U2 and I

My love affair with U2 started when I was 6. That’s quite a tender age to fully understand the depth of their music, their poetry, and the complexity of their creativity. My father brought home “The Joshua Tree” cassette and that’s pretty much all he listened to for weeks. I wasn’t complaining. There was something about them that made me feel nostalgic. I was 6. What nostalgia could I possibly have? But yet, there it was. Bono’s voice made me emotional and elated at the same time. I didn’t have the vocabulary to express myself. Papa was addicted to them too! He’d put on the cassette tape every night and Bono’s falsetto would take over our little home. The sound from our trusty two-in-one would fill my ears with lyrics I could not understand, but the music I didn’t want to stop.

For years U2 has remained with me, my favourite, my go-to music, my unchanging love. And then I lost my father - my wisdom, my teacher, the ultimate bad-ass rocker. He knew more about music than any person I’ve ever known, and he knew even more about books. Authors and their books, poets, and their poetry, nothing was hidden from him. Long before books became cult classics, he’d bought them and devoured them and known their value.

When he died, I lost part of myself and for more than a year, I could not bring myself to listen to the music I had loved for years. I couldn’t even bear to look at pictures of the band. For a year I pressed on, mourning my father, craving the sounds I heard with him as a child but unable to allow myself the liberty of enjoying that music he loved so much. 

And then when I thought I could listen to them without going to pieces, I did. I was wrong. Song after song of “The Joshua Tree” began and ended and I sobbed harder with each song. The memories washed over me, drowning me, enveloping me. And I had Bono to console me.

And then 2019 happened. U2’s tour of India happened, and my first concert happened. This band that I had grown up with, and wept my heart out to, performed the songs that shaped my childhood right in front of me. I wept, I screamed, I clapped, I sang, and I wept some more. Having my father in this experience with me would have been the gift of a lifetime. But for now, I’ll enjoy this music he shared with me.