On Sal Mal Lane (13 page)

The Musician

First son, oldest child was not a title Suren wore with pride. Indeed, he bequeathed what duties he could to Rashmi with such frequency that Rashmi behaved as though she were the oldest of the siblings, stepping forward to accept instructions and lead the way as if practicing for a lifetime of managing small children. But he could not hand over his gender. That he was stuck with, the maleness of it and, worse, the first-maleness, the oldest-maleness. It came at him each morning like a patriotic flag unfurled and snapping into place in a stiff breeze, calling out to him in the guise of all the expectations that had been organized into his schedule: classical music and chess folded into a rich batter of mathematics, the tried and tested path to the airy adult life of an engineer.

In his thirteenth year, on his birthday, to be precise, Suren attempted to alter the inexorable course of his life. “I don’t want to be an engineer,” he blurted through the candle smoke hanging over a specially ordered Green Cabin cake shaped like a red railway carriage, a cake far more suitable for a different kind of boy, even a differently aged boy. The cake, settled neatly at the very center of the oval dining table with its new navy blue table cloth, was surrounded by flat plates filled with elegant tiered tea sandwiches with carrots and beets, and crisp round cutlets filled with fish, Suren’s favorite birthday food. In the face of these treats, Suren might have been expected to stay quiet, but he, like the other Herath children, was growing up. And growing up usually meant that good behavior, the kind of behavior expected by good parents who had raised their children properly, was destined to be shrugged off as personalities and tastes and a multitude of other characteristics, and their accompanying difficulties, were discovered. And so, Suren did not stay quiet.

Mrs. Herath, the one who always secured cakes and celebrated milestones, leaned forward to re light one of the blue candles stuck to the blue base of the cake. She waved the match in her hand to put it out, and then smiled indulgently at her older son. “What nonsense! Of course you want to be an engineer. Everybody wants to be one,” she said, barely shocked by his words but wanting to make sure that she quelled any unseemly expressions of free will. She knew where that led. It led to unsuitable marriages, marriages agreed to in moments of spontaneity instead of waited for in the proper way. “Look at the Silva boys, for instance,” she continued. “Their mother has told me several times that she is always trying to get them to study and be better than they are. Her dream is to get at least one of them to be an engineer. But unlike them, you, my son, are a genius, you were born to be an engineer.” And Mrs. Herath stroked Suren’s head reassuringly.

Suren, already seated at the table, looked up at his mother, who appeared to be particularly cheerful in a pink flowered sari. “Geniuses can do other things,” he suggested, sullen but hopeful.

“A genius can choose, yes,” his mother concurred and corrected at the same time, “but if he chooses foolishly, then what is the use of being a genius? Hmm?” And she moved away from him to set out her favorite small Dankotuwa Porcelain white plates with their delicately pleated edges. As she did, she spared a grateful thought for her husband, who had secured these same plates for her through some connection he had at the factory, the plates being designed for export, not for local consumption, the country being safely led at the time by the fiscally conservative Mrs. B, whose policies of ending imports while simultaneously increasing exports had earned the country a budget surplus and a star even from entities like the World Bank that Mr. Herath preferred to scorn.

Suren watched his mother’s activity as he considered this line of reasoning. It seemed to make sense and yet it did not. For what was the worth of being a genius if choice was denied to him? After all, fools were always told what they should do and they were foolish because they obeyed. He was about to share these thoughts when help came from an unexpected quarter. His father spoke up.

“What is it that you want to do, Suren?” he asked, tapping the butt end of a cigarette on the surface of his left thumbnail.
Tap, tap, tap.

Suren turned to look at his father. Still dressed in his work clothes, a modified version of the national dress, gray pants with a matching Nehru-collared tunic, Mr. Herath was sitting by a chess table, curved teak legs supporting an ornate board of carved brass. He had bought it at the one estate auction that he had attended with his wife, outbidding the competition so fiercely that there had been no money left for her to purchase the hat stand with mirror that she had been eyeing. It did not matter. She had exacted her price by turning it into a side table complete with silk table cloth and the telephone directory and phone, the latter rubbed frequently with 4711 Eau de Cologne, arranged neatly on top. She had hung a cuckoo clock above it, further reducing its pedigree and worth. Still, it was Mr. Herath’s favorite perch, right next to the table, as though in apology.

“I don’t want to study to become an engineer,” Suren said, a touch of anger creeping in though his face remained uncreased. “I am good at maths, but I am better at music. That’s what I want to do. Music.”

Rashmi gazed at her older brother in dismay. This was not the sort of passion that bode well for the future. Music was a pastime, not a vocation. Yet there Suren sat, his eyes steady, his mouth firm, indeed, his whole body straight, but obviously at ease with this ludicrous idea.

Mr. Herath nodded slowly, lit his cigarette, and exhaled a first puff of smoke. “You want to study music?”

Suren looked unsure. Studying was related to graded accomplishments and he did not care for the latter, particularly since a steady acquisition of A’s at schools where A’s were parceled out in single digits each year had kept him from the enjoyment of life in general and music in particular.

“You want to play music?” Mr. Herath asked, watching his son and trying very hard to stay focused. The failure of the recent strike, and the plight of Mrs. B, lay heavy on his mind. Still, although Mr. Herath wanted more than anything else to pick up the perfumed telephone and round up some friends with whom he could discuss what avenues remained for addressing the needs of the fishermen, the rural and urban poor, the voiceless—yes, he did think in such terms—and the possibility of securing the release of comrades who had been incarcerated in the aftermath of the strike, he had decided to make a special effort to be present for the momentous occasion of his oldest son’s entry into the teenaged years. This was a heavy price to pay and he wanted his presence to count. So he asked the question again. “You want to play music?”

“Yes, that’s what I want. I want to play music.”

“That’s what you are doing, playing,” Mrs. Herath said, her voice sharp as something familiar and bilious rose in her belly the way it had done before the birth of each of her complications. “You
play
the piano. You
play
the flute. And I hear that you are even talking about
playing
the guitar.”

“Can we cut the cake now?” Rashmi broke in, knowing full well when her older brother needed to be rescued and hoping that he would be grateful for the diversion, but Suren plunged ahead.

“I want to play music forever. I don’t want to do it after school and practice pieces and do it on the side like a . . . like a . . . hobby. I want it to be all I do. I want to be a musician!” He finished, unable to keep the triumphant note from the end of this speech. Both his parents spoke at once, and Suren was momentarily thrown off balance by the equilibrium between them, the joint postponement.

His mother, cake knife emphasizing her words: “And how will you live? Who will support you? Who will want to marry you?”

His father: “Good. But if you want to play music, you must study music first.”

“I’m cutting the cake,” Rashmi said, glad that at least Nihil and Devi favored her response to the heat rising around them. Nothing good ever came out of such heat. Only tears. In the end, somebody cried. She took the cake knife from her mother’s hand and sliced through the cake. Nobody seemed to notice that it was she who blew out the candles on the cake and that they hadn’t sung “Happy Birthday” for Suren.

Suren stared despondently at the piece of cake on the plate before him, his mind far away. He thought about Kala Niles, of the way she imparted her own love of music to him, with care, as though the love itself was something to be treasured. He thought about Tony, the Sansonis’ grown-up son, who had taken Suren home and shown him his guitar not a week after they had first moved in and suggested that he, Suren, play it. He thought about the Tisseras, who stood each evening by Kala Niles’s fence to listen to her practice, still dressed in their workday clothes, and how they, though they clearly did not understand any of her music, still seemed to consider it only right that she should have them among her audience. He thought about the Bolling twins, who were able to sing every song that was played on the radio without any effort at all. He thought about his family and how their lives had been filled with music, between their piano playing and singing, not to mention all the concerts their mother and father dragged them to, each according to his or her taste; their mother to performances of Western music where polite applause was crowned occasionally by standing ovations and many bows, their father to those given by visiting Indian musicians and native ones too who sat low to the ground and seemed unconcerned about their audiences, barely raising their heads to acknowledge that they had even come. How was it possible that he was surrounded by music and yet was being denied the right to live his life in time to the rhythms and subtle equivocations of musical phrasing, the hurry-ups and slow-downs and wait, wait longer, wait in silence of eight notes arranged and re arranged in complement to exactly what was being felt by composer and listener alike?
Diatonic,
he heard the word in his head.
Chromatic, pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, octatonic,
each iteration of the scale opening innumerable possibilities for harmony. He thought about the Pythagorean major third, the Didymus comma, the way the intervals sound out of tune rather than as though they were different notes. This, he thought, was where his brilliance at mathematics bled into his love of music; music was the realm in which his mathematical brain danced.

“If you love music you don’t need to study it,” Suren said at last, choosing the parent of least threat even though experience had taught him that if something needed to be done, his father was also the parent of last resort.

At this, and over the warning murmurs of his wife, Mr. Herath exercised authority by adjourning the game.

“We can talk about all this another day. Look, Rashmi has cut the cake. Let them eat cake!” he said. He stubbed out his cigarette and launched himself out of his seat with a celebratory rubbing of his palms as though he could, when the occasion warranted it, enjoy such bourgeois things as birthday cakes.

But that other day came and went in an unusual way with the usual result: nothing happened. His father came home one night to announce that he had secured tickets to a performance by Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan. He escorted Suren to this event and then chose a post prandial setting, with the sound of dishes being cleared, Kamala coming and going to wipe away the evidence of dinner, the time of night usually reserved for these useless debates for, after all, what kind of resolution was possible between dinner at eight and bedtime at nine, to opine that Suren should be sent to India, to Bhatkhande, to be precise, for training in music.

“The original music,” he said, “the music that began music.” In Mr. Herath’s opinion, reading, writing, arithmetic, music, coconut cultivation, sanitation, and everything in between had an origin, and nothing could be done in the present unless one retraced one’s steps to that origin and, having arrived there, at the origin, read everything ever written about that topic by anybody anywhere in the world. Although, if a choice had to be made, then the Greats would come first. His selection of Greats was scattered and multi cultural; not for him the myopic clinging to a particular nation of origin when it came to these matters. Yes, even America had its quota of Greats, though almost exclusively in literature and physics.

“Where?” Mrs. Herath asked, her tone so incredulous at this suggestion that her first born child should be sent away from home, that any reasonable husband would have shied away from further discussion. Except that in her case she had an unreasonable spouse, one whose unreasonableness took the form of being inattentive to things like timing, mother-son bonds, years of diligent parenting such as she prided herself in accumulating, and, if nothing else, logistics, for who truly believed that a thirteen-year-old Sri Lankan boy could be so easily shipped off to the Indian wilderness?

“Bhatkhande,” he repeated, as though his wife had not heard him clearly the first time.

It might have ended there, for Mrs. Herath was just as skilled at decimating the present evocation of the Greats as her husband was in invoking their power, except for the fact that Suren, thirteen and believing, hope and relief united in his pre adolescent body, burst forth in affirmation,
Yes, I want to go to Bhatkhande!
something he said though he had no knowledge of what that place might be, what degree of training it might confer upon him, or the suitability of his level of preparation to its curriculum. He said it, because for the first time he had been told there was
a place
where he could go and study music, nothing but music.

It ended therefore, not then but much later, after many words, all of them bitter, all designed to extract the maximum degree of emotional currency exchanged at black market rates, all of them uttered without foresight or consideration of the subject or his very small desire, until all four children lay wide awake listening, listening, to the way things always are with parents, where the things that concern children fall by the wayside and the adults move on to worrying the same tired bones with the same tired mandibles.