My heart went cold as he excitedly showed the video of the Persian graduate student playing Paganini,

   “This could be you,”

    “Funny, he doesn’t look like a 30 year old undergraduate with cancer three co-majors, a thesis, and zero family as I crash in the library some night to avoid sleeping in my car.”

     Of course, I was ignored as he continued his fascination.

     “…Murīd.”  Well, fuck.

Now, viola was a religious obligation.  But only one song. Not a Paganini, sadly, but equally vigorous.

        Patience only lasted about six months, I was never any sort of musician and only played 2nd flute in middle school band out of continuation of habit from the shrill, over-expensive birdcall device I was assigned in the second grade to “feminize my lip formation”

     Gamely, I learned to tune the thing.  Just as I learned to tune a flute, with gritted teeth and perfect pitch so frustrating that any deviation felt like failure as each tuning of the A string brought anxiety of it ‘snapping’ and whipping me across the face.

       The brother who insisted on viola study, despite claims of professional musicianship, became increasingly unavailable except to demand perfection, of one singular piece of classical music, meant entirely for a Violin, with finger-shredding pizzicato, rapid-fire measures, and a repeated and building urgency which someone barely scratching out “ode to joy” after a month of study, could produce.

     By lack of instantaneous prodigy, I was seemingly abandoned to figure it out with a local fiddler I met in the library twice a week, it caused friction.

      “That,” he would say with disdain, “is a street busker and derelect fiddler.  fit for the streets or the pub, but not formal performance,” he sneered, “self taught.”

      “How am I different?  You suggested I take up the viol, you offer zero guidance, and criticize my failure to learn it instantaneously.”

       “You, are an ivy league student”

         “This is not an ivy league institution, it’s Tier 3 at best.”

         “I have your full transcript from the one you attended prior.”

          “It does not count if I only attended because a relative is vice president of the board of directors and I transferred before my grades could be inferred as nepotism.”

         “You’re absolutely correct, I was mistaken, Shamsi… it counts even more profoundly as it indicates you live below your caste.”

         “My ‘caste’ is full of assholes who view the majority of humanity as an inferior species and only ‘like’ our own if we provide social or financial benefit.  I provide neither voluntarily.  Khalas.”

“Nadoroste, benefit is extracted from the proletariat to the glorification of whomever controls the means of production…in this case, I produce Talent, you seemingly produce excuses only.

      “I don’t even have proper calloused fingers ffs”

       “Your failure at maintaining good practice is a poor reflection of yourself alone.”

      And so. The dreaded piece remained as I struggled through it.  Oddly, the man who assigned the viola never once taught it, only insisted upon it for the value of it, violist were like those who play oboe, French horn, or bassoon, generally rare-enough to be welcome to fill a seat in an ensemble with easy-enough parts where lack of expertise could be obscured by slow, droning, harmonics under the competency of a violinist with charisma or a cellist with surprising moxy.

       Not surprisingly, I did not succeed in learning the piece correctly.  I stumbled and struggled with every possible tutor available,  it was above my skill level, and the brother who assigned it seemed to gain strength from his constant derision of my efforts while never once picking up an instrument himself.

      In my private moments, I had concluded he developed his neurological condition that he claimed prevented him from actually teaching, as Allah’s own punishment for his outstanding arrogance on the subject matter.

      “You, a student of a prior symphony musician, inspire zero confidence”

       “I reflect the competency of my educator whom never once picked up a single musical instrument in front of me while demanding I should have instant fluency with zero muscle memory or prior training altogether in alto clef,”

     “That should not be necessary.  As Murīd, you should reflect my competencies as a rust-less mirror”

     “Correct.  I am an arrogant blue blooded derelect treated like proxy slave by a low birth rank exile of a exiled lineage with high ego and low Adab”

      “We are going to pretend you did not speak that”

       “You’re right.  Honesty is anathema, I forgot to curtsy when I entered your office as you grade remedial English in a zero rank university staffed by communists and CIA MkUltra program plants.”

     “You cannot disrespect me, I am your elder.  If a person is even one minute older, in my country…”

      “Okay, your country….which is known as AMERICA, please, continue as you describe how antiquated social dictum from your own childhood apply to a student you claim to teach while showing zero example of what I am to learn except to criticize my efforts and suggest that I should “magically” know how to play an instrument because YOU used to, with zero training, is absolutely mental.”

     “if you cannot accomplish it you are worthless”

      “if I cannot accomplish it, it is because of lack of innate talent, lack of support, absence of proper training, little time, and few resources. I am literally couch surfing to complete this degree, the only reason I endure you at all is because I care about you, and although you have become and absolute quintessential asshole who seemingly lost all ability to teach the last 6 months, I still inexplicably love you.  i don’t know how, or why or what sort of love it is, but fighting with you harms me and I would rather set the fucking thing on fire and be your friend then continue it under your derision.”

      “You are going to continue to learn the piece, it is now your final project.”

       “For a diplomacy major?  A viola performance is necessary to obtain my degrees, anything else,  your Highness? perhaps I should also learn to train wolves and basic pc repair for my pre-law courses….?”

    “Wolves & computers are logic-based systems, you are hardly a nuqt, much less a system.”

     “And you are a bacha bazi dancing for the CIA and abusing the last person who cares about you outside of your mother”

      “I wash my hands of you”

       “Make sure you scrub under the nails to remove the metaphoric flesh you gouge from me with your unrealistic expectations and inability to defend me correctly against side effects of your career decisions.”

      I was still responsible to learn the piece, so I did.  I performed in front of anyone who would listen, and most found no fault with it.  I did not invite the asshole to my defense, as he had given nothing but derision prior and since his edict to suddenly demand I learn viola and a particular piece of sheet music, he was far too important and famous for Sufism.

       Years later, when we were both dying, there were few ways to communicate.  The internet was censored for the burnt and all outward communication was sandboxed as it was expected the heavy metals would slowly lobotomize what intelligence remained of the country incapable of love nor dignity.

     Despite swollen digits and painful edema, the viola was brought out, tuned, and assaulted with MuseScore warm-ups, with the original photocopy of the offending symphony still uncreased in the zippered portion of the case, the title underlined three times and highlighted in green, even still.

      Now, older, although it does not flow easily, it is recognized, it begins only with one note.  repeated, faster, at least my part.  The beginning makes no sense without accompaniment.  But after the introduction,  the rest sounds as of a very angry and quarrelsome bird elucidated a complex legal case as a prosecutor both accusing the damned and pleading with judge and jury as the stenographer kept the beat beneath, until it all ends in United summary of the entire argument. 

     [The next movement, like the slow whining excuses of students asking why they are forced to hand-write anything at all while AI exists as they wax poetic about the value of intellectual ease…in handwritten essay]

     I never learned to play the third movement, it was never my piece to play.

      However,  I learned the more I mastered the first movement with technical precision, the health of the one who first assigned it declined as if the improvement of my own competency drained a limited well where my mastery seemed inexplicably tied to his decline; and each personal success became his failure.

      I watched him wither as I continued to play.  I stopped caring.  I started wearing ribbons on my right wrist that trailed and danced with each bow stroke, the song I could not play becoming my callsign.

    and he was not proud.  even then, pleading me to stop, as if he did not assign the piece, the one that was “useless unless perfect” that my failure to learn it prior without support, was somehow proof of failure to God, and then later, my successs at it, seemingly draining the lifeforce from the one who assigned it like pond, drained by plant life and evaporation.

     “Why does this man deteriorate as I perform as he assigned?  Why is he drained by the successes of another so much so that it becomes life or death to stop the music, attribute it to AI, or claim it is prerecorded as my own hands create the notes in accordance to the pre-set patterns, measure by measure.

    Staccato, pizzicato, Forte, tremolo, does not matter.  The horrid song comes to define me like a classical radio alert system or air raid siren for the prestiged… that single repeated note, then the flurry of explanations, the concordance with the orchestra, then the United closing.

      I play for no one but God as strangers tune in.  I can hear my every mistake, slipped note, bad set, and off-timing.  Whatever purpose learning the song once had is lost.

    The original brother is incoherent and only responds with anger, confusion, or resentment.  nothing meaningful. I play larger auditoriums as my own brother files ridiculous claims that I am not human, my viola is stolen, and that I am somehow “not authentic” or inexplicably “cheating” at the viola.

     Some even listen to him.

Now I am playing for London, it is my worst performance and thankfully, the piece is famous enough to be recognized by that single note repeated in the introduction.  The exhausting reels, climbs and breathless, repeated explanations.

    I have now been playing the same piece for 20 years, only to find that nothing mattered but the title.