I dragged my feet through the snow down a street in Toronto. Passing between crowds of people, cocooned in coats, I crossed the intersection. As I reached the other end, where people were huddled in a bus shelter, thick smoke escaping their nostrils, a faint sound echoed through the streets.
I followed it. My feet paced faster with the rhythm. Music had taught me one thing about time: it either moved slowly, or so quickly that some notes passed unheard. But whatever the tempo, each one left its own impression.
The man, clad in a hand-knitted sweater, held a violin, wrapped in duct tape, playing with his eyes closed. Like an old friend, there was an unspoken connection between us.
Once again, I was lost in the music. The cooing of pigeons, people recording videos on their phones, and car horns with their own rhythm all became background noise. I was sitting back on my tall metal stool, hands on the piano keys, sifting through melodies in my head.
When I was a child, I snuck into music stores to play piano. There was something about the weighted keys of a grand piano; a precision of sound. A piano keyboard felt cheap and plasticy as if someone with a bad ear, paid minimum wage, had slapped it together with bits of old parts.
The owner of LMusico, a burly man with wrinkles on his forehead, didn’t like children. I took my place on the leather stool in front of the Yamaha grand, felt the shining keys. My eyes skipped over to him, standing behind the counter, rushing to cash a customer out. His footsteps were short like a staccato measure in a bar of music that crept up without notice. He pulled me up by the ear, took a lint-free cloth out of his cardigan and started rubbing the keys. Then he dragged me out the door, wagging his finger, saying I had damaged his piano.
He gave me a forced and broken smile when I walked into the store with my parents the next day.
Mother, my Ami, wearing a Persian dress with tiny glass beads, smiled at the man that hated me. She glanced at Baba, who had his hands in his pant pockets, and was looking around suspiciously. Ami started fingering through music books on a rack probably looking for Persian folk songs.
“Let me know if you’d like assistance,” said the man behind the counter. I led Baba to the back of the store.
We moved past the piano keyboards lined up by the door; past the ceiling-high racks of music books, alphabetized in their sleeves. Boxes of drum sets were stacked with a sale sign and six grand pianos sat in luxurious angles.
Baba wouldn’t spend so much on something he thought was a waste of time. He’d say playing a piano attracted the jinn. For him, only three things existed in life: praying namaaz five times a day, making good money, and having a job that didn’t force someone to turn their head with a sour look.
“Taimoor, play something.” It was the first time he’d asked me to play the piano. I thought I’d misheard him, but he said it again. This time with a demanding voice. Suddenly my eyes were searching for Ami. I closed the gap between us, stood by the leather stool, but my heart was beating fast. A rush of embarrassment came over me. He only wanted to see if I was worth wasting money on. I didn’t play, and we walked out with a sixty-one keys piano keyboard.
When we got home that evening, my fingers weren’t graceful enough. I practiced scales from the pocket-sized book, Basics of Piano, for hours, but ended up hurting my wrists. The pain didn’t stop me. I knew I focused too much on playing rather than feeling what I played. Every note sounded the same. Dum dum dum. By the end of that week, Baba laid down rules the night I’d moved it into my room.
Morning: not allowed to play because the neighbours were asleep.
During the day: only for an hour between 3pm and 5pm.
Evening: a death warrant for my piano.
In the comfort of my room, I started creating melodies in my head, listened to Chopin, trying to hold on to each note. Classical music had power that was timeless. I would get lost in it until a knock on my door and Baba’s voice saying, “enough,” would thrust me back into that small room.
One night, perched on my stool, thinking of a melody, a sense of curiosity took over me. I imagined a tiny musician lived inside every piano, orchestrating the beautiful sounds.
Ami once told me, when I was just four years old, Baba bought me a new toy car, and by evening, I held its roof broken in one hand asking, “Ami, where’s the driver?”
My piano had suffered the same fate. I stared at the sixty-one black and white keys scattered across the carpet. Octaves were mixed together, scales were removed from their family keys. And just like the invisible driver in my toy car, there wasn’t a tiny musician hiding inside my piano.
I got two lashes on one hand, two on the other. My hands were swollen. I could count the black lines engraved into the back of my hand. Baba swore never to buy me a piano again. I put my head on Ami’s lap and cried all night. Her soft hand, patted my head, telling me he’ll never understand.
Ami replaced my piano with a new one. Baba was furious, but with time, he pretended not to hear it. For him, it became just another decoration, thrown in a corner of a wall collecting dust.
Over time, he began to follow a strict schedule: meals at a fixed time, polished shoes, clean clothes. I invited jinn with my piano, while Ami met his demands.
Ami once mentioned, that she wanted to fly. To be a pilot and pass over different countries. She’d sit in the backyard, watching planes fly over, but soon she’d slide the mesh door and walk into the house. Time is a funny thing. As it passes, even a sliver of that dream doesn’t exist anymore.
I began attempting pieces I wasn’t prepared for. At times, I wanted to let the fear in my fingers takeover, discard the rhythmic one-e-and-a; two-e-and-a, counting I had finally mastered. But I kept going.
Ami would sit on my bed and request Persian folk songs for me to play. She would sing two verses to get me started, and I would transport her back to the valleys she’d described in her stories of childhood. She would listen for hours, and I’d play for as long as she asked. Baba’s snoring in the room down the hall would soon become background noise.
When I finished playing, she would get up, kiss me on the forehead, and say, “Mashallah – God has willed it.” That single word would reignite my dream of becoming a pianist.
For my fourteenth birthday, Ami started paying for my piano lessons. Elena, my instructor, let me play what I wanted, but she disapproved if something was too difficult. Like my father, she kept the authority and discipline going. Yet, I would secretly learn two measures of a piece until the pain in my wrists would force me to stop.
I hated the day I gave Elena the bad news. School had taken over. My piano sat in the corner, covered in a white sheet.
Baba’s face had a rare glow the day I helped him unload my piano keyboard from the van. Time had past, but he was sure he had won this battle. I tucked it in a corner of a local charity storage compartment and never went back again.
I sometimes read Elena’s texts to reassure that piano had existed in my life. We spoke a couple of times in five years. I was in university, and she had stopped giving lessons to be with her newborn son. She had become a shadow of my past that sometimes came out of its hiding places.
After all this time, I still felt it. The man with the duct taped violin had uncoiled something inside me. Like a flicker of light, I was desperate to touch those ivory keys again. Relive those moments of finding and listening to notes like a poet searching for the right word.
People applauded, I emptied the change from my wallet, and walked to the bus terminal.
I wanted to go back, until he decided to leave, but I was running late. As I walked away, his echo faded into the city, muddled in the lineups for a coffee, or in that disordered crowd finally boarding their bus.
I had sat, for a moment, back on that metal stool. My mind had drifted into places I had once dreamed of.
Becoming Writer 2016 Anniversary Contest 