ఆజాద్In 2021, on the seventh of May, a message rushed through the veins of optic fibres in India, with the urgency and grief of a primal shriek from a newly birthed child — across borders, through entire oceans — resting on the doorstep of my phone screen in Sweden, marking its presence with an onerous knock. That my father had transitioned from the physical realm because of COVID.
It’s 2022, the eighth of May, to be precise. I was sitting on the shore of the most populous beach in Barcelona, playing my father’s favourite songs on a speaker loud enough for the waves to carry them to wherever my father was at the moment.
A Telugu song, titled ‘Kannepillavani Kannullavani’ from one of his favorite movies, ‘Aakali Rajyam’ (‘a nation of hunger’) — the CD of which had in our rented home — disturbs the quiet of the sunburnt white women soaking in the light.
‘కావ్యమైనదీ తలపో పలుకో మనసో..
…….
సంగీతం l నువ్వయితే
సాహిత్యం నేనౌతా’
( ‘ the one that became a story
is it the thought?
is it the sound?
or is it the heart?
If you are the music,
I am the lyric ‘ )
It’s been years since I had been so close to the womb of the sea. I haven’t been to south India in five years, where I was born and where my entire family has lived all their lives. I hadn’t seen, smelt, or touched my father for four years before he passed away. I couldn’t be there for his last journey back into the soil.
Where I come from, when people die we weep so loudly that we pull the entire universe into the orbit of our loss — from the sky to the sea into the arms of our sorrow, the whole street at a standstill, a grief that disrupts, that forces everyone to feel within the depths of their being that tomorrow will be a different day. A day without the one who lived, loved and laughed among us. You surround yourself with people who knew the one you lost, and you hold onto each other, soothing your heart in the warmth of a collective lament. A proper farewell. A celebration of the years lived, an elegy for those unlived.
To meaningfully grieve from a distance, in foreign lands and under skies where my father never lived, where no one’s tomorrow is different from today due to his absence — that hasn’t been possible for me.
I take the music he — and I — love through the streets of Berlin, where I live now. Emanating from a speaker slinging from my shoulder, we softly write ourselves into the sonic history of this city. I carry my father and the grief of his loss, wrapped up in the notes of favourite singers crooning our favourite poetry. His memories walk with me through this music, gently nudging my heart, quietly shedding their flesh into my blood vessels. It’s the skin my paused sorrow chooses to wear, at least till the moment I get to weep at the feet of his grave to my being’s content.
No one in this city will ever meet my father. They will never know the depth of his eyes, the breadth of his smile, and the sheer ease with which he moved from being a stranger to a beloved of anyone who was lucky enough to rest in his shade.
But whether they know it or not, they meet the memories of my father every time they listen to these songs on the streets. Every time they cross paths with me, they are caressing my grief — and my divine submission to the paths it lets my heart take.
The memories of a sky become clouds on its canvas. I’d like to think there will always be a cloud — a memoriam, or a gravestone of sorts — for my father on these cold and alienating European skies. And that its presence will feel like a warm hug to any being displaced and alone in their mourning.
*
పెద్దన్న
శ్రీరామ్ పుప్పాల
విజయ నాదెళ్ళ
స వెం రమేశ్
లిఖిత్ కుమార్ గోదా
కృష్ణుడు
ఏ.కె. ప్రభాకర్
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