[I]

The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said to him, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar, Of things exactly as they are."

[II]

I cannot bring a world quite round, Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can And reach through him almost to man.

If a serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

[III]

A tune beyond us as we are, Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in tune as if in space, Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place As you play them on the blue guitar,

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change, Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew. The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are, A composing of senses of the guitar.

[IV]

Tom-tom c'est moi. The blue guitar And I are one. The orchestra

Fills the high hall with shuffling men High as the hall. The whirling noise

Of a multitude dwindles, all said, To his breath that lies awake at night.

I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where,

As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentarily declares

Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else.

He will have to reaccquaint myself to these silences at night as they have become somewhat unfamiliar, like the voice of a friend whom you haven't conversed with in a while. But till some such familiarity happens, he will have to revert back to using the tricks he had learnt from a novel on how to cleave himself into her, you and I.

...

So I am listening to a recording of a Nitin Sawhney's live performance here. I have at various points of time sung praises of Mr. Sawhney's music, and he is worth listening to again and again, and worth discovering (MusicIndiaOnline has all of his albums here!) if not already discovered by the unelightened masses. Why you ask? In return I ask, tell me of one contemprorary musician who has made immigration, identities, apartheid/ racism, impact of technology on human life, nuclear weapons, love songs etc the central concerns of his or her music?

...

She. Who is she? Who was she? Which 'she' will she become? You ponder on these questions, as if you are supposed to move a chessman in a game of chess where the opponent's pieces not only are allowed to change form (i.e., a rook can become a queen and a queen a lowly pawn) but also color. Before you began playing did you wonder how many moves will you have to make to check-mate, if ever?

...

This was a part of the world that you passed through about a decade ago. The purpose of your visit was persumably to learn a computer language (Fortran 77 was it?) so that you can have an easier time in the coming semester. You got on a bus heading in that direction, a bus which followed a route that lay in the Naxal belt. So in the middle of the night in the middle of nowehere, a couple of heavily armed policemen got on the bus, and stayed with the driver for the next couple of hours.

You were woken up when the bus reached the next state, and was stopped for no reason on the highway. One or the other political party had declared a state wide bandh, i.e., strike. And so this bus couldn't travel any further. And no, nor could it turn and go back across the state borders. You, who were getting schooled in the art of patience, had several adventures and finally reached the place you were supposed to reach.

Once there you didn't do any programming but rode a bicycle all around the town, and to this village down the road with a temple on a hill. At that point you were yet to encounter Jejuri in the dank literarture section of the large engineering library (fondly called CL by the natives) that you were to haunt in the coming days. You were miserable then, and for many subsequent months. Happiness is something that you never made a pact with after you were expelled from paradise.

And now, after many years, when you read of despair that has not been manufactured, and the consequent suicides, you feel very foolish, and very greatful for the much that you have been given.

This prior weekend, my friend C, to pull me out of the doldrums I was (am?) in, did the thing that usually acts as a pickmeup for me, and dumped a load of new books into the maw of this paper filled room. One of these books had this whimsical title: The Nimrod Flipout, with a funny book cover of a startled looking guy in a bunny suit hunting ducks with a shot gun.

Surprised? Of course I was surprised. You go out with a girl. First date, second date, a restaurant here, a movie there, always just matinees. You start sleeping together, the fucks are dynamite, and pretty soon there’s feeling too. And then, one day, she arrives all weepy, and you hug her and tell her to take it easy, that everything’s okay, and she says she can’t stand it anymore, she has this secret, not just a secret, something really awful, a curse, something she’s been wanting to tell you the whole time but she didn’t have the guts. This thing, it’s been weighing down on her like a ton of bricks, and now she’s got to tell you, she’s simply got to, but she knows that as soon as she does, you’ll leave her, and you’d be absolutely right too. And right after that, she starts crying all over again.

“I won’t leave you,” you tell her. “I won’t. I love you.” You may look a little upset, but you’re not. And even if you are, it’s about her crying, not about her secret. You know by now that these secrets that always make a woman fall to pieces are usually something along the lines of doing it with an animal, or with a Mormon, or with someone who paid her for it. “I’m a whore,” they always wind up saying. And you hug them and say, “No, you’re not, you’re not,” or “Shhh . . .” if they don’t stop.

“It’s something really terrible,” she insists, as if she’s picked up on how nonchalant you are about it, even though you’ve tried to hide it. “In the pit of your stomach it may sound terrible,” you tell her, “but that’s mostly because of the acoustics. Soon as you let it out it’ll seem much less terrible — you’ll see.”

And she almost believes it. She hesitates a minute and then asks: “What if I told you that at night I turn into a heavy, hairy man, with no neck, with a gold ring on his pinky, would you still love me?” And you tell her of course you would. What else can you say? That you wouldn’t? She’s simply trying to test you, to see whether you love her unconditionally — and you’ve always been a winner at tests.

Truth is, as soon as you say it, she melts, and you fuck, right there in the living room. And afterward, you lie there holding each other tight, and she cries, because she’s so relieved, and you cry too. Go figure it out. And unlike all the other times, she doesn’t get up and leave. She stays there and falls asleep. And you lie awake, looking at her beautiful body, at the sunset outside, at the moon appearing as if out of nowhere, at the silvery light flickering over her body, stroking the hair on her back.

And within less than five minutes you find yourself lying next to this guy — this short fat guy. And the guy gets up and smiles at you, and gets dressed awkwardly. He leaves the room and you follow him, spellbound. He’s in the den now, his thick fingers fiddling with the remote, zapping to the sports channels. Championship soccer. When they miss a pass, he cusses the TV; when they score, he gets up and does this little victory dance.

After the game, he tells you that his throat is dry and his stomach is growling. He could really use a beer and a nice hunk of meat. Well-done if possible, and with lots of onion rings, but he’d settle for some pork chops too. So you get in the car and take him to this restaurant that he knows about. This new twist has you worried, it really does, but you have no idea what to do about it. Your command and control centers are down. You shift gears at the exit, in a daze. He’s right there beside you in the passenger seat, tapping that gold-ringed pinky of his. At the next intersection, he rolls down his window, winks at you and yells at this chick who’s trying to thumb a ride: “Hey, baby, wanna jump in back so we can all have some fun?”

Later, the two of you pack in the steak and the chops and the onion rings till you’re about to explode, and he enjoys every bite, and laughs like a baby. And all that time you keep telling yourself it’s got to be a dream. A bizarre dream, yes, but definitely one that you’ll snap out of any minute.

On the way back, you ask him where to let him off, and he pretends not to hear you, but he looks despondent. So you wind up taking him back home with you. “It’s almost 3 a.m. I’m gonna hit the sack,” you tell him, and he waves to you, and stays in the beanbag chair, staring at the fashion channel. You wake up the next morning, exhausted, and with a slight stomachache. And there she is, in the living room, still dozing. But by the time you’ve had your shower, she’s up. She hugs you guiltily, and you’re too embarrassed to say anything.

Time goes by and you’re still together. The fucks just get better and better. She’s not so young anymore, and neither are you, and suddenly you find yourselves talking about a baby. And at night, you and the fatso guy hit the town like you’ve never done in your life. He takes you to restaurants and bars you didn’t even know existed, and you dance on the tables together, and break plates like there’s no tomorrow. He’s really nice, the fatso guy, a little crass, especially with women, sometimes coming out with things that you could just die. But other than that, he’s great fun to be with.

When you first met him, you didn’t give a damn about soccer, but now you know every team. And whenever one of your favorites wins, you feel like you’ve made a wish and it’s come true. Which is a pretty exceptional feeling for someone like you, who hardly knows what he wants most of the time. And so it goes: Every night you fall asleep with him struggling to stay awake for the Argentinean finals, and in the morning there she is, the beautiful, forgiving woman that you love, too, till it hurts.

..

Etgar Keret is the author of The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God and Other Stories. He lives in Israel. This story was translated by Miriam Shlesinger.