'a' is my Blue Note

"Yeah!", Jacek yells as he strums his guitar, feet thumping, creating a solid 16-bar jazz framework. Creating variations across the fret and across the octaves, offering plenty of spaces for me to fill in, in this small jamming room at KJC.

I fumble, stumble, and internally grumble as I try to strumble along. I had just been able to get a finger hold on the rhythm, and had just magically flashed out a series of notes that evoked this outbreak from my mentor.

Jacek looks at peace with his guitar. Once he settles into his position, nothing moves except his mouth, his hands, and occasionally his right foot to tap along the rhythm. The guitar is part of his body and mind. His hands blend into it.

"Build it... build on it. More!"

Paradoxically, this Jacek's reaction and prodding shatter my fragile grasp of my mind, sending out shards of thoughts everywhere. Embarrassment, self-awareness, panic. My fingers freeze, my dumb mind frantic and chasing madly at that escaping rhythm just a quarter note ahead. I try to get back to the flow and listen intently to discern the escaped pattern. Trying to find out where we had progressed in that damned 16-bar prison. But I am running behind a tantalizing balloon string, just inches above my reach, floating into the sky.

It must be my guitar, I think. It doesn't seem to accept my hold. I notice a developing strain along the length of my back and shoulders.

In the end, I heave a sigh of exasperation, and stop playing. Pentatonic scale. Jazz. Natural, mellow and easy. Bhutro pani haina!

I mumble a few apologetic incoherents, staring at the floor (the sight of dirty, synthetic Nepali carpet sending out another tangent of thoughts). I feel like a a guy who just accidentally bumped into a Doko full of chicks, confused and dazed by the spill of the tiny birds escaping in every direction.

'Aarghhh', I try to voice out my internal frustration, and look helplessly at Jacek's hand making pefect jazz shapes in the guitar neck, moving up and down the fret. His head moves now, eyes encouraging me to catch up. I just return the gaze stupidly, futile, hopelessly lost.

After about three or four bars, he stops. "Milan, Milan, Milan...", he says, disapprovingly. I absurdly feel like a child, back in a classroom.

"Yes, I know", I say, "It's-"

"You need to practice more. You need to take this more seriously". He goes on, saying it's just a waste of time if I get stuck in what he called was just a basic (implying that it was his time that is wasting). I nod a few times, accepting his blame. Need. More seriously. I hear the rest of his words, but stop comprehending as I get hypnotized in his lips lined with whiskers. (how can he be so still and move just his mouth?)

"You should let go and enjoy the flow", he was saying, "It's just the the 5 notes of the Pentatonic scale. Play whatever combination you want."

But in my mind, I know that I have already given up for this lesson. Next class. I think. Next class, I'll show this guy what I can do.

But I'm like a sponge right now. Each object in that room triggers a sensory explosion and takes me to a new timeline. I am a supernova, a collapsing star going out with an explosion of thoughts, triggering and flinging out mental bombs of memories and reveries from the core of my heart into the deep space. A supernova of Pentatonic notes. Not linear and mellifluous, weaving into the strand of time. But instead a jangling ball of cacophony, a playing of all the notes in a spot, them radiating out like an exploding pentagram of a star. A real time-traveler.

My name's Pentatonic too: M.I.L.a.N. 'a' is the Blue note.