Knicq

Of Vices, dreams and super-senses.
knicq posted in Knicqisms on January 23rd, 2006

Of the many vices that I have been unable to rid myself of, one that figures most prominently is music. This is not to imply, however, that I have succesfully discarded any vices from my system. Any vices that have not found lodging in my person have done so out of their own freewill, and might I add at their own peril, for sustenance as guaranteed in this person is seldom to be found elsewhere.

I do not advertise, and I am not famous in viceland, not to the extent where you would have vices making a beeline to take up lodging in me. I have picked up my vices along the way, but any that found their way in, have made themselves comfortable and at home. There was perhaps a vice or two that came along, found me, but had to move on; not because I showed less than usual eagerness to accomodate it, but because it found me incapable of hosting it. To quote Yousufi in a rather crude translation, “If God had given me the aptitude and capability for sin, I too would have partaken in the fruits of repentence”.

Music, however, is one of those few vices that I have deliberately, though not wholeheartedly, tried to cast off, and failed miserably at doing so. It has been a love-hate relationship, in that I love to hate it, but I do not; and I hate to love it, but I do. Against this backdrop, one could be forgiven for assuming an in depth understanding of the nuances of music on my part. The fact of the matter is that at my brightest I am able to tell Chinese music from Celtic, and Rock from…well…non rock. It stops there, however. My discerning matter puts its hands up after such enviable achievements. It is perhaps because of this ignorance that I am able to enjoy all kinds of music, barring of course most of the crap that comes out of Bollywood, or is sold in the name of music by the likes of Ali Haider, Shahzad Roy and company.

I used to have a recurring dream in my younger days. I am not sure if the dream specialists will be very pleased with my employment of the term ‘recurring’ here, since I had the dream only thrice, and once out of those times I was not even asleep. At the other two times, I was running a high fever. It was a strange dream, there were no monsters in it, and no gory scenes that would excite JB into a frenzy, yet it was one that scared me witless; it was a dream that oscillated between extreme noise and extreme silence. Thats all I would remember afterwards, but the alternating noise and silence would haunt me for minutes after waking up too. It would be as if my sense of hearing had somehow become enhanced, and being equipped with the bat powers unexpectedly can be a harrowing experience. I stumbled across this universal truth rather harshly.

Once during my college days, I had woken up with these powers, and I remember hating the sound of water gushing out of that faucet in the bathroom. Bats must hate flowing water. It can be amazingly loud, which perhaps is one of the reasons there are no bats in bathrooms. Our bathroom was under-equipped, in that there was no shower in it. We relied on the good old bucket and mug system for bathing, and in the absence of more modern facilities had to depend on stove-heated water.

The two ‘cauldrons’, one extra large and the other large, which used to be on our stove perpetually, form an intergral part of my nostalgic reminisces from those days. The larger of the cauldrons was used to make tea for ourselves and our visitors ( in that order by the way), and the smaller one to ensure that none of the four occupants of the apartment froze in the bathroom, lest any of the other three got delayed from their classes. Attending the classes was important, two of us got to play table-tennis between classes in their college, while the other two had girls in their classes. Our priorities were never in doubt.

Coming back to that loud and cold morning, I decided to take a quick bath to wake me up completely and wash those bat-ish powers away, but regretted my decision gravely after the first mug of luke-warm water jolted the rest of my senses into hyperactivity. I had succesfully transformed myself into the-one-with-the-super-senses using nothing more than a plastic mug full of water. That was the only upside. One of the downsides was that the water had some-how interfered with the slow-motion setting in which I had hitherto lived my life. The speed with which things started happening was mind-boggling, dumb-founding and quite like all other things too fast to be described by anything less than a compound adjective. This coupled with my acute sense of hearing meant that extending my hand to the plastic mug was an ordeal that brought about a near-nervous break down.

With the kind of speed my limbs were generating, I could have beaten Bruce Lee into a pulp before he had a chance to say Nee hao. Not surprisingly, a showdown with Bruce Lee was the last thing on my mind at the time. Pulp, however, was a word that painted the picture of my mind like a thousand pictures could not. There are times when there is only so much that a picture, or a collection of pictures can tell. Pulp, for instance, would look little different in any of the thousand pictures one took of it. The word itself delivers the point home much more potently, and it takes four letters rather than a thousand clicks to convey the message. Kum kharch balaa nasheen as we say in Urdu.

Not one to shy away from a challenge, I set out to master my new-found powers, and finish my bath in the process. I began by mastering the agility of my limbs, all the while keeping my focus on keeping the noise-levels to a minimum; no splashes in the bucket, and no pouring of mug-fulls for me. Seeping the water into the mug in multiple installments, and that too because osmosis was just not an option, and trickling rather than pouring was the name of the game. Effectively this meant that it took me five minutes to just refill the mug, and fifteen to empty it. I do not recall the exact flow of events, but I do remember that by the time I was finished, my super-sonic arms were sore from restraint, the water in the bucket had turned ice-cold, and the resulting goose-bumps on my body had become so pronounced that when I poured water on myself, it was made to negotiate its way around them. I had missed my class too. I do not remember how long it had taken for those super powers to subside, but I do know that I was thankful they did. I had to have my morning baths, and I hated missing those classes.

The relevance of this tale of superheroic bath with my dreams, and of the two with my love-hate relationship with music?

Well, I used to suffer from those super-senses in my dreams and after waking up from them for some time, and mother, who is our in-house dream specialist, had interpreted my dream early on saying that the noise represented music, while the torch I used to be carrying in those dreams represented knowledge, and that the two in my life would be mutually exclusive. Given that my learning curve has become a trough of late, while my exposure to music has grown manifold in the same time, it seems she had got that one right too. Come to think of it, the only time I was ever awarded a scholarship in my academic career, was also the time during which my cassette player had gone on strike against the kind of music I was listening to, and refused point blank to play any of it.

It stands to reason then that I should be able to regain my intelligence and the learning ‘crest’ if I stop listening to music once again. There is of course the possibility of permanent damage that might already have jeopardized my return to intelligent thought process, but then one must realize that JB with permanent damage to all his faculties makes it through his day solely on one flash of intelligence per day, what’s there to stop me from following suit? My thought process is niether nicotine infused, nor nicotine infested, and even my mother would agree nicotine is a bigger vice than music.