Skip to main content

The Music of Romance

Fiction

Solomon stared at the message.  It is not often that a message comes traversing twenty years and makes your heart skip a beat.  No, the message was not twenty years old.  He had had no contact whatever with the sender of that message for twenty years.  In those days, twenty years ago, she was a symphony that flowed through his veins.

“You made me pass English.  Remember the guidebook you gave me?  And the tricks you suggested?  I passed English because of that.  Otherwise I wouldn’t be the teacher that I am today.  Thanks.  Sangeeta.”

Solomon read the message again and again.  His heart pulsated faster and faster.  The heartbeats struggled to recreate a familiar symphony from the mounting feeling of nostalgia.

Does she remember only the guidebook and his tricks for passing an exam?  Have you forgotten the math exam in which you showed me some answers so that I passed?  Your roll number just preceded mine and we were sitting on the same bench for the exam. 

He wished he could ask her that.  He wished to ask a lot more things. 

“Why don’t you understand calculus properly so that you don’t have to copy my answers?”  She asked him after that exam.

“Why don’t you teach me?” He asked seriously.  She was good at math.

He learnt differentiation and integration from her.  As she explained the steps he would watch her lips occasionally.  It was a delight to see her lips moving in umpteen directions as she made dy and dx dance on the pages that they filled together.  The dance metamorphosed into a Wagnerian opera that flowed into his being, through his veins. 

Sangeeta, you were the music of my heartbeats.  No, he couldn’t send her that message either though he had typed it out in the Whatsapp rectangle.  

She had never encouraged the overtures he tried to make.  Friendship without romance was her clear stand though she never said anything at all in that regard.  But he knew that she had understood his feelings.  Which woman doesn’t?  But a relationship between a Sangeeta Nair and a Solomon Joseph could not grow into a Wagnerian opera in those days.  So Solomon gratified his romance reading the Songs of Solomon in the Bible.  Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the people.  I delight in her shade and her fruit is sweet to my taste.

Solomon wrote his own songs too. 

Do you know why you are so beloved to me
Even when I know you will never be mine?

The kiss-curl that wafted in the fan’s breeze touching her cheek gently and seductively made him long to be a wisp of hair in that curl.

When love smothers my heart like a burden
You are there without your knowledge holding me tight…

After college they parted ways.  Never to meet again.  Each one knew that they wouldn’t meet again.  Some things don’t need words to be articulated.

“How did you get my number?”  He tapped the message and sent it.

“Met one of our college mates who had your number.  They are planning an alumni meet…”

His heart pounded again.  An alumni meet?  Will I meet her again?

She was married.  Her children were studying in a residential school near the bank where he worked as manager.  The Whatsapp messages came and went briskly. 

“What about your family?” She asked.

When love smothers my heart like a burden
You are there without your knowledge holding me tight…

No, he couldn’t write that to her.  No, love is a Wagnerian opera.  Let it flow through his veins.  Without death.  Without interruption. 

He will meet her at the alumni meet, he decided.  Will he tell her the truth?  No, he shouldn’t.  He can just say that he never wanted to marry so that she won’t guess anything.  That’s part of the Wagnerian opera, isn’t it?











Comments

  1. JaiNovember 19, 2017 at 8:01 AM

    "It was a delight to see her lips moving in umpteen directions as she made dy and dx dance on the pages that they filled together." - simply lovely...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pranju chakrapaniNovember 26, 2017 at 12:33 PM

    Beautiful! Tomichan, simply beautiful.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The...
62 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 3

Street leading to St Francis Church, Fort Kochi There were Christians in Kerala long before the Brahmins, who came to be known as Namboothiris, landed in the state from North India some time after 6 th century CE. Tradition has it that Thomas, disciple of Jesus, brought Christianity to Kerala in the first century. That is quite possible, given the trade relationships that Kerala had with the Roman Empire in those days. Pliny the Elder, Roman author, chastised in his encyclopaedic work, Natural History (published around 77 CE), the Romans’ greed for pepper from India. He was displeased with his country spending “no less than fifty million sesterces” on a commodity which had no value other than its “certain pungency.” Did Thomas sail on one of the many ships that came to Kerala to purchase “pungency”? Possible.   Even if Thomas did not come, the advent of Christianity in Kerala precedes the arrival of the Namboothiris. The Persians established trade links with Kerala in 4 ...
10 comments
Read more