by Sumana Roy
‘Only when he’s singing.’
He looked at me, as if that was the answer.
‘Oh, so one cannot be mad always just as a singer cannot keep singing all the time?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’ He wasn’t looking at me anymore.
‘How frequently is one mad?’
‘Don’t confuse this with riyaz – it’s not like practising singing of course!’
‘What is it like then?’
‘How would I know?’ He wasn’t irritated but curious, as if he too was interested in the answers.
‘How do they know that the man next door is mad?’
‘Perhaps because he throws things? I don’t know.’
‘Others throw things too – sportsmen throw balls into baskets. They are mad too, you think?’ I laugh when I think about my response now. I must have been a precocious girl.
I only remember parts of the conversation. There were more silences than sounds. At one point, I think, I asked whether the voice of men sounded different from those who were not mad and he asked me what I meant. ‘Like a rainy sky sounds different from a sunny sky?’
I now wonder where my parents and sister had vanished for such a long time. Had they taken my sister to the dentist to get her braces?
‘Will you take me to see the madman, please?’ I suddenly told him. I hadn’t known, until then, that I was capable of imagining such a request.
‘But… how would you know it’s him?’ asked my Music teacher. He was winding his watch. Had it stopped? He did this often, so I couldn’t be sure.
‘Please take me there once, before my parents come. I promise I won’t make a sound. I’ll just see him and come back, like I look at gods in temples – I won’t open my mouth, I promise,’ I said.
I don’t remember the rest of the pleading and bargaining, nothing except the silence that followed. The only sound might have been the screeching of the iron gate of the madman’s house being dragged over concrete.
There was nothing inside the house. Not even light. It had been emptied of all its contents, as if asking why houses should only be containers. Emptied of its residents too, for there were no humans anywhere. All the things – and there really weren’t too many things – I’d heard being thrown out of the house lay on the ground, resting, calm, their passion all spent. They had a kind of poise that fallen animals and humans lack. They didn’t look like they were in pain. These were not my observations but my Music teacher’s as we came out of the house and on to its compound.
We found no madman and no mad things. Except one which my Music teacher carried home in a cycle rickshaw.
A harmonium whose black keys had been scooped out. I put my fingers inside the holes. Suddenly the harmonium, a thing of no interest to me, became a toy, a thing of the imagination – a piggy bank where one could store more things than musical notes. ‘I’ll take this, please?’ I asked, restless to show it to my sister as soon as she was back from wherever she’d gone.
‘No! It’s mine!’ It seemed to me that he might cry. ‘How can there be music without opposites? See, they’ve taken away all the black keys. Only white? Why did they? These are the mad keys – without them there would be no… Can’t you see that this is why we don’t touch the black keys of the harmonium with our thumb when we’re playing?’ He said all this while trying to fit his fingers into where the black keys had been.
Later, when I’d study William Blake at university and use ‘Without contraries there is no progression’ as an epigraph to write essays on the poet, I’d find myself thinking about that evening in 1986. I’d ask myself whether a girl – or a ‘little boy’ – like me had been Blake’s neighbour too. I’d read these lines from his poem ‘Mad Song’ and wonder whether he had given us one truth about madness, a madman’s insider truth: ‘For light doth seize my brain/With frantic pain.’ Did madness hurt, like a headache, like stomach cramps, or a growing pain in the legs, or even like a heartbreak?
My Music teacher stopped coming after that. His last words to me, as he put the black key-less harmonium on his lap on the cycle rickshaw, were: ‘The world always wants to take away our black keys… Those who are mad are lucky. Madness is only for people on earth. It doesn’t exist anywhere else, not on heaven, not in death.’
My parents didn’t believe me when I told them who the madman was. ‘Are you mad?’ my mother screamed at me, again.
I still check nervously for the black keys on the harmonium when I attend concerts. And I wonder about what happened to the black keys on mine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree, a work of nonfiction, Missing: A Novel, and Out of Syllabus: Poems.
Her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, LARB, Drunken Boat, the Prairie Schooner, Berfrois, The Common, and other journals. She lives in Siliguri and Sonipat, where she teaches at Ashoka University.
