TREASURE ISLAND

The number that I am going to sing now,” Dya Singh looks at the sea of faces in front of him and pauses theatrically, “will have you on your toes. It’s a Sufiana qawwali and in the country where my ancestors come from— India— it’s a song that celebrates unity,” he continues. The crowd waits tentatively and then as Singh breaks out in to Dum mast qalandar mast mast, a loud cheer goes around. Singh’s version is peppy, interspersed with quasi-Bollywood jhatkas by two of his daughters, who are also part of the troupe, and the motley crowd seems to have found its groove. The Irish band Teada follows, with their traditional Celtic ditties and the evening seems set to be an affair to remember. Sitting under the star-spangled sky at Penang, in a quarry overlooking the botanical garden, and watching musicians across the globe perform, it was a distinct feeling of well-being and happiness that washed over me.

 The evening before, at an elaborate dinner party organised by the Penang State Tourism Council, at the Khoo Kongsi, a gorgeous and undoubtedly the grandest Chinese clan house on the island, that seemed straight out of a Jackie Chan movie, we had met Singh, a musician of Indian origin, with 14 CDs to his credit and world tours across Asia and the US. A resident of Australia now, Singh was born in Penang, where his father, a Sikh musician moved over six decades back. “We grew up on these devotional songs and hymns. When I shifted to Australia, I thought I should continue with the tradition of Shabad kirtans, only make the presentation a bit more contemporary so that younger people had something to cherish as well,” he had said, tucking in to the lavish dinner buffet on offer. The contemporaneity certainly seemed to have worked for him the following day as encore requests kept coming in. Our party though, had started much earlier, when we reached Penang a couple of days ahead of the festival. Located off the north-western coast of peninsular Malaysia, Penang is often referred to as the Pearl of the Orient, and has a multi-racial population comprising Malays, Chinese and Indians among others. Even though Georgetown is the main administrative base of the island, and the more populated part of the region, it’s the sylvan beaches further up north that we were headed for, Batu Ferringhi to be more precise. “It means the rocks of the foreigners,” our cabbie told us, “because during colonial times the foreign ships used to dock here for food and fuel.”  

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