Let it Be...

There are sullen memories that refuse to leave even when they no longer swell your heart and send a flush like they did. With each new moment, the last frame is erased clean. But sometimes, just sometimes...it revisits. They come often, wrapped up in a rhythm of a familiar tune.

Like the soft, mournful moaning of Adam Lavine’s ‘She will be loved’ that turn in the wheels of a 1987 green Maruti on the wide, expansive roads of dry September Chandigarh. 3pm lazy drive to the office, when all thoughts rested on the song and we drove with a heavy heart in memory of the midnight song a someone had once crooned. And another autumn romance that flickered and died in the season of decay. Or a sweetly morbid ‘Autumn Leaves’ that races to a Mohali room, where a friend had serenaded a November sun, while the beta tape captured poetry in motion. Opeth’s ‘Hope Leaves’ is a road-trip to Helsinki’s alleys that never ended in the still of the black night – where the dead played merry and the winds played God.

Kulu-Manali stretch in the summer of mammoth landslides, when we slept out of unpacked suitcases in a friendly neighbourhood picnic in the summer of 1990 that was spent in a 1984 white Maruti with ‘Ram Lakhan’ and the season’s flavour ‘Kabutar Ja.’
Coldplay’s ‘Trouble,’ ‘Yellow’ is a frequent transport to the sterile corridors of a early morning advertising agency that took colour of mental infestation through the day. Then of course is my room, with this very monitor, many heartbreaks, many pages, many tears, many smiles, many flutters, many a touch – the mellifluous melodies have poured words on paper too often. Audioslave, a constant companion on a January Delhi- Noida toll road. Work to deception to deep friendship – all in a day’s work and my first road trip back home with a willing companion – no a dear friend. Or when the mirror danced with me on ‘A Delicate’ and ‘Life’ morning.

And then the reason for all music – the Irish flute, the Danish violin, the Spanish guitar and the English piano – and of course Christmas – a beautiful medley of all things ‘Train,’ ‘Jimi Hendrix,’ ‘Janis,’ ‘Van Halen,’ ‘Led Zeppelin,’ ‘Pearl Jam,’ ‘Neil Diamond,’ ‘Sinatra’ too, ‘Joe Satriani,’ ‘Metallica,’ ‘Megadeth,’ ‘Rage against the Machine,’ ‘Red Hot Chilli Peppers,’ ‘System of a Down,’ ‘Dream Theatre,’ ‘U2’,‘Nirvana’, ‘Oasis’…

There is a new wave that’ll take me back to this moment later maybe – a certain ‘Coloublind’ Dave Mathews questions ‘Where are you going?’ Or could it be ‘beautiful’ Garbage rolling in when the ‘Saints are coming’ on a Greenday. Maybe maybe maybe…

I’ll always have my music*…