Mittal Music Classes

Mittal Music Classes
JM ORCHID GH-01, B805, Sector 76 Rd, Aditya Celebrity Homes, Sector 76, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India

Mittal Music Classes sits on the first floor of a butter-yellow haveli that has been converted into a row of shops on Jaipur’s M.I. Road. A narrow wooden stair, its treads grown concave by decades of determined feet, leads past autoflash studios and kite vendors before opening into a 400-square-foot room whose sloping ceiling is armored with egg-carton acoustic foam. Two Yamaha upright pianos, black and walnut, occupy the bay windows like twin sentries; a third, baby-sized Casio, travels on vacations to remote satellite classes in villages outside the city. Three walls are plastered with dog-eared Swar-alankar charts and faded photographs of every student who cleared the Prayag Sangeet Samiti’s Visharad exam since 1987—hundreds of grinning faces wedged between garlands of saffron marigolds.

Sunil Mittal—guru, proprietor, living metronome—enters at 5:45 p.m. each day carrying a tanpura the size of a small pumpkin and wearing the same uniform: crisp white kurta, steel-rimmed spectacles, rubber chappals percussion-ready. His family founded the school in 1954, and although the city now hums with guitar institutes and DJ consoles, this small chamber still dedicates itself to khayal, thumri, and the aching slide of a sarangi bow. Admission is invitation-only after a fifteen-minute aural test: the guru sings a complicated murki and asks the child to echo it back three octaves higher; the ones who do not flinch earn a spot on the khaddi. Older vocalists meet on Tuesday evenings in a semi-circle on durries, notebooks balanced on raised knees, leaning toward Mr. Mittal’s tanpura drone the way sunflowers tilt at dusk.

Thursday sessions belong to instrumentalists. Under fluorescent rings of light, tabla players thread taals like mathematical lace while violin students mark their four-note tantrakari grids with colored Lego bricks placed on the chairs in front of them. Sagar bhai, the studio’s forty-year technician, keeps a soldering iron and spare harmonium reeds wrapped in newspaper beneath the wooden bench; if a reed thins mid-raag, he glues another in under ninety seconds so that alaap need not wait. Up on the ceiling, two rotating fans push the scent of sandalwood agarbatti over the glass dividers that separate the individual practice cubicles; siblings refining Bandish can peek sideways and see beginners drawing their first Sa-Pa curves without disrupting one another.

Every 14 January, the hall empties its furniture and fills with carpets for the annual Sankranti baithak. Twenty-five voices begin at dawn with the Raga Lalit in slowly swelling light; outside the lattice windows, kites line the sky like sheet-music staves. Local chaiwala Prahlad wheels in thermoses of kesar doodh at eight, signaling a ten-minute recess in which notes are traded for gossip. The performance ends past midnight with Todi, the students and maestro circling each other like the final turns of ceremonial leheriya. After the last tihai, the applause is muted—more sigh than clap—because everyone knows that under these low beams, music prefers to sink into the rafters rather than shout.

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