O2

Rough Sketches

~Quincy~

  I grew up in a little cottage in a field, away from the modernized cities of India in which I was born. My parents were often away on business trips at the time, leaving me in the care of my grandmother. She was not an old lady who baked or knitted, but rather one who crafted all kinds of marvellous tales. Every night, before I was tucked into my hard cold bed, she would tell a story of bats and vampires, of castles and dragons, of short people and rings, of damsels in distress. Yet, one fine evening, after I had asked about the "back-stories" of my mother and father countless times, Amita told a tale that was certainly not as fictional as the rest.

   Your father, she began, my son, started out as a door-to-door businessman. He didn't sell magazines like the others. He didn't have super-food or energy drinks in his bags. Instead, he carried around a violin every day, and he played. He demonstrated the instrument for many people; the last man he advertised to, a round potbellied thing, was so astounded by the sound's quality that he purchased it for six trillion American dollars. Now, Kishen had much more money than he had planned to obtain. He already had his dream-house, a bungalow by a rushing stream. But in the time that Kishen had played the violin, he developed a passion for it and felt he needed to continue. He left India to go to a music shop in Tokyo where he had previously seen a used Hardanger Fiddle in the front window.  He shoved the leftover currency (save for a few thousand dollars) toward a man in the corner of the store and begged on his knees for lessons. The corner man smirked greedily and said, 'You have yourself a deal."

      After seven years of training on all 8 strings, Amita continued, my son gratefully thanked the cash-hungry yet wise instructor and left the building feeling a boost in talent and pride, unaware that he had nowhere to go. After hitchhiking his way to Japan, Kishen had stayed with a man named Daichi and his greedy family for the past several years. He could never return to his homeland to see how much he had worried I, his mother, and was hardly able to pay off Daichi. Once more, Kishen played for the townspeople; this time, he set out a large clay pot for spare change. His fiddling, inspired by the folktales of Norway, brought tears to their eyes (and cash to his cup). Daichi's family, the Matsuokas, delightedly shared his profit until they had more than enough, then moved into a phenomenal chateau on their own private island, becoming kind enough to reward their roommate with their old abode. Even with a slightly decent paid-off home and vegetables growing in the backyard, Kishen still needed to support himself. The strings on his Hardanger Fiddle were wearing down.

      For the next few weeks, your father started to use new techniques in his performance. He plucked his Hardanger fiddle whenever playing a song about a chicken. . . Amita drifted off and sipped her lemon tea while I nearly fell out of her arms snickering. And, she continued, "used big sticky staccato notes to put emphasis on the tune. One day, after playing an exceptionally emotional solo, a thin girl who looked more like a stick figure than a woman skittered over, her unnaturally red curly pigtails bouncing behind her. She took out a pochette, a tiny form of a violin, and, in the international language invented so long ago, asked Kishen to play a duet.

      Her name was Mayu, and although she wasn't beautiful in the traditional Japanese sense, she was pure of heart and soul. She and my son bowed out a deep, resonating melody. It eventually shifted to a tune that expressed the very meaning of "walking on air", and ended in a romantic, flowing composition. For three minutes after their 'musical courtship', as your daddy referred to it, they stared at each other, their eyes sparkling with new love. They were truly meant to be.

     It turned out that Mayu was homeless, so Kishen invited her to stay for the night. He prepared a stew of roast carrots for two, and they ate by the furnace, talking between spoonfuls about their lives.