Terry Gross, the iconic host of NPR’s signature interview show ‘Fresh Air’ (Pic: Will Ryan, www.npr.org)
Have you noticed how a disembodied radio voice almost invariably fails to live up to one’s feverishly imagined image of its possessor? For me it began in my childhood with the two most pervasive voices on India’s airwaves for generations—those of singers Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi.
If memory serves me right, I think I saw the pictures of the two more than 20 years after I had so intuitively known their voices. The mystique was broken that day. I had by no means imagined Mangeshkar and Rafi to be the world’s most beautiful people. In fact, beauty was not even part of my imagination, even though I had a very definite expectation what they ought to look like on the basis of their voices.
However, the chasm between what the two really looked like and what I had wanted them to look like was enormous. It was as if I had been swindled by their faces long after I had been seduced by their voices. Of course, that reaction was entirely a reflection on me rather than Mangeshkar and Rafi. When I say the mystique was broken what I am actually saying is that a disembodied voice is poor clay to build a whole person out of.
I never met Rafi but did get to interview Mangeshkar once, thanks entirely to my friend Shireesh Kanekar. When she asked “Chaha ghenar ka? (Will you have tea?)” in Marathi, the voice behind that banal question sounded so arrestingly familiar that I looked around the room to make sure that it was not coming from some invisible source.
Since then there have been other voices which have not matched their mental images. There was the voice of Ameen Sayani, for decades India’s most familiar host conducting its most enduringly popular radio hit parade. It would be safe to say that Sayani was the voice that arbitrated popular Hindi cinema music. I met the man close to 20 years after I had grown up listening to his voice. When he greeted me at his office in Bombay in the mid 1980s, for a moment I thought he was a mimic channeling Sayani and not Sayani himself. It was as if some strange man was lipsynching Ameen Sayani.
Another voice, which has mercifully remained a voice after decades, was that of Shameem Qureishi, a broadcaster on the All India Radio’s Urdu Service. I don’t know what he looks like to this day, which is just as well because who knows what might happen to the mystique around his voice if I found out what he looks like?
Yet another radio voice that has become a subject of that feverish imagining in the last five years belongs to Terry Gross, the iconic host of NPR’s signature interview show ‘Fresh Air.’ Hers was not an image that was fully formed in my mind like those of Mangeshkar, Rafi and Sayani but my mind had begun to extrapolate a look from the voice. Then I saw her on ‘The Colbert Report’ the other day. The mystique was radically rearranged. It was not broken because it had not yet been fully formed.
There is a common underlying theme to my reactions to all the disembodied voices. I feel as if the person out of whom a particular voice is coming is a masquerade. So when I saw Terry Gross talking to Stephen Colbert I had this weird sense of having been tricked.
None of what I feel has anything to do with the people I am talking about. It has everything to do with the way my mind works.
