The Glass Piano

In my head, The room seems to give off a faint fragrance of jasmines.  The young woman standing in the middle of the room looks homeless. Don’t get me wrong, her clothes are neat and well matched, her nails impeccably shaped, her hair tied up in an elegant bun. Her attire is immaculate and collected, she- just isn’t.  

There was something, a strange melancholy, an emptiness in her flat, blue-black eyes. The very air around her seemed to heave sighs in every motion. However,

She must have stepped into the fragrant room and dropped her bag to the floor. In a corner, stood the great glass piano, looking over the humdrum, and busy lane through a huge window with panes of a myriad variety of colours. An ebony chandelier lit the room in an eerie light.

 Yet as she walks to the piano, she seemed to be home. As she strikes the first note, she seems to forget the world.  

Night after night, I watched her from my little flat across the lane and she would play her piano through them all. I could never discern a tune, maybe, there wasn't any? Or maybe, my five-year-old self did not recognise any. But the sound it made was so unearthly, that it took your breath away. 

She leaves the short bench and stands at the window, half her face bathed in pale blue, as the moonlight is filtered through a sky-blue pane. On that floor carpeted with dry jasmine, she lets a letter fall from her hands. She was my winter angel.  Let me explain, every winter, say mid-October, she would start visiting that room. I would eagerly wait in my room and when she did come into that room, she would shoot me a smile and sit down on the piano and play away. You see, that glass piano was the music of my childhood. She would come and go, every winter night, and every night that she did come, she would play through the night. At times, I would also get a second smile. It made me glad to be her confidant.  In my head, she was some great princess, fulfilling her dreams of playing the piano, or burdened under a curse to weave music for all

eternity. She was an angel, and insomniac angel who would come to put me to sleep.  

Sometimes, I still catch myself humming that haunting music and slowly shifting my feet.  

There are thousands and thousands of dried jasmine flowers, their fragrance dulled by time. Every winter, she begins her life anew, with new hope and enthusiasm. She plays her piano through the night and lives a daydream through the day. You see, see doesn’t sleep in the winter. She is after all, a princess, she has to live her fairy tale … Every night that she lives her fairy-tale, she drops a single jasmine.

 A single flower for every night she spends living a hope. I was the one who found her. They tried to pull me away and take her, but I was her friend, how could I let them? I should not have let them take her away. But what could I do? They were giants. I had gone to get my ball from their garden and there, I found my princess, lying on the soft grass, as if sleeping. Her arm bent at an awkward angle, her impeccable dress a little crumpled, and eyes, finally, with an expression.

 She looks at the boundary wall with an expression that will haunt the living daylights out of my mother, but she is not there yet. It is a sight that I will remember for the rest of my life, my princess looking at me as if I was her only friend. As if I had the solution to the problem her heart holds. As if I was that knight.  I go near her, she smells of jasmine, her face and her arms are covered in fine scratches, as if she had been scratched over and over again by a cat. Her eyes are moist and her breath is a ragged little beast.  And, my mother comes, screaming. I hear them say, a few weeks later, that they found a piece of glass in her chest. I think it was her heart. I think it has a crack right down the middle.  

Just like the magnificent piano, they found it broken in so many pieces and never told anyone.