There is a loud thunderclap. A few seconds later, there is a long silver line that flashes across the sky. Even in the night, I can still make out that the clouds are dark and enormous and might rain the entire night and the day after. The skyline of the city becomes more beautiful as a strange darkness engulfs the city. The falling water sweeps all over the city hand in hand with the cool wind. They both dance around in innumerable patterns across the narrow alleys and the broad highways of the city. From the window, I can see that there aren't any bright lights in the city that could dare to look into the eyes of the dark sky. Even the lamp posts glowed dimly with their heads bowed and eyes stuck forever to the roads.
I always wonder at the rain.
Water from an infinite reservoir called sea is pumped up to numerous small and foamy reservoirs in the sky through a mechanism of density variation powered by the very ancient sun. It is then run down through a filtration unit and pressure regulators. Finally it is discharged on to the ground through a million nozzles. Drip. Drip. Drip.
I didn't notice when she had come in, for when I turned I saw her standing beside me looking at the rain pouring through the city below. She looked at me and smiled meekly.
She then turned around and lay down on the bed. "How was your day?" she asked.
"Nothing glorious!" I said. "I had a few lectures. And I almost had a breakthrough with my thesis, but then it turned out to be a dead end as usual. What about yours?"
"Well, the same stuff, just a different day." She sounded tired. "Or maybe it's the same day every day." She then closed her eyes. "I have a bit of headache, though."
"A bit? Are you sure?" I asked her. "Tell me that you didn't see the doctor even today?" I couldn't conceal the annoyance in my voice; and why should I, when she wouldn't see a doctor for the headaches that she has on every other day? A couple of times I fixed up a few appointments, but she just wouldn't. She opened her eyes and looked at me and like all other days shook her head.
"And even though it is useless may I ask why?"
"I didn't feel like going to." She said while trying her best to hide a grin.
How do you respond to such an argument? Logically, you can blast numerous loopholes into it, but for any argument to make sense to her, it would require a little less indifference in her for this topic. I let my case rest for the nth number of times.
That night when we slept, I could still hear the rain dripping onto the roofs and the city roads and it brought a strange mirth into the calmness of the night. The sound of raindrops was as good as the lullabies that my mother sang when I was small and which I remember in bits and pieces. As I lay on the bed listening to the falling rain drops, I couldn't tell when sleep overcame me.
And then I woke up.
It was a Liszt piece, I could tell. And the sound was coming from outside the room. I looked out of the window and could see that it was still dark outside, though the rain had slowed down. She wasn't in the bed, I noticed. I then looked at my phone and saw the numbers 3:14 AM glowing on it. I switched on the bedside lamp. In the light, the slumber haze mellowed and I could hear the music more clearly. It was Franz Liszt's 'Liebesträume'.
This piece, the German name of which literally means 'dreams of love', was based on a poem by Freiligrath that sang about an unconditional love. As the notes fell one after another in the silence of that rainy night, I started feeling something like an ancient nostalgia. Every time a note struck this nostalgia changed forms. Every passing period I found myself feeling a nostalgia which though might seem strange felt as if someone might have experienced that same shade of the emotion in a different place and era while listening to this piece. As it moved towards the climax, it felt as if I had collected every quantum of nostalgia that the piece had evoked till now. Feelings of love both fulfilled and unsolicited ran through me at the same time. I was loved, I was hated, I got spurned, I felt pleasure, I did charity, I smelt chaos, I sensed calm- I felt all of those various myriad emotions and feelings that we usually bundle into a single word called 'love'. And I didn't seem to remember when but I was already out of the room and moving steadily and slowly in the direction of the music. There was gravity in that music that seemed to follow the inverse proportionality law: the more close I got to the music, the more I was attracted to it. In those few fleeting moments, I was nothing less than a rat looking for the Pied Piper.
It was her. She was playing that music on the piano in the spare room.
I stood at the doorstep and watched her as she played out the last portion of it. Her hands moved smoothly with calculated precision as if she was even calculating the force with which she struck the keys. I haven't seen anyone own anything the way she owned the keyboard. With her back straight, she sat on that stool sweeping her hands across the length of the keyboard. There was a harmony between her, the piano and the music. There was a symmetry to the way the three fitted into each other. This musical enchantment carried on till she pressed the last notes of the piece. After which I do not remember anything except waking up.
I sat up and looked outside the window. The rain had now become a drizzle. And then I remembered the music from the night. It felt a bizarre and surreal experience as I tried to remember it.
"Good morning." She said walking up to me. She had already dressed up for work like always. "Slept well?" she asked and handed me a cup of coffee that smelt like earth after rain. There wasn't anything unusual on her face.
"Yeah." I said. "Except the part where you start playing Liszt in the dead of the night."
Her eyebrows and lips twisted to express surprise. "What are you talking about?" she asked.
"You were playing Liebesträume on that piano in the spare room in the night. And I must tell you that you played it like a professional." I clarified.
"I wish I could do that. That's one of my favorite pieces. But I didn't play anything yesterday night." She sounded surprised. "And it's only you who finds my playing good; my piano buddies still laugh at me because I often miss a beat."
I liked it when she played the piano. But she hadn't mastered it after all. And the way she played it in the night with such a sublime mastery, that even Liszt would have appreciated her rendition of his piece. This meant that there was only one logical explanation to the curious series of memory that I had. And she said it out loud for me.
"You must have dreamt it." She said. "You are really good at that." She then laughed. Dreams of love. I also smiled, inwardly.
That must be the most apt inference. The more I thought about it, the more I decided on that it was a dream. But having said that, I must admit that it felt extremely real and strange.
After she had gone, I performed my early morning rituals and then went to the kitchen to see if there was any breakfast. Of course I knew that I would find something after all, because there wasn't a day when she hadn't made breakfast for both of us. As I picked up a plate of sandwiches and started moving to the dining table, I happened to glance up. And then I saw the piano in the spare room.
It didn't look different from the last time that I had seen it. The same set of vagrant articles remained seated in the same places of the room around it. The spider webs on the book shelf also looked the same as if they hadn't grown or moved since the last time. It must be out of mere curiosity, that instead of directly going to the table, I entered the room with the plate of sandwiches.
It even smelt the same. The air hadn't changed a bit. I stepped ahead. The piano was now in front of me. I could see the same mediocrity emanating from the instrument. The uprights, the pedals and the keys- they looked as ordinary and old as before. Only there was one small change: the film of dust on the keys was gone.
©Zeeshan Akhtar