The piano was a large ordinary chunk of mass placed almost centrally in the room. It was surrounded on the right by a washing machine, a couple of blankets and a few suitcases and trolleys and on the left by a broken chair, a three -shelved wooden bookcase with around thirty odd books mostly on Physics and History on the two lower shelves and a complex network of spider webs on the top one. It was pushed back to the wall leaving behind enough space between the piano and the door for people to walk around or populate more redundant species of matter into the room or to place a stool and, if one wanted to, produce a harmonic, repetitive sound pleasant to the ear using the instrument.
I had seen better versions of the kind of piano that it was. I remember one of these from the music classes in kindergarten and from one of the church choirs. The piano in the church looked grand with floral patterns carved on its wooden frame which also protruded out with beautiful wooden designs. The keys, white and black both, were stainless. There was an air of royalty around that piano.
This piano however looked ordinary and old. The wooden frame was upright and polished to a deep brown shade below a layer of dust. The keys, white and black both, sparkled in the fluorescent light of the room from beneath their film of dust. The pedals glistened with their cupric smile in the same haze. It was certainly an unremarkable piece of musical instrument.
"I didn't feel like playing it", she said.
"Fair, enough, but would you feel like playing it anytime in the near future?" I asked her.
She looked at me and pursed her lips. Maybe she could sense that I found it a bit out of place that she hadn't touched the piano even once. "Do you know that the piano is basically just a process of selective hammering?" She started speaking and slowly moving towards me with the coffee in her hand at the same time. "When you press a key, a chain reaction starts which leads to rapid motion of a hammer which then strikes a string to produce sound. If you could find a blacksmith these days and chanced upon his shop, you could hear the same clinking and clanking. The only difference is that the blacksmith doesn't care about the sound that his hammer makes, he cares about how he hammers. The pianist on the other hand is deeply concerned with the nature of that sound, which are of course controlled by the hammering of various strings in the background. But come to think of it, the sound from the piano depends upon the force of the hammer and which string it strikes, almost akin to a blacksmith, whose forgery depends upon which part of metal he strikes and how hard. I think that a pianist is nothing but a seasoned blacksmith with a more fancy hammer and anvil."
She had reached me by now, while I was still trying to circumnavigate round her analogy. She put her coffee mug down and her hands on my shoulders.
"That's a very different way of looking at it", I said "But don't you think that you are bringing an artist to the level of a vocational trade? Aren't you dragging a pianist to the doorstep of a blacksmith?"
"Not at all. I am raising the blacksmith to the altitude of a pianist and calling black-smithy an art." She said.
She had amazed me once again. Only she could speak so profound yet so common, science yet so poetic! Where does she grow these beautiful thoughts?
Apart from bewildering me she also was able to sweep out the germ of a thought that had popped up in my mind earlier, for as I slept that day, I couldn't even remember that I had found it odd that she hadn't been around the piano even once. In the darkened room, as I slept beside her, I couldn't help but notice the gleaming innocence on her face in the haze of the yellowish light that entered the darkened room from a slit in the curtain on the window.
I would have told you that the next day was like any other day, but I wouldn't, because it wasn't. It was the day that she played that piano for the first time.
… to be continued
©Zeeshan Akhtar