You will never know.
You will never know the impact you had on me.
I was an angry, anxious seventeen-year old. The school counsellor kept assuring me it was all normal.
“It’s a stage you just have to grow through... adolescence. You’re going to be fine.”
The night that I abandoned my violin by the side of the road after a school concert, I wasn’t fine.
I hated playing the violin.
I enjoyed music, and I craved being around musical people. They were all crazy, they were my kind of crazy -- leave an expensive instrument on the side of a road and walk away, crazy.
It would be ten years later, far from the bright lights of the Victorian Arts Centre and in the humble home of my Arabic violin teacher; that I would fall in love with that old wooden instrument again, the one you found and sent back to me.
Standing in Fouad Harraka’s living room, watching his hands and fingers bring life to an instrument I had once abandoned, doubting I would ever see again.
The love affair with middle-eastern music began a couple of weeks before I met Fouad for the first time. I had stumbled onto a piece of music on YouTube which spoke to me like an old friend I had re-united
with, we had a lot to catch up on. I had discovered Arabic music, I had re-discovered the violin.
Fouad and his wife Hanna opened their home to me. I became a member of their family. We spent Christmas day together; a Lebanese Christmas lunch, there was so much food!
Fouad made that violin of mine make sounds I could only dream of as an awkward adolescent suffering teenager.
“Arabic music Shankar...you need to have the spirit, if you don’t have the Arabic spirit, it is hard” he would say.
I would repeat the same thing to the girl I would meet that night before leaving Melbourne for Kununurra, the East Kimberley. You know when you see someone and every ounce of you compels you to go forward and make an introduction? When you just know you need to say something, even if it’s just ‘hello’? She was intense, she was bright, she was warm hearted, and that night she had all of my attention. I said hello.
Alison, or Ali, is a violinist. I tell her that I am one too. I play the Arabic violin.
A few months go by and I am sitting on the top of Kelly’s Knob, a big rock sitting on the outskirts of town, overlooking the Kimberley plains below me. What a sight. What a world. My new friend Danny sits not so far away. We are “jamming”. Danny is playing his Digeridoo, I am on my violin, yes, that one.
Tourists stop and listen. They take photos of the odd pair: a white hippie playing a digeridoo and a Sri Lankan playing the violin. The music is sad, but it keeps them there, listening.
Dinner tonight is something out of Ali’s cook book. She gave it to me when I went home to visit. It’s meant to be easy recipes. I’ll probably end up calling her for help.
It was ten years ago that I lost my violin on the side of the street, outside the Arts Centre. You returned it to me, a stranger who I will never meet, who didn’t know that the violin belonged to a frustrated, anxious teenager. That was ten years ago.
You will never know what impact you had on my life.
