Nachtmusik

There's something inexplicably beautiful about how the piano starts sounding as you move deeper and deeper into the night.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's the blue glow of the LED screen on my keyboard, floating like an island of hope in the sea of darkness that surrounds it. Maybe it's just that my insomniac habits are playing tricks in my head again. Heck, it's not even like I'm playing a Chopin piece or something - or even a piece at all, for that matter - just a few broken chords, and highly incorrect renditions of a couple of Grade 2 pieces from my memory...

Nonetheless, it's so beautiful...and somehow brings back some vivid images...of early Bangalore mornings, of my  train trip from Berlin to Prague, of the first "night-out" I ever made at home after setting up a killer patch on a newly purchased guitar effects processor, the ringing in my ears post late night music room jam sessions back in IIT, the feeling of diving into the contents of the socks Santa used to fill up on Christmas back when I was a kid, the magical winter evenings of Kolkata and the feeling of snugging into a warm quilt on a chilly night in Darjeeling, only to wake up next morning to the smell of a hot cup of tea and garma-garam parathas, to the sounds of my Dad humming a tune while reading the newspaper, and my Ma sitting in front of him, looking out of the window into the distant hills, sipping tea and then turning her towards me only to exclaim with a mildly pleasant surprise "Uthe gechhe" ("He's woken up")...

I bet no drug, no matter how costly or how potent, can ever give a high like this!