Ustad Salamat

 

The exhibition perplexed Salamat.

 

We’d gone to the DeYonge Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for  show titled something like ‘Great American Portraits: From the Colonial to the Modern’. Or ‘America’s Gentry: The Landed and the Larded at Rest and at Play’ … Something like that.

 

The show was assuredly extensive. It filled rooms with scenes of estates’ owners and their horses. Breeches and riding-crops. Ladies and their daughters posed in ruffles and on settees with the subdued vitality of 

waxen wreathes. Fox-hunts and hounds and more gentlemen behatted

on steeds. Statues made their advent with more established prosperity.

Pages from the Declaration of Independence and then the Bill of Rights.

Gilbert Stuart, Reynolds, Chapman, … Smoke clears after the British

sack Washington to reveal more Parlors of Alabama, Virginia, and the Poconos, Colonels and Merchants and their highly coiffed wives and nobly

poised sons in backgrounds of purple, pink and pastel….

 

Within the ninth-or-so such Room Salamat looked at me. He of the Punjab, the northern Sub-Continent—India and then Pakistan—was then

60. He was about five-foot six. He was brown and rounded face was often

a reflection of light. His dark eyes were deep and quick to register nuances.

 

 

Salamat and his older brother Nazakat had been dual prodigies, celebrated

in Delhi and Lahore. Satjiyat Ray had chosen Salamat to be voice of “The Music Room” when the singer was 22. Over the past two decades the honorific of Ustad for this artist was universal and he was huzzahed with

honors across Europe. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was his nephew and pupil.

By 1995, Salamat’s voice and artistry were richer and more expressive, 

more capable of startling profundity in the Alap and marathon runs in 

the Tintal, than ever. 

 

“Where are the musicians?” Salamat asked in this our ninth-or-so Room

of expensive portraits.

 

His own family and its Shem Gerasi tradition dated from the court of Akbar the Great in the early 17th century.

 

“Ah, my friend, “ I said, smiling. “You can’t expect that here.”