Songs and Stories

Songs and Stories

 

I write from a cremetorium and I swear by my origins that this story conforms to the unwavering loyalty to clichés.

I am aware that the cremetorium is the weirdest of places to write from, for that matter, anything, let alone a story, but I can’t be tardier than what I have been all this while.

Eighteen years is a freakin', long time to stay on one story, isn’t it? I wish tardiness wasn’t in the list of my genetic inheritance.

Here, at the cremetorium I become the famous singer who crooned his best number sitting by the bier of his dead sister. It wasn’t just a dirge for his sister, but a delicate and gradual unveiling of a story. A story of drawing rainbows, of playing under the sun, of a heart burning in sorrow and another entranced by indelible moments of joy. The famous singer’s song was his story.

My story, by the way, is my song.

And the tapping on this laptop keyboard is my beat. With each tap, I see the song shaping up as the dirge for the event.

The event is my mother’s death.

As I look at Ma’s eyes shut fast, forming a vital part of a body, covered shoulder-to-toe in a white burial shroud, adorned with Marigold and Tuberose garlands, fragrant with incense sticks, quietened by the gelid touch of death, lying on the bier, waiting to be raised to the wooden pyre, I hear the song louder than ever. As if every syllable, every sound of it is going through zillions of fissions at a time, conjuring the past and metamorphosing it into indelible moments. The story is playing like a billowing tune at the top left corner of my head.

It’s an unending loop. I can’t stay on it anymore.

Afterall, eighteen years is a freakin', long time to stay on one story, isn’t it?