The Inheritance

When my grandfather died, he left me a violin and a note. The note said: "For Anika. It does not yet know how to be yours. Teach it patiently."

The violin had been made in 1923, in a workshop in the city of Lahore, by a man whose name had been almost rubbed off the label inside its body. My grandfather had bought it when he was twenty-two, on a market stall, for less than he later spent on a single dinner. He had played it badly, with great enthusiasm and a strong, unmusical voice, for fifty-four years.

It had travelled with him on a steamship across the Arabian Sea. It had survived a flood in his first London flat. It had been mended four times by a quiet luthier in Hackney who refused, every time, to take more than the cost of materials. When he handed it to my mother, who handed it to me, the case smelled of camphor wood and old rosin and the warm leather of my grandfather's hands.

I had never played the violin before in my life. I had played the piano badly and the recorder very badly and once, on holiday, a tin whistle. My grandfather had known this perfectly well.

The first sound I made on the violin, in my bedroom on the evening of his funeral, was so awful that I laughed. Then I cried for forty minutes. Then I tried again. The second sound was, very slightly, less awful.

I have been trying ever since. The violin does not yet know how to be mine — my grandfather was right. It has spent a hundred and three years learning the hands of other people, and it is taking its time to learn mine. Sometimes, in the evenings, when the streetlights come on and I draw the bow very slowly across the open D string, I think I can hear it considering me.

That is enough, for now.