by Anupama Krishnakumar
In her night dreams, she is almost always playing the violin. She finds that she is very different in these dreams, the violin dreams as she calls them. She is smitten by this version of herself – elegant, poised, and other-worldly. An almost angelic self, holding an exquisitely beautiful violin. Every single time that she wakes up from these dreams, she examines her fingers, feels her face with both her hands and strains her ears to figure out if she is hearing anything remotely violin. But she doesn’t. And she feels disappointed. Each time. As much as she loves to see this self of hers, she also despises the realisation she has about the futile search she carries out – looking out for traces of her violin-playing self in the real world.
Intrigued by the various notes that her dreams unleash in a shimmering gold-coloured textured paper, her music-hungry eyes scan impatiently through dozens of songbooks that speak their own language. The semi breve, minim, dotted minims, she imagines, are laughing at her, for the foolish dreamer that she is – ‘You can’t get us, can you?’, she imagines them saying, yet she runs her fingers over them with reverence, sincerity, passion and love. Don’t they realise that she knows their language only too well?
She loves the eyes she owns in her dreams. The lashes are long, unapologetically artistic – so fittingly beautiful for a pair of eyes that belong to a woman who rejoices playing the violin like there is nothing more joyful in this world. Nothing more joyful than producing soulful music by the graceful movement of the bow and of dexterous fingers on four magical strings. Nothing more joyful than eventually dissolving and becoming one with the ocean called Music.
She was a violinist, once upon a time. Her passion for music and the instrument was stitched to her soul. Like a beautifully embroidered flower. She would play, sway, dazzle and mesmerise. She created music. She cast a spell. The violin was her friend. It was her foe. It elevated her, relieved her and gave her life a purpose full of promise. But it also made her woefully dependent, attached and restless in its absence.
The violin brought her fame, drew the world to her feet. But it consumed her like a wild forest fire. It journeyed with her through the years – through the playfulness and innocence of childhood, love and ambition of youth, deterioration and loss of old age. The violin was a silent witness to the history of her life – her ups and downs, her musician life and her family life. It was also a repository of her emotional roller coaster, for she didn’t know any other way to express and confess other than to converse with her violin by playing it. It was witness to how the world celebrated her and eventually how easily it abandoned her.
At eighty five, now, the violin haunts her in her dreams. It teases her, ‘Come on lady, take me back into your arms. Let’s rekindle our passionate affair.’ But she doesn’t dare. She is filled with fear as much as she is with the desire to be reborn as a violinist. She can’t hear a word, a trace of sound but for the music that she hears within the chambers of her mind – the music as she had heard it and as she had known it before her ears began to fail her. She can’t hold a pencil steady, leave alone a violin and a delicate bow. Her wrinkled hands tremble agitatedly as if they are fragile, withering leaves hanging precariously from the branches, in danger of being pooh-poohed by the arrogant wind anytime.
But she lives on powered by her violin dreams in which she is the avatar she wants to be. Till her breath ceases. She plays the compositions of the great and revered Masters, the sound growing more and more powerful within her mind. She tosses and turns in her sleep, her eyeballs racing frantically under her wrinkled eyelids, following the dream of a passionate violinist. Her fingers twitch excitedly within the folds of her blanket every single night, as a musician the world has long forgotten attempts to make peace with her fate by living her dreams within dreams. Her violin dreams.
