“Spinning into Saffron”
The incense had burned low, curling fragrant trails through the open window of Anjali’s flat. Outside, the narrow streets of Varanasi hummed with motorbikes, laughter, and temple bells. But inside, time had dissolved. Ravi sat cross-legged, a battered sitar across his lap, plucking out the same hypnotic phrase for what might have been hours. Anjali leaned against the wall, eyes half-closed, the sounds of raga and distant chaos blending into something strangely holy.
“Again,” she whispered, and Ravi smiled without looking up. His fingers danced along the frets, summoning a melody that shimmered like heat waves off sandstone.
They had met just two weeks before. She, a traveler from London with a tangled past and a mind full of half-finished poems. He, a musician who’d grown up on the ghats, whose grandfather had played for kings before the world changed and music became something to sell.
They spoke little at first, finding common language not in words, but in vibrations. One afternoon she played a scratchy vinyl from her bag—The Beatles’ Revolver. When Harrison’s “Love You To” spilled from the speakers, Ravi sat still, entranced.
“He understood,” he murmured. “Not perfectly. But he listened.”
Anjali smiled. “It’s why I came here.”
Now, on the sixth floor above the river, as Ravi played and she dreamed, it felt like the song had never ended. It had only grown, like ivy, like memory, like something eternal.
She reached into her notebook, scribbling:
If you hear the raga at dawn,
Don’t ask for meaning.
Let it undo you.
Ravi stopped playing. “You write that now?” he asked, amused. “You think like a mystic already.”
She looked up, laughing. “I think I’m just high on chai and sitar loops.”
He nodded, then grew serious. “We’re not so different. You, me, Harrison. He broke rules. So do you. That’s why we make music.”
It wasn’t a love affair. Not quite. But there was love in it—in the same way the sitar didn’t simply play notes, but called them forth like prayers. There was no beginning or end, only rhythm. Only the eternal drone beneath the moment.
As the sun bled across the rooftops, Ravi struck a chord that hung in the air long after his hands had stilled. The city pulsed. Anjali closed her notebook and looked toward the river, where a funeral pyre burned.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “I leave for Calcutta.”
He nodded. “But tonight, we play.”
And so they did. No audience. No purpose. Just one final invocation of the truth Harrison had discovered and they had each been chasing:
Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.
Only this wasn’t a dream. This was now. This was love—not a person, but a place, a sound, a shared breath between past and future.
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