In the Space between Singing and Listening

(First published in Aalaap Magazine in April 2014)

Haan kahun toh hai nahin
Na bhi kahyo nahin jaaye
Haan aur na ke beech mein
Mora satguru raha samaaye

‘Yes’ doesn’t quite catch it
‘No’ is not quite right
The space between ‘yes’ and ‘no’
Is where my true guru hides

Near Mussoorie in June 2008, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a small organisation called SIDH located in the village of Kempty, a small event unfolded. It was tentatively billed as a ‘Kabir workshop’. I was in residence there at the time, working on a novel as well as giving workshops, and I was curious about how this workshop would go. It included films and talks by a Ms Shabnam Virmani, besides music, and I fully expected this Ms Virmani to come and give us lectures on Kabir - since lectures and Kabir had indelibly become connected in my mind since school days.

What I encountered was something quite spectacularly different. The films were not what I (lazily) expected documentary films to be. And to encounter Kabir in the voice of Prahlad Tipanya was as revolutionary a revelation as making love for the first time, or perhaps reading the Upanishads yourself, after hearing about these things for so long. There’s nothing like real experience. I was practically meeting Kabir for the first time.

Since that first event in Mussoorie, when the films were still rough-cut, several other Kabir festivals, concerts, screenings and yatras have taken place all over the country. Somehow the idea of journey and Kabir have got inextricably linked in my mind. And this is not a little ironic, since Kabir often pokes fun at all our restless perambulations.

Daudat daudat daudiya
Jahaan lag mann ki daud
Daud thake mann sthir bhaya
Toh vastu thor ki thor

The mind made you scamper
You ran, as far as the mind could fare
Tired of its flight the mind grew still
And the object was right there

What we were looking for, what we set out in search of, he seems to say, was always right here. In another place, he says to himself:

Kabir bahut bhatkiya
Mann le vishay viraam
Chaalat chaalat jug bhaya
Til ke ote Raam

What long wanderings, O Kabir
Let the mind cease its quests
Ages have passed in this search
In a granule, Raam rests


It’s a special feeling when something precious comes to you without your seeking it. Perhaps that is one meaning of ‘the thing’ being right here.

I struck up a friendship with Shabnam in Mussoorie and got involved in some of the Kabir Project’s subsequent travels. One of our first journeys together was a trip to Chhatangarh village near Jaisalmer in Rajasthan to vist Mahesha Ram. In the star-studded nights of the desert - clear, dry air, ample, cloudless sky - we had the privilege of listening to this man sing, outside of a performance context, in his own home, surrounded by his children who were learning from him. And the rasa of listening fully entered into the body. There was no showboating here - neither from the singer, nor from the listener - and no egos to please - neither someone else’s nor your own. Only the music, and an opportunity to be. It was as if the voices and words of Kabir, Meera and other poets came to live in that moment, inhabiting the throat of a singer who is a worthy inheritor of a long tradition of folk music. Mahesha Ramji remains deeply inspirational for us to this day.

Mahesha Ram in the mood
(Photo by Jackson Poretta)
 
More rollicking kind of trips followed - heady yatras in Malwa and Bikaner, for instance, which had whole busloads of people travelling from village to village for a week for nightly satsangs. But years later, another very quiet and intimate journey touched me deeply. The Kabir Project team went to the outskirts of Trivandrum in 2011 to spend a week with Parvathy Baul at her house, which had an akhada for her practice and three dogs called Raja, Rani and Kartik.

Parvathy is not only music, but also a very deep personal practice. She is also silence. She is also insight. She didn’t only sing; she also spoke to us. We talked to her about the intricacies of the Baul path, the practitioner’s obligations and rewards, viraha (separation from the Beloved, longing), seeking out the purusha and the prakriti within, and so on. All the songs that got sung and documented were very much embedded within this context. Again, they were not just performance material in that setting - they were living songs, bearers of subtle, profound and fragile meanings.

In the akhara with Parvathy Baul
(Photo by Smriti Chanchani)

In 2012 I moved to Bangalore and formally started work with the Kabir Project. A much deeper immersion took place. One could almost say - a transformation. I started working with these poems and songs as living material - I started to translate them. And in order to do that I had to learn to catch exactly what they were trying to say. Many poems opened themselves to me through this process.

I also started sitting in on Shabnam’s satsangs much more regularly. This informal space - where a group of friends gather to share music and meaning - invites you to dive in, to participate, to listen and to sing. I, like the others, started singing along. Always having been really fond of singing, I didn’t realise I could fall in love with it to this extent. And that there was this space, open and available and inviting, to sing, to express, to become the song. And that the songs could grow deeper with each bout of listening and/or singing.

I have not stopped singing since this time. The songs have not stopped speaking to me. This space - mystic poetry in the folk idiom - is a powerful space because it is the meeting-ground of melody and meaning. Neither is secondary - both are preeminent. This is the space where rasa (taste) turns into bhaav (feeling).

And it is a very powerful moment when this happens, because, as one song says: “Bhaav bina bhakti kadiya nai hove hai”. (There can be no devotion, without the presence of feeling.)

It is the space, or a moment, of a pregnant silence, when singing and listening, music and meaning, you and me, become one.

Kehna tha so keh diya
Ab kuchh kaha na jaaye
Ek raha dooja gaya
Dariya leher samaaye

I said all I had to
Now nothing more to say
One remained, no ‘other’ stayed
Like waves merge into the ocean


(All translations by Vipul Rikhi)

Two Tempos



(Of men, women and relationships)

Listening to the woes of a certain woman friend about the wretched emotional quotient of the men she’s been involved with - a classic male-female paradigm! - I came up with this theory of two tempos on the spot. It’s pretty simple (even men can grasp it - unless they’re in the middle of a cricket or football match).

Men and women are in different emotional tempos. Generalising largely, men are suspicious, cynical and afraid (of emotions). Therefore they take a long time to begin to trust their partner emotionally in order to start revealing themselves (that giant monster called vulnerability!).

Women on the other hand are totally out there. Their speed of emotional relating is not only dazzling, but also threatening, for a man. So men come up with convenient and disparaging labels like ‘needy’ to ward off this kind of behaviour (eg - horror of horrors - calling three days in a row!). And women can get into a funk about ‘not wanting to appear needy’. Predictably, this kind of thing goes nowhere.

Relationships prosper when the two partners trust each other emotionally. Before this state arrives, there is the whole drama of ‘is it too early?’ or ‘what does she want from me?’. Men need to learn that emotions are not monsters that are going to eat them up (nor are women who are emotional). Actually, their whole culture needs to teach them this, which it doesn’t. It does exactly the opposite. It tells them that in order to be a ‘man’, it is necessary not to be ‘weak’. Needing someone, wanting to be with someone, putting oneself in a position of even a little vulnerability - these are absolute no-no’s. The only way you can ‘want’ someone is like Shahrukh Khan in Darr or as a Don Juan - a stalker or a conquerer.

Women, on the other hand, could learn to trust their own resources a little more, to find themselves as much in themselves as they seek to do in relationships, and thus not take off like an emotional jetplane that the man can never hope to get on board with. They need to bring a full person to the relationship, rather than a half one whom the relationship will somehow magically complete. Parvathy Baul calls this finding the ‘purushatva’ in oneself.

Of course, these gender binaries are quite artificial and the result of a lot of conditioning. Still, one has to acknowledge that they exist, in different measures for different people. On a lighter note, women can experiment with coming up with creative names for the emotionally crippled state that many men find themselves in - to match the label of ‘needy’ that they so easily get slapped with. How about ‘emotionally challenged’ to begin with?

I am...

a dreamer caught in reality
eternity caught in time
a desert caught in an oasis
a poem caught in a rhyme

I am that which cannot be
What I am cannot be told
I am that and this is me
This was I but that is old

A Wooden House


In speaking of those days I do not wish to say that they were unhappy. They weren’t. But they weren’t happy either. In fact those were our dog-days. Days that we have barked ourselves by.

On a Winter's Night


Prologue and first act of a love drama in verse (sort of): On a Winter's Night.



Prologue

Two strangers in overcoats and hats on a foggy night. It is hard to tell who the man is and who the woman until they speak. They are standing still, not quite face to face, but looking past each other, into the distance.

In Hot Water


This is Act 1 of a radio play I wrote in April 2007 for the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition.


List of Characters:

Mr Chatterjee, a Bengali Indian, recently husband

Mrs Chatterjee, another Bengali Indian, recently wife

Yves, a French tourist, interested in the mysteries of Tantric sex

Maya, a young American seeker, with the stars of enlightenment in her eyes

Tenzin Norbu-la, an elderly Buddhist monk

Swami Drown-ananda, a venerable Indian yogi in the nude

Scene: The action is set high in the Himalayas, on the last piece of land left before water from the melting poles has swallowed up the whole of the earth.
 

Death


I want to reach simplicity as an arrow reaches its mark
Shot straight for it, wavering neither here nor there
Exploding in its end like
The fire that killed the spark

It will sweep through me like rain across the land
Water on my body, flood in my mind
A drowning that will be as difficult
As it is kind

It will come very quietly like my ancient lover at night
And hide from me awhile lest I die from the sight
But death will be simple like a child flying her kite.

The Nature of the Self

The self is riddled with desire. The nature of the self is to give in to this desire. This leads to suffering, teaching us nothing.

I first began my steep ascent the day I lost control of my senses. My eyes would not be still, they jumped from object to object. My ears strained at the leash to hear all kinds of sounds which had no meaning. My tongue swallowed everything but forgot to taste it on its way in. My nose was not blocked for the first time in ages, yet I smelt nothing, or everything, which made no sense. Soft touch was upon me all over my body, yet--

A Simple Love Story


An excerpt from the first chapter of the novella, A Simple Love Story.
You can browse through or buy the book here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H25NZ62

Boy Meets Girl


Speaking of words and roads…
            We were on our way back from a temple city that we’d gone visiting in a group. At that time anything that we could do was in a group. Like a protective umbrella around us. So afraid to reveal ourselves and our desires. Even to simply say that we wanted simply to be with each other was like running naked at that time. So we sought the protection of a group. When it came to love, we were heartbreakingly innocent.
           

House out of Time


This extract is from a novel called House out of Time. This is part of Chapter 6.



6.     The Pigeon among the Cats

When Mr Shah came to, he perceived a few people gathered around him, while most others carried on with their hurried movement hither and fro. His office bag with the tiffin case containing his lunch was beside him on the floor. It took him a couple of minutes to figure out where he was. He was on the floor of a Metro platform. He was on his back because…

Ah, yes. He must have fainted. That’s why all these people are here, looking concerned and asking questions.

Yes, I’m fine, thank you. I’m getting late for office.

Nothing happened. The blood just rushed to my head. It’s just that I’m epileptic. In fact, my fits are quite regular, often turning very violent. As a matter of fact, I’m mad. I’ve received electric shocks in insane asylums and that’s why I faint from time to time on the Metro platforms. Can I go now, having given you all my psycho-medical history?

So cursing all solicitous enquiries along such ungrateful, sarcastic lines, but maintaining a perfectly polite and courteous exterior, Mr Shah pushed along on his way to office.