Dylan Jones: If you ask me

If you ask me the real sound of India is not the wailing and the shouting that you hear every day in the dusty streets, it is not the tortuous Muslim prayers that can keep you up all night as you lie in anticipation 800 yards from the Taj Mahal, it is not even the traditional north-Indian folk music that still seems to be piped into every open space (the constant drone produced by the four-stringed tambura).

I'm not even sure that the real soundtrack is the Bollywood pop you hear blaring out of Tata trucks, tuk-tuk taxis, shops, roadside barbers and hotel lobbies – though I've spent the last two weeks listening to it, as I travelled around the Golden Triangle between Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, and I'd forgotten how powerful it can be. When I was much younger, I commandeered a soundtrack LP of an Indian film that belonged to my father; I'm not sure he ever saw the film, although the music was extraordinary in itself. This was back in the early Seventies – Lord knows where he got it – and at the time it sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. The record consisted of a woman who sounded as though the love of her life had just absconded with her heart, juxtaposed over a difficult time signature that seemed to make no sense to my callow Western ears.

Little did I know that most Bollywood pop sounded like this – and judging by what I heard last week, still does. But I loved that record so much that I remember being irrationally upset when it went missing – and though the form doesn't seem to have changed much, nothing I've heard since comes close. I doubt I will ever be able to find my record again, as I never took a note of what it was called. Phonetically it went something like SAJEENAY, COOLY SAJEENAY, and had some sort of spoken intro, like an old soul song. Which I suppose it was, in its own way.

But now it is long gone, just another of those things I remember lying around the house as the Sixties turned into the Seventies, along with the Neville Shute novels, the Nina and Frederick EPs, coffee-flavoured Angel Delight and various blue-metallic soda siphons (which at the time were a symbol of sophistication like no other).

Oh, and the real soundtrack of India? That's easy: the motor horn.

Dylan Jones is the editor of 'GQ'

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