Music muse

You are sitting in a bus that is travelling somewhere from the god-forsaken rural interiors of Karnataka to Mysore. All around you there are baskets full of vegetables and flowers. There is incessant Kannada chatter all around you of rural folk. Gawd! Why doesn't the driver stop playing the goddamn music? You stand out like a sore thumb with a jhola and jeans. With a horrible headache from interviewing tens of people, you ache for one minute of silence to clarify your pain. The glass window of your seat is broken, the continuous sound that it makes jars on your ears. You can't help feeling drawn to the jarring sound. You concentrate on it and then juxtapose it with the background music, and the surrounding chatter. You choose the background music and then slip into a lilting sleep. Of all things, the loud Kannada music in the background offers a shield against all else. Suddenly, I prefer it to everything else. Is that why you find loud music played on terrible buses?

Something similar happened to me yesterday and this time it was soft Chinese music. Chinese? I would have never expected that!