Time Travel

Time Travel 

It was a warm April evening, the alleyway which led up to the apartment block wore a deserted look because of the curfew. A few strollers had stepped out to relieve the tedium of a cloistered life by pacing in front of their porches. A police patrol car would drift by occasionally to ensure people were keeping indoors. The pandemic had transformed the robust neighbourhood into a valley of seclusion, a ghost town whose inhabitants had retreated into the recesses of their apartments to cast a suspicious look on stragglers who dared to linger in the silence of the fast melting April twilight.  

From the refuge of her bedroom she could take in the reduced animation in the adjacent stree with the onset of the evening. From some distant apartment block the strains of a melody drifted into her hermitage. Someone was harping a familiar tune on the strings of a classical guitar but the name of the composer eluded her. It triggered a profound sense of yearning in her, the slow soft cadences building up to a pitch of longing before dissipating into an abyss of loss. The music kept on tugging at her feelings long after it melted into the thicket of the night. 

The next day she woke up with the same sense of unease, a surfeit of emotions she could not contain. She had to find the lost trail, the tantalizing spin of emotions which carried traces of a lost time. In a corner of her bedroom tucked away amidst the paraphernalia of a bygone era the faded teak wood instrument stood gathering dust. The metal wounding around the base strings had become rusty, the tuning pegs were jammed with dirt, the orange sunburnt face of the instrument with an intricate motif that circled the sound hole had lost its gloss. 

She did what she could to revive the once handsome looking timber body, oiling the pegs and tightening the slack of the strings to a perfect pitch till they yielded a mellow sound. Her fingers were stiff as they plucked at the strings, the sounds that emerged were staccato falling apart in a disjointed heap. It was an awkward correspondence between old lovers who had chanced upon one another after years. But she lingered on trying to coax out a melody from the fragmented notes. Closing her eyes she tried to revive the notes of the haunting tune one at a time, her fingers faltering , missing the mark falling short of a note or two. Gradually she found her way into the wave of affect that the song inspired and it lifted her spirits. The notes assembled themselves and soon the lost melody was at her finger tips as they gently caressed the old instrument. How could she forget the tune? Leo Brouwer's “One Day in November" evocative of loss and longing brimming with memories, dovetailing with the strands of her solitary life. 

The music opened up a portal, it transported her to a different milieu, perhaps a much richer timescape dense with memories where she encountered a lithe twenty something young undergrad fond of wild rambles, drifting through the busy thoroughfare on warm afternoons after college. Fleet street with its dilapidated colonial mansions, wild assortment of foreigners, gramophone stores playing Jim Reeves, inviting you to a slow waltz as life spinned on in mazy circles, the riotous street vendors peddling colorful knickknacks, the second hand bookstores, book nooks with their dusty shelves stacked with out of print copies, a liquor store where men had queued up to get heady in the summer heat and sandwich places slapping all sorts of ssauces in between buttered slices stuffed with vegetables and cottage cheese. Life unravelled itself as a slow whirlwind playing with momentum taking you off your feet once in a while in a dizzy state of excitement as you hovered in the upper reaches; the push and shove of bodies on the street transformed into this tug and sway in a carnival of lost souls. Popolo was a robust town, with life surging all about you, you could surf around in the endless cacophony meet characters straight out of a Dickensian novel with their own idiosyncrasies and crazy streaks. Everyone had a unique style of performing the rowdy street vendors, the old Sindhi with a twinkle in his eye behind the counter of the antique store, the ice candy man with his colorful ice golas mixing up the syrup with the skill of a bartender. It was an Avenue of ceaseless delights to which the hippies and firangis travelling on a shoe string budget dressed in harem pants added an element of exotica. It was in a narrow alleyway that took off from Fleet Street , named Marquis street that she had chanced upon the queer looking shop tucked away into the cavity of an old mansion. The signboard read Zogoiby's Everything Tuneful. From behind the glass door there emanated a strange concoction of sounds, the sagacious notes from a grand piano, the melancholy drone of a violin, the grave sounding notes which she guessed was produced by a cello all blending in to create a surreal universe of sounds. It had become her daily ritual to pause at Zogoiby's on her way to the subway from college and admire it’s strange architecture and even stranger sound that could conjure up visions of long lost cities. Music that dated back ages brought to animation and when the notes cut through the frigid air of a dusty town it could catapult you as if in a time capsule to places that you had only read about in books. It was at Zogoiby that she would end up picking her first stringed instrument, a nylon string guitar hanging by its slender neck with a label that read Granada. The burnished body of the instrument had survived the ravages of the years nestled in a dark corner of her bedroom and on that warm April morning she found out that the instrument could still perform its magic, one only had to pick it up and unlock its mysteries.