The article which appears below was originally published in Krishna Tiloks's book, Notes Of A Dream. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
Kareema Begum is a force of nature. Determined and resilient, she’s the sort of person who knows what has to be done and sees it through, sometimes against all odds. After her husband died, it was up to her to take care of her son and three daughters. She was twenty-eight years old.
‘She didn’t even know how to cook properly,’ remembers Raihanah. ‘Her mom—our grandmother—had taken care of all that. But then our grandmother passed away a few years after our dad, and Mom had to learn to cook too. She had to learn a lot of things very suddenly and all at once—which she did.’
There was nobody for Kareema Begum to really turn to after the condolences of friends and relatives were offered and accepted. Certainly, there was no great wealth stashed away that she could rely on or that she was going to inherit. It was all down to her and she accepted the situation for what it was. There was no feeling sorry for herself. She had a stomach for hard realities and gave as good as she got. And there can be little doubt that a lot of her son’s own methods of dealing with adversity—accepting it and focusing on what needs be done without lamenting—come from her.
As a woman in 1970s’ India, Kareema Begum couldn’t go out and work to support her children. She had nothing in her favour that would have made her employable in an office: not the right gender, not the right skills and certainly not the right time or place in history. So she did whatever else she could to keep her household together.
To begin with, she started renting out her late husband’s instruments. Given that such equipment was rare at the time in India, it isn’t difficult to imagine she found enough people willing to hire them. The young AR would take the instrument along, set it up, take care of it and bring it back home. Almost no one else around knew how to set up a keyboard back then.
Another source of income for the family was the rent they received from letting out the house in T. Nagar. The family had by this time moved into their (final) home in Kodambakkam. ‘The old house was rented out only in name though,’ Fathima recalls, laughing. ‘The tenants hardly ever paid the rent. There were two families living there—one upstairs and one downstairs. One of the families paid regularly, but the other one, the people downstairs, gave us quite a bit of trouble.’
Kareema Begum had to feed herself and her children, put them through school, everything, using what little income she was able to generate. But she was determined never to let her children feel like they were being deprived of anything.
‘Whenever we asked her for something, she would do her best to try and get it for us,’ remembers Fathima. ‘She hated saying no, wanted us to have what all kids got. She got my brother whatever musical instruments he asked for. She knew he had talent and encouraged it.’
Some urged Kareema Begum to sell her late husband’s instruments, invest the money and live off the interest, but she refused adamantly. For she knew those instruments were going to be her son’s future. Indeed, when many musicians eventually started buying their own keyboards instead of hiring them, she suggested that AR start learning to play the keyboard himself.
‘She has a sixth sense. It’s a little unnerving sometimes, actually—her intuition. She can tell about people instantly. And she knew that music was it for me,’ says AR. ‘Most moms would say, “Don’t pursue music, become a doctor.” She did the exact opposite with me. She saw something in me much before everyone else.’
She certainly did. Kareema Begum says her son, while still very young, used to observe his father making music. He would listen while Shekhar created a tune, and later try to play it himself. He would make his own additions, twist the music around a little, and it would turn out to be the same tune essentially, but somehow different at its core. Sometimes, his father would even end up using the version that AR had tinkered with.
‘He’s a born genius,’ says Raihanah. ‘He just had it in him. No other explanation.’
AR’s first musical teacher was, of course, his father. Shekhar was the first to notice that his son had noteworthy musical ability and gave AR his first lesson when he was four. Rahman remembers it only faintly. Shekhar taught his boy how to play the piano.
Shekhar eventually also had a guitar made for AR and his sister Raihanah—the only other of the four siblings who took up music professionally. This is not to say that the other two sisters did not possess musical talent. All of AR’s sisters have sung for his jingles and movie songs. ‘We can all sing,’ says Fathima. ‘Our father’s genes, I guess. I can do harmonies at any rate. Solo is a bit of a struggle. But our parents didn’t really let us explore music in a big way when we were girls because the belief was that if a girl got into singing no one would marry her. But whatever we heard, we could sing back nicely. We had no one to correct us really, but we learnt.’
As a child, AR did receive some formal musical training. A man named Joseph used to teach him and Raihanah how to play the guitar. And AR also started learning Indian classical music from Nithyanandam Master and from Dakshinamoorthy, the man who ‘discovered’ his father.
He also learnt Western music from Dhanraj Master, who had taught some of the biggest names in Chennai’s film music scene—including Shekhar. ‘He was a fantastic teacher, no doubt, and whoever he taught went on to be successful,’ recalls Raihanah. ‘He had a golden touch. I didn’t go to him, but Rahman did.’
According to Kamini Mathai, Shekhar would also ask any composer who dropped by the house to meet him to also spend some time with his little boy and teach him what they could.
‘He was a curious child,’ Fathima remembers. ‘Always interested in watching Dad work and in how instruments worked. When we went to recording sessions to watch our father conduct, he would always be observing him.’
Later, AR was put in Musee Musicals. The place was essentially a shop for instruments, but it also offered lessons to anyone who wanted to formally learn music. His skill was clear. He was a fast learner, and, in addition to learning how to play the various instruments, he also had a particular fondness for understanding how they worked.
AR would sit for an hour or two every day with his masters and learn. His parents always wanted him to have a musical education, though they never got around to discussing whether he would be able to make a career of it one day. AR claims he had always had a great interest in science and, left to his own devices, would have followed that path. And his father wanted his son to go to both school and college.
Things, of course, didn’t quite pan out that way. If there was anyone whose vision for AR’s future came true, it was his mother’s.
