And thank you Tanya for the music...

There's an unforgettable line my father once wrote on the back of a extra passport size photograph of himself that he gave my sister: 'The sky is not less private although it belongs to everyone else'. Fathers belong to their children but not to them alone. Some fathers, indeed, appear to belong to everyone else and not at all to their children. Our father, during the time he was in the public service, was like that. And yet, he was ours. We knew this. He may have thought we did not, hence this assertion which, to be fair, could have been about his relations with his family and others or a general observation about things larger than degrees of belonging to and within families.

There are things that don't belong to authors. Like words. They belong as much or more to the reader. Like art. And artists. Some, at least. Those exceptionally talented individuals and the work that they produce by mixing into gift the 'nothing-magical-about-it' secret ingredients of commitment to excellence, discipline, hard work, and other things that border on the insane but so necessary if anything close to perfection is to be obtained. They are timeless. They don't belong to anyone. They belong to us all. They are, some would say, heavenly nodes used by the divine to reassure the world with a soft 'I am present'.

I don't believe in divinity. To me, such moments, speak of that which is most commendable in the human being: the ability to experience, to live, to exist in exultation, in such a manner that enriches the world.

Right now I am thinking of music. Feeling it. Hearing it not in ear or memory but in strange places like heart and vein.

I don't know how to appreciate classical music and I know that true appreciation requires the kind of exposure, commitment to listening, guidance etc that I have denied myself. I remember something that my friend Anuruddha said about music and appreciation. Nadeeka Guruge, by some accounts one of the most talented young musicians of our time, had been asked to sing a popular Hindi song. Nadeeka had smiled and responded, 'mama vindinnam, umbala kemathi nam ahapalla' (I will experience and you, if you feel like it, listen). He did not sing. He whistled the tune while strumming the guitar. Anuruddha said it was the most beautiful rendering of the song he had heard.

Listening to Tanya Ilangakone-Ekanayaka's solo piano recital at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, said to be one of the top classical music venues in the world, I was enveloped by mixed feelings. No, I wasn't in London. I don't understand that kind of music. I listened to it on youtube. It reminded me of something my friend and former colleague at the Agrarian Research and Training Institute, Dr. Udaya Rajapaksa once said. Udaya, who did his PhD in the then Soviet Union, said that he had to study in Russian. Learning Russia exposed him to Russian literature. He said, 'We all loved Pushkin when we read him in Sinhala translations. We loved all the literature that came to us in translation from the Soviet Union. We didn't feel it was about another country. When you read the same things in Russian it is a hundred times more beautiful. I can only imagine how beautiful it must be for a Russian, who would be reading in his mother tongue and had lived those stories and places in body, heart, sensibility and nuance.'

I don't know music-Russian, if you get what I mean, I've not inhabited those chambers and was reading it all through a fractured transliterator, a laptop with a poor reproducer of sound culled from an internet audio-visual clip. I can only imagine what a Russian who knew Russian in all its nuances.

There were four pieces in all. I listened to Ravel first (Jeux d'eau), video-free. Then Bach (Prelude and Fugue No. 7 in E flat major, BWV 852). Then Beethoven's 'Piano Sonata No. 15 in D major, Op. 28 (Pastoral)' and finally Tanya's own composition, 'Adahas: Of Wings and Roots'. Yes, all video-free first time. The titles meant nothing of course, since I don't know 'Russian' or 'Russians'. I felt, however, that it can't be just Pushkin, but Pushking AND others at work. How could ten fingers make me believe there was more than one body, one heart and mind working them? For a connoisseur of literature, this might not have sounded as magical as it did to me, I don't know, I didn't ask around. I know this, though. I was swept off to a place and kept somewhere high, from which vantage point, a myriad landscapes were made to flow and flow before and below me.

There were colours I had never seen, wide expanses of sky, rolling waves and a quiet slip of day to night through twilight and longing. Made me want to know the identities of the authors, the titles of the images that floated by, the names of the colours so foreign to me and yet, so familiar. There was a seamlessness and a 'seamlessnessing' that made me, an outsider, feel that I was not in a strange place, seeing strange things for the first time.

Ravel was to me a teaser that commanded, 'listen!' I did. 'Bach' was a child on a walk, running now, stopping to pick a stone of unusual shape or colour, tripping down incline, trudging up hill, letting the hours pass through her as though they were centuries and seconds. A happy, happy piece.

Beethoven: a movement from haunting through exploration and assuredness to a resolution that I just could not make sense of. It left me lamenting my illiteracy.

Finally, 'Adahas'. I knew there was reference to things Sri Lanka and even my untrained ear could pick it up. I realized that if I was asked to categorize, I would not be able to say if this was ours or someone else's. I remembered experiments in 'fusion' that were nothing more than random and awkward mixing. Here there was blend. Finesse. Translation. Transliteration. Mother tongue as well as Russian. For once I felt I understood music.

I watched. I don't know anything about writing, but watching Tanya write these pieces of literature on what was clearly a magnificent piano I realized that there was technique here that was made of both exceptional talent and an incredible amount of work. I looked for music score. There wasn't any paper. Just fingers and keys and an outpouring of dream and metaphor not in the manner of overflow but of effortless but deliberate gifting.

I like to think there was a surge of patriotism, but I doubt that was the dominant sentiment-strain. There is a quality in rendering and technique that persuades one to relinquish ownership, withdraw nationality (even though such things are hardly conferrable or denied) and recognize instead the global character of citizenship.

A few weeks ago, I quoted something a friend sent me. It was about music and what it is all about and what it does (amenable to extrapolation that encompasses other art forms as well of course).

'There is a party in progress, and a young man, is feeling lost and wandering about a mansion. He finds himself in a huge library where an old man in a shaggy white mane is bending over a gramophone listening to a record. Suddenly, the old man sees and beckons him closer. "Beethoven", he says. The young man stutters, "I cannot understand". "You will, because it was written for the beauty that hides in your mind", says the white-haired one. Over the next hour, passages are played, phrases reveal their enchantment, music becomes magic. Then, the symphony ends. The young man finds speech has fled him. He utters some thanks and turns away. Then quickly remembering another courtesy, he asks for a name. The old one bows his head gently, and softly says, "Einstein. Albert Einstein"' Princeton, New Jersey.'

Tanya did not play for me. Or for us. She was totally absorbed in an experience I doubt very many could replicate or identify with. We are privileged that we got to be around, one way or another. She does not belong to Sri Lanka or Sri Lankans, but she is ours, she is mine. She just wrote some 'Russian' short stories for her own serene joy and pleasure. As a by product of that 'being', the musical-nothingness that is my mind was turned into a something that could, in the very least, recognize the particular configuration of word and metaphor as 'literature'. Thank you Tanya.

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be reached at [email protected]