Music and Gardens Part I
After two years of college, I wanted to act in the world rather than sit in a classroom and study it. So I withdrew from college and applied to the Peace Corps. While awaiting acceptance and assignment, I lived in New York and worked at the N.Y. Times. After many months word came that I was to be a member of India 16, a high-risk, high-gain group. We spent a few months training in language and, but as we were about to board the plane for India, the villages in Gujarat where we were being sent were bombed by the Pakistanis. While our destinations were being sorted out, we were invited by Israel to live and work on kibbutzim. After several months we were sent to new destinations in India.
I was sent to Tasgaon, Maharashtra, together with Charles Gibson. Chuck had grown up in California, the child of a homeless mother. They scoured garbage cans for food and slept on cardboard. He had a bright mind and was an avid reader. Chuck and I ended up in Maharashtra where our house was in ‘Bangle Alley”, where all the bangle-makers lived and sold their wares. At the end of the road was the jewelry-makers’ road.
Part of our assignment was to get to know everyone in our village and find a project that would bring peace and harmony to the place. One problem with this directive was that we were trained in Hindi, but the language in our newly assigned area was Marathi.
After settling in, I went for a walk the first evening to explore the town. The houses were made of mud, with very few if any windows. The doors were narrow and low. The roofs were metal. Inside every house was a lantern. The glow of lantern-light flickered everywhere. And everywhere was the sound of music, from the houses, from the temples, from the shrines. One family invited me into their home. Everyone was sitting on the cow-dung floor. They brought me a tall glass of what I thought was water, but quickly realized was some kind of booze.
Three of the men were playing music—a hand-drum set, a tamboora, and a sitar. I went back to my house and returned with my clarinet and guitar. I couldn’t speak Marathi, but I could speak music. After that night, I wandered throughout the town and sat in with local musicians with my guitar, strumming a whole-tuning progression, or singing the blues, which they loved.
Mr. Mulae was the Hindi teacher at the high school. He came over every day and taught me Marathi via Hindi. He thought I came from Mumbai, since that was the most remote place he could conceive of. The lessons and study took up most of the afternoon.
Meanwhile, my housemate, Chuck Gibson, began to believe that he was a holy man. He spent night and day in meditation. His beard grew very long. He was blond and fair, so the locals thought he was a divine incarnation, and he agreed with them. There was only one telephone in the town, located at the bank. I was able to inform Peace Corps’ Mumbai headquarters about my roommate’s situation, they had a team on the way to Tasgaon to relocate him back in the U.S. We had become good friends, so I was sad to see him go. I didn’t miss our conversations, however, since, on the second day, he took a vow of silence, and hadn’t spoken to anyone since then. He wrote on a tablet to communicate.
The town was laid out by caste and subdivisions within the castes. The biggest separation was between the Hindus and Muslims, who did not mix.
I quickly became enchanted with India. People were genuine and music and dancing were omnipresent. Since I was relatively skillful on the guitar, I assumed another string instrument would not be hard to learn. I asked around and Shankar, a sitar teacher, showed up one day with a sitar for me to practice with. He agreed to teach me once a week. He would always leave me with a lesson. I’d be able to master the lesson in a couple of days, and by the time Shankar returned, I could play the music better than he could. After a few weeks of this, I was pretty sure he wasn’t really a teacher. I asked him about it. He told me he couldn’t answer immediately, but would get back to me.The next day Shankar stopped by and told me that at 11:00 pm, I should shutter every window in the house, and on the hour exactly open the door briefly. Someone would visit me.