What is it about the Baul singers?

What is it about the Baul singers? 

These musicians, singers, spiritual minstrels of West Bengal, whose calls move through the strains of their longing voices, their instruments inadequate to express their need.

My sweet friend Karuna is living with a community of Baul singers in Shantiniketan, just outside of Calcutta, yet their passions and wildness can get too much even for someone so spiritually attuned and she has come to seek refuge on my terrace. 

She invites me to a concert where her friend, and now former landlord, is playing.

The concert is on at a venue just round the corner from my apartment – further than we thought it turns out as we sweat and stumble our way across the broken paving stones that make up AJC Bose Road, asking every third person we meet if we are still on the right track.

We arrive late and enter the hall – it’s full. The stage is amateur, brightly lit, school gym style. One single microphone stands in the centre, wires snake across the floor. A man is reading monotonously from a piece of paper, the mic squeals, people wander on and off the stage, one man brings a random foot mat for someone to stand on.

An old bearded man then takes the mic and starts to sing.

Probably a fakir, Karuna tells me, as he dressed in white, not the traditional colourful attire of the Baul singers. The old man twists and turns to the melody of his songs then he hands over to the next.

A man with wild white hair, dressed in a patchwork coat of multicolours. He starts to sing. With no effort something moves through him. The sound is too loud, the acoustics poor, but behind all of that something is alive, a serpent that carries a formless power on its scales.

A space in the core of my chest starts to burn with a heated pressure, the same between my eyebrows. For two songs this continues. His high-pitched notes dissolving space and form around the hall. The drum beats of his accompaniment, the fullness of the rolling flute.

Karuna has to catch a train. “But you stay,” she tells me.

“No I’ll leave now; that is enough.”

What is it about the Baul singers?

Oh Calcutta II

So I grabbed my suitcase, hastily packed from yet another short-term abode and dragged it up the remaining stairs to the terrace, banging against my calves. Within two minutes, my clothes were inside the single mirrored cupboard. My two books were on the shelf alongside Johnathan's two books of collected Tagore poems. My grandfather's dogtag from WWII hung off the handle of a decorative jug.

I look around.

A large room, a double bed in the corner, the doors and windows covered with soft bamboo blinds giving a shaded stillness. Fan whirring. I lay on the bed gazing at the ceiling, listening to the ever-present honking of car horns below, far enough away to lose the impact of the frustration and persistence they represent.

I lay back. Calcutta.

What am I doing here?

My mind goes - as it has done repeatedly and pointlessly for months now - to the last few years of my life, in a futile attempt to find the thread linking all the pieces together.

Israel, London, break up, India, ashram, breakdown, London again, France ...
Somewhere the thread snapped.

"Move on, move on. You have to move on," everyone but everyone was telling me. Yet I was frozen in a dark terror, riddled with fear, nerves shattered, mind stonewalled, seeing nothing but black.

Until ...

It was an odds against all odds. My CV posted on an Indian job website, a call to my parents' house one snowy morning after Christmas, a swift interview, a lengthy visa process and a few months later I am the new international editor for a newspaper start-up in Calcutta ...

And so a new thread begins ...

The street - everyone's bathroom

Shaving, washing, urinating ....

... and today's message from Mother Teresa

My walk to work - 22nd Jan

It starts, as always, at the chai stall.

While I hear temperatures are holding at well below zero in the UK, blankets of snow, frozen roads, closed schools, summer has started to come to Calcutta - or so I was thinking.

Having a camera in the vicinity does strange things to people.
Men started to amble ever so nonchalantly towards the place where the strange blonde girl was writing and taking pictures. Standing that little bit taller, that little bit prouder. Go on take my picture. Well you had to really.

This girl is always walking around the area, holding her baby to her hip, standing in front of people without needing to say what she is asking for. I don't even know if it's her baby - for all I know it's part of some city-wide use-a-baby-to-get-money scam. I have managed so far to ignore the requests, or actually sometimes the demands, for money, for children, from children but well, what can you do?
I fumbled in my pocket and drew out a flimsy excuse of a worn, ragged bill, which the mother/sister/baby borrower slipped professionally into her bag. One more sucker, I thought. But then a few minutes later I saw her walking back towards me with some food she had bought for the baby - even though it was some horrific sticky orange thing that I'm sure would offer no solution to the child's tiny thin bones she had pointed out to me earlier.

I set off on my 25-minute walk to work. Now those who know me me will know I have one of the worst senses of direction ever. I am phenomenally bad. I am impressively bad. 

Calcutta is not the place to have a bad sense of direction. The streets look the same; they have at least two names each, one ludicrously British - Hungerford Street, Devon Road, Shakespeare Avenue - the other unpronouncably long and neither of which help as no one seems to know where anything is, nor how to get there, anyway. One of the main arteries is bizarrely shaped like an infinity figure of eight that seems to turn itself inside out and be on every part of town all at once. A nightmarish trick of urban planning (or rather lack of) for someone as geographically-challenged as myself. 

My walk to work, however, is blissfully simple. Turn left out the house, turn right at the park, left at the Austin sign and straight. 

Yes Einstein, how right you are.

Now you see what I mean when I say that the pavements have been hijacked, forcing anyone so foolish as to walk to further extend the heights of foolishness by walking on the road. This is what the main stretch of my walk to work looks like.

And conveniently located so while you're picking up your new hubcaps and ratchet....

Today's message from Mother Teresa:

and into the office I go.

My walk to work - 21st Jan

I walk to work. Most people think I'm mad - the Indians don't seem big on physical exercise, but at least it keeps me somewhat active, even if I am breathing in heavily polluted air.

Every day starts here at my chai stall. They guy is pumping water from .... a water pump, I guess. 

The chai stall owner keeps a bucket of that water by the stall that people come and help themselves from. 

I have refrained.

Down the road and round the corner is what appears to be a massive makeshift urinal. 

Right next to the main road. I hold my breath for about 20 metres either side.

As you do

Being a nation of non-walkers has somewhat eradicated the need and use of pavements, meaning one lane of traffic is actually shared by pedestrians. It makes for some interesting road safety observations. 

Walkers swell out into the road, and the cars... well they don't actually care. Do not think for one minute that they will stop for a pedestrian ... But it also means that (or is a result from) the small cramped shops spread out onto what was a pavement. Anyone trying to walk down it is squeezed - on this particular road - between mountains of tyres and car parts and a metal railing, supposedly protecting you from the road. But what it actually does is simply encourage people to walk along the road.

Today there seemed to be some interest over a motorbike - or nothing at all ... hard to tell.

Two doors from my office is Mother House, the centre of the charity set up by Mother Teresa. I pop in every day. I sit by her shrine and take a few minutes of silence before heading out into the day. 

Every day there is a different message in flowers. 

This man lives on the street just outside my office. He sells something, I'm not quite sure what, odds and ends, bits and pieces, I've seen old hairbands, radio parts, eye glasses.

Everyday he smiles gently and welcomes me with his hands together in prayer, the traditional namaste. And the same each time I return home as he is neatly folding away his wares. 

Oh Calcutta

As I came out the lift on the top floor of the building that was to be my new home, I turned to the right and saw a mezzuzah on the door. My heart settled in recognition and I registered no little amazement. Could I have found the only such home in the whole of Calcutta?

Inviting me in for a cup of chai, my landlord shows me around the apartment he on-and-off occupies in the space beneath mine – the specially built room on the rooftop terrace, the likes of which are not to be found anywhere else in this sprawling city.

In his large airy apartment, artwork by an Israeli artist adorns the walls and a rusty stained mirror with Hebrew stencils advertising the somebody’s spice shop awaits hanging. “Oh something I picked up in Jaffa years ago,” he tells me. I finger the edges lovingly, delicately combing the fading lettering.

Jonathan.  My new landlord and friend. The half English, half Burmese, Hindi-speaking Jew born in Calcutta, now lives in LA and about six other cities around the world. He seems about as lost as I am. He once told me that during his early adulthood he used to travel the world with a white passport – nationless. Now that’s a man after my own heart.

His father worked for British intelligence in Calcutta (or Kolkata as they call it now, but without the same nostalgic strain, I feel), his mother a Burmese Jew. Grew up running the streets round Newmarket, taunting the rickshaw pullers and drinking pure sugarcane juice. He went to school in England, somewhere progressive and liberal and encouraging that he loved, before the whole family moved again to Israel, where he says the raw struggle of those early state years meant little food on the table and stress that eventually killed his father.

Then the U.S., more study and through a bizarre twist of fate and an open creative mind, he ends up “making jeans.”

“Jeans?” I asked.

“Yes, jeans,” he replies.

“To be honest it was quite funny as I really had no idea what I was doing – and was pretty sure one day I’d get found out, but that day never came.”

A fortune made from a random idea – taking scrap denim from warehouses, patching it all together and making a new pair of jeans. It took off. Big time. Who can predict fashion?

By his early 20s, major U.S. retailers were carrying the brand, factories were running, people were employed, things were moving. Then some personal stuff, a betrayal perhaps (his face goes sombre, so I don’t push) and it was time to move on. So he bought his first building.

At the age of 24.

“And that’s how I sort of fell into property,” he says.

I look at my own paltry collection of belongings at the door. One suitcase with pretty much everything I own in it. I have never owned a property in my life, and little else for that matter.

At the age of 38.

We walk up to the terrace where I will be living. It’s his pad really. His refuge when he comes to Calcutta that he never rents out. Only when I came and saw it and sat sharing a Kingfisher beer and breathing in a gradual feeling that everything was going to be ok, I asked him if he would rent it out to me.

“Well I never rent it out,” he reiterates, “but something tells me it will be good for you here.”

And so it was agreed and cheersed under a night sky lit up with the neon lights of a nearby hotel sign, a glowing advertisement for spine and brain MRIs and the odd star desperately pushing a feeble sparkle through the polluted air.

Oh Calcutta.

When I first arrived in Calcutta, my employers had arranged a two-bedroomed flat for me on the other side of town – near Maddox Square – the most happening square in Calcutta, they told me, especially at Durga Puja celebrations. Well Durga Puja came and went and if unbearably loud and bad renditions of Michael Jackson’s Black or White and a surge of young people letting off firecrackers, horns and any loud thing till 4am is happening, then I guess that’s just what it was.

Nothing wrong with my apartment, only I couldn’t stand it. The thin metal chairs scraped on the tile floor like fingers on a blackboard, the shower dribbled water down the wall rather than on me and the balcony from my room was a slither of space surrounded by bars, where I would sit knees hunched up most evenings like a bird in a cage.

And now in my room. A large terrace with plants around the edge, window sills and doorframes painted in a faded blue that whispered Mediterranean. Inside, bamboo blinds spread a shady coolness, fans whirr. And the biggest shower I have seen to date....

Not Jewish?! (part twelve)

SHALOM TO ALL THAT (PART IV)

I slouched over to the open window of the lounge that Grizzly and I shared. Our apartment was on the fourth floor and looked out over a square on a little side street where Israel’s national poet Bialik once lived. A sculpture of blue tiles honored this fact and the area had drawn musical academies and galleries to set up home there. On some nights, light piano music or the high vibratto of an operetta would drift through our window and mingle with the voices from the television. Today, it was serenely quiet; warm, sun-filled and serenely quiet.

When I was growing up in England, Sundays used to be like this – although not so much sun-filled. The shops were closed, public transport took the day off, parents eased into the Sunday papers or slept off large Sunday lunches and as children we were always told not to go knocking on our friends’ doors and disturbing the neighbours. Not now. Now England’s shops are open, cashing in on another day of business, and transport and people chug their way round the high street chains like it was any other day.

Even though in Tel Aviv on Shabbat, the cafes are open and filled with people and the streets and beaches are bursting with couples and pushchairs and children, there is still a sense that this is a day of rest. The buses don’t run and the shops are all closed, people sleep in late and take the day easy.

There’s many here who want to see the tradition stopped, to fight what they protest as another sign of the religious control over the country and there are some huge furniture and DIY stores that have opened on the outskirts of towns that draw in crowds of families – complete with screaming babies, bored toddlers, little patience and a whole pile of stress. Like I’ve said before, I’m not religious but here I think they’ve got a point – have a day of rest; who needs to buy shelves on Shabbat?

Anyway, I was looking out of the window, trying to imprint the smells and the emotions into my brain so that I would be able to conjure up the feelings of Tel Aviv on a Shabbat late into my life – and then I decided to get my camera and headed out into the streets, just in case my mental powers of recollection should fail me late in life and pictorial evidence should be required.

It was hot. I strolled down to the end of the road where the coffee shop that had been blown up was now up and running and full of people. It had been up and running and full of people about 3 days after the terror attack – the speed of recovery was astonishing. There’d had even been a piece about it in the local paper. “Café Oleh” was the title of the article (oleh means to go up in Hebrew – Nice headline, I remember thinking to myself, as the first worrying signs of the newsdesk cynic started to show – but again that’s material for a whole other chapter in itself…)

I wandered up Allenby Street, whose sleazy bars were all locked up and neon signs switched off; metal shutters covered the entrances to the stores where during the week cheap, bright clothes spilled out of the boxes at the front and deeply tanned and bleach blonde sales women stood around smoking cigarettes and shouting to each other over the happy pop music that blared from speakers all round the shop.
Grafitti scrawled on the wall next to the shop shutter promised purveyors that designer items could be found inside: Gap, Banana Republik and Calvin Kline, they assured.

Taking a right off Allenby and at the end of the street, the sea greets you, gently rippling, sparkling into the distant horizon.

I walked into a side street, into the old and crumbling Yemenite Quarter. On its flaking walls, faded posters from some local election were slowly, and over the windows of the jumbled apartments, swathes of material acted as makeshift curtains to hold off the October sun. Slight rips in the fabric offered a glimpse into the darkness, as the inhabitants – most of them foreign workers from China and the Philippines – shuffled sleepily about inside.

Outside, old women with wrinkles running like deep grooves through their face sat still and silent on the doorsteps, their hands folded in their laps, lifting them occasionally, as if in slow motion, to waft away a fly.

I sat down on a low wall, the heat of the stone seeping through to my skin. From one of small stone houses next to me, men started to sing, three or four voices – a simple harmony. I don’t know what it was, I don’t know if it was a religious psalm or an old folk song, but as the melody floated gently from the darkened room and the smell of black coffee with cardamum mingled with the warm silent air, a heaviness settled on my chest and my heart felt ready to break.

I started picturing the sights around me, but knew a photo would never capture this so I picked myself up and walked away from the singing back up towards home. I walked up through the deserted Carmel Market, where stray cats and pigeons were picking between the bare stalls at the fallen fruit that had been trampled underfoot in Friday’s hectic sales, and back to my street.

I had plans for that night to go out with friends. I only had about two weeks left in Israel and had planned to spend them saying good-bye to them and to Tel Aviv.

But as it turns out, Tel Aviv had different plans for me …..