabla player, and keyboardist (which requires a completely different set of skills from a pianist, trust me) who would be joining us. The keyboardist asked us what songs we were singing and the keys they would be in, and we just started. No practice, no lead-in, no discussion of order, nothing.
But everything went without a hitch (well, except for the power going out RIGHT as I grabbed the mic). I introduced the song completely in Telugu, after rehearsing it my head about ten times, and everything afterwards synced together so well. I’ve spontaneously sung with a lot of musicians, but this was an experience like no other because I got to sing a song in my native language the way I had always dreamed of: with a tabla (or as my brother likes to call it, a ding-a chic-a), a keyboard set to strings mode (I don’t think any Indian keyboardist actually uses the regular piano sound), and a congregation of people singing along.
