Dear Musicians, We Type To Your Tunes

We were in Bristol, walking down the beautiful streets in the centre when Aashray introduced me to Hozier. I know 25 is a very late age to become aware of his beauty but I'm glad that it he took me to church through a phone speaker in the middle of the night.

I couldn't stop listening to the song on loop and till date, some days my playlist is just that. There are songs you find comfort in, but that song has changed its placement in my life multiple times. At first, it was swaying my body in the small hostel room. Then it made me write for a topic I stay away from because I don't think it's my place to comment, and I don't want to end up saying something wrong. I learnt in the last year, that you can only do pure justice to your story and perspective and never someone else's. So, I wrote for the LGBTQ+ in India, for the first time, as a heterosexual person. Here's what it came out as:

Lovers like Hozier’s Until 2018, homosexuality was criminalized in India under section 377 of the Penal Code.

Love scares me for if it walked towards me across a Boots cosmetics aisle and batted away my familial inhibitions with its violet eyelashes, it could lay the tombstone of my family name.

So, I sing with you, Hozier, Take me to church.

For if love called to me in its moonlight-soft midnight moan, I would swim across the crocodile swamp to be with it.

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies.

But the emergency number for our city is 377,

so I’m to float through the whole republic

before I can reach love.

I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife.

Love scares me for it’s only a matter of time till they sends jitters through the nerve endings

on my spine and hands, with a brush of fingers, and sparks that their hair lights on my shoulder bone, until I’m electrocuted.

Offer me that deathless death.

For if it were up to me I’d look at love only to look away,

take a different train, queue keeping two people

between us, keep my hands in my pocket, turn my head away from their neck when hugging. For I, could be beaten or burned or banished to death if love were someone like me, if she were, if she.

Good God, let me give you my life.

Or if it were up to me, would I sin for love, like a festive ritual?

For if there’s only hell for love and I, wouldn’t I live my heaven on earth?

Amen

Amen

Amen

Painting: Music by Gustav Klimt. Source: Wikiart Visual Art Encyclopedia website.

I wrote what I scared me about the society we're living in and I hope I did not hurt any sentiments in the process.

Lastly, after six months from writing it, the song became an urge to self-question my merit in life and my contribution to the world. It's not what I would've liked but since this is all about honesty, I believe I could reveal my story. I still find the fact of a song being so persuasive to an individual, within the span of an year, purely artistic. That's what art is to me, that's what connects all these different forms that we share and interchange ideas and emotions from.

For the love of art,

Charuvi