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The Tuning Fork

T. SHER SINGH

Early last week, news stories began to report a murder-suicide involving a family of four Sikh-Americans in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

The perpetrator husband and the victim wife and two sons were identified from the very outset, giving key details of their residential location and history, employment, etc.

From the outset, I could see that the names were new to me. I had never heard of them before, had no ties to them, direct or indirect … knew nothing about them.

Yet, the story hit me with gut-wrenching intensity. It has remained uppermost in my consciousness throughout the week, and continues so today: the thought of a whole family unit disappearing from the face of the earth; the innocent children; the battered wife; the troubled husband.

And the violence. Worse, the sheer brutality.

Stress? Mental illness? Did something snap suddenly, or was it a slow-burn, simmering innocuously, privately, quietly, undetected, unobserved, unknown even to those closest to them? Were there any symptoms? And if there were, do they appear sinister only in hindsight, or did they warrant an early intervention? By whom?

I see that I am not the only one who is struggling with these thoughts. I have heard from umpteen people from around the world who similarly knew nothing of these four or their extended family before the tragedy, but, like me, their sleep too was being invaded by the fallout.

Though we’ll never feel even a fraction of the pain and sense of loss experienced by family members and other loved ones left behind, I realize now that we … a whole community, an entire diaspora … too have been mourning and grieving and praying, and wondering if some collectivity amongst us could have helped avert the terrible climax.

And I’ve been wondering too about what it is that reaches out across thousands of miles and touches us, grabs us, grips us, in our distant and anonymous lives.    
  
Reminds me of the Physics class in school aeons ago, when Brother Kelly, our science teacher brought out a large wooden case and plunked it on the sprawling desk that separated him from us in the lecture theatre. We were still in the midst of the chapter on “Sound”.

Sporting a golden hue, the box was about two feet long, a foot or so wide, some three inches deep.

He lifted its hinged cover and invited us to come down from our ascending rows of desks to cluster around him.

Slowly, delicately, he pulled out two-pronged metal objects of varying size and thickness from its velvety interior and stuck them upright in holes on a wooden bar, which he had also extricated from the box.

“These are tuning forks,“ he declared.

They didn’t excite us much, I remember, those basic, minimalist, boring pieces of metal.

We could see the day wasn’t going to be half as exciting as when we’d been shown how to make Hydrogen earlier in the year. How could one forget, ever, how the whole apparatus had exploded within minutes of the bunsen burner being lit under the huge flask?

We’d spent the rest of the day in the school infirmary having shards of glass pulled out from our bodies with tweezers. Classes had been cancelled for the rest of the day. A good time had been had by all.

But today, with these strange looking metal thingees?

He picked up one, struck one end of the U-shaped double prong on the edge of the desk, and then quickly held it vertically over the desk and gradually lowered it until its smaller end, the stub, touched the wooden surface. The whole desk, it appeared, began to hum.

He repeated it with a bigger fork. Again, it resonated but with a slightly different sound.

He had our attention now.

He pulled out a third. Again, a singing hum, but at a different pitch than the previous two.

He hit it again, stood it upright, and then with his other hand lifted a second fork and merely stood it a foot away on the desk top. It began to hum on its own.

Magically.

Now there were two hums, different ones, but they soon merged into a single one.

This went on for a while. He regaled us with various permutations and combinations of the earlier steps, using all the forks in different configurations.

He would strike a fork on the table and then hold it next to our ears. First one, then two ... One struck, another unstruck. Both hummed merrily.

There were more variations. He made a drinking glass vibrate without even touching it. And then, made a window pane rattle.

What followed was a fascinating lecture on resonance.

And what he termed “sympathetic resonance.”

A passive string or object, he told us -- while continuing to play with the forks, to our utter fascination -- responds to the vibrations of another string or object even though they are physically unconnected. But only if they have a “harmonic likeness”.

That is, if one creates sympathy in the other.

If it does, then both resonate. And sing. Or hum.

Or cry.

Together.

In harmony.

In sympathy.     
 
I guess that’s what we do then, don’t we, wherever we are, no matter how far removed we are in time or space, when we learn of the joy or sorrow of another Sikh, even if he or she is a stranger or out of sight. Even if he or she will forever remain so.

We feel sympathetic resonance.

Vibrations picked up through space all the way from Johns Creek … or Oak Creek.

From Fauja Singh’s triumph in London the other day, or from the dark days of the Partition of Punjab in 1947, or the inhumanities of India’s pogroms in 1984.

It’s a resonance that unites each of the 30 million Sikhs around the world.

If you’re looking for unity, here is where you find it.

And it is the kind of unity which is to be found nowhere else, in no other community, to such a degree of purity and intensity.

It is a gift unique to Sikhi. Lying deep within our DNA, just like the trait that the metal of the tuning fork carries no matter where it goes, alone or in the company of others.

But it doesn’t stop there.

The sympathetic resonance I have seen and felt in the hearts of Sikhs is not just for other Sikhs.

The concentric circles of harmonic likeness not only go beyond family and friends and neighbours and colleagues and well-wishers and Singhs and Kaurs,  but they get bigger and bigger until they encompass all of humanity.

That is the Oneness that shabad gurbani sings about.

It is akin to the very first drop of nourishment a mother gives to her newborn, the very first grain of solid food that it is blessed with by an Elder. It permeates our very being, from birth to death.

It is this ability to effortlessly, automatically, empathize with Sikh or non-Sikh, friend or enemy, the victim and the oppressor, the victor and the defeated, the favourite or the underdog, that makes us Sikhs.     

It is what sets us apart.  

February 10, 2013

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