It is Friday night. I am watching India-West Indies first one-dayer as all channels flash MJ is no more. I take out from mybookshelf Moon Walk where it is with Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Malraux’sAnti-Memoirs, Neruda’s Anti-Memoirs, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk toFreedom and Marquez’s Living to Tell the Tale. It was a birthday present to my son who, right from his school days was MJ’s fan, had heaps of his CDs and DVDs and a large board on the wall with a blown-up poster We are the World mounted on it. No lover of Pop, I was a slow convert to his magic. I was touched by the poetry in this lyric of MJ and LionelRichi, the evocation of childhood and a determination to change the world.
Over the years I watched how his double-platinum singles rocketed to the top of the music charts with afierce velocity equalled only by his hallmark gyrations of the body and wild rumoursabout his eccentric personal life; how his Thriller was listed in Guinness Book of WorldRecords as the biggest selling album of all time.
Michael Jackson was no Vaslav Nijinsky. He never performed a ballet A pres-midi d’unFaune. He was far away from the divine dancer whose loveliness and joy combined with a poignant melancholy, so much praised by Paul Claudel. But he too had a darkened soul. When he performedThriller, he too seemed to have another soul that carried his body and his attire was aflame. He had captivating eyes behindhis black glasses.