The Sound Track to my Life

 Our Philips radio, the Bakelite monster, was the first on our street, Court Road, so called because the District Courts were just a hop, skip and a jump away. It arrived in 1945, a year after electricity in the houses. I remember hearing about Gandhiji’s assassination on that black and brown box, and the whole neighbourhood crowding into our corridor, weeping while they listened. It had big dials in front and needed a great deal of tender coaxing and fiddling before it surrendered its news-nuggets. 

     I remember Nehru making that famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, at midnight, on the ramparts of the red fort, the day India became independent in August, 1947. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom...’ The hair on my arms stood on end.

   Transistor radios arrived while I was living in remote Ikot Ekpene. I got one in 1964 for my father when I travelled to India after my first tour – if you were Indian in those days, the whole point about going overseas was to return with as many electronic gadgets as you could carry in your hand-luggage, wires trailing down the gangway. You walked down the narrow aisle in an aeroplane knocking down passengers right and left with your loot.

   The radio, in one shape or another, has come to stay in my life. In all the African countries I worked, the World Service heralded my day in, and I slept, at the end of the day, to the world news, in the dulcet tones of another privileged gentleman (no women then) with cut-glass accents. On an insomniac night, the national anthem and our gracious queen put me to sleep. They bred the news readers specially, I used to think, in exclusive enclaves, to confound the world.

   Radios got smaller with the years, and now, I have a tiny unobtrusive white companion which is always within hands-reach when I sleep. When I travel, it is the first object I pack along with my pills and potions of senility, and my multiple sticks for support.

   When the little box, quite ugly in white plastic, is not near me, I fret and fidget till I get it back to where it belongs. At the moment it is all agog about Afghanistan. I am waiting for that day when it tells me that our slippery P M has gone AWOL for good.