by Ami Rao
And then they weren’t in the concert hall at all, but in a darkened room with a ceiling fan and a bookshelf crammed with books and a bed with a jade-green cover and she was lying down on this bed – his bed – and she could feel the weight of him in the deep, soulful timbre of the cello, and his weight was filled with loneliness and longing.
And then they weren’t in the room, but under water in a swimming pool blowing bubbles with their mouths, and they were swimming towards each other, arms outstretched, closer and closer until the tips of their fingers touched.
And then they weren’t in the swimming pool, but in a wood with tall trees and the forest floor was a carpet of lavender and they were running on this carpet, running barefoot, holding hands, running towards the orange sky where the sun was flaming over the horizon.
And then they weren’t in the forest, but back in the room, in the concert hall, but there was nobody else there, they were alone, just her and him, and the music. And she could feel it. The tension in the air. And the cry of the bow. And the vibrations in her ribcage. And the unexpected swell of joy that lives on the other side of the surrender.
‘You okay?’ she heard a voice say and it sounded so far away.
‘Ameena? You okay?’
She nodded without speaking. But she took his hand and held it to her heart.
1.22
In David’s apartment, very early the following morning, they were propped up in bed, reading the newspaper and drinking coffee.
‘If all else fails,’ Ameena said thoughtfully, looking up from the paper, ‘you can become a barista…’
‘Is the coffee good? Is that what you’re saying?’
She smiled, a sweet sensual smile that David knew said many other things too. ‘Yes. Very.’ Then, turning to face him and attempting to look serious, she said, ‘Okay, I have a question.’
‘Anything. Aside from how I make such great coffee because that’s a secret I take into the ground. Get it, get it?’
Ameena chuckled. ‘You should be a stand-up. Ever thought of being a stand-up? You’d be a great stand-up.’
He held his palms facing upwards and then proceeded to alternately raise and lower them as if weighing something. ‘Hmm,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘barista or comedian? Tough choice! Impossible choice! An embarrassment of riches! Which one shall it be?’
‘You can do both! Do both! It’ll be amazing. A funny barista. A funny Jewish barista. Just what the world needs. I mean, have you ever, in all your life, met a barista who made you laugh? The Jewish part is like a triple bonus. Like finding YHWH in your triple venti soy latte.’
He laughed, then leaned over and kissed her. ‘Have you made this your life’s purpose, beautiful? To find my calling? I already have a calling, remember?’
‘Yes! And that’s what I wanted to ask you about before you distracted me with all the coffee talk…’ She sat up suddenly. ‘Hey! we could call it “Jehovah Java”!’
David rolled his eyes. Ameena made a comical expression, ‘Or not! Okay listen, so the guy who wrote that piece we listened to last night…’
‘Elgar?’
‘Yeah. Elgar.’
‘Edward Elgar, one of your lot!’
‘He’s English?’
‘Well, he’s dead now, but he was English, yeah. 1900s. One of the greats. I believe he was knighted and everything.’
‘Oh…’ she said, pondering that fact.
After a few seconds, she nodded. ‘Yup, that’s what we do where I’m from. We take the common man and when he does something really, really good, we touch his shoulder with a sword and hey-ho! we make him royalty. Anyway, here is my question, knighted or not, you have seventy players sitting on a stage, so when he writes this stuff, how does he decide who does what?’
‘Ah, my lovely, that’s orchestration.’
‘Umm…’ Ameena frowned, looking quizzical. ‘I don’t want to be the girlfriend who says I don’t know what you mean, but I don’t know what you mean.’
David smiled. ‘I don’t expect you to know about orchestration, but the girlfriend part was nice to hear,’ he said, and looking at him, Ameena felt herself blush.
‘Right, okay,’ he said, ‘let’s see. So orchestration basically means choosing an instrument to play each note of a piece. So for example, a piece written for piano has ten notes at a time, orchestra has seventy instruments, so if you want to orchestrate that music, you’re going to have to give some of those instruments the same note, meaning you’re going to divide up all the notes among the orchestra instruments – each of which has a different timbre – depending on which instrument you hear playing a particular note of the piece.’
The morning sun streamed in through the open window, climbing over the wall and across the ceiling like the many legs of some strange shapeshifting creature. David turned towards her and Ameena watched as the legs walked all over his face.
She could see how much he loved this, even talking about it. His eyes were animated, filled with their own light.
‘Then,’ David continued, ‘you’re going to think of lots of other music-theory type things – texture, dynamics, tempo, harmony – what’s the mood you want to create – do you want drama or contemplation? Lightness or darkness? Happiness or melancholy? Or some of all of the above at different points in the composition? All these decisions to consider and the whole effect can be transformed with just minor adjustments to a single choice. Just like that, it becomes a different piece.’
She nodded and she realised then, with some instinctive certainty, that he was happiest when he spoke to her about his music and somehow to her, this – his being happy – mattered. ‘So it’s fair to say Elgar was a composer and an orchestrator?’
‘Yes, and in this particular case, Elgar was self-taught. Bach – you already know I think Bach is the greatest – so for me, he was the master orchestrator. I think it was Stravinsky who famously said about Bach, “You can smell the resin in his violin parts, taste the reeds in the oboes…” So yeah, most great composers who write music for orchestras are magnificent orchestrators, and as they write, they can see the whole thing unfold. I’ve heard of some composers, you show them a sheet of music and they can hear the entire orchestra in their heads.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah. It’s incredible, I know.’
‘And that’s kind-of-sort-of what you want to do? But with jazz and movies?’
‘In a nutshell, yeah.’
She nodded her head.
Then, to David’s great amusement, in the kind of accent you’d expect to hear in a Tennessee Williams play, she said, ‘Well, I do think that’s swell.’
Later that morning, at work, David walked into Hershel’s office and closed the door behind him. He leaned up against it, arms crossed behind his back, one leg bent, the flat of his foot pressed to the door.
‘Hershel.’
‘David.’
‘I had an epiphany last night.’
‘Uh-oh.’
‘No seriously. I was with Ameena…’
‘David, if I were you, I’d stop right there. This is a place of work.’
‘…at a concert.’
‘At a concert?’
‘At a concert.’
‘Who’s Ameena?’
‘My girl— a friend. Doesn’t matter. Look, the chocolate milk client? We’ve been hitting a wall because we’ve been thinking about it wrong.’
Hershel looked at him curiously.
‘What’s that look?’ David said.
‘Nothing, go on.’
David threw him an exasperated look of his own, then continued. ‘Okay, this is the thing, right? We’ve been driving the pitch forward on logic, and that’s a perfectly viable – and valuable – way to do things. But then you know in that last meeting, we kept saying we’re missing something, and we
all agreed we were missing something but none of us knew what that missing something was. Well, this is the thing, I think it is missing heart. I’m not sure this pitch is about logic alone.’
He stopped. Hershel was chewing his pencil. David noticed to his amazement that he had worked his way up to about half the length of the thing.
‘Can you stop doing that, it’s disgusting.’
‘David, do me a favour?’
‘Throw the pencil away?’
‘No. Don’t touch my pencil but do please carry the fuck on. I’m listening. I wouldn’t be listening if it wasn’t good. But I ain’t got all day, even if it’s coming from our very own Messiah Ben David.’
‘Haha, Hershel, that’s hilarious.’
Hershel waved his hand dismissively, but David could see from the way he was sitting, leaning forward on his desk, eyes narrowed to a virtual slit, that he had the man’s attention, which David knew from experience was a fickle thing. So, he ignored the urge to curse and simply continued. ‘I mean, this has been said before, but the pressures of the business and this incessant desire to appear “new and shiny” often leads us to prioritize left-brain rationality over right-brain emotion. The truth is that the world’s most iconic brands, from Nike to Dove to Apple to Coca-Cola, have all been built on the back of goosebumps-inducing, emotion-based advertising. Truly memorable advertising begins with one question: What do we want our consumers to feel?’
Hershel raised his eyebrows. ‘What do we want our consumers to feel?’
David nodded. ‘What do we want our consumers to feel.’
‘And you got this from a concert with Mina?’
David turned to leave. ‘You’re welcome. And it’s Ameena.’
A few hours later, in the afternoon, David and Ameena exchanged emails at work.
davidgreenberg: hi!
ahamid: Hi
davidgreenberg: so… randomly. just listened to the main theme from the da vinci code. same, very basic fifteen-note motif played over and over endlessly. yet thrilling due to orchestration.
ahamid: Oh yeah?
davidgreenberg: bold as brass. one tune. on a loop. like an academic exercise in development through orchestration. shows what orchestration is and why it matters, to answer your question from before.
ahamid: Hmm… trying to get head around. Sorry. Head somewhere else this morning. (Thanks muchly to you). Are you saying it is a single unremarkable tune but becomes ledge because of orchestration?
davidgreenberg: ledge?
ahamid: Yes. Ledge – legend. What better word?
davidgreenberg: ok whatever (!) well, yes. basically.
ahamid: Listen together tonight?
davidgreenberg: sure. your place or mine?
1.23
And then… Yusuf thought as he prayed together with his son facing the window, which faced east towards the Qibla…
And then, there was Kareem.
Kareem who had always been more Pakistani than a Pakistani in Pakistan. More Pakistani in his thoughts, in his tastes, in his habits, in his allegiances, in his stubborn adherence to a cultural ideal his parents had left behind a long time ago.
Kareem who, in Yusuf’s mind, was full of contradictions.
Kareem, who wouldn’t think twice about parking illegally in a disabled spot, but who would happily give up his seat on the bus to an ageing or less abled person.
Kareem, who against his teachers’ expectations (and perhaps also their will, for Kareem was not popular with his teachers), obtained perfect grades in maths and science but failed English with equal consistency because he couldn’t be bothered to read the texts – ‘All these dead people,’ Zoya overheard him telling Ameena one day, ‘who cares about all these dead people and what they wrote?’
Kareem, who found it difficult to express his affection for his sister, but had always been fiercely protective of her, so much so that despite Ameena’s heated opposition, he would sometimes take the bus all the way to her university and ‘shadow’ her home if it was late.
‘Do you think I’m stupid,’ she asked him one time, ‘do you seriously think I don’t see you sitting at the other end of the bus with that dumb cap over your face?’
‘Don’t know what you’re on about, yo,’ he replied, pretending to tie his laces.
Kareem who had, at that very moment, spun his Eminem cap back to front, his own casual way of conforming to the religious practice of wearing head garb while praying.
Kareem, whose deep confusion about un-belonging had been simmering under the surface for years, but who had lately begun asserting his place in the world with a brazenness that tore at Yusuf’s heart. For Yusuf felt it sharply, this tear in his own heart, because he had not come here to this foreign land for his children to be torn in their hearts. No. Had he known how much distress it would cause, this disease – this dis-ease – he would not have come, not for all of Zoya’s begging and pleading and illusory talk of dreams.
He looks now at the boy, his son Kareem. They have finished praying and Kareem has respectfully folded away his father’s prayer mat, before putting away his own. After he has stacked them both neatly in their place, he says politely, ‘I need to go out now Abba,’ and when he comes down a few minutes later, donned in his ‘going out clothes’ – his cap turned back the right way round, a pair of baggy Levi’s and those massive white sneakers and all that fake gold that brown boys his age seem to want to cover themselves in – Yusuf gapes at him until Kareem asks his father to ‘quit staring like that, yo, it’s freakin me out!’ Technically, he doesn’t ask; he sort of raps it out, hand gestures and all. A different boy, this one who has come down, from the one who went up.
Different…
And yet the same.
Some people, Yusuf knows, go through their whole lives living in multiple compartmentalised worlds and manage to go back and forth between them with ease. As a father, the thought is bewildering.
Yusuf sighs.
He loves Kareem. He has always loved Kareem. In fact, every time he looks at Kareem, he is filled with wonder, at how beautiful the boy is, at how he, Yusuf, could possibly have had anything to do with it.
So, every time he reads news like the kind he read that morning not so long ago when he was at the barber’s shop getting his beard trimmed, he finds himself wondering, with anxious mind and bewildered heart, about the perpetrator of the crime: the rapist, the murderer, the robber, the terrorist. What mental affliction, he wonders, must drive someone to such horror. What abuse or abandonment or monstrous lack of love. What terrible sense of despair he must be subsumed by, someone who is capable of such inhuman acts. The someone he had read about. Someone. Someone…
Someone else’s son.
1.24
Jazz, David had once mused, has a way of teaching you how to live.
Later, in the privacy of her own mind, Ameena had pondered upon that statement. It was, she felt, something one might say about a person. Inside of those words, lived love.
‘I want to know… more,’ Ameena remarked casually one evening. They were at David’s apartment. David had been playing the piano; Ameena had been lying on the sofa, eyes closed, listening to him play. ‘I want to know… you,’ she said, when he was done. ‘What’s your story, Piano-man?’
He smiled at the nickname; she had never called him that before. ‘My story? You already know my story.’
She shook her head and slightly furrowed her brows. ‘Nope, I know all these disconnected bits and pieces. I want to know the complete story. Specifically, about you and jazz. How you two fell in love. The love story of David Greenberg.’
David walked over to the sofa and sat down next to her. He lifted her legs gently, placed them on his lap and smiled as her frown lines dissipated. ‘The love story of David Greenberg…’ He chuckled. ‘Okay, Miss artist-writer, I think I can give you a
pretty good story. So, you know how I told you about my high school science teacher?’
‘Who became a jazz teacher?’
‘Yeah. Him. Jack. So, imagine… I’m fourteen, it’s my freshman year of high school, and there’s this jazz class.’ David smiled at the memory.
David had signed up for the class without even having heard the music. His only goal at that time had been to take a class – just not his mother’s – that would give him credit for knowing how to play the piano. And playing the piano, teenage David had thought privately, was something he was pretty good at.
‘You’re taking the jazz class?’ one of his friends had asked him at the time.
‘Yeah,’ he had said airily.
‘Why?’ his friend had asked.
‘Why not?’ he had replied.
The friend had smirked. ‘Taught by the science teacher?’
‘He’s a professional bass player,’ David had replied, which was the truth but also born out of some strange sense of loyalty towards someone he didn’t even know yet.
Now, he said to Ameena, ‘My mother taught piano at my high school, classical piano, and my dad adored her – both her and her music – so that’s the kind of music I grew up with, Bach, Haydn, sometimes a bit of opera. I had no idea what improvised music was. All I knew how to do, thanks to my mother, was to convert notes on a page to sound.’ He laughed. ‘Basically, I was clueless.’
Ameena smiled too, at her own imagined throwback image of an adolescent David – conscientious, earnest, a bit nerdy, eager to do whatever it took to shine at school – and felt a kind of unexpected tenderness. Oh Piano-man, she thought – a tiny, private, slightly shocking thought – I may just be falling in love with you a little bit. A little bit. May. Just.
‘So, get this,’ David continued, oblivious to her private thoughts, ‘you know how the other day we were talking about life being about moments, right, how chance and moments and random luck can change one’s life? Well, I had a couple of these moments of my own, and one of them was that the summer before this jazz class, we all received a cassette in the mail…’
