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

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

Ghost with a Cat

It was about midnight when Kuriako stopped his car near the roadside eatery known as thattukada in Kerala. He still had another 27 kilometres to go, according to Google Map. Since Google Map had taken him to nowhere lands many a time, Kuriako didn’t commit himself much to that technology. He would rather rely on wayside shopkeepers. Moreover, he needed a cup of lemon tea. ‘How far is Anakkad from here?’ Kuriako asked the tea-vendor. Anakkad is where his friend Varghese lived. The two friends would be meeting after many years now. Both had taken voluntary retirement five years ago from their tedious and rather absurd clerical jobs in a government industry and hadn’t met each other ever since. Varghese abandoned all connection with human civilisation, which he viewed as savagery of the most brutal sort, and went to live in a forest with only the hill tribe people in the neighbourhood. The tribal folk didn’t bother him at all; they had their own occupations. Varghese bought a plot ...
8 comments
Read more