It's All Music

When my garden became my paradise on earth

You feel it, don’t you?

That almost imperceptible hum of imbalance, precariousness, just behind the peace you’re reaching for. It’s always there, like the front you put on when walking through a city, until a friend recognises you and then it falls away and you are you again, as gloriously you as you always were as a child, and then you remember yourself, not yourself, but your constructed self, the self you never signed up for, the hand-me-down self.

I hear music in the background as I type, Indian music, and a thousand thoughts go through my head in an instant:

• “The white neighbours will hate them and by extension me and my family too”

• “Why are they playing music at 10pm loud enough to carry through the warm Summer evening?”

• “It was peaceful until the music started, why can’t it be peaceful again?”

And it goes on and on.

Except that none of that matters, really, because none of the above were my ideas.

White? I didn’t even know what that meant until people started to beat me up and swear and spit at me for being brown.

Brown? Ditto. A label. I can give it whatever meaning I want now. I don’t have to keep the labels of the racists, or of the colonised desi mind my father gave me.

Then there are the barking dogs! Just the unbearable, constant, shrill racket of the hounds of hell.

Then one day I remembered an old Punjabi folk song my mum used to sing as she sewed. Something about dogs barking at night.

And it came to me like that Hitchcock zoom effect.

What are dogs going to do at night except bark? That’s what they do. That’s their music.

Birds take their turn in singing.

Dogs do their barking.

Humans put on some music.

The trees rustle softly in the breeze.

It’s music.

All life is music.

What is my garden? It’s not an ecosystem, it’s a string quartet, a microcosm of life’s glorious ensemble, singing, humming, vibrating with colour, with chorophyll, with the bass drum of a million heartbeats unseen underfoot.

It’s peaceful.

I can drop the anxiety. I can let it go. I can accept it all and be part of it, in harmony, in ensemble, in peace.

So can you.