Agony has a face
I have seen my father stare at the waning moon. As if part of it. Only not quite yet. Let it disappear and he’ll be found in the dark night pacing up and down the stairs. I cogitate on the clomping of his polished boots. How they rattle the wooden floor and how they draw the agonised breath out of me. For me, the stinking gullies are way better than what is left of charred hopes. At the hindsight, I reckon, seeing is not believing. What lies beneath a head bobbing over a drooping shoulder is heavy. If that’s the word. He’s pining away the loss of my mother. His presence a poignant sign of her absence. Her death did not kill her. It killed him. Her accusations were too heavy to contain his composure. His deep-set, blood-shot eyes look for her kindness. Then he goes numb, withdraws from a world bereft of her love. The days paint him with strokes of grief and sleep eludes him during the nights. I sense the ever expanding void in him. Only he is oblivious to my concern. He surrounds himself with smoke and stabs the thin air with his cigarette butt drawing patterns, perhaps her name. Sometimes I find him peekabooing behind the billowing curtains, fumbling with the locks, arms akimbo stomping the floor like a toddler, fetching water in an earthen-pot from a dried well, drenching from head to toe in the downpour, shrieking with terror, injuring himself with shards of glass, groping about in the darkness and flinching at the plink of a leaky tap. It’s true haunted houses don’t have roofs or parapets or chandeliers or stairways or banisters or ceilings or floors, all they have is a disturbed spirit.
Soumya says, the deftness of the veena holds my breath and explodes my heart with joy. Also revered for being the iconographic instrument of Goddess Saraswati, it truly belongs to the ear that is tuned to recognise and appreciate fine music.
In our dream band, on veena:
Soumya Doralli is an Indian author of two books of fiction I Seek You (Half Baked Beans Publishing, 2023) and Hues of the Sky. Her short stories have been published in Active Muse Journal and a couple of anthologies. Soumya’s “Dribble” has appeared in 50-Word stories.
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 