Did you make sure to hear some music last night? I did.
Of course, Im one of the lucky ones. I wasnt on any of those trains that set off from Churchgate. I knew no one on them, not directly; though my dear friends wifes cousin was on board, and he escaped unharmed, and his friend merely needed some stitches.
Doubly lucky, because I could, after a long day of small frustrations, step from the sticky street into a room where there was taking place, in a relaxed off-night way, jazz.
Quiet. Sound.
Could it have been more apposite? When Rez shifted to his hybrid guitar, the one with sympathetic strings, and Kiran stood at the mic in her kurta top, and they launched into their song called Pearl as in, homage to Daniel?
As she worked through the scales against the organ and hi-hat, intently pulling the notes from thin air, by hand, in that geometric way Indian singers have, there seemed a moment of formal lamentation. Sorrowful, and wise.
Later, with two desi sistas cousins, in fact we spoke of mosaics of hundreds of tiny shiny tiles that make up, if not life, at least a livelihood. Of missing chunks, ripped out by invaders or worn away by time.
Testing the metaphor, we imagined a workshop where we I stay up late, polishing new pieces, some to partly fill the gaps, others to extend the composition.
I remembered that Ive struggled, albeit in small ways.
The sound filling me still, I remembered: the possibility of tiles, the necessity of stitches.
