The Moon was a ship of conversations

The moon was a ship of conversations. A narrative that spanned through epochs in smiling truth. The boy – ravaged by expansive perception swung around in dizzy reception. His hands drew thoughts, he laughed. In the park a walkman played ‘I am one’ by THE WHO, he felt like he was one, he felt like he’s playing the bass, guitar, drums and singing all at once as the moon shone constant revelation.

What did they talk about? Jesus? Elvis? The atomic bomb? No.

It was mother. Mother who? Mother everything. Pink, embryonic bliss, soprano.

Meanwhile the madman laughed and cried in envy and in love. A duel ensued within him. ‘Let him be?’ ‘Paint it’. In deafening speed. He jumped – stared at him, eyes that seemed to the boy to tell of seconds – the friction, the piercing pain of tired time.

‘Look here’ said the madman – this is the face of death. At 3.a.m. in a god forsaken ridge in south Delhi – a 17 year old and a 23 year old stared into space.

Zip two years. The boy’s a spaceman, sitting on the control panel, as the engine roars – he’s ripping his Bharat music house drum kit. The space ships taken off – it’s a strange ship. No engines here – just the rowing of cyclical beats. And the offs – like an affirmation of existence – Yes! Yes! Yes! It’s a dynamic universe, yes! Ever knew now – endless dimensions. The Israeli girl dances – her blue universe of Hindi cosmetic covers giggles curved.

Krishnamurthy – Padmashri bharatnayam’s ambiguously mind sculpted nephew cries out his tales of maternal deprivation in a dark corner of the universe – his room. The gypsy girl and boy walk in as light. Smoke makes movies. Jim Morrison takes them on his own ship – blue sea, cities, floating. The father, daughter and the Holy Ghost set out for the hills. Go to I.S.B.T catch whatever bus they can take – a book, 1498 peanuts and 4 childhood memories later, they arrive. It’s not quite Ladakh, its only Bilaspur at the foothills of the Shivaliks. The stars are real – a well knit carpet overhead. They walk downhill, the village sleeps at 10 and its 11, some distinguished voices would say it’s the wrong time. Anyway – there they are the boy and clown Krishnamurthy. It’s a lake that stretches as far as the eye can take them, the boy breathes in black and white opium ghost tales, the clown cries. Abu! He says. Abu! It’s the lake of sadness! Abu likes the expression – lake of sadness, that is.

Krishnamurthy! We’re Jesus.

It’s a fast fast trail in his dreams – through a map, motoring foot breeze through the states, the cities, the plain, the hillocks, the deserts and the hills. The boy and the Jesus crew – fair and blue eyed – each knows the experience of pink love essence. Guitars, honey ginger tea, fairies. One point in the great wandering, golden stamps stacked up in ancient chests fly through the singing night. And then someone says that they’ve reached Manali.


In Zari says the gypsy girl, in a Diplomatic Enclave park. In Zari – Oh! There’s a village at the end of the mountain where you get everything you want. There are candles and chocolate cakes and huts with stories of Kabbalah and black black gold.

In Kasaul says the psychic girl on the phone – are stories of magic. It’s a magic village I hope you know and meanwhile tell me if you see what I see. I see blue haze says the love struck boy and a photograph. Exxxxactly whispers the psychic girl. Silence falls on the telephone, endless nothing communication, aching breaths and charmed laughter. Green fields, flight, flight, steam. Past lives, candles, pianos.

Do you know that my grandmother is buried right beneath my room and my parents make their own bhang on Holi and that I am a member of a satanic church since I was 12 and that I can recite the second coming in exquisite rapture and that I love you and I cant be yours because it’s a sign. Says the psychic girl.

The madman walks half naked on the streets kicking stones with his army boots singing Iggy Pop, chasing smack as he rests on the walls of Delhi Police headquarters. Eyes shining fear. Someone reads T.S Eliot somewhere. The madman dances rage. Chrakvartin Karmadhari, ever moving, never stopping – his acidic ancient verse.

Wasted naked breath. Crying for help. Ravaged by toxicity, toxic cities and the kind. With the wind and the weather around me, up to the skies and the moons, I tread, who will come softly who will come freely?

Sri Aurobindo in white linen – 1921. The steamer from Engand. Peace. India. Hindi. Pranayama. The Mother – French, occult, Krishna, Madame Blavatsky, candles, piano.

Tapasya, meditation hall, winds of ghazal essence in keyboard strains. Eyes closed, transcendental meditation roots, beautiful children. Flowers and roots and space and discovery and even a bit of tai – chi. Andre Agassi and Ivanisivich in the Wimbledon final, table tennis racquets with Guns n Roses anagrams.

And before that? The unnatural stuff, anti – environment haircuts, Young Madonna – The like a virgin Madonna, raw, uncooked white flesh. Salman Rushdie and the British ad world. Distant dreams of cars that don’t look like boxes and multi storied office parks. Superconductive trains and Toyota manuals that smelled so sweet. One television channel and the gypsy girl and the boy and the madman and the psychic girl in Appu Ghar.

What did the Toyota brochures smell of? Happiness? Efficiency? Technology? What?

Whatever it was, it was imported. That word that brought pictures of super efficient air – conditioners in the age of Fiats and Ambassadors and sometimes a Maruti 800 as well. Days of married Rekha smiling through magazine covers. What did they sing then? Dede pyaar de. Top of the Pops kept showing Ozzy Busas 78 tour of India back when it was simply known as ‘English music’.

Win amp media graphics 15 years from then – a dead Jimi Hendrix plays purple haze with programmed artistic accompaniment. What would he have said? Far out? Maybe. The fucking industry has milked the cow dead anyway, the boy from Seattle, slow hand in England fears him, the man who was called god. Foxy muthafukin managers a suit dressed as a hippy – feeds him potion in his beer before the show. Guitar boy Hendrix bleeds to death on stage. Now they must kill the poet and the singer too. Drama, Windfalls, targets, dollars, labels, ROYALTY. Jim fuckin Morrison dies in Paris, Janis Joplin dies too, 1971 – 27 – Robert Johnson – the devil, rock n roll.

Archie’s gallery – plastic nauseas Valentines Day mediocrity packaged in sickness. There they are! the 27 club – the three great J’s of rock n roll. Morrison half naked caged monkey poet etched in incomprehensible obscure sex symbol fame. The two J’S AROUND. Pan left – oh it’s only Che Guevara selling another fucking T SHIRT. Who fucking cares that he died fighting the crabs of capitalism? Looks intense, doesn’t he?



Bhai’s wearing yellow Bono shades, riding a tough RX 100 into a drain, walking into walls, having imaginary conversations with leggy women. And me? I’M BOWLING AGAINTS A WALL – Geoff Boycott saying the fastest ball ever bowled again and again and Oh! That glorious ‘he’ of commentator’s vogue. Steaming in, bathing in sweat, loving it. What else did I love? THE BLUES. B.B. King, Elmore James, Muddy Water, you name it. Cricket and blues and ehh. School. Got a 28 in math’s last year failed, now am a trendsetting all good everything bigger than the other boys. And Sherlock Holmes in the study room, in the study table, under the study lamp, studying the complete adventures of Holmes and Watson one day before the chemistry exam. Elementary my dear whoever...

Minus 10 years, ancestral home in Agra, backyard full of guava trees, And those bottles from uncles lab – in violet and pink and metallic green. And then those fat books with beautiful smelling dust – the boy – 7 who knows all types of chemical formulae and names in the fucking periodic table and then what – Robinson Crusoe and Elvis Presley and 8 years and Mendelic what?

Cricket. Kapil Dev – Palmolive ka jawaab nahin, world record. Leaping higher and higher. Dark blue Indian uniform, bottom of the table, Kiran More dropping catches. The blot.
Two kids from Bombay – Kambli and 'Tandoorkar'. Boost bat, teenager – David and Goliath – a century – triumphant leaping. Boy wonder. Disney’s cartoon hour on Sunday morning. Deedee’s comedy show, hilarious. Marbles, Beetle and trips. Javed Miandad abusing India on TV hitting Chetan Sharma for a six of the last ball in Sharjah. Sharjah – Dawood Ibrahim, Sunny Gavaskar, movie stars. Pakistan, green stars. Wasim Akram round the wicket bowling out Chris Lewis with a vicious bouncing in swinger. Jubilation. Rhythm Flying hair. Imran Khan lifting the cup. I’ll bowl faster, faster, faster. Hammering against the backyard wall.

Olympic games, sports day. I want to be the wind. Fast, fast, fast. Ben Johnson’s on drugs. Finale, formations in torches, Mikhail Gorbachev. Rajiv Gandhi in a million pieces on the cover of the Indian express. People cried for their leaders then. The media still sold death. Dante’s inferno coming into life. Nostradamus prophesizes in cantos – the third antichrist and Kennedy and Khomeni.

Burning streets, college bhaiyas in blood. Mandal commission and V.P. Singh. Chandrashekhar’s a fuckin cheat. Burn the mothafuka. His fucking grey stubble. Corridors of neighborhood cricket full of burnt pamphlets. Rainbow oil on the roads – it’s the gulf war. George Bush senior – first generation of chaos. Michael Jackson and the black ‘ Bad’ poster, leather and the life sized Michael Jackson poster. Thriller’s past us. Terminator – VCR, Bad prints and thrill.

MTV. This is the right choice baby and Remo Fernandes. Busking, Goa. Gary Lawyer – with a cigarette in my hands. Skeleton, smoke, drink, DRUGS.

Hindi films. Killer red. Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff – twins. Amitabh Dharmendra - twins. Dilip – Devanand – twins. 20 years, tattoo of a train on their arms. The fair. Widowed mother, the working class hero – the coolie, the thief, the hawker, the peasant, fucking the entrepreneur, the politician, the drug lord, Mogambo. Dancing in the fields.
Fruit juice banner artworks – Govinda, red cheeks.


Calcutta. Neighbours chucking muck on each other. Fish markets, the viceroy’s palace, Queen Victoria memorial, Metro, beatitude in ashram. Shantiniketan – raga, sweet raga, trees, poetry and cow dung. On the train back from Shantiniketan after elevated minds pace, one day after Holi. Cow dung rain in the train lashed out with vengeance. Not so shanti, but the raga…


African voodoo music made rock n roll, avers boy to classmate. Think of it – rock, r & b, ragtime, Africa, voodoo. Drum worshipping in Africa – a tribe gathered around drums – call and response, worship, drums and voice, voodoo. Osho Ashram, Pune – the ghat where Osho was burnt – Babas smoking chillams. All kinds of people – pink love German Oshoites, Japanese nymphomaniacs, single mothers smoking, local dons, bass guitarists, everything underground. The ghat. And what got boy there? The music.

Drums, ever accelerating, drums fashioned out of trees, with tabla tonality and log sticks. The grid’s not 4 as in western or taal as in Indian, it keeps speeding up. Eg. counts like 16, 15, 14… that still doesn’t explain it though – its essentially constant acceleration. And bells – the devils note – F# and other micro –tonal evils of worship. 4th octave screams, responding, voodoo. And inside the temple? A small hut with a shivling and photos of some bhairo baba who looks like Bob Marley. BOY BELIEVES IN GURUS AND ROCKSTARS. Boy saw Hendrix in sai baba in Osho. Boy floated after vipassana. Boy danced for days till he didn’t know days from weeks and years. Boy saw beautiful beautiful people in maroon robes, boy played chordless guitar in Buddha hall and screamed CIRCLES! Boy ran out of money and went home to Delhi.

A friend Das in Gauguin backdrops in bottles of green and the artistic heritage. Friend Das believes he sculpts through fingers in magic strokes, does play jazz guitar. At his place be the conversations and the jams and the conversation jams – boy the poet.


Moon girl – eternally beloved to boy in staple dreams. Meg Ryan love comedy ways anyway. Girl on a bicycle, batik kurtas, kaajal, pink nipples, milk skin. The girl whose voice changes when you touch her, who adorns different forms with her hair and her eyes and her incense. Girl from childhood intimacy undiscovered till late adolescence. Stand by me and imagine and love and Roy Orbison rolled into 1. Boys friend, lover, confidante, deserter.

Milky way goes flying away, now I’m homeless and thirsty and alone. Milky way.

Yesterday by the beatles covered by wet wet wet. Mc Cartney, blackbird, ballads. Acoustic guitar love. Robisnon Crusoue , pieces of eight, The Mississippi, treasure. The doors of perception – the wrinkled sheet and infinity, Coltraine, hazrat nizamuddin dargah. Friends whirling and singing and losing themselves, the joys of raga bhoopali – pentatonic heaven. 5 ONE SHORT OF 6.666 Alestair Crowley and Led Zeppelin and the laws of thelema with do what you will, what did Jesus say?

Ever thought of the mechanics of mass consciousness. Endless delusions wrapped in hysteria. The mob needs to kill, to suck, to destroy and rebuild. Gives them something to do.

The grid of existence – square pockets, shining revolving, yet completely compact. Condensed cells of energetic knowledge – the stuff that makes matter. And a square called boy, called you, called me with its experience, its sum energy. One cell in our body has enough electricity to light up a city for 3 days. That’s quality. And mass is nothing but tamasa in its most manifest state – an inertia that stems from ignorance. An ‘it’s not done’, ‘its right’, ‘it’s wrong’. What gives me an organism – the right to classify lives as lives and non lives? A case in point being the fact that you and I would have taken at least 10, 000 lives that aren’t lives as we ‘humans’ value them.


Now a ‘ normal’ guy watches bad luck force a woman to go on her knees and lick a strangers testicles and act like she’s getting off on the whole exercise, aren’t you and me the rapists here. Or are we just celebrating the death of romanticism?




Every Sunday, father and son would see all the ruins of Delhi. Blinding, charming grandeur to boy. Snake skin on the moat outside old Delhi. The astral wonders of Jantar Mantar, wind blowing centuries, why does the Old fort look like clay? Lodhis and Khiljis and Akbar, Shahjahan, Aurangzeb. Green Sherbat. Peanuts, cotton candy. Papa and his stories, of kings and intrigues and Prithviraj Chauhan, songs of Ala Udhal – the warrior.

Papa, square framed glasses, puffed hair, worlds of science and poetry. Rhyming words, easy smile, would get up at 7 o clock in the morning in white kurta pyjamas and make a cup of tea. Drop boy to the bus stop. Give boy science journals with his articles on superconductivity, boy would see beautiful white paper and photographs. Papa got a double PhD. Scholarship in Japan; boy saw old photographs of young papa in Japan in front of a blackboard, with beautiful Japanese women boy wished he could smell. Papa knew everything – astrophysics, cricket, especially international politics. Papa’s stories - of spies and technology and behavioral patterns across countries. Kerry was a tough guy, U.S. - U.S.S.R. missile race – the intricacies of a planned economy. Papa’s Pakistani friends, his embassy days. Days when he slept in the open naked in Pilani. Days when he was Agra University’s hockey captain – a goalchee. Days when he foxed Mohinder Amarnath with his off cutters. Papa’s off cutters in the backyard – no nonsense action – absolute accuracy – would hit boy in the stomach. Papa and boy cricketer playing with a thick heavy red rubber ball in the Lodi Garden lawns – Boy hits a drive against Papas instructions, ultimate tragedy – the ball is lost. And then a moment – Papa and boy by the bush looking for the ball, when papa says ‘ go back to the moment… the ball bounced here.’ Boy’s frozen bat angle at the stumps where he batted and the location of where the ball bounced and the parabola and boy discovers it – the red rubber ball. Revelation like Nagarjuna’s treatise on time and motion.. Papas distinct motion, looking into his eyes – go back to EXACTLY where it started and trace it back, ‘remember this throughout your life. ’

Papa and boy walking down the streets of Saket on Dussehra day – Ravana burning bright big in the foreground. Swords of silver and gold. The ten avataras of Vishnu – boy loves god. Loves kacchap and matsya and varaha and parshuram especially. Asks mom for more stories – water colours of ten avatars, Vivekanad and Gandhi. Vishnu – purple seat of snakes in the land of clouds. Shivjee’s the coolest – loin cloth, long hair, Ganga from his hair, his neck’s blue because he’s swallowed the world’s poison. Boy believes in closing his eyes and making a wish. In a park, he closes his eyes and wants to hurl a stone to the clouds, he throws, the stone never comes back.

Boy loves shiny rocks – chamkeela, he loves the ring of that word. It goes perfectly with the ring on shine – visually. Boy picks up all shiny stones, from construction sites, from school trips to Nainital – he loves the golden ones – with violet, blue, decimals and if you magnify them – you’re in the land of Shivjee and Parshuram. Big, small, squarish, oval. Golden, bronze and silver. What a fool the world is – leaves ‘em here for boy to collect.

Papa gives a yellow bag for collection. Boy put all his shiny stones there. Boy learns about Harappa and Egypt and Mesopotamia and China too. Papyrus, emerald daggers, Tutankhamen’s golden tomb, the rivers – Tigris and Indus and Nile. Nile has got to be blue thinks boy. The dancing girl of Mohenjadaro, the bearded man, seals and the remains of earthen ware from Harappa – whitish yellowish rocks with calligraphic designs in black and brown. Treasure.

One day boy’s walking home and he finds the Harappan rock, quickly picks it up. He’s convinced that there’s a trail laid out for him. Finds more and more – brownish, blackish, greenish Harappan rocks everywhere around his school – ashram school. School is heaven, no books, no exams, just fun and ancient civilizations and sports day, with sack races and 100m and long jump. Boy’s waiting to go to the Govt. and give them some of his stones and own a treasure. There’s also a key boy has found and a ruin a t the back of the slide in school, it’s a small qila. Boy knows there’s a secret door there somewhere. There’s a treasure inside. There used to be a princess who comes in his dreams and tells him of the treasure. She’s Akbar’s descendant. Also Arabian and really beautiful.


Mirza Ghalib used to roam this very city drunk with pain and poetry. With brownish Urdu rose verses he sprinkled on ears that didn’t really listen. Did he also drink green sharbat? Who else Hazrat Nizamuddin. Boy sings Sufi. Boy learns Sufi from man outside his ad agency in Malviya Nagar. Sufi man recites poetry, sings hazaron khwahishen aisi in his own composition. Boy’s sitting eating Nihari in a muslim village behind his office with his guitar resting on the dilapidated walls. In walks in mad paan eater, says ‘ u a musician (all in Hindi Urdu off course), boy apprehensively affirms. Me too, let’s go. Paan eating old mad man says he’s from the Lukhnow gharana, tabla player. Takes boy to an even smaller shop in a galli, there’s hardly space for both to sit, but they do. Tabla madman insists on buying chai for boy as he starts with taanas, one after another, Takita taka takitatak ka dha dha dhin, diganakitadhin nakita dhin. Boy’s impressed. They go to mad tabla’s house – a small place to keep a khaat, behind a dustbin type locality. The place seems to be full of mammoth municipality dustbins. Between the Muslim village and the city of New Delhi. Tabla leads him into a dark dark room, only gas a tabla and a khaat and a suitcase. Boy tunes his guitar. Tabla mad takes out a diary of sorts, it has all sorts of records of his life. Qawwali leader, tabla performer, black and white kid from Gharana, Different qawwalis, Bollywood orchestra.

Boy starts making up a song, starts making up languages, plays jazz chords and sings indianish western nothing beautifully. 4 Girls from the north east come inside the room, looking a t boy. Tabla mad’s head is spinning inside and outside. He says – Boy you’ve got the voice and u’ve got the touch. Now listen to me, I’ll tell ya something, you don’t need to learn vocals, if you play the strings, the strings will teach you vocals. Spits paan or maybe just looks like he does. Now I know the Dagars, I know the Sabris, I know a guitar player, and he’s Muslim he’ll teach you really well – Masha Allah. Let’s form a band, you and me, we’ll go out and show the world. I’ve been in this city for 20 years, god it’s ruined me says the mad tabla. There’s no water – no water! I’m a Gharanedar artist!
I can play anything! Mad Tabla sounds like a brownie or an alcoholic but says he’s a devout Muslim, he doesn’t touch anything. The girls from north east look Chinese, they are all short, look like sisters, they’re smiling at him. He takes their numbers. Mad tabla oldie says ‘ Hi Hi look at him, he’s my students, sings rocknroll, works in an ad agency right here’. Tabla pokes at boy, says ‘please ask them to give me water, not ignore me like I’m untouchable’ Boy smiles says to the girls ‘He’s an old man an artist, please give him water’. Boy’s sitting in the park outside Tabla’s house with tabla. Tabla is seeing album covers, Tabla’s talking about over rated musicians asking boy to find him a job as a music teacher. They drink 4 pet bottles of Pepsi. Boy’s out of here, there wherever. Catches an auto to a place called Lado Serai. Catches a TOYOTA Qualis employed by the call centers in Gurgaon where he lives. They pick up passengers on their way back for Rs. 10. Boy sees all kind of people in the cab, does an exercise he learnt in theatre class – look at a stranger and try to figure out the story of his life. Well thinks boy looking at the turbaned man with a hookah on his left – definitely native to a village from Haryana. Probably sold his land to make it big here and got duped by a Punjabi broker who promised to turn him into Ratan Tata. Now he’s… I don’t know – someone who picks up a twig for half a paisa. Boy always looks at these guys sleeping in little ridgelettes collecting twigs and grass. Sometimes he sees wandering ascetics looking like they feel terribly cheated by god. Some of these guys carry snakes on there necks and hypnotize people. The fear of the snake paralyses you for half a second, he then asks for a Rupee or something, cut to you minus 500 Rupees after 30 seconds. You see the back of the ‘ascetic’ and a snake hissing bye. A bit like the ad world eh? Boy always finds pen salesmen on buses amazing – great oratorical skills, great discount offers – something like five ball point pens for 10 Rupees. Wonder what separates them from lazy yelling constipated guys in cowboy hats and jeans working on brand Coca Cola. Boy is also on of them. Children playing harmonium and drums on trains – some great voices and jazz drummers there, so distant from the world of French embassy officials watching them boy and friends sing Carmen. Boy loves Bob Dylan, he once heard these farmers at Noida sing folk songs from U.P. He heard Aala Udhal too. A scriptwriter friend has also heard it, she’s 45, divorced and she smokes a lot of hash. Boy wrote a film script about a stupid boy from a small town who becomes a fast bowling hero, aided by 17 hours of practice and kind drug dealers. This was the output of a week long intensive Hollywood script writing workshop, taken by an Indian Hollywood writer producer who looks like a conman and talks like a saint. Boy kinda shared his plot synopsis with some people at the workshop; he met a 24 year old assistant director ex model, assistant and nephew to Piyadarshani. He met a 45 year old small time photographer who suffered from self pity and compromise. Photo studio could hardly speak fluent English, looked like a fly and had illusions about being some sort of social worker because he felt like crying each time he saw a kid. There was this one guy who kept talking about wanting to make movies on the traffic lights in Delhi, on how he feels when he’s sitting in a Maruti with his wife, and then there’s a traffic jam in 55 degree Delhi heat. That’s real social work for you. Then there was this theatre actress called Ekta or something, who thought boy was a theatre veteran for some reason and invited him to a tour of France. Boy couldn’t act. A year after the workshop boy’s first draft lies buried somewhere in his basement while he sees this film called Iqbal which totally matches his script but for details like the fact that the mentor is a drunkard ex cricketer instead of a coke dealer. The similarities are striking but then again boy’s protagonist is dumb whereas Iqbal’s protagonist is literally dumb. What a pity, it was boy’s tribute to Tommy and The Who.

Basketball Max’s parties were the most happening thing in high school. Boy’s friend since three Basketball Max. The place would be buzzing with high school royalty – the 350 pound scumbag Manjo, the freak with a twisted tongue Aamir, and the girls with the shortest shortest skirts. Boy always felt like a renegade at these parties - the wavelength that would come and shock the wave of Backstreet Boys and Puff Daddy and all other kinds of teeny Bop bubble gum gangrene. Boy would sit right next to the computer and wait for the right time to play ‘ The Real me’ by The Who, ‘Pinball Wizard’ , ‘Love Song’ by Syd Barret. This would usually be The Toni time when all the Goondas of school and short skirts are dancing on Toni Braxton. At another party boy remembers having spent the whole night drinking the complete lyrics of Bob Dylan. Max’s dad had been to Woodstock. Max preferred Dr. Dre.

Zap 10 years and boy and Max are talking about a possible animation film – Max listens to Alice in Chain has long hair and studies in design school, Boy has an idea – black and white, street kids collecting garbage, making a paper boat from garbage that floats in a drain. Max digs the idea. A film dies.

One day in the hills of Ranikhet, boy went out with ma in a car. It started to rain, and the hills, washed and bathing, green, almost fluorescent, painted. Down the hill and up the hill in the crescent rain, till they reached Heda Baba’s Ashram. Ma in a white sari and boy walked in the rain, giggling. Inside diyas illuminated the picture of Heda Baba, 4 disciples in the hall did Aarti. A sanyassin said that Heda Baba is a shiva avtara and that in his last incarnation, he was a youth of 21 who ventured into the Ashram one day, and there was a halo around him. He died at 27. Sacred silence, solitude, beatitude, altitude, rain…

Ma told me of a cousin who started having bhang and turned religious and was one day roaming in the village, when an Ashramite, recognized him as an incarnation of their guru. He was taken to the ashram, given silk robes and people came and lay prostrate on his feet. A few disciples took him to a railway station, pumped kilos of bhang into him and left him at the railway tracks to be trampled by a passing train. There also was the story of an uncle who got addicted to brown sugar because he had ice cream after school. He then fell in love with a socialite, lost in love. Got married, held his kids by their hair upside down from his 8th storey Bandra flat and threatened to drop them if his mother didn’t pay up for his next fix. The madman - Mallu of naked Iggy Pop smack singing fame actually got his mother to go and buy prescription pills for him to trip on. Madman told boy of this racquet he and his friends ‘the smack brothers’ ran where they would actually hunt down addresses of people who just lost someone and turn up at the funeral with consolation and unsettled bills. The family would be too grieved to question and so they would be found at night in some corner of the diplomatic enclave chasing a stranger’s death.


Boy has a dream. An ancient Pagoda – a temple with saints in Kathakali, a corridor, height, air, mist. Dhvani,Shruti, the lost note, perfect score. A valley of right. They are dancing, singing truth. The sound is the secret, it’s the word. In circles they swivel, mudras sculpted. Eyes that say DHRUPAD.