Latest / My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story / My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 26: Saloni's Voice

Transcript

My Playful Wife — Season 1, Episode 26: Saloni's Voice · My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

0:00
My Playful Wife, Episode 26, Saloni's Voice,
0:04
written by Mia. She sang in the shower on Tuesday
0:10
mornings. I had known this for three years and
0:15
never once heard it. I want to exact about that
0:19
because it is the whole of the episode and the
0:21
whole of what I had learned and kept learning.
0:24
that knowing a thing and hearing it are not the
0:26
same, that you can live beside a sound for three
0:29
years and have it not reach you, blocked by the
0:32
simple fact that you are not listening, that
0:34
listening is not a thing the ears do automatically,
0:36
but a thing the whole attention has to choose
0:39
to do. I had known, the way you know the furniture,
0:42
that Saloni sometimes made sound in the shower.
0:45
I had filed it under the ambient data of a shared
0:48
life, along with the click of the geyser, and
0:51
the particular complaint of the bathroom tap,
0:53
and I had never once actually heard it because
0:56
I had never once been listening. When I started
0:59
listening, I heard, she had a good voice. Not
1:04
trained, not performing, she did not know she
1:08
had an audience, would have stopped instantly
1:11
if she had. This was the singing a person does
1:14
when they believe themselves unheard, which is
1:17
the only honest singing there is. But naturally,
1:20
easily in tune, the voice of someone who would
1:23
have been told, in school, that they could sing,
1:26
and who had then, in the ordinary business of
1:29
becoming an adult, of becoming competent and
1:32
married and a maker of useful and beautiful things,
1:35
simply stopped and let the singing lapse, the
1:39
way you let so much lapse, not by deciding to
1:42
but by never quite deciding to keep it. One Tuesday
1:46
I stood in the hallway outside the bathroom door
1:49
and listened to the whole song. I don't know
1:53
what it was, something old, something filmy from
1:56
before our time, a tune with the particular ache
1:59
of the songs people's mother sang. She sang it
2:02
all the way through, not knowing I was there,
2:05
her voice coming muffled through the door and
2:08
the water. rising and falling, sure of itself
2:11
in the way people are only sure of themselves
2:14
when they think no one is keeping score. I stood
2:17
very still in the hallway. The way I go still
2:20
when I am thinking hard, the hell -breath stillness
2:23
Saloni had identified in me years ago, and I
2:26
listened to my wife sing a whole song she did
2:28
not know I could hear, and something turned over
2:31
in my chest that I did not have a clean name
2:33
for. Three years. Three years of this had been
2:37
happening on the other side of a door, every
2:39
Tuesday, and I had been on this side of it, not
2:42
listening, and it had simply gone unheard into
2:45
the water and the drain week after week. A small
2:48
private beauty produced and lost, produced and
2:51
lost, because the one other person in the house
2:54
had not yet learned to pay attention. At breakfast
2:59
I said, You have a good voice. She looked up
3:04
from her toast. Her face did the thing a face
3:07
does when it has been caught at something private,
3:10
not offended, exactly, but exposed, the specific
3:13
startle of a person who believed a thing of theirs
3:16
was unobserved and has just learned it was not.
3:20
I'm not singing, she said, reflexively, a denial
3:24
of a thing not yet accused. You were, I said,
3:30
in the shower, just now and I think every Tuesday.
3:35
For three years, probably. You have a good voice.
3:38
I never heard it before. I'm sorry it took me
3:42
three years to hear it, but I heard it this morning,
3:45
the whole song, standing in the hall like an
3:48
idiot, and I had to tell you, you have a good
3:51
voice. She looked down at her toast. She was
3:56
quiet for a while, and I watched a series of
3:59
things move across her face, and I did not rush
4:02
her. because I had learned that the important
4:04
things in Saloni surface on their own schedule
4:07
and cannot be hurried up without being driven
4:10
back down. My mother sang, she said finally.
4:16
I went still. I knew, now, what that meant in
4:20
her, what cost the mention carried, how rarely
4:23
she spent it. We used to sing together, she said,
4:28
when I was small. She had a song for everything,
4:32
a song for cooking, a different one for each
4:34
dish, so you could tell what was for dinner from
4:37
the next room by the tune. She said it almost
4:40
exactly as she had said it on the roof. In the
4:43
dark, in the summer, the same image, and I understood
4:45
that the roof and the shower were the same wound
4:48
surfacing twice, the mother coming up through
4:51
the daughter's hands at the stove and the daughter's
4:54
voice in the water. We'd sing while she cooked.
4:58
I was her. I was the one she taught. And then
5:01
she, she stopped. Her mother had died when she
5:05
was 19. I knew the outline. Had been given more
5:09
of the inside on the roof. And I stopped. After.
5:13
I just stopped singing. It wasn't a decision.
5:17
One day I noticed I hadn't sung in a year. And
5:20
then it had been five. And then it had been.
5:23
She turned her cup. It's been 15 years. I don't
5:28
sing, except apparently in the shower on Tuesdays,
5:32
without knowing I'm doing it. My body still does
5:36
it when my guard's all the way down. The rest
5:39
of the time, I keep it shut. Why Tuesdays? I
5:45
asked, gently. She thought about it, and arrived
5:50
somewhere she clearly hadn't been before. I don't
5:54
know, she said slowly. Maybe we cooked on, she
5:58
stopped. Her eyes changed. We cooked together
6:01
on Tuesdays. My mother and I. It was the day
6:06
my father worked late, and it was just us in
6:09
the kitchen, and we'd make the whole evening
6:11
of it, the two of us singing. Tuesdays. She looked
6:16
at me, undone a little by her own discovery.
6:20
I never put that together. 15 years, and I never
6:24
noticed, I only sing on Tuesdays. My body's been
6:28
keeping her Tuesday this whole time, and I didn't
6:31
even know. We sat with that. The enormous tender
6:36
fact of it, that grief stores itself in the body's
6:40
calendar, that a woman could keep a standing
6:42
appointment with her dead mother for 15 years
6:45
without her conscious mind ever being told. Sing
6:52
more, I said. She looked at me. Not for me, I
6:58
said quickly, because I saw the flinch, the reflexive
7:02
recoil of a private thing asked to perform. I
7:05
don't mean sing for me. I don't want a performance
7:08
I'd never ask you to. I mean just more. For yourself.
7:13
For her. Sing more than Tuesdays. Sing while
7:17
you cook the way she did. Sing in a workroom.
7:21
Let it out of the shower. Fifteen years is long
7:24
enough to keep a beautiful thing locked in a
7:27
bathroom. I paused. You make beautiful things
7:31
and give them to the world. You taught a roomful
7:35
of women that they're allowed to make a useless
7:37
beautiful thing for themselves. This is yours.
7:41
The voice is the one beautiful thing you've kept
7:44
locked up. Let it out. Not for me. Just let it
7:49
out. It's been 15 years, she said again, but
7:54
differently this time. Not as a wall, as a fact
7:58
she was turning over, testing for weight. I know,
8:02
I said. Start with Tuesdays. You're already doing
8:06
Tuesdays. Just do them with the door open. That's
8:11
all. One open door. See how it feels. And if
8:15
it feels like something, do Wednesday. And then
8:19
we'll see. She was quiet for a long moment, and
8:24
then she nodded. Once small, the way she makes
8:28
real commitments, without flourish, the same
8:32
nod she'd given the night she decided to attempt
8:34
12 impossible pieces by May. I had learned to
8:38
recognize that nod. It was the most serious thing
8:42
her body did. I heard her singing the next Tuesday.
8:49
With the door open, Not loudly. She had not become
8:53
a different person overnight. The voice was tentative,
8:57
a thing testing whether it was still allowed,
8:59
but with the door open, deliberately, the song
9:03
coming clear into the hallway now instead of
9:05
muffled, offered rather than hidden. I was in
9:09
the kitchen, and I did not go to the door, and
9:12
I did not comment, then or after, because I understood
9:15
that the worst thing I could do was make it a
9:17
thing, turn the open door into a stage. I just
9:21
let it come into the flat and be part of the
9:23
flat, the way the light was part of the flat,
9:25
and I made the chai, and when she came out I
9:27
handed her the cup at the right hand, the right
9:30
temperature, and said nothing about the singing,
9:32
and she said nothing about it, and that nothing
9:34
was in agreement, that this would be allowed
9:37
to happen without being discussed, which is the
9:39
only way some things can be allowed to happen
9:41
at all. And the Tuesday after that. And then
9:47
one evening, not a Tuesday, she was in the kitchen
9:49
cooking, and I was at the table with the notebook,
9:52
and she started very quietly, almost under her
9:55
breath, to sing. A different song. A cooking
9:59
song, I understood. One of her mother's. She
10:02
did not announce it, and she did not look at
10:04
me, and I did not look up from the notebook,
10:06
the two of us each carefully not making it a
10:09
thing. But my hand had stopped on the page, and
10:13
I was listening with the whole of my attention
10:15
to my wife, singing her dead mother's cooking
10:18
song over a pan in our kitchen, fifteen years
10:21
of silence breaking quietly over the onions,
10:24
and I had to keep my eyes on the notebook for
10:26
a while. Longer than the sentence required. Because
10:30
some things you receive better by. Not looking
10:33
at them directly. She sang while she cooked after
10:37
that. Not always. Not performed. Never performed.
10:41
But it became, over those weeks, part of the
10:45
sound of the flat. Part of it's weather. It's
10:48
accumulated evidence. My wife's voice in the
10:51
kitchen carrying a tunesome woman had taught
10:53
her 30 years ago in a different kitchen on a
10:55
Tuesday. The song coming down the generations
10:58
through the hands and the voice both. The cooking
11:02
and the singing reunited at last after their
11:05
long divorce. I wrote in the notebook one of
11:10
those evenings while she sang at the stove. She's
11:13
singing again. 15 years. It turns out her body
11:17
kept her mother's Tuesdays the whole time, unconsciously,
11:21
in the shower, where no one could hear, including
11:25
her. All it took was for someone to finally hear
11:28
it and say, that's beautiful, let it out. Three
11:32
years, I didn't hear it. I think about all the
11:35
other things I'm still not hearing. The voice
11:38
was behind a door I never opened because I never
11:42
even tried the handle. What else is behind doors
11:45
I've never tried? I'll spend the rest of my life
11:48
trying handles. That's the whole project now.
11:52
Trying the handles on a woman with more rooms
11:55
than any house should have. Today a door opened
11:58
and a dead woman song came out, and my wife didn't
12:01
even know she'd been keeping it. Attention. The
12:05
rarest food. I served some this morning by standing
12:08
in a hallway and finally, finally listening.
12:12
That night, in bed, in the dark, she said, Thank
12:17
you. For what? You know for what? I didn't do
12:25
anything, I said. I stood in a hallway. You listened,
12:31
she said. Three years, and then you listened.
12:34
Do you know what it is to be married 15 years
12:37
to a silence and then have someone hear the thing
12:40
under it? She was quiet a moment. She'd have
12:44
liked you, she said. My mother. She liked people
12:48
who listened. She'd have liked that you gave
12:50
me back the Tuesdays without making me perform
12:53
them. She'd have liked that you knew the difference.
12:57
I wish I'd met her, I said. You're meeting her,
13:02
Celonie said in the dark. Every time I sing now,
13:06
you're meeting her. She's in the songs. That's
13:09
where she lives. You're meeting her on Tuesdays
13:13
over the onions. Keep listening and you'll know
13:16
her as well as anyone left alive does. Some weeks
13:24
later, Piyush and Mira came up for weekend, and
13:28
on the Saturday night, after a long dinner, the
13:31
singing left the kitchen for good. We were all
13:35
loose with food and the lateness. The four of
13:38
us around the table with the plates pushed back,
13:40
and Mira, who had heard, somehow, perhaps from
13:44
Celonie in one of their long calls, that the
13:47
singing had come back, asked, lightly, with great
13:51
care, whether Celonie would sing something. I
13:54
tensed. I knew what the asking risked. I had
13:58
spent weeks learning never to ask, never to turn
14:01
the open door into a stage. I looked at Celonie,
14:05
ready to cover for her. to change the subject,
14:08
to hand her the out. She didn't take the out.
14:13
She looked at her hands a moment, then at me,
14:16
a quick look, checking the way she checks, and
14:20
I gave her the smallest nod, the one that means
14:22
whatever you want. I'll catch it either way,
14:25
and she took a breath, and she sang. A full song,
14:30
her mother's, for the room this time, not under
14:34
her breath over a pan, not behind a door, but
14:37
offered, deliberately, to the four of us at the
14:40
table, her eyes half -closed, her voice steady
14:44
and true and fifteen years out of practice, and
14:47
somehow none the worse for it. The kitchen held
14:50
it. We all held it. And I watched it land on
14:54
each of them. On Piyush, who had known Saloni
14:57
for years and had plainly never heard this, his
15:00
face gone soft and startled. On Mira, who missed
15:04
nothing, and who understood exactly what she
15:07
was being given, the magnitude of a private thing
15:10
made public for the first time in 15 years, and
15:14
who had the grace to receive it without making
15:16
it a thing. When it ended there was the particular
15:19
silence that follows a true thing, the silence
15:23
that is the highest applause. Nobody clapped.
15:27
Clapping would have been wrong. We just sat in
15:30
it. Bobby. Piyush said, finally, quietly, I didn't
15:36
know you could do that. No one did, Saloni said.
15:41
I'd stopped. For a long time. She looked at me
15:45
across the table. Someone heard it through a
15:48
door and gave it back to me. Mira looked at me
15:53
then, the noticing look. the one that sees the
15:56
whole shape of a thing in a quarter second, and
15:59
she didn't say anything, but she lifted her water
16:02
glass an inch off the table in my direction.
16:05
A private toast. I see what you did. The same
16:09
gesture Piyush had made to the table in April,
16:12
the family's substitute for the words, we didn't
16:15
have. I lifted mine back. Later, washing up,
16:20
Mira came and stood beside me at the sink. The
16:24
way she had that first Diwali. Two careful people
16:27
finding the quiet corner. You gave her that back,
16:31
she said, low, under the water. The voice. Do
16:35
you know what that is? People take things from
16:38
each other for a whole marriage. Twenty years
16:40
of taking, mostly without meaning to. You gave
16:44
something back. You found a thing she'd lost
16:47
and gave it back to her. She dried a plate. I
16:51
told you once you were the other thing. Not the
16:54
thing you were afraid of being. This is what
16:56
I meant. The other thing gives back. I didn't
17:01
have an answer, so I did the thing my father
17:03
does, the thing the whole family does in place
17:05
of the words. I took the plate out of her hands
17:08
and dried it myself and bumped her shoulder with
17:11
mine once, which meant thank you, and I receive
17:13
it and stop now before I can't. She understood.
17:17
We finished the dishes in the good silence. That
17:21
night I lay awake and thought about giving back
17:24
as a category of act, because Mira had named
17:27
it and the name had lodged in me the way her
17:30
names always did. She was right that most of
17:33
marriage is taking, not cruelly, just entropically,
17:37
the slow attrition by which two people wear away
17:40
each other's edges and call it settling. I had
17:43
done my share. In the comfortable years, I had
17:46
taken Celonie almost entirely for granted, had
17:50
taken her competence and her chai and her presence
17:52
and given back in attention, the cheapest currency
17:55
there is. The year had been, among everything
17:58
else, an enormous violent rebalancing of that
18:02
account. And this, the voice found behind a door
18:05
and handed back. was the first thing I could
18:08
point to that was purely giving, that took nothing,
18:12
that simply returned to her a beautiful thing
18:14
she'd lost and asked nothing in return. There
18:18
would be more to give back, I knew. The voice
18:20
was one door. There were others. Fifteen years
18:24
of small -lapsed things in a woman who'd been
18:26
grieving since she was nineteen, beautiful things
18:30
set down and forgotten in the long business of
18:33
surviving. I would spend the rest of the marriage
18:36
finding them. That was the good work now, the
18:38
opposite of the year's terrible work. Not digging
18:42
tunnels through pain, but walking the rooms of
18:45
a person I loved, trying the handles, finding
18:48
the lovely lost things behind the doors, and
18:50
handing them back, one at a time, for as long
18:53
as we both kept choosing the mornings. So, I
18:59
keep listening. On Tuesdays and the other days
19:02
now, too. And I am, slowly, over the songs, coming
19:07
to know a woman who died when my wife was 19,
19:10
met entirely through the tunes she left to her
19:13
daughter's body, which is, I have come to believe,
19:16
a real way to know the dead, perhaps the only
19:19
way, through the beautiful things they planted
19:22
in the people they loved, that go on coming up,
19:24
year after year, in voices and hands, as long
19:28
as someone is paying enough attention to hear
19:31
them. To be continued in episode 27, The Notebook's
19:49
of My Playful Wife. If this story is staying
19:53
with you, the next episode is already waiting.
19:56
Subscribe so you don't miss it. The complete
19:59
book is on Amazon, and early episodes plus bonus
20:02
chapters are on my Patreon. Links are in the
20:05
description. Thank you for listening.