East-West Vignettes

Several years ago, in a Manhattan jazz club, a shy little man in white homespun shirt and pajamas sent a written request to play with the band. The leader of the jazz band read the note and asked the waiter who had sent it. The waiter pointed to an Indian gentleman at a back table. The leader peered through his reflecting dark glasses and beckoned the stranger to come onstage.

            The Indian left the table with some difficulty and bumped his way through the curious audience to the small raised stage. His progress was hampered by a pair of Indian drums he was carrying in his left hand.

            “What’s that?” asked the leader.

            “My drums, sir,” answered the Indian. “If I am to play with you I must use my own instrument, the tabla.”

            “Oh yeah, the drums. So you want to play with us,”said the jazz musician. “Well, whaddya want to play?”

            “Myself, I would like to play in Teen Taal,” said the Indian diffidently. “That is your three times.”

            He explained his plan. “You please play in this basic rhythm. And I shall accompany on the tabla with seventy-two beats from my right hand and twenty-four beats from my left hand and then increasing with the improvising.”

            The Indian cleared a space on the ground for himself, untied his shoelaces, took off his shoes and placed them neatly under the piano. From the cloth bags on his shoulder he extracted a small silver hammer. With this he began to hit the pegs on the sides of his instruments.

            The jazz musician grinned at the crowd, leaned over and asked the little man, “Seventy-two and twenty-four, huh? Okay. Say, what are you doing down there with that hammer?”

            “I am tuning, sir. May you ask the piano to tell which key you will prefer?”

            The leader turned to the pianist with a shrug and said, “This guy’s crazy. Give him a G and get him out of here.”

            The piano player, with exaggerated formality, played a G octave. The Indian nodded and hit the pegs on his drums harder.

            “Yes. Pa. Pa. Pa,” he sang to his drums the Indian words for the G note.

            “I think he wants to play “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” said the pianist, winking broadly at the appreciative audience.

            The leader sat down behind his drums in resignation, nodded to the vibraphone player, picked up his sticks, and shouted “Well all right!” and the jazz band broke into a fast blues.

            The little Indian beamed with pleasure. His hands began to move over his drums. A hollow bass emerged from his left drum, his other hand was almost invisible as it moved over the right drum. After a few minutes the leader put his sticks down and shook his head in disbelief. Then the bass player stopped to listen. Now it was a duet between the piano and the Indian. The piano would play a melody and the tabla would reproduce it in double time, then in triple time. The leader came in again using his drums to create a solid three-beat backing to the Indian’s intricate rhythms. The Indian and the piano player were laughing with pleasure. The pianist jumped up and down as he played his instrument, the Indian shook his head in an ecstasy of invention. On each downbeat he would crane his neck around to look at the leader and then bring his head down sharply so they could hit both of their drums in unison. The pace got faster and faster, the crowd was on its feet, cheering and whistling.

            When the performance came to an end the jazz musician took off his dark glasses and wiped his face.

            “Who are you, man? Where did you learn to play like that?”

            “That was most enjoyable, sir,” said the little man. “I learned my art in Benares. UNESCO has brought me here to make it popular in the West. I hope it gave pleasure.”

            The Indian collected his shoes, bowed in deep namaste to each member of the band, picked up his hammer and drums and left. He didn’t know that he had just played with the most famous jazz drummer in the West. The jazz drummer didn’t know he had accompanied India’s most distinguished tabla maestro. But they’d had a beat encounter.

           

           -- (Gita Mehta, Karma Cola, 1979).

           

            A young woman of  “good family” was terrified when six Delhi constables arrived at her parents’ house at three o’clock in the morning to arrest her for the murder of a Dutch millionaire.

            “We know you and your friends are responsible,” said the Delhi police.

            “But why?” she asked, while her parents stood by stunned into silence. “He was a friend for two years. What motive could we have?”

            “How should we know why you killed him? That is for you to reply. All we know is that you had dinner with this man. You left the house at midnight. Two hours later the servant found him dead in the bathroom. Dead.”

            “But he was perfectly all right when we left him,” whispered the girl.

            “If he was alright, then what was the dead man doing in the bathroom, naked in front of the commode?” asked the senior police officer sternly.

            “Naked on the commode!” exclaimed the girl’s mother in horror.

            “Not on the commode, corrected the officer. “In front of it. Fallen forward onto his knees and chin, holding a book in his left hand.”

            The young Indian woman abruptly took the interrogation into her own hands.

            “Now look here! If I had wanted to kill my friend, Iwould not have bothered to undress him. And I certainly would not have put a book in his hand. Kindly tell me what he was reading at the time of his death.”

            The police, thrown off balance by this unexpected aggression, looked hurriedly through their notes, and passed the relevant page to the officer in charge.

            The officer cleared his throat and read: “The deceased was on the bathroom floor with a volume in his left hand, opened to page thirty-nine. The title of the volume is as follows, The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”

            “There you are!” said the Indian girl triumphantly. “Who would leave such incriminating evidence in their victim’s hands?”

            The police officer was not listening to the girl. He was peering at the note on the file. Finally, he looked up and asked, “Was this Dutch millionaire by any chance Hindu-minded?”

            “He was very interested in our philosophy,” confirmed the girl.

“I see,” said the officer, and signaled his men out of the house. As he reached the door, he turned around and addressed himself to the young woman’s parents.

            “If the deceased was Hindu-minded,” observed the officer morosely, “it is the probable cause of death.”

                     --  (Gita Mehta, Karma Cola, 1979)