NusratForever.com

The only time I can really cry is when I’m vacuuming. My vacuum cleaner came from Sears and cost $449 (although I got it as a floor model for $200 off). It’s called something like a WIND MACHINE or WIND TUNNEL. It has powerful suction and is as loud as a riding lawn mower. When I feel like crying, I drag out my vacuum cleaner and I put on my CD of Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan singing, “The Long Road,” which is from the score of the movie Dead Man Walking. The song is sixteen minutes long and goes like this:

We all walk the long road,

cannot stay.

There’s no need to say goodbye.

All the friends and family,

All the memories going round, round, round.

I have wished for so long
how I wish for you today . . .

I turn the CD up real, real loud, push REPEAT, and go around the house vacuuming and crying. I cry for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who died of cardiac arrest in London when he was only forty-nine years old. I cry for my mother and my father and Randy and Sydney and Julia, and for my mother-in-law who died a slow death from Alzheimer’s disease, and for all the dead people I know and all the people who have died in wars and airplanes and falling buildings, and for all the suicides. I cry for all the living, too—the survivors—and all the sadness and meanness in the world, for those in hospitals and refugee camps, for all the desperate people who feel like they’re at the end of their rope, all the drunks and drug addicts, those who hunger and those who mourn and will never, ever be comforted, and for all animals that are sick and feeble and old. I vacuum everything. I vacuum real good.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a Pakistani who was considered one of the greatest singers of Sufi devotional music, a style known as qawwali. He had liver and weight problems most of his life. In addition to performing with Eddie Vedder for Dead Man Walking, he also wrote and sang songs on the soundtrack of Natural Born Killers.

Sara Pritchard