The River Sutra

 I first read this book in the 1990s and stupidly I lent out my only copy (I don't even remember to whom) and never got it back. After that it seemed to go out of print and I couldn't find it. Last year, I stumbled upon it at BookXcess and I bought a couple of copies and stupidly, gave both out as presents, confident that I could find another copy as this bookshop seemed to have numerous. When I returned, scarcely a month later, I couldn't find any. It had run out. Of course it had. This was such a good book. I ordered a copy at full price on Book Depository only to find the last copy there on my next visit. I bought that too and have it stored away to give as a present, but only to someone who will appreciate it. 

Here, I share my favourite chapter from the book. 

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The Musician's Story

It is hard to be the child of genius.

Even when I was very small, not yet three years old, I was aware that my father dwelt in some other sphere as if he had struck a bargain with God that took him outside human boundaries.

No one stopped me when I lay on the floor outside his music room because I never made a sound as his fingers moved across the frets of his veena forming shapes in the air, a whole architecture of sound that I could walk through and around, so substantial when I listened that I believed it would last for a thousand years.

I always wondered as a child, where did such beauty go? Which audience of spirits sat waiting for the sounds to rearrange themselves into arches, vaults, balconies, spires, domes that they could inhabit? But I could not ask my father. He was surrounded by musicians, their silent applause flowing around him as impassable as deep water as they listened to his genius taking him toward some unknown dimension on the ladder of music that he was constructing so painstakingly with his veena.

Whenever I tried to approach my father, that sea of adulation closed like water over my head before I was able to reach the smiling figure glancing at me with indifferent interest as if I were a pi-dog puppy who had wandered into his music room. I don't think it could be said of my father that he was sensitive to the presence of other human beings unless they intruded on his music, so he never noticed me. But he noticed my despair.

You see, despair is an emotion, and the emotions were like shoals of brilliant fish swimming  through his melodies. Or coloured gases floating through the ether in which his music dwelt.

To the entire household's astonishment, when I was six years old my father, who had never accepted a student from all the great musicians who had begged to sit at his feet, stretched out his hand, making a bridge for me to cross the gulf of praise that separated us, and offered to teach me music.

My first music lesson extended for several months. In all that time I was not permitted to touch an instrument. I was not even permitted to sing the seven notes of the scale: the sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni that are the do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti of western music.

Instead my father made me sit next to him in the evenings as the birds were alighting on the trees.

"Listen," he said in a voice so hushed it was as if he was praying. "Listen to the birds singing. Do you hear the half notes and microtones pouring from their throats? If I practiced for ten lifetimes I could not reproduce that careless waterfall of sound and sshh...listen closely."

I tried to imitate him, bending forward in my chair. "Hear? How that song ended on a single note when the bird settled into the tree? The greatest ragas must end like that, leaving just one note's vibration on the air."

I nodded in enthusiasm, hoping to please him, but he did not see me. "Do you know why birds sing at dawn and at sunset? Because of the changing light. Their songs are a spontaneous response to the beauty of the world. That is truly music."

Then he told me that he would die happy if he were able to create such music five or ten times in a whole lifetime.

"Men are fools," my father said as we walked in the jungles behind our house. "They think only humans respond to beauty. But a feeding deer will drop its food to listen to music, and a king cobra sway its hood in pleasure. Listen. Do you hear that peacock's cry? It is the first note of the scale. Sa."

Standing under the trees we waited to hear the peacocks cry again, and when they did my father's voice echoed them and the peacocks fell silent, listening.

It seemed to me that we were wandering only for pleasure in the fields around our house or in the jungles. I did not realise my father was teaching me the seven notes of the scale as described in the classic texts.

But at sunset we waited until the cowherds were driving their cattle back to their villages and my father said, "Can you hear that calf calling its mother? It is the note -- re."

We watched my mother throwing vegetable peelings to the goats in our back field. "Hear the goats? If you sing ga three times, very quickly, it is the bleating of a goat."

We waded into the paddy fields behind the herons. "Ma, the cry of the heron."

At night, "Pa, the song of the nightingale."

In the bazaar streets as we followed the horse carriages, "Dha -- the neighing of a horse."

And when the circus came to town, my father was excited at the opportunity of teaching me the last note of the scale. "Can you hear the ni -- when the elephant trumpets?"

Then my father sang the notes of the scale so I could hear him imitating the animals we had seen -- the strutting of the peacock, the panic of a lost calf, the destructive antics of a goat, the sweeping flight of the heron, the nightingale nesting in a tree, the rearing of a horse, the power of an angry elephant -- until the nature of the notes became second nature to me. He also sang the ragas in which each note predominated so that my uneducated ear became familiar with all the major ragas before I ever held an instrument in my hands.

"There was no art until Shiva danced the Creation," he said, explaining how melody was born. "Music lay asleep inside a motionless rhythm -- deep as water, black as darkness, weightless as air. Then Shiva shook his drum. Everything started to tremble with the longing to exist. The universe erupted into being as Shiva danced. The six mighty ragas, the pillars of all music, were born from the expressions on Shiva's face, and through their vibrations the universe was brought into existence.

"The melodies of these six ragas sustain the harmonies of living things. When they fuse together they become the beat of Shiva's drum that brings the universe to destruction. But they are all male. And music can never be still, it can never be without desire. Life must create more life or become death. So each of the six ragas were given six wives, six raginis to teach them love. Their children are the putras, and in this way music lives and multiplies.

Then my father said I must see the emotions through which ragas and raginis communicated with each other. "Each raga is related to a particular season, a time of day, an emotion. But emotion is the key that unlocks a raga's soul."

So, every day for a month, we went together to the dance academy to study Shiva's dance of Creation. I watched girls my age struggle to convey emotions that they had never known but that were the basic moods of dance: Laughter, Wonder, Heroism, Anger, Grief, Pity, Love, Fear, Tranquility.

Sometimes I laughed at their inability to put sufficient gravity into their moods, and my father was displeased.

"Don't treat the arts so lightly. They are Shiva's gifts to mankind. If you choose to be a musician, you enter into a pact with Shiva himself. Remember, every note you play sends new music into the universe. You can never reclaim it."

I thought my father was speaking to himself because I did not understand his meaning. But at last I was able to ask the questions that had always been in my mind. "And where does all that music go?"

"It returns to the sound that is all so all-encompassing it is silent, the sound we call the secret of the Gandharva Veda."

"Have you ever heard it?"

"No, but every day I listen for it when I play. You must listen for it too. The Vedas say that by playing the veena with the correct rhythm, keeping its notes and its character intact, a man can hear that sound and attain salvation."

Then my father took me to the small street of painters that stretched at one side of the town temple to watch the artists grinding their colours with stones. He was always searching for ways to make me understand the link between my music and the world, and while I peered over the artists' shoulders, he taught me which ragas they would be painting from the small pots of colours they were placing before their paper -- sa was black, re was tawny, ga was gold, ma white, pa yellow, dha indigo, ni green.

That portrait of a man with black skin carrying in his hand a sharp-edged sword to slash through the clouds like lightning was Megh, the raga of rain. That man with flames around his head, riding a savage elephant to show fire's power, was Deepak, the raga of heat. That girl fanning herself with a peacock's feather as she drank from a goblet was Vaulika; that maiden lying in front of a hut on the grass with a garland in her hands was Desi; that girl talking to her deer as she took them home at evening was Todi.

By the time six months were over I could recite the moods that each raga created and its seasons, and identify them in the pictures I saw being painted in the street. 

Still, an entire year passed before my father finally allowed me to take the veena across my knees.

I was so small the instrument stretched beyond both sides of my body and my crossed legs didn't even touch the arm. My father instructed me to place both hands on the strings without making a sound.

"Always treat your instrument with humility. After all, what is a raga? Five notes, seven. If you add some halftones, maybe twelve. It is only a skeleton of melody. And the veena is only two gourds attached by a piece of wood and a handful of wires. But when they are united, and you create a composition from their union, it must speak the language of the soul. You see, a raga has its own soul. Without its soul, its rasa, a raga is only a dead thing."

He warned me I must respect each note of music so that I could give it life. "Once there was a great musician who boasted all the time that he could play better than anyone else. One day the notes of the scale turned into seven nymphs and walked past as he was playing. Suddenly one nymph fell to the ground dead. The musician was playing his instrument so violently that he strangled the note in his strings. He murdered the nymph with his pride."

I started crying, fearing my father would somehow blame me for the nymph's death. He only smiled at my distress and continued his story. "As the musician was staring in horror at the dead woman in front of him, a holy man passed by and asked if he could borrow the instrument. He played on it so sweetly he brought the note nymph back to life. That is how you must try to play."

And then at last my father allowed me to pluck the primary scale from the strings of my veena. For half an hour he listened to me play as closely as if he were listening to a great musician before stopping me. "The first sound of creation was Om. Each vibration of Om created new sounds that led to the primary scale. Think of these seven notes as the Om of music. If you cannot lay them correctly you will never be able to master a raga."

I was only a child but my father wanted me to understand that music was the mathematics by which the universe could be comprehended. Morning after morning, month after month, he made me play the sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni over and over again, one hand moving up and down the frets, the other plucking at the veena's strings, until my fingers bled. He ignored my tears and forced me to continue practicing until the cushions of my fingertips developed calluses. But still he was not satisfied with the clarity of my notes.

If my mother had been more sympathetic I would have asked her then to end my music lessons. Unfortunately, my mother seldom spoke to me. My ugliness upset her. When other children stared at me, sniggering at my ugliness, my mother's eyes filled with tears but she never comforted me or told me they were wrong.

Shamed by my mother's tears, I hid in the bathroom, examining myself in the mirror to see if my face was losing any of its coarseness. Each time I looked I saw only two features in the mushy flesh, this nose growing bigger as if trying to join this chin that drives forward like a fighter's, tempting an opponent's attack.

My father was oblivious to my ugliness. After listening to me practice on my veena he would play himself, making me learn the scales that formed the ragas. For two years these skeletons of melody were all I learned. My father would play some notes and ask me what he was playing. When I identified the raga he would recite a sacred saying peculiar to it.

"A goddess presides over each of the ragas. If you truly meditate on the raga's sacred teaching, its goddess will give you mastery over its melodies."

I stared at him resentfully as he spoke, hating his nose and chin because they were exaggerated so cruelly on my own face. He was not a handsome man, but at least his features were in proportion to his face, and his naturally austere expression lent them distinction. I wanted him to give me a sacred saying, a goddess who would grant me beauty.

Perhaps I did my father an injustice. Through music he tried to free me of my own image so I could love beauty wherever it was to be found, even if it was mot present in my mirror.

Then one day when I was eleven years old, my father gave me a picture of a man with matted hair and snakes clasping his forehead above his three eyes.

"This is the raga you will learn. The Bhairav. Bhairav is another name for Shiva, meaning the Fire of Time."

My hands trembled as I held the picture of the god, his body smeared with ashes, a drum and a trident in his hands. I had been under my father's instruction for five years by now. At last my father felt I was capable of commencing the performance of a raga.

At that very moment my mother began to sit outside the music room as a jailer waits for a prisoner. I was not gifted enough for my mother to feel secure about my future. She had lived so long with genius that she could recognise it like a bazaar fruit seller recognises a fine mango from a merely good one even though he has not grown it, and she believed that a woman without genius could be protected only by a husband in a harsh world designed for men.

When I finished my music lesson, she forced me to endure teas with her friends and their sons. I could see the boys recoiling from my ugliness but my mother's resolve to see me safely married only hardened as, week after week, the teas progressed and no offers were made for my hand.

How can I describe my anguish in the years that followed, as I struggled to please my father inside the music room, and then outside the music room consoled my mother for my ugliness?

One one side was my father's invitation to wander freely in the fields of music, where even a child like myself could fall on cushions of melody, run across bridges of notes, swing on the stretch of the veena's strings, make garlands of different-coloured notes to place before the goddesses of the ragas. But outside the room I saw my mother's face creased with worry, my ugliness reflected in her eyes.

By now my body was beginning to show its maturity, changes that I could not overlook if only because the weight of the veena was too much against my budding breasts. With these changes in my physique had come a change in my emotional state. My senses felt everything too strongly. I no longer swam with the freedom of a dolphin through the caverns of my father's music. I was too preoccupied with my own ugliness and my mother's despair, my uncertain future looming before me as mysterious as the changes of my body.

Suddenly my father decided he no longer wanted to teach me. "You make too much music. A raga is not composed of notes. It is composed of the silence between the notes."

Once I would have wept openly at my father's words. Now I lowered my eyes that he would not see my great shame. My pain attracted my father's attention. Or perhaps it was my silence that made him relent.

"I will continue to teach you. But on one condition. They say the greatest gift a man can give is the gift of a daughter in marriage. If you insist on studying under me, you must be prepared to be a bride."

It seemed to me that I could not escape the spectre of marriage. Knowing no man would me as a wife, I begged him to continue my musical education.

"Think carefully before you say yes," my father warned. "Remember, if I teach you the raginis I will be giving you as a wife to my gods of music. Such a contract cannot be broken. It will be a marriage sealed by Shiva himself."

I humbly assured him I understood, and my father continued my education.

Now my father's lessons lifted me into another universe.

He changed my instrument from the veena to the more pliant sitar, hearing in that softer instrument my yearning for beauty as he taught me the grace notes that distinguish the great musician from a student.

"Imagine a raga as a riverbed. The grace notes are the water of the river. It is written in the Ragavivodha that a raga without grace notes is like a night without moonlight, a river without water, a creeper without flowers, a woman without a garment."

He taught me the subtleties of tenderness, how to be supple before gravity, how to gentle anger, how to seduce and sigh and caress through my music.

"You must think of yourself as water washing over stone, shaping it with the relentless touch of your love. Think of yourself as silk that disguises its strength in softness. The force of your desire, the heat of your longing must melt the rigidity of the raga."

My sensibilities became so refined under my father's tutelage that when he recited to me the contemplations of differeing raginis, I could immediately visualise them.

"Here is the contemplation for Lilvati. She is of sixteen summers, she wears ropes of pearls, she carries a lotus, and she speaks of love to her confidantes while she waits for her beloved.

"The lilting Madhu-madhavi has a golden complexion and is of incomparable beauty. She is seated laughing with her lover on a swing at springtime.

"The yearning Shyam-Gujari stands in a moonlit garden telling a peacock of her longing for her lover.

"Here is the contemplation of Bhairavi. The appointed hour of her tryst has passed and her lover has not appeared. She tears off her jewels and the flowers in her hair. She smears her body with ashes, grieving for the loss of her beloved."

Just think what my study did to me, an adolescent girl who knew the stain of her ugliness would prevent any man from desiring her, and yet learning only how to express longing.

But I cannot say that mine was an unhappy life. I had already experienced one miracle when my father undertook my musical education. Now the second miracle happened.

It was evening, the time when my father played to the gods. None of us could disturb him but sometimes I passed near the room to listen.

This evening I stopped to look through the doorway of his music room, never having heard my father play this way before. To my surprise I saw a young man sitting below my father's platform playing the veena. He was dressed as a supplicant, bare-footed, his torso naked except for the instrument resting against his bare shoulder. I stared in wonder at his slanting eyes, at his black hair falling softly to the strong line of his neck, at the muscled arm as his fingers moved across the frets of his instrument. He was so beautiful I shut my eyes against his power, thinking I had imagined him in my long training in desire. When I opened my eyes I still saw him, and it was as if ten thousand honeybees had stung my heart at once. 

I don't know how long I stood there, but finally the young man laid his instrument at my father's feet.

"Will you accept me as your student?" he asked humbly.

My father did not bother to disguise his impatience. "Everyone knows I have never taken a pupil, except for my daughter."

"Then let me live here, so I can listen to you play. I will serve your food or heat the water for your bath. I will perform the most menial tasks if only you permit me to be near you."

"Are you so willing to do anything to be taught by me?"

"The more rigorous your terms, the happier I will be to accept them."

"Music is not allied to pain. You will not be a better musician if you suffer more than other men."

"Just tell me what you require of me and I will do it."

"If I teach you, will you take my daughter as your wife?"

"Is that all? Willingly."

My father lifted his hand to beckon me into the room, and the stranger turned. I saw the shock on the stranger's face, as if he could not believe my father could sire such ugliness.

At that moment I wished my father dead. He did not see the stranger's disbelief, and if he had my father would not have cared. Genius stands at a strange angle to the world of humans, careless of its own cruelty.

And what refinement of cruelty it was. Day after day my ugliness faced the stranger's beauty as my father taught us.

Locked in my hatred of my father, I could not bring to my instrument that longing which I had perfected when there was no one there.

My awkward playing made the stranger's music more unforgiving, so that the notes of his raga had an iron hardness that forbid approach.

My father was enraged at his insensitivity. "The ragas are the architecture of emotion. Have you never known weakness or fear? Are you so stupid?"

I wept within myself for the stranger's pain at my father's harsh criticisms. But my father was relentless. "Any pedant can learn a raga's melody. It is only a matter of practice. Music goes beyond technique. The Boddhisatva broke every string of the veena, one by one, and still the raga continued, vibrating in the waters of human emotion."

The stranger did not yet know his own genius, only his talent and his ambition, and my father eroded that ambition with ruthless skill.

"Your tastes are too cheap to play the great ragas. You are content  to create mere pleasure. Didn't your last teacher teach you the Upanishads:

"The better is one thing, the pleasant another,

 Both aims may bind a man,

 But the wise man chooses the better over the pleasant?"

Then my father turned to me, his fury at my incompetence as great as his anger at the stranger's lack of imagination.

"What are the two emotions that govern the two sexes in all music?"

"The heroic for the man. The erotic for the woman," I whispered, fearful of drawing the stranger's eyes to my face.

My father raised his hands in the air in front of him as if beseeching the gods. "What am I to do with these lumps of clay? From the outside they look like a man and a woman. Why are they not alive?"

We were betrothed, my father's two students. And yet we never spoke to each other except in stilted greetings and farewells.

My father spoke for both of us, haranguing us to become more than we were, not allowing us to hide our shame from him and from each other.

Once he took the veena from the stranger's shoulder when he was again displeased by the boy's playing. "Do you know what this instrument is? Look at the curve of its neck. Its breasts, its slender arm. This is the expression of Shiva's love. Can't you imagine a woman? Or love?"

Day after day, lesson after lesson, he shamed us, forcing us to understand the meaning of being a man and a woman.

But what we learned most from him in those years was the blessedness of silence, when we were neither struggling to please him with our instruments nor listening to his voice harshly reminding us of our errors.

Over the months my father's fury made us conspirators. Fearing his anger at one student would be deflected on the other, we began helping each other, trying to read the other's mistake before it was made, increasingly conscious of each other's moods.

Now I remembered my father's teachings as I tried to be the water to the river of the stranger's raga, the moonlight to his night. And when I thought how my father had said that a raga without the waterfall of grace notes was like a woman without a garment, I tried to teach the stranger what a woman felt, pleading for his attention by extending the notes pulled from the strings of my sitar so he could hear the ache in me.

Suddenly it was as if I had gained a voice to tell the stranger of my pain at my own ugliness, of my remorse that he should have been locked into this unjust bargain of marriage by my father.

I do not know where I learned such duplicity or if I always harboured it in my soul, but I began seducing the stranger with my weakness and he grew heroic in his music to defend me from my father's contempt.

As silk disguises its strength in softness, as water erodes the unforgiving nature of stone, as flesh embraces steel, I embraced the music of the stranger's veena and through the strings of my sitar, I told him that I dared to love his beauty. Slowly, oh how slowly, the stranger's music began responding to the request in mine until we were no longer conscious of my father's presence in the room, only hearing the pleading of my ragini to be the wife of his lordly raga, the silences in between our notes growing electric with desire.

Sometimes I saw the stranger's eyes linger on some part of my body left exposed by my garment and I did not hasten to cover myself, pretending I had not noticed his attention wandering from my music. I even began to hope I was not as offensive as I had always believed myself to be. We were young, you see, we were a man and a woman, and we could not pass our days in the constant dialogue of desire without being overwhelmed by it.

But my mother was growing impatient for our marriage to be performed. The stranger was by now twenty-one years old, I was eighteen. Every day she demanded that my father set a date for the wedding, yet my father hesitated. I had never seem him indecisive in his life. I could not understand why he bargained each day with my mother to delay the marriage he had himself demanded from his student.

Finally he told my mother, "Let them play together on the night of Shiva. Then we will choose a date."

That year, as always happened on the night of Shiva, our house was filled with musicians. All night, the musicians played, one after another or sometimes together, waiting for the moment when my father would lift his veena and praise his gods with his genius.

But this year my father told the assembled musicians that tonight his students would play for them. Then he invited us to join him on the platform.

It was the hour to play the Bhairav, the raga of Shiva, when darkness turns into dawn. The stranger played the opening movement of the raga. My father nodded in approval listening to the stranger slowly unfold the raga's divinity, carving a great stone temple of music in the air. I understood that my father's harangues against what is only pleasant in music as the magnificence of the raga was displayed to us, becoming ever more grave, more monumental, more relentless, as if embodying its name, the Fire of Time.

And now I disturbed its mighty solitude with the sacrifice of Parvati wooing Shiva from his asceticism, pleading that he love her. And so we played together, as the darkness turned into filigreed shadow, and still we played until there was light in the room, and still we played as the sun showed its power, until exhausted by the consummation of our music we ended together  on a single note, as if consigning our music to the silence that followed it.

When even my father could no longer hear that last note vibrating in the air, he rose to his feet. "Tonight I gave my daughter in marriage to music. I have fulfilled my duties as a father. Now I free this young man from our bargain. But if he still wishes to marry my child, the wedding can take place whenever my wife wishes."

The stranger smiled at me as my mother placed a garland of flowers around his neck. I dared not look at him in case my joy overflowed, flooding my eyes.

And so the stranger left our house to return to his family while my mother made preparations for our marriage.

For the first time I preferred my mother's company to my father's. We collected my trousseau and decorated the rooms in which my bridegroom and I would live as man and wife. 

The priest was organised, an auspicious night was chosen for our nuptials. We sent shawls and saris for my bridegroom's parents.

Every day my mother speculated on the progress of events. The bridegroom's family should be arriving soon, the red invitations with the gold lettering must have reached their destinations.

Then at last a messenger arrived from my bridegroom's family. 

My mother and myself hid outside my father's music room, whispering excitedly to each other as the messenger unwrapped gifts below my father's platform.

I looked at the shawls piling up at my father's feet and recognised them as the gifts we had sent to my bridegroom's family, but I still did not understand what was happening until I heard the messenger say, "Your student thanks you for granting his freedom. He is betrothed in marriage to my daughter."

From that moment I have not touched my instrument nor entered my father's music room. The very sound of music is hateful to my ears.

So my father has brought me here.

He says that I must meditate on the waters of the Narmada, the symbol of Shiva's penance, until I have cured myself of my attachment to what has passed and can become again the ragini to every raga.

He says I must understand that I am the bride of music and not of a musician. But it is an impossible penance that he demands of me, to express desire in my music when I am dead inside.

Do you think it can be done?

Do you think this river has such power?