Letters

The sitar player

[short story or plot]

When Harris considers his own life, adding up all the positives (weighed against various relative negative tribulations) he considers himself to be living entirely in the positive, in almost complete fortunate realisation of wellbeing and luck. He feels satisfied. Lucky man, lucky country.

Harris, standing at the traffic lights of a busy city intersection, in full glare of summer sunlight, exposed to all its heat and feeling the humid contiguity of clothes on skin, Harris reaches up with his left hand (still carrying briefcase) to undo the pressure of his tie and starched collar, to let some of the heat out. His forehead is hot. An internal drop of sweat runs down his right arm (holding his umbrella — insurance for evening storms) and is taken up, invisibly absorbed by the cotton fabric around his wrist.

The traffic is intensely noisome: it fills his ears. As he would vaguely remember later (and even then with difficulty), Harris had an acute sensation which began in his eyes and rushed to the centre of his head, a sensation he could only characterise as 'cerebral sunstroke' — which in itself he thought not entirely accurate. But that was it. The glare of windows, sunlight and the endless reflections of these on chromed metallic surfaces, on trims and aerials, on reflective surfaces of all sorts like a million beads of glaring concentration, these infected the sluggish stream of the traffic with the sickness of light, changing it. It wasn't as though time stopped or the clichéd veil of perception lifted momentarily, but the noise and hulking masses of metal coalesced into a new perception, a cadence of rhythm so fine as to be minutely complex, staggeringly precise in its punctuation. It was a whole new order of sound and hearing (Harris saw himself thinking with distance and intimacy combined), a madly ordered river whose every tremor was necessary and bright, timed to perfection. Unthinking, he retraced his steps and went home immediately, where he sat on the edge of the bed he shared with his wife and sat there unthinking and untalking for many hours. All was silent.

After a long while of quietude, his wife despairingly having left him alone with his helplessness, Harris got up and tried to consolidate a few random memories of youth with picture books lined up on a low bookcase. A print of the Venus de Milo, poring over the folded drapery. No. A black and white print of a domestic Vermeer, its invisible shards of light also unsatisfying. A mass of inert, meaningless text and number, unable to engage in meaning. He had an idea and rushed downstairs. Flicking hastily through the collection of LPs with his thumb, Harris paused, seeming to have found. Yes.

Harris, an unspeaking pilgrim type, left everything behind on a plane bound for New Delhi. There, he found an aging man who sold him a worn and slightly tarnished sitar from the back of an instrument shop in an unspeakably poor section of town. He spent several weeks of broken communication trying to find a teacher of the instrument. An equally quiet and extremely disciplined old man surfaced who agreed to private lessons.

Harris learned how to tune his instrument. He spent whole days in practice, repeating the basic scales up and down. He learnt the ragas and rhythmic cycles. With the years he learned their correct correlation to times of day. At times disturbingly absorbed, his teacher nonetheless found him uncommonly apt in the rigours of Indian music. He never disclosed his past. He became, with time, a perfect improviser.