Song Of The Day: Preet Modi Layers Music For Every Emotion

Have you ever heard a song that immediately rushes back old memories that you experienced? Be it feelings of loneliness, hope, first love, or heartbreak, many times a good song can encompass all those emotions and bottle it up in a melody. Song of the Day is a book about just that. It is a collection of short intimate stories about big emotions felt by young people and how songs are a way to feel these emotions and go through them.

Here's an excerpt from Preet Modi's Song of the Day

A heavy burst of rain poured against Kabir’s black polyester raincoat as he walked through puddles of ankle-deep water. Over the last year, he had started skipping college on most days and had spent his time sitting alone at cheap coffee houses doing nothing in particular. Today was one of those rare occasions when he had managed to attend his lectures. After his classes had ended for the day, he had felt a strong urge not to go home. He had taken a slow train on his way back and then boarded an empty bus from the station. Inside the bus, the rhythmic clinks of metal straps swinging back and forth kept reminding him of how silent their school was the day after Tara’s accident. He made up his mind to get off near her apartment and visit the pool again.

As Kabir walked to the place, he wondered whether he would see Kalki again. After all, she had suggested that they meet again even if she was only half serious. When he finally reached the pool though, the place was completely desolate. He glanced at the nearby garden and noticed that the bench where he and Kalki had sat down a year ago was no longer there, replaced by dirt and an overgrowth of grass. Residential lights blurred in the distance beyond, accompanied by an unwavering gust sweeping through the air. Under the rain, the water in the pool rippled and seemed to fold and unfold in an endless motion.

Kabir waited for a long time, but Kalki never showed up. When the rain finally eased, he sat alone at the edge of the pool and smoked in the darkness. After a while, he cried a lot, but eventually, it felt okay. He felt a strange sense of relief because Kalki hadn’t shown up. Maybe she was out somewhere—on the back seat of Shaun’s motorcycle perhaps—in love and able to forget. The thought was reassuring to him.

A few mornings ago, he had woken up earlier than usual and cried for no apparent reason. He could only remember fragments of a dream that had been playing in his mind: He was a boy in a raincoat looking at a lantern gliding across the night sky; its small light shining faintly in the air like the distant glow of a gemstone ring. And somehow when he woke up, there had been a disorienting change within him. He had felt it more clearly on his way back from college a few days later as familiar landscapes drifted past the train’s windows. A strange stillness. As if the fluttering inside of an older time had grown stagnant and the back and forth swinging of metal straps had finally stopped. A realisation dawned on him, one that he had been trying to evade.

Two years ago, on a relatively calm monsoon night, Tara had died, and he had never been able to convey the true extent of his feelings towards her. He felt like he was sixteen, and now, all of a sudden, he had turned eighteen. There was no way to reconcile the years in between. A longing had enveloped him two years ago, and it had followed him everywhere he went— at swimming pools and train stations; at dirty cigarette stalls and parking lots in shopping malls. But recently, he had had a change of heart. There had been days when Tara had slipped out from his thoughts. He had made a few close friends, and there was a girl that he had developed feelings for.

A strong wind ruffled Kabir’s hair, and he wondered if it was okay to break his promise to Tara. To not always keep her in his thoughts. To not think about her every day.

‘What song would we dance to?’ he had written back to her the night of the farewell, and she had whispered the answer to him with a hug. Kabir closed his eyes as he played Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol for the first time in two years. Until then, it had seemed to him that he couldn’t listen to the song anymore. Tara’s death had swept his heart clean of something innocent that he could no longer retrieve. The days before her death felt like a time when everything had been incredibly pure. Like a gentle morning that hadn’t touched the colour of the grass yet, and one could still hold the dew between their fingertips. When she passed away, all he felt he could do anymore was try to cling on to what was left of her inside him. To desperately hold on to a place, a song and an old note that carried his only image of her handwriting. It was like one of those promises kids make by interlacing their little fingers together. The most honest childhood gesture. But no one made those promises anymore. Kabir held on to the note tenderly while he waited for the last bits of the track to play out. As the song ended, he dipped his feet in the cold pool water and slowly swayed them back and forth in waves. A few splashes later, he smiled and left for home.

Excerpted with permission from Song of the Day: Stories by Preet Modi, published by Westland.