Sujatha Rao

Inspirational Others

3.8  

Sujatha Rao

Inspirational Others

The Bird Has A Song

The Bird Has A Song

5 mins
197


The blank page stared back at Keertana – empty, barren.

“Wait. Not so fast lady! Why don’t you consider its blankness as excitement waiting to happen.”

A smile crossed her face with this thought. This is how it has been over the last few months. As though there is a constant struggle within herself between her own two contrasting facets.

While one of them tried dragging her down, the other always tried to lift her up.

“So far, so good. It’s the lifting up me that is winning” Keertana mused.

“Gratitude for everything life has to offer,” she wrote these words on the blank page. Thereafter the words just started flowing out of her and soon the page was full.

Keertana’s life had been like “neighbour’s envy, owner’s pride”. She had everything going good in life. Her husband Abhiram’s company was doing extremely well. Her two children were doing very good at their studies. Her music classes were getting a steady inflow of students. She had been giving concerts regularly and was earning accolades.

Then the tide seemed to turn. From the fateful moment when she noticed that lump. Initially, it was quite small and she ignored it. As it started to grow, she decided to get it checked. Soon a flurry of tests followed and their worst fears were confirmed. She had the dreaded “C” disease.

She fought with it, with her family and music supporting her every step of the way. And she won without having to go under a knife for surgery of any sort. When they found no cancer cells in her body, the whole family erupted in joy. And she never felt healthier in life.

She started going about her life with renewed vigour. She glided into rooms in her house humming a tune. She started attending and giving music concerts. She welcomed the changing seasons with a suitable raga.

When she found her school-going son’s beautiful sketches something inside her stirred. She started to doodle and soon people were appreciating her newfound talent.

She was so full of life that people commented she had a glow about her. “Oh, it’s the glow of cancer. You know things glow as they are leaving” she joked around in reply to people’s questions about it.


Annual checkups became part of her routine. Four years into her happy sojourn, the doctors found some traces of those “c” cells once again. Initially, she brushed them aside, saying they were just traces and they would go away. After all, hadn’t she fought and conquered a larger nemesis, she asked herself.

When the patch invaded her lungs so much that she found it difficult to talk a couple of words or take a few steps without gasping for breath, she realized she was in for another prolonged fight. As she went through her treatment, she would lie down in the bed listening to her favourite music and visualize herself singing again.

Marghazhi season with its annual cultural fair renting the air with its soulful songs and toe-tapping beats, kept replaying in her mind. She would close her eyes and inhabit those sabhas and kacheris in the vast city of Chennai that paid rich tributes to the legendary Tyagaraaja.

Those images and sounds were there with her when she went through her chemo cycles. They were there when she was recuperating.

Seeing her hands and feet moving in tune with the rhythm playing in her mind even as she lay still in her bed, her worried younger son Anirudh shook her out of her reverie to find out what actually was the matter.

She replied “Oh No, Ani. I was attending one of my favourite concerts. You spoiled it for me.”

A relieved Anirudh retorted jocularly “Amma, during the pandemic, everyone is working from home. You are roaming around from home.”

As they broke into laughter together, gratitude-filled Keertana’s heart. She realized how lucky she was to have such an understanding and empathetic family right down to her school-going son.

“I have got to fight. Both for myself and for all the others I love. More than anything else, I have got to fight for my soul mate music and get back to singing. ” she told herself as she resolved to overcome all the difficulties one at a time.

At the end of her chemo cycles, she kept her promise made to herself and sang an excerpt in Karna Ranjani raga to the great delight of her husband who recorded it with great gusto and shared it with family and friends.


After a few weeks, when the doctors suggested Mastectomy as the next logical step, she willy-nilly gave her consent. On the surgical table, when the surgeon asked her to keep talking so as to check the effect of anaesthesia, she bowled him over with the question “Can I sing, instead?”

“You may sing Keertana” a visibly moved surgeon replied.

There were moist eyes in the room as Keertana drifted off into her musical wonderland humming her favourite tunes as the effect of anaesthesia took over. 

“The surgery went off well and your wife is doing fine Mr Abhiram. In my career, I have never had anyone sing on my surgical table. Neither did my colleagues. Your wife is really something. We are hopeful about her recovery. By the way, since how long she has been singing?” the surgeon asked with a smile.

“As far back as I remember” Abhiram replied trying to hold back his tears, as he remembered the Chinese proverb “the bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.”


The story is based on certain true inputs.


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