Music Is My Savior

Usually, whenever I heard Jal (Pakistani Band) perform, or even when I went for a Them Clones’ silly park concert I felt it.  It was like a feeling that would be so difficult to describe. It was just there. It gave me a high. Just like to a crack addict. It felt like the highest state of being; it felt like liberation for my cramped soul. The musical notes broke the tight shackles that surrounded my existence. In that moment nothing mattered except the here and now. It felt as though as though the pressure of time was colliding with the happiness bursting through me. I could feel my soul seeking atonement and emancipation through my voice, loudest that I could make it, but insignificant in the crowd. It gave me a newfound confidence that made me feel as though I could take on the world. All my sins and my sorrows seemed to dissolve in the guitar riffs. It was nirvana in the true sense of the word. It made everything else seem inconsequential and unimportant. Music was the true savior of the disturbed; music was the real God. I couldn’t play a note to save my life, but I can say with conviction that I am the most religious devotee. I always wondered to myself why normal religious practices and spiritual talks didn’t inspire me. Why my feeling for such things would always be nonexistent and useless. It was then that I realized I was taken by the different kind of God: the kind that presented itself through musical instruments, through the voices of the musicians. It was the kind that asked for nothing in return. It was logical. It didn’t believe in superstition, it didn’t ask for numerous hours in a church or temple. The temple that it required was within us. It was in the ears, mind and heart of those who could actually sense the music. It was an experience higher in awakening than any other instance. Nothing could be same anymore because it converted all its devotees to fundamentalists looking for a different kind of “jihad”. We were the followers who just seeked fulfillment through sounds on the radio, TV or iPods. We were stanch converts looking for a meaning and searching for a kind of solace only music could provide. I wish it would’ve lasted forever. However, all good things come to an end, and so did the concert.

But recently when I went for another concert of a band I particularly loved, I didn’t feel it anymore. I searched and searched for that “feeling” that usually presented itself, unasked for, in my heart. But that day was inauspicious. It didn’t arrive. Not even when I begged. I felt stripped and cheated. Stripped of the beautiful experience I knew belonged only to me, and cheated because it was taken away from me. I can’t begin to describe the sense of loss I felt. I was scared because it didn’t come. The concert was over and my devotion didn’t reap its rewards. I was shocked, hurt and betrayed.  Such was the power of anything that you loved and felt so strongly, that it had the authority to hurt and betray you without reason and still come back later and be taken in. I wonder why I was being taken away from the one thing I could still feel and experience, why my identity was being played with. My sense of wonder, joy and fulfillment that was reserved for the greatest of all Gods was on a journey to far away, with no return flight ticket. It was all I could do to weep, and wallow for the loss of a friend that kept you going in times of happiness and sorrow, in times of thunder and rain, in moments of accomplishment and epiphany, in situations of loneliness and loss. It was all mine, and it was gone.