शोक से श्लोक · Grief into verse
Grief at its full weight. The training is not to lift it. It is to give it feet and a beat.
If something grey is near you, the grey of a dove, a thread or a cloth, tie it on your wrist. That is Bharata's colour for karuṇa. Or begin as you are.
A śloka of yours is kept on this phone. The inside door plays it.
First the body, later the voice, later still only inside. Any of them, any time; nothing is locked.
The grief was given feet and a beat.
Every road ends at śānta, the centre. That road is there for another time.
Why this
In the Rāmāyaṇa, Vālmīki saw a hunter kill one of a pair of krauñca birds, and words burst from him in grief (1.2.9 to 14). Of those words he said: bound in feet, even in syllables, fit for the lute and the beat, let what came from me in grief be a śloka (1.2.17). The grief became verse, śokaḥ ślokatvam āgataḥ (1.2.39).
The verse is the anuṣṭubh: eight syllables to a quarter, four quarters to a śloka. Your taps decide which beats are long and which short. The metre's own rule decides three: in every quarter the fifth is short and the sixth long, and the seventh is long in the first and third quarters and short in the second and fourth. Vālmīki's first śloka keeps this rule, and the inside door plays its beat when you have none of your own.
Karuṇa in Bharata is slow (XIX.58 to 59), its colour the grey of a dove (kapota, VI.42 to 45), its notes gāndhāra and niṣāda. The flute plays your line on Ga and Ni and ends each quarter on Sa.
Your words are never asked for and never leave you. If you keep the śloka, only its beat is kept, on this phone, and you can let it go. How long counts as long is ours.