Part I - Inheritance

07:25
Damn, it’s cold, as usual. So cold, in fact, that even the snow has frozen solid on the road sides. I’m not sure if that sentence makes sense but what I’m trying to say is that when it gets very cold, snow stops being its usual fairy-tale powdery self and solidifies into rock-hard ice. Imagine a river frozen dead in its tracks; I come across 2-foot crests and troughs - all motionless, bound and locked in a cold embrace. Very nice to write about, but not nice at all when I have to cover ground quickly on a full stomach and get to the station in time. Just a short while ago, I had force-fed myself a couple of parathas in an unhealthily small amount of time because I was starving, which was because I had spent all but 30 minutes of last night working on this huge homework. And I couldn’t even complete it. No matter, got bigger things coming up…

My mother loves classical music - she bought herself a veena with her first ever paycheck more than 30 years ago. She sings really well too, and can identify about 3 million different “ragas”. So it was only natural that she wanted her children to get into Carnatic music. It began when I was in 2nd grade and my brother had only recently mastered the art of forming a coherent sentence. The three of us would ride on my mother’s tiny two-wheeler all the way to (what used to be) the outskirts of my town to this music teacher’s home for an hour’s worth of lessons a few times a week. In no time, I started despising the whole idea, dismissing it as, and I distinctly remember this, “girly”. I liked the idea of singing but not classical stuff, somehow. I would protest and whine about my friends laughing at me if they ever found out but my mother would have none of that. The lessons continued.


08:00
The train is late, as usual. I enter the enclosed waiting area in the station and invoke an arcane ritual involving rubbing my palms vigorously and pray to the God of Fire to deliver me from the cold clasp of death. I know very well that I should be grateful for this chance and quit whining about petty things but come on, it’ll be boring to simply accept the fact that the temperature is -10 Celsius as it should be on a January morning in these regions. And I don’t like boring at all. I don’t like waiting either. Over the years, I have mastered a unique way of planning my day which counts on other people to be on time so that I can be late. So it’s not entirely unreasonable for me to get annoyed because the train is late…


I continued protesting against the music lessons and the protests continued to be ignored. So I used my infinite cunning and started picking faults with the music teacher. “It takes too long to go all the way and come back and leaves no time for homework”. Aha! She couldn’t let anything get in the way of school work, so I thought I had nailed it. But my mother found a music teacher who agreed to come to our home to teach us. When I found out, I deflated so fast that I almost froze all of my bodily fluids owing to rapid adiabatic expansion. A few months passed and I started picking faults with the new teacher too and so my mother found another one. This one was an accomplished old-timer who taught close to where we lived, so I was cornered, but not for long. He was attacked and injured by a rogue bull one day [I swear complete innocence] and he stopped teaching. I tried to convince my mom that it was a sign but she just found me yet another music teacher.


09:11
The train has been moving for a short while and I’m waiting for the ticket guy. I want an uninterrupted nap all the way to Chicago once I show him my ticket; I need to catch up on as much sleep as possible. It’ll be a disaster of unimaginable proportions if I get sleepy later in the evening. Normally, I would put on my Walkman phone and drift away into Neverland as it continues to dump high quality music down my auditory canals but this time there was no time to charge my phone to 100%. I’m forced to turn it off and sleep in silence, which isn’t as bad as it sounds to be honest… I slowly let my defenses down and let the irresistible Angel of Sloth seduce me into her wide open arms and long curly locks that smell of Salvation. I melt away into the sweetest oblivion as her warm breath touches my face, happy in the knowledge that Salvation is exactly what awaits me 130 miles away…