Freedom

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

I remember looking at the moon and thinking why it follows us to the street and the woods and along the route of my father’s scooter. I must have been six or seven but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that I could take the moon to my terrace and the courtyard. It would follow me to my grandma’s house and to my school on the annual celebration nights.

– Why does it move with us?

I remember asking my father, to which he replied

– It doesn’t move with you. It’s so far that your movement is negligible from its point of view and you seem to remain at the same position. That is to say, the moon doesn’t move with you, you remain at the same place relative to the moon.

A long conversation followed owing to the untameable curiosity that only a child can posses and uninhibited flow of knowledge that only a parent can facilitate. At the end of it, I took away the following lesson

‘With increased distance, you seem to remain more at the same place relative to the thing that is far away.’

The idea in my head was not so polished but that was the essence of it. So, I started observing the phenomenon. On train rides, the far away mountains moved slower, they seemed to stay with me for long, while the nearby bushes rushed away.

As I grew up, ‘thing’ was substituted with ‘people’. Do people who are closer to you go away soon or are in the haste of going away and the ones who are far – geographically, temporally or in a relation – want to stick to you, pursue you for long?

—-

I was let go of work which I did not enjoy. It was something to cheer about so I went to a bar in the southern part of the town the day I was given the pink slip. It was a nice cozy bar stuffed away in a corner in the bustling locality of Colaba in Bombay. On the table was a flag with a note that said –

‘In case you want to share the table with a stranger, please turn this flag upside down.’

In the hope of sharing the table with a pretty girl in a short dress, non-existent, I did as asked and ordered for a Pitcher for myself. It was 4 in the evening and I was waiting for my drink to arrive when a man in grey overcoat and shabby hair with a book in hand came panting and took the chair on my table. He sat there. And sat there. Reading his book. I tried to look at the title but couldn’t. The pages were yellow. It was an old book. I said

-Hi.

He looked up and said

-Hi.

And went back to reading his book.

My beer arrived but he did not place any order. I offered him a mug out of courtesy and he took it.

– Which book is that?
– Oh this one? This is a collection of poems by Robert Frost.
– Robert Frost. Miles to go before I sleep?
– Yes. And many more. Just hear this one.

And he read one from the book. It was about a man who was irritated by a bird singing by his house and shooed it away only to realise that it was his fault to not let the bird do what it was supposed to and that there was something wrong in silencing a song.

– Tomorrow is Indian Independence Day, right?

It was.

– I feel that freedom is nothing more than allowing someone to do whatever she or he wants without compromising on the freedom of others. Freedom both defines and limits itself. It’s a recursive idea.

– So it means I cannot kick you off the chair because you are free to sit here?

– Yes. And that is because you have given me the right to sit here by turning that flag upside down. Without the idea of rights, absolute freedom would result in chaos. However, both are totally different concepts. Therefore, you see how critical the constitution was to regulate the newly obtained freedom of 1947.

So the discussion had actually went from a Robert Frost poem to Indian Independence.

– The poet exercised his freedom to shoo away the bird compromising the freedom of bird to sing. It was an ideological conflict which resulted in remorse and ceasing of the song.

That was heavy stuff. I came back.

—-

When I came back, I saw a letter slipped in from under my door. It was from the girl with whom I was going out for a while. The essence of the note was that she had found a man – ‘boyfriend’, she wrote – and that I should stop contacting her.

I pondered over my freedom of going to her house and asking her for explanations and forcing her to be with me but that would compromise her freedom to leave me. So, I threw the idea out of the window. She was quite close to me and therefore she was in the haste of going away. She was the bush near the railway tracks. I cried and slept to my own sobbing.

The next morning, I was woken up by the voice of a faceless girl next door who practiced Carnatic Music. And as was the habit, I woke up, took my harmonica and started complementing her music. We both had never seen each other, but I could recognise her voice amidst any noise whatsoever.

It had been an year since we had been doing this. Almost five months back, the girl whom I dated had gone to her apartment and silenced her because it disturbed her morning sleep.

Today, it was a Happy Independence Day – from the miseries of life. Today, it was a Happy Independence Day – for no one silenced any song.

To me, although she stayed close, she was the moon. Or it could be the fact that since she was the moon, she stayed close. She was free to go away, but she didn’t. She was free to sing, and I was free to play the harmonica.

Two freedoms, one music.