Aluva: Senior musician S Hariharan Nair had lost both his hands in a mishap when he was 21, after which he had been using prosthetic hands. Today, at the age of 70, he lost them too in the monsoon floods.
What has shattered Nair and the cultural world even more is that the deluge also damaged the manuscript of a book he had completed and was readying for publication.
A total of 15,000 pages of his yet-to-publish ‘Sangeeta Sagaram’ remained drenched in the furious floodwaters that invaded his house from a swollen Periyar
The calamity further perished a lot of Nair’s musical belongings at his East Kadungallur house that also accommodates the Sariga Sangeeta Academy. Among them are instruments such as the violin and mridangam besides the tanpura and the shruti box. Plus, tomes, books and reference material that benefited his vocal career over a span of five decades were also damaged.
The list of irretrievably lost items include out-of-print music books, palm-leaf scriptures, texts on philosophy and astrology, audio records of yesteryear classical maestros and instruments that are related to music therapy.
Nair was interested in music as a child and initially learned Carnatic under a local guru named Koonamavu Lonappa Bhagavatar. When he was 21, he got a mechanic’s job at Premier Tyres in nearby Kalamassery.
The year, 1971, turned out to be tragic in his life as the casual labourer lost both his hands into the third month of his job. Nair subsequently got artificial arms fixed at a Pune hospital.
He later married, went on to master in Sanskrit and Telugu besides taking Carnatic classes under masters such as Cherthala Govindankutty Bhagavathar, Palluruthy Natesan Bhagavathar, Mavelikkara Prabha Varma and Nedunkunnam Vasudevan.
Today, water has receded at his single-storey house after rising to a height of eight feet. “There was a deluge we faced five years ago, but that time water reached only up to our courtyard,” recalls the musician, draped in a veshti around his torso. “One never thought the flood would be this grave.”
In the peak of the crisis last month, boats arrived at his home and rescued Nair to a safer place.
Sorrow, though, has no bounds when the musician notes that all he had kept for the art world of tomorrow got swallowed in a single day — without a trace.
