Fairy Dust and Jazz

prologue

December 2007

Prologue

Maaeri

‘Ab ka karoon

ka se kahoon

ae Maaeri?’

The day my mother passed made me realize that human intuition is fallible, just like all our other senses. It wasn’t an extraordinary day, just like the days before, and if there was any inner voice to listen to, I certainly ignored it. There weren’t any signs. Hell, I wasn’t awake for the first half of it, not until it was time to play at the bar. No spidey sense went off when the worst happened, and there was no obvious billboard on my way to work that asked if today was the day that everything would change.

It was only when I came back home to find my father in my room that was something amiss. For the six years I’d lived with him I knew he wouldn’t voluntarily subject himself to my company, not unless it was imperative.

“Your mother’s gone.” His tone was ruthlessly neutral, and seconds passed before I even forgot to respond. There wasn’t any questioning where she’d gone, or why he was telling me if she’d gone some place I could go, too. Instantly the memory of our last conversation came to me, and I hadn’t even told her how much I love her. It had been a two minute conversation over three weeks ago, and really, the highlight of the call was that she woke me between my untimely slumber.

Sinking into the couch I thought about what’d happen next. Of her sweet face wrapped in white, and the funeral. Well, the cremation. Mother was always firm on being Hindu, even if I wasn’t any kind of believer of God’s. Now, even more so, I refused to acknowledge any of that. I could only think of the resort, of what was left behind, and the days that would pass before I decided where to end up next. Questions that never came up before danced around me mockingly. Would I still keep singing? Would I come back to London?

Was my mother proud of who I’d become?

“I suppose you’ll be making your way back.”

I’d forgotten he was in the same room. Somehow, thinking about my mother in his presence made me feel queasy. Like I was tarnishing something pure. Like it wasn’t right.

“I suppose.” I told him without looking up, acutely aware of his shrewd grey eyes boring into me.

He didn’t ask many questions after that but I guessed there wasn’t much left to say anyway. We weren’t very close for father and son, and we never did have much in common. Nothing but the taste for jazz and the old jazz records he left behind with my mother. Records that were now, legally, mine.

The fact was that it hadn’t yet fully hit me in the head that my mother was gone. As the seconds passed it sank in that this would take a while to sink in. It felt like it might take a long while. When I couldn’t breathe even after that, I accepted slowly that this was the last crack in my broken down armour.

In a dark and dreary mist of solitude, I felt the need to hold onto the only person I could now call family. Looking at him now made me sink further into the abyss. Depending on my father was what got me into this mess in the first place.

“How did it happen?”

“An accident, I’ve been told.”

“And the other guy?”

My father, it seemed, was thinking of what to say, or perhaps how to put it. “I’m told it was a hit and run, Nathaniel.”

The thing about consolation was that it never solved anything and I knew what to expect after this, what people would say to me, with that look of pity in their eyes, no less. Knowing what had to be done didn’t make any of this better or easier. Knowing that I had to be strong didn’t make me feel stronger. I didn’t know what to expect from my father but I didn’t like that deplorable look on his face.

Strength or no strength, I wasn’t going to let him see me break. Not in front of him, anyway.