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)