The Mystical Flutist

Chapter 2: The unsaid words

Tuhi told her friends about the ‘strange boy’. But no one had heard of any new student, and it was unlikely that any new student would join in the middle of the semester. Couple of days passed, and Tuhi forgot about the boy…but the tune lingered on in her mind.

Gailo ki gaan shei ta jane

Suur baaje tar amar prane….

Bolo dekhi tomra ki tar

Kothar kono abhash pele….

(Only he knows what he was singing

But the tune lingers in my heart….

Can anyone tell me what is it, he was talking about….)

It was Thursday, laundry day. Tuhi collected her soiled clothes and was on her way to the girls’ laundry room. While she was crossing the staff quarters she heard him. She stopped at her tracks. Tears swelled in her eyes…again. She followed the music and found him sitting under the old banyan tree, eyes closed, head tilted to a side, playing his flute. Tuhi walked up to him. The boy looked up, saw her and stopped playing. He slowly stood up facing Tuhi…the flute tightly clasped in his hands. He looked at her as if he was waiting for her since an eternity…as if ‘she’ was the only person he ever wanted to see. Tuhi didn’t know what to say. No one had ever seen her like this before. She fidgeted, but couldn’t look away from ‘those eyes the colour of deep forest pool’.

But then someone called out Tuhi’s name from behind. Tuhi looked around and saw Alisha and Veena, had come looking for her. Before she could turn back the boy ran away again. This surprised her, why did he run away. She wanted him to meet her friends. But he was gone.

“What are you doing here?” Alisha asked Tuhi.

“Nothing”, she replied, her eyes still looking at the old banyan tree.

“Why do you always wander along Tuhi?” Veena complained.

Tuhi carried on with her daily chores. But after dinner when she went to bed…. she couldn’t hold herself anymore. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She felt sad, angry, elated, betrayed and a whole lot of other things. But she didn’t know what exactly she was feeling. She had never felt this way before. Though she had not hurt herself, she felt a strange pain and her tears just wouldn’t stop. Every time she closed her eyes she could see those ‘deep green eyes’ soo full of pain. This wrenched her heart more. Tuhi cannot see anyone in pain. When she was 6 years old, in her Kolkata house a sparrow had built a nest on the ‘chile-kotha’ (a small room at the rooftop). The sparrow had given birth to 3 little baby sparrows. Tuhi loved to hear the little birdies chirp and every afternoon she would sneak up to the roof to see the babies. One morning when she woke up, she saw that a little sparrow had fallen from the nest and was lying hurt on the staircase. Tuhi was hysterical. She gently picked up the little one, put it on a stack of cotton and tried feeding it. But the little bird was too small to eat on its own. Tuhi sat with the bird the whole day, and refused to move from there, no matter how much her mother insisted. By the end of the day the little bird, who was hurt and traumatized… died. Tuhi’s heart broke. She cried for 2 days and sulked for many more to come. That was her first tryst with death and loss.

Tuhi attended her classes, went for the dance practices, participated in the church choir and continued with her life. Nothing seemed to have changed apparently, but deep within she just couldn’t shake off that pain. It gripped her heart, and every so often clouded her eyes. She had never felt anything like this before…it was as if nothing was making any sense. She did her homework, giggled with her friends, laughed at the jokes…but couldn’t feel anything. The only time when she remembered “those eyes the colour of deep forest pool” that her heart ‘twisted, twirled & twitched’ in pain.