The Harmony: Part 4

Three days. No chanting.

Not faded. Not reduced. Gone. He woke the first morning and lay still for a full minute waiting for it. Nothing. He made chai. Nothing. Went to office, sat through meetings, ate lunch with Samar. Nothing. The city was just the city. Ordinary noise, ordinary silence, no layer underneath either of them.

He slept properly for the first time since the dhaba.

The second day he called it a stress response. Sleep deprivation, overwork, the brain finding patterns where there were none. He went for a walk after office. Bought a cutting chai from a stall and stood on the footpath and drank it and felt, for the first time in a week, completely ordinary. The relief was real. He let himself have it.

The third day he realized he was listening for it.

Not wanting it. Not missing it exactly. But checking. In the gaps between things. Between one thought and the next. Between a song ending and the next one starting. The way you check a door even when no one is supposed to arrive.

He went to the temple three lanes from the PG that evening. Left his shoes at the entrance. Sat in the back corner during the evening aarti with the notebook page folded in his pocket and compared. Syllable by syllable. The priest had a practiced rhythm, decades of the same words, a genuine fluency. Karan tracked it against what he remembered.

Wrong hymn.

He tried two more temples over the next two days. Different areas, different traditions. Sat in the back each time. Never approached the pandit. The calculation was simple — too much risk of being smiled at patiently, handed a pamphlet, told that modern stress manifests in unusual ways. So he sat and compared and left.

Nothing matched.

On the sixth evening he was at his window. Late. The street below had gone quiet. He sat on the sill and looked out and the question that had been forming for three days finally arrived cleanly: did he want it to come back?

He sat with the question for a while.

Then he stopped running from it and leaned toward it instead.

The silence held for a long moment. The street. The fan. The distant TV from Mrs. Sharma's flat.

Then, from somewhere beneath the ordinary sounds of the city, unhurried and exact.

The chanting.

All four voices. Exactly as they had been. As if the six days had not happened. As if it had simply been waiting for him to stop running and start reaching.

He sat at the window for a long time.

He told himself he did not feel relief.

The chanting, as always, was indifferent to what he told himself.