Last night, I woke up around 2:00 am. A not-so-pleasant dream again. I was thirsty. I reached for the bottle beside my bed and drank.
It was while lowering the bottle then, I noticed that sitar. It had been close to four years since a friend gifted the same affectionately. It had been moved occasionally, cleaned diligently, examined curiously, and once-in-a-while it was also handled with the enthusiasm of an irritating boy who knew absolutely nothing about playing any musical instrument.
As my eyes fell on that Sitar, a strange thought hit me. The sitar’s wood had aged by now. One or even two of its strings had been replaced in the past. Scratches had gathered on its surface.
Yet, I was sure, in the right hands, the sitar would still play out a beautiful music. That aged wood would not break. The replaced strings would not go out of tune. The scratches would contribute nothing to the creation of music.
The instrument would simply do what all beautiful musical instruments do. It would help sing.
Maybe, some of us humans are also like that. We age. New people enter our lives. Some leave. Some parts of us are replaced. Some are repaired. Certain experiences polish us. Many others leave scratches.
And if we are fortunate enough to encounter the right hands, maybe of a dear friend, a parent, a teacher, a companion, perhaps even a stranger, we will discover that none of the hurts has taken away our capacity to bring our inner music out.
But not all of us are so fortunate though. And certainly, I am not among those fortunate souls.
The rest of us, like me, still carry festering wounds instead of scars. We make new friends but secretly miss the old ones. Our bodies grow older, but certain thoughts do not age at all. And then we can take our extraordinary imaginations, our memories, our ability to construct impossible possibilities, our hopes, and employ all of them to make ourselves feel entirely miserable, the whole night. We will build an entire future around something that can never happen at all. And there we doom ourselves, feeling miserable each minute.
When that thought hit me, something became very clear. Given our imagination, memory, aspirations, and hope, we possess nearly all the ingredients required to assemble joy. And yet, from time to time, we arrange the very same ingredients differently and manufacture sadness within us. And we do that in such an expert way too.
As I lay thinking of this silently, my eyes fell on the sitar again. A faint ray of light was entering through the window and falling on the beautiful gift. And somewhere between two gulps of water and an unfinished night, I began to overthink myself into anxiousness. My mind had already decided that sleep was no longer part of the night's schedule. So, I surrendered.
‘Think of little Sahana on a swing’, I told myself to escape my misery.
The image appeared immediately.
For a moment, she was laughing.
The swing moved forward and back.
She laughed out loud.
For that moment, I smiled.
I pulled the pillow closer and shut my eyes with slightly more determination to sleep and to sleep with positivity.
But thoughts of those ingredients came back again.
The imagination I possess.
The memories I have accumulated.
The situations I have lived through.
The people I have loved.
The people I have lost.
The friendships I still carry.
The futures I continue to imagine.
The aspirations toward which I move.
They were all there.
And I knew they could all be combined into feeling gratitude and joy. And they also could be combined into feeling miserable.
And each time, like most, I assembled the misery. I simply resisted the combination that led to joy. Choosing joy felt like effort, when misery flowed more naturally.
Is there anything wrong with me?, I wondered.
By then, I had drifted. Think of little Sahana again, I tried telling myself again. Yet I had drifted far away by now.
May be, it is such miserable drifts that will allow me to find a natural joy someday?, I ask myself. No answer arrived. And I continued to feel a numbing sadness. Maybe allowing myself to drift was the shortest road back toward becoming joyful the next day?, I checked with myself again. No answer came this time too. And I lay there, wide awake, at three in the morning to survive just another sleepless night.
I lay there to experience again, the hurts of the past, the melancholy of the future, and all of it condensed into the present. Is there any way out of it all?, I wondered.
Who knows?
Who truly knows?
