In Silence

She was enjoying it. She listened to the ripples of music sweetly brushing against her soul; she reached the peaks of harmony in variations of pitches and tones of the musician. She had always loved hearing those melodious timbres from times unknown. It’s been her greatest joy in life to walk through those theoretical time structures between sound and silence, that they fondly called music.

It was like a stride through her life. It carried all the beauty and pain of loneliness in which she was dwelling. She saw the stings that pricked her mind and the memoirs that evoked smiles. She saw the candles of timbre light up the beauty of conscience, lingering as a shadow behind the rhythm. At times she felt that she can rewrite her script to experience the wholesome harmony. She could see it all in music.

She has been carrying the pain with her. She was lacking something that most others had. She could sense the vibrations of loneliness all around her. She felt that she was singled out, that she was an object of sympathy. That’s when she started to hear those voices. She sometimes heard her own conscience weep in patterns, which she felt was musical. At some point of time, she started to harmonically chant sequences of voice in her mind. She freely wandered through the mountains and valleys of pitches and tones that she never anticipated to attain by herself. She had set herself on a magical journey. She blazed into the voyage that cut through the borders of tones and silence, of patterns and combinations, of culture and humanity, of melody and harmony, of rhythm and timbre, of tears and smiles, most importantly of conscience and pain. She wriggled into the space between tones and turned her back against solitude. She won her fight.

When she closed her eyes she traveled some years back and she heard the doctor tell her “There has been no other option but to perform total laryngectomy to remove the cancer. Without your vocal cords it will be difficult for you to talk again”. When she opened her eyes she had tears in her eyes, but a peaceful Mona Lisa smile sported her face as she alighted into her new world filled with beautiful notes. Her heart was so quiet to hear the music in the air around her, the music amongst the trees and mountains. She set her foot on a confident new journey, which was about to turn her life around.

How true are the words of Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist - “Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous”

- This article is dedicated to a person, who had achieved new heights in her small world of music, who had created a life for herself out of void when falling into that black hole was so likely, who inspired all of us who knew about her, who realized there was a music even in silence.