What was I doing on the stage of the prestigious Lionel Wendt auditorium in Colombo? Singing. Of all the ways I might have imagined returning to Sri Lanka, this was not one of them. I first came here twenty years ago and have returned half a dozen times since. Something about the country has always drawn me back and tempted me to stay longer. Last week, serendipity — the word itself borrowed from Serendip, the island’s ancient name — brought me back. This time, to sing with a choir of over seventy-five people, none of us younger than fifty.
Music used to simply be the air inside our home. My husband had a melodious and strong singing voice and was a gifted guitarist, and there was rarely a day he did not pick up his instrument, find a chord, and sing. We were both part of the Bangalore Music Group — a warm and talented circle that gathers regularly around a shared love of song. When he died, suddenly and far too soon, I continued to go. It was a way of staying close to something we had shared. And I cherish those monthly gatherings still.
But there is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with being on the fringe. The singers in that group know their repertoire with the ease of long practice. They arrive with their songs already inside them. There is little space, in that dynamic, for someone still wanting to improve. I attend, and I enjoy, and I leave with the faint, familiar ache of someone who loves a thing but has not yet found her place within it.
That ache, perhaps, is what made me reply to the Facebook post about the Silver Songbirds. The choir was founded by Nirupama Menon Rao, who settled in Bengaluru after a long and distinguished life in service: India’s Foreign Secretary from 2009 to 2011, Ambassador to the United States, China and Sri Lanka. She had encountered a seniors’ choir in Colombo and returned home carrying a conviction that something similar needed to exist here — not a gathering of the already accomplished, but a space where older voices could learn, grow, and find each other. The choir took shape under the early guidance of Soundarie David Rodrigo, founder of Soul Sounds Academy in Colombo, one of Sri Lanka’s most respected music institutions. When Soundarie announced that her seniors’ choir was staging a full concert and extended an invitation to the Bengaluru group, a few of us jumped at the opportunity.
The Lionel Wendt is a serious venue. It carries the weight of real performances, real artists, real audiences. Walking into its rehearsal space with barely two months of choir practice behind me required a conscious setting aside of self-consciousness. What helped enormously was the generosity of the Sri Lankan singers.
There is a gentleness to the islanders that made the transition from stranger to fellow chorister easy. They welcomed us with open arms, shared what they knew without condescension, corrected without diminishing. For someone who had spent years feeling peripheral in musical company, it was deeply fulfilling. By the fourth day of rehearsals, we felt we had known each other forever.
The night of the concert, the audience arrived in the spirit of loyal support. They left having witnessed something that surprised them. Standing on that stage, even I — who knew how recently and imperfectly we had come to this — was moved by what the choir produced together. The Broadway repertoire filled the hall with enchantment. The soloists were exceptional. The harmonies held. We emoted the lyrics under the watchful eyes of the artistic director Jermoe D’Silva who had put us through the paces with highly entertaining drama.
One moment will stay with me. Seated on the side was a super senior who had been quiet and unsmiling even in the mad gaiety of the green room. For the final number, she rose smiling from ear to ear and singing enthusiastically. I reached and drew her forward, and we sang that last chorus of ‘Oklahoma’ handin- hand with gusto.
After the show, the families gathered around the choir. Bouquets were presented with hugs and squeals of delight. Grandchildren stood with their phones raised, capturing grandparents in a moment of triumph, much as the seniors would have cheered the young ones in kindergarten. It felt like a full circle moment in the cycle of life.
Standing on that stage, in a city my husband and I had once visited together, something shifted in me. The songs that filled the hall that evening were not the songs he used to play — and yet, in some way the music connected to him, to those years, to the life we had shared before silence moved in. It felt like a gentle closing of a door that had been left open for a long time.
Grief does not resolve on a schedule. But sometimes something finds you — a song, a stage, a stranger’s hand in yours — and you realise that you have closure. I had to cross an ocean for it.
As we gear up to perform in Bengaluru for the first time on the 12th of April, I take heart that I have found a thread that connects who I was to who I am now.
- Sandhya Mendonca, author, biographer, podcaster, and publisher at Raintree Media, offers a distinct female gaze of the world in this column.
