Mr D'Souza · The Long Way Down to Morning · Pulse Beat
Everything she was, she owed to a man who smoked on the balcony of a rented room in Fort Kochi and taught violin to anyone who could pay thirty rupees, and, if they could not, to them too. Mr D'Souza…
Everything she was, she owed to a man who smoked on the balcony of a rented room in Fort Kochi and taught violin to anyone who could pay thirty rupees, and, if they could not, to them too.
Mr D'Souza had been first violin in a Goan orchestra before drink and a failed marriage took the rest. He was sixty when she met him, with hands like old rope and an ear that could hear a quarter-tone's lie across a street.
"Again," he would say. Never good. Never no. Only again. Until one afternoon, after she had played a slow Bach air for the fortieth time, he had put his cigarette out and said, very softly, "There."
She was ten. She had cried. He had pretended to be looking for a match.
It was he who wrote to the conservatory in Berlin, in handwriting like a spider's, and he who stood on the railway platform when she left, not waving, with his cap in both hands. She had not told him about the finger. She could not imagine saying it to that face.