A year of achievements

1) Learning to cook for real, to experiment with cooking, to cook traditional dishes and coming to really enjoy the activity.
2) Learning to keep house and coming to enjoy that too!
3) Understanding a particular -- and very peculiar -- kind of mental make up which is most of the time enraptured with numbers and displays special feelings for engines.
4) Coping with quizzical looks in return for looks that say "I need attention because I am sad."
5) Swallowing a sleepy (make that 'sleeping') grunt in reply to "Bye, I'll miss you."
6) Accepting that "haan" or "hmm" can be a logical reply to an intense expression of affection.

In short, learning to live with a member of the male species who needs to be fed regularly in large quantities and who on the whole has the personality type of an algorithm.  Congratulations to me.

Miles to go

... before I sleep.

How many more?
Strength to face, strength to rise and strength to end. I must have.

Music Immortalised

So my blog has been lying neglected for more than a year! An MPhil and a marriage surely cannot be that awful. Yet, they, and all the attendant changes and some unexpected dips and drops in terms of mood have taken a toll on my writing. And music.

It’s been a while since I returned to Mumbai and though God alone knows where I might be a few months from now, I have been unsuccessfully trying to decide whether and how to resume music class. Besides, singing itself is just not happening. Blame the inspiration that refuses to strike. The imagination has curled up in a hospital bed and the voice just... doesn’t... lift.

But this blog post was meant to be about a book. I read Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music in Bangalore. Its intensity caught me by surprise and though the plot is sometimes downright trite (all those contrived twists and turns about Julia hiding her deafness, the unconvincing story of a quick and long separation and Julia’s sudden marriage not to mention an ending that combines a predictable climax with an open conclusion), the best in the book is devoted almost exclusively and most exquisitely to music itself. The thrill of finding the Beethoven string arrangement or choosing The Art of the Fugue for an encore admittedly cannot mean for me what it means to a reader more closely familiar with Western classical music, but it did strike a most tuneful chord.

Michael’s intimacy with his violin matches his yearning for Julia and this is a relationship described with great poignancy. The recovery of the Tononi becomes almost a recompense for the inevitable loss of Julia and saves for Michael  more than a history and a profession. The book talks like only a musician can, one who almost vanishes at the moment of making music. Such being the intensity in the novel, Michael’s neurosis, though exasperating, conveys piercing sorrow even in its obstinate self-torture. The pain is also present in Julia’s sinking sense of hearing that carries away from her what matters more than anything else to her, and it is as much conspicuous in her inability to share this language with anyone in her family. Which is why the guilty passion found again but foredoomed creates an unbearable despair amidst so much beauty in the landscapes of Vienna.

Although the novel ends sentimentally, for anyone who has known despair, irretrievable loss and the drowning swell of music that heals only as much as to keep alive and revive memory, these words may mean something:

Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is blessed enough, to live from day to day and hear such music – not too much or the soul could not sustain it – from time to time.