A Song, A Coconut Scrapper and A Memory

 Waking up with a line of a long-forgotten poem, a melody unsung for years, or a scent that was once intimately ours is a delightful support to carry through the day. The beauty of the end might remain uncertain. Still, the splendour of this moment is graspable, gradually paving the way for the next moment, then flowing onward, brightening the day, lending elegance to months and years, crafting life into a gentle brook of vernal memories.

Hence, today I awoke enveloped in Talat Aziz's rendition of "Sun Li Jo Khuda Ne Wo Dua Tum to Nahi Ho." The more this song intertwined within me with fervor and lethargy, with grace and inefficiency, with euphoria and despair, the more I sensed your memories intensifying within. Yet, we existed united for merely a fleeting moment, just one afternoon. Never before, never again. And this paradox holds its own wisdom. Frequent closeness and promises of care lead affection to wane till it fades. A recurrent affirmation of attachment often turns into a practised and unmindful utterance, without any emotional unrest.

Here, touching the coconut scraper, I recollect how we scrape out certain things inadvertently from the quotidian. Like your clumsy hairs, an inelegant asparagus grows now in the emptied bottle of honey you brought to my place to spread over crêpes. My first mobile phone is no more, sold off a decade ago. Recently, a friend took a few cherished volumes of Fernando Pessoa, Neruda, and Paul Celan, only to forget his promise of delivering French poetry and philosophy books the next day. How swiftly we forget, how effortlessly things erode and vanish!

You gifted me a song that I carry forever. Sharing knowledge, as someone said, is an underrated language of love. True. But sharing a song? A book? A coconut scraper during pre-autumnal days for palm pudding, or lending the bottle of organic honey you acquired from the recent Sunderbans trip? Devoid of pretentious intellectualism, stripped of teenage radicalism and pseudo-fondness for neo-noir films. Just being together, not physically close but staying divergent centrifugally, destined for an unpredictable rupture in the future, and yet joined by a song after the midlife crisis.

Isn't that love too?

31 August, 2023