How music has saved my family

Could it save the world?

Hola GJ friends,

Sorry to be a couple of days late with this post. There were extenuating circumstances- which I will explain another time.

In the while, here is your weekly post from The Global Jigsaw. It’s on music, because when all is said and done, we’ll always have the tunes.

I hope you enjoy reading this. Would love to hear all about your favourite songs, concerts, musical moments. Please comment here:

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I appreciate your reading the Global Jigsaw, regardless.

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If music be the food of love, play on, give me an excess of it. Our family lives by these particular words of the bard and unlike for Shakespeare, there is no sickening of the appetite from music’s surfeit at the Arias-Aiyar household.

Time and again, music has rescued us from despair, stood in for love when words failed, soothed hurts- physical and emotional and been the glue when cracks appeared in family life. Not to mention the long car rides during which it helped keep the peace.

It began with the birth of Ishaan, my older son, who was diagnosed with colic when he was a few weeks old. The term “colic” we discovered is really a description of a certain kind of behaviour - more than three hours of crying, for more than three days a week, for more than three weeks in a row, in an otherwise healthy baby.

Doctors variously advised us to burp the baby regularly, swaddle him tightly, and massage his tummy. But they invariably ended with the sobering conclusion that it was most likely we would just have to wait it out. The majority of children mysteriously stopped crying by the end of three months.

 The dark tunnel of colic was lit with moments of humour. At one point my husband and I found ourselves at three in the morning, him jiggling the baby like a jelly fish in a baby carrier, while I followed him manically waving a rattle.

But the funny side was often difficult to see. For weeks nothing seemed to soothe Ishaan during a colic-episode. Then one day, frustrated that all my attempts to calm the baby having come to naught, I decided to blast some music over his screams to drown out his crying and lift my mood.

I happened to play an old Bob Marley CD. “Wai yai yai; wai yai yai yai,” the refrain for Buffalo Soldier sounded too much like a baby crying for comfort, when suddenly I noticed something. The baby was not crying. He was smiling. In that minute I wept. My baby was finally happy, thanks to Bob Marley. He might be colicky, but at least he had great taste in music.

In the weeks that followed, I filled the house with music. We danced to dire straits, swayed to Bach and stamped through flamenco. Even Auntie Mei, our Chinese nanny, at first sceptical of all the shimmying, came around.  And one day I caught her doing the twist, baby clasped to the hip, Chubby Checker belting out a number in the background.

So it was that music helped me fall in love with my crying baby, a little more every day, as we danced our way through colic. I sang to him while we pirouetted, and all my bathroom singer fantasies were realised.

This didn’t last too long though. Today, both boys tend to roll their eyes and if physically possible, run away, when I begin to sing. Admittedly my tendency to imagine myself as the soprano in Mozart’s The Magic Flute might have something to do with that reaction.  

I’ve also devoted the last half decade to ensuring the boys learn piano. This has involved as much toil and as many tears as musical notes. The Greek philosopher Plato was on the money when he said, “Of all animals the boy is the most unmanageable…the most insidious, sharp-witted and insubordinate of animals.”

Ishaan, circa 2019, playing piano in school

But I persevered, and was rewarded the other day when Nico, my younger one, closed his eyes while playing Pachelbel’s Cannon and said, “It (the music) makes me float.” Nico is now a western classical music devotee, who spends more time listening to videos of piano concerts than he does watching his favourite, but entirely inane, youtuber, Unspeakable, playing video games. I cannot stress enough, that this is a very big win.

Nico circa 2018, when his feet couldn’t even touch the ground!

Ishaan on the other hand has progressed from Bob Marley to Kendrick Lamar. I don’t share his enthusiasm for the latter’s music but we do bond over the effect that lyrics can have. They are the poetry of one’s teenage years. They make our feelings transparent to us.

I remember memorizing every word of every Pink Floyd song and the ocean of profundity I believed it helped me swim in. And I watch Ishaan’s eyes turn round and rapt when he listens to Lamar and all I can think is: there will always be music, and thank God for that.

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Ciao for now. Take a few moments today to listen to some music and do nothing else. Its a reward to yourself. And I can think of few things that are more universal. If there is a recipe for world peace- it must lie in music. No?

xoxo