Being Adnan Sami’s Neighbour

The sounds began even before he’d moved in next door. And for years changed tune in step with the state of his career and marriage. Then, abruptly, silence.

The sounds began even before he’d moved in next door. And for years changed tune in step with the state of his career and marriage. Then, abruptly, silence.

Adnan Sami’s walls have ears: mine. His home and mine are on either side of a wall that conducts sounds as if it wasn’t there. On some days it has sent across a little conversation, but mostly there has been music, which is exactly the sort of relationship a musician and his listener should share.

My first acquaintance with the singer was a decade ago when I was a student in New York. A homesick friend brought by a cassette with a cheesy cover. It was autumn, a time when it is cold and beds are harder to roll out of. We heard Sami’s album, a collaboration with Asha Bhosle, in sappy nostalgic silence. We found home in the oddest things.

A few years later, with distance crunched, Sami’s videos became a kind of joke. You’d remember them: gorgeous women fall in love with and then betray him, and they weep because he literally fills their dreams. Then came his remarkable transformation. Some said he lost 90 kg. That’s about two Kareena Kapoors. Some said he lost 110 kg, others conjured 130. Sami said it was more like 107.

Then, after getting to know him the same way most of us get to know celebrities, he moved next door. I learnt of his intent to live there on a particularly quiet afternoon, and this I learnt through sound. When flats are being done up, you become familiar with all kinds of noises. Whining drills, clinking hammers, raspy saws—they fall into the background. But who can get used to a jackhammer when it is used only a few feet away? When I confronted the man using it, he apologised and said that he was doing this for Adnan Sami. For months, we heard sounds when we least expected them. At 2 am, there would be a gentle but unmistakable sound of a nail being driven into the wall behind us, for example.

When the songs began, it was like having your very own musician. He’s doing something new, my father would say delightedly, pointing at the crack in our wall (caused by vibrations from Sami’s renovations), some evenings. We discussed the possibility of recording these songs and putting them up for sale, but the market has consistently undervalued muffled soundtracks.

Once in a while we’d stop everything and listen to the sounds he composed next door. Sometimes he’d be at it all night, listening and re-listening and repeating a portion again and again until I could internalise it while doing whatever it was I did on the other side. Often the sounds were clearer when we stood beside pipes. They made the notes distinct and available to judge. We were among the first to hear his latest songs.

Some nights, there would be nothing but the sounds of videogame violence. Explosions would keep us up. One morning, my bleary-eyed father insisted I had the same videogame he had heard all night long.

Sometimes there were previews to events we’d read about in the paper. There was a Spanish-sounding phase—each song is a phase—that went on for weeks before it turned, quite suddenly, into a Michael Jackson phase.

Soon after, it was revealed that Jermaine Jackson had called on Sami, and they were to create a tribute to Michael together.

The Spanish phase began for us one evening when sour notes wafted in haltingly, and we looked at each other to confirm our own conclusions: this was new music, and he was creating it right now. As he played with it, the song grew fuller over time, somehow becoming lighter, but more complete, than it had been the day before. His voice came in, and the tinkering continued. Of course the song isn’t Spanish, but it sounded that way, and so the phrase stayed.

Discordant notes came through from time to time. Interesting things happened in the flat, as we were told by Mumbai Mirror, a city newspaper, which seemed to have a reporter living inside to report Sami’s domestic troubles. When we heard raised voices one night, we saw it in the newspaper a couple of days later. One memorable report quoted Pooja Bedi, who had gone to the house, saying that Sami’s wife “suddenly…lowered her top and exposed one of her breasts”. Explained Sami, a few lines below Bedi’s revelation, “I tolerated all of Sabah’s whims for old times’ sake… Now I can’t have any friend of either sex over at my place without her intrusion.”

Through this newspaper we learnt more about him and his wife than we should have. Once, the volume of music went through the roof and stayed there all night and early morning. Two days later, as expected, Mumbai Mirror reported a fight that ended with the police arriving at his doorstep. Every time they arrived afterward, it was assumed that they were there for Sami. They would leave empty-handed.

Now, for the first time in nearly two years, there’s silence. There are no midnight shoot-em-up rounds, or songs blasted at max. This could be because of his latest problem with his third wife: his new and fourth wife cannot live in these flats by court order.

We sleep in peace, for now, with no sounds or voices or music to rouse us from our dreams. Live music is fine, but this kind of quiet just can’t be bought.

Adnan Samineighbourliness