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Some years passed. I was 33. In Paris, I now lived in a ménage à trois. Not like the Mormons, rather like children of the post Woodstock era. I lived with Terai and his wife, Katoun. Terai is French, born in Papeete, in the middle of the great Pacific Ocean. He was brought up by his father, a French judge of de Gaulle’s force libre, who subsequently became a dissident theosophist in south India. I had met him when we’d been students of Delhi University. Katoun was his childhood sweetheart, an exquisitely beautiful, upright, uptight French Catholic with a big heart and a feu au cul as she bluntly put it. We were dear friends.
Terai was soft, compassionate and tender, and radiantly handsome, knew my adventurous past and loved my rebel heart. Result: I fell desperately in love with him. We were in a fix. I proposed that there was an alternative to forcing Terai and Katoun to separate; all three of us would live together, happily ever after. And after some initial dithering, they both gave in to my quixotic logic. Katoun became the mother of one, and I became the mother of two of Terai’s children. We shared our beds with each other, as well as our responsibility for our children.
***
When I read out the flyer for the Baul concert to Terai, that September day in 1982, he instantly agreed to accompany me. Katoun would stay at home and look after the children; I’d done my share of babysitting that week, while they had been at the opera with Katoun’s father.
***
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| SONG SUNG TRUE: Paban Das Baul and the jacket of the book Pic: Rajesh Kumar |
The concert was like nothing I’d witnessed before. Dressed in saffron robes and patchwork jackets, three Baul singers played the simplest of instruments. The first carried a one-stringed drone; the second strode in cockily, plucking, drum or khamak slung in a bandouliere over his shoulder; while the third came tripping in, jingling a tambourine. Each singer had his own remarkable face. Sitting in an open circle on the stage, they invoked their ancestors. Their voices sounded so familiar, I felt I knew them already….
***
I didn’t even notice Paban at first, next to these two more forceful figures. Feminine, pliant, with a head of curly locks, he had an innocent face, his bright eyes laughing. He hung about in the background, poking his index finger into his left nostril to clean it, unaware that the French public in the auditorium were chuckling because they imagined his gesture was part of the show. He rose, swirling gracefully around Subal and Gour, striking his tambourine softly at first, then building up, little by little, to a crescendo of thundering rhythm, till at last he began to sing. Transported by the spell of his deep, bass voice and his insistent, steady tempo, the two older singers swung and swayed, then leapt up to join him in a dance. The three formed an ensemble, turning, dancing, jumping; they began to whirl, commanding space like a cyclone...
The magicians on stage charged each other with energy like lightning conductors. Each passed his current to the other, creating sonic waves with their instruments, which transformed into birds: clay bellied babblers and bamboo nosed warblers, wood eared and copper beaked, gut eyed and silk voiced, humming, droning, jingling.
I sat, enthralled, wanting to cry out to them, wanting to break the stunned silence of those who sat around me.
When the concert was over, I walked up to the stage. Paban was seated there alone, looking morose. His face expressed surprise and awe when I addressed him in Bengali. He rushed off in search of Deepak Majumdar, a bearded, bespectacled Bengali intellectual with the traditional jhola slung across his shoulder, and the leader of their group. With his consent, we made a date for dinner at my home the next evening.
***
The next evening, we dined together in the little basement kitchen of our home on the Rue du Moulin des Pres. Deepak and the Bauls seemed as delighted to meet me as I was to meet them, and even more so when they saw what I’d cooked for their supper: a simple Bengali supper of rice, dal, fried aubergines and some catfish, picked up in Chinatown nearby and cooked into a light, watery curry spiked with kalonji, chilli and coriander. Paban cried out. ‘Hari bol! Hari Bol! (Take the name of Hari!)’
‘Magur macher jhol! (a catfish curry!),’ responded Gour Khepa, grinning from ear to ear.
‘Ghor jubotir kol!’ (the lap of a young woman),’ said Subal Das sotto voce, his thin lips curling slightly on his inscrutable face.We were old soulmates though we’d only just met, and I chattered with Deepak happily.
Terai and Katoun disappeared after dinner. They had to be at work at nine the next morning, and lived by the rigid Parisian clock. My own clock was more flexible. I had a part-time job as a translator, and often worked out of home, so I stayed up with the Bauls till dawn.
***
Paban helped me clear up in the basement and load the dishwasher while Deepak, Subal and Gour Khepa smoked their last chillum of ganja, arguing with each other vociferously in the living room upstairs. Wild and abandoned on stage, reincarnating a veritable bhairava baba, Paban was quiet off stage, seeming overpowered by his articulate, bullying elders. He was twenty-six years old but looked like a stripling, and fell easily into the role of a younger brother, calling me didi. He invited me to visit the Baul mela of Kenduli in mid January, on the day of the new moon, Makar Sankranti. Makar, he told me, was a crocodile but when he attempted a sketch on my kitchen wall with a pencil, it looked more like a dragon. I made a mental note to wipe it off before Katoun woke up, as I told Paban I’d try to make it. We stood at the window for a while, as dawn broke over the poplars in our triangular patch of back garden. A blackbird sang on the laurel tree, announcing the sunrise.
