Adventure Divas (18 page)

“Education is the best resource for a woman. If she can improve her economic situation, she can take care of so many things. She can also stand against the caste system and the so-called untouchability.”

Alice wants to be sure I understand the gravity of the situation in these disenfranchised communities. Making us, the press, understand is critical, and thus she is willing to talk as long as we want. She seems unfazed by this long day under a brutal sun, but working against such a tide of ignorance and facing such a monumental challenge—not to mention political persecution—must take a personal toll on her.

“Do you have fears?” I ask, thinking of the sometimes dangerous circumstances of her work.

“Now I don’t have any fear, I don’t have any fear. This attack,” she says, referring to the former local authorities who persecuted her and her colleagues and tried to destroy Bal Rashmi, “has made us stronger, because we have seen a lot—a lot we could never have imagined, you know? That is the difference between us and them. We will do this good work again, with full strength.” As Kiran Bedi articulated regarding the death of her mother, when you confront your fears directly, you transcend them.

“Are you . . . happy?” I ask, as fearlessness and integrity, while admirable, don’t necessarily add up to joyful living.

“Oh yes.” A mellow expression replaces the serious intensity with which she has been speaking. “It gives me happiness when I work. It gives me happiness when I reclaim something which was going bad. I am not powerful. I am not in the politics. I am not a rich man’s wife or daughter. I don’t maintain any status. I am a social worker. But I will not stop. Now nobody can stop us.”

This combination of personal humility and fierce determination seems to be part of a long-standing Indian tradition, with Mahatma Gandhi as its most famous recent exemplar. “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others,” Gandhi said, and Alice, like Kiran Bedi, seems to have taken this maxim to heart.

Alice’s commitment to her work is total. She has forfeited her own status (and possibly her health, from the sound of that cough) rather than exercising it at the expense of others. That ethos—and the small pink seashells that are her passion—are the wells from which she draws happiness.

It is long dark by the time we start our two-hour jeep ride back to Jaipur. We, the crew, are exhausted, heads bobbing with fatigue. “Alice,” I ask after a long silence, “what’s a diva?”

“Diva?”

“Yes, diva, does that word mean anything to you?”

“Diva is, like, lamp.”

“Yeah?” I say. “Nothing else?”

“You said ‘diva’?” says Alice.

“Diva. D-I-V-A,” I say.

“Yeah, it is a lamp, which gives lots of light to others and goes on burning, you know?”

She looks out the window at what seems to be a small cluster of lanterns a quarter mile in the distance. “We must drop off this chalk for the school,” she says, and the jeep begins to downshift.

Only later would I find out that
diya
means “lamp” in Hindi. Perhaps Alice misunderstood me, perhaps not.

Our cab whizzes
along Mumbai’s Chowpatty road. We pass a bawdy billboard that screams
HUM DIL DE CHUKE SANAM
!
,
which looks to be a recent hit movie. The billboard’s lusty, big-eyed couple, in what you might call aggressive repose, welcome us to Bollywood:
Palm trees. Movie stars.
The city’s thriving film industry, which turns out hundreds of feature films a year, is just one indication that Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is the country’s economic powerhouse.

We decide to take the rest of the day off. John and soundman Doug take in Bollywood’s latest at an air-conditioned theater and Julie, Cheryl, and I go our separate ways to explore Mumbai. I buy a plastic rendition of Kali that plugs in and makes the goddess’s garland of severed limbs flash in bright red, and I get my fortune told: “You make a good friend and a bad wife.” (And I paid for that?) Cheryl buys a poster of a leisure-suit-clad guru Si Baba, plucked from a bin of a hundred deities. Julie gets oil dripped on her forehead at an Ayurvedic health clinic.

Later, the three of us meet to swap stories over an early dinner. “I told the Ayurvedic guy I was seeking treatment because I was having trouble sleeping,” Julie tells us, passing the chicken curry and some herbal chutneys clockwise. “He asks me why, and I tell him because I broke up with my boyfriend before coming to India. He looks at me puzzled, then says, ‘Well, get a new one.’ I’m telling you, there’s a really different relationship to attachment here,” she concludes drily.

On our walk back to the hotel we come to a bridge that crosses a river. I stop, and delicately ask Julie about what has become a slightly touchy subject.

“Julie, any luck on finding us somewhere to fish?” I say, looking down on a strangely deserted river’s edge, in what is a very populated city.

“Holly,
give it up,
” says Julie, who has been irritable with a bout of something lately (or maybe just a sad heart). “All the rivers in India are either
dead
or
sacred.
”

Well, looky whose Ayurvedic treatment didn’t work,
I think.

The water
does
have an odd green hue, not dissimilar to the Chicago River on Saint Patrick’s Day.

We return to the hotel and find John bellied up to the bar and looking sulky. Something is wrong.

“Half of Cheryl’s film is blank,” John says.

“What?” I say, praying I misheard him.

“Blank. Nothing on it, they say.”

“Did they put it in the wrong soup?” Cheryl asks. “I marked the black-and-white explicitly,” she adds, teeth grinding.

For two minutes we spiral into a finger-pointing frenzy in which we call into question the competence of Kodak, the Indian film industry, Cheryl’s film cameras, the blasted hot sun, and my judgment about developing the film in situ rather than FedExing it home. It is a stunning display of the virulent strain of ass-covering that is endemic to the TV industry.

Weak from days of fever, I lack the horsepower to reach the high road, much less take it, so my response to the ruined film is to find Julie an hour later and have a
meltdown
about the waste of precious money, the heartbreaking loss of images, and the goddamn incessant heat.

“Holly, I will fix it,” says Julie, with all confidence.

She gives me two Cipros and two Advil and slips in a sleeping pill and some unidentified orange tablet. I wash it all down with a Kingfisher.

It is Tuesday.

I float off to a fuzzy otherworld, thinking Julie is off to war with the local Kodak people to get our money back and somehow sprinkle magic dust to reconstitute the footage. But as an experienced producer, Julie knows that sometimes the best fix is to simply knock the director unconscious.

I wake up Thursday, without a fever and optimistic.

We have an appointment to meet with a composer and tabla musician named Anuradha Pal at her home near Mumbai’s Chowpatty Beach. “She’s a demi-diva,” Julie says over a breakfast of puri, pakora, and black, steaming coffee, “so we can start late. Nine
A.M
.”

Our India research was so chock-full of strong candidates that we have taken to calling some of our subjects demi-divas. What may sound like a catty divatocracy is really just practicality. Anuradha, since she is
merely
a world-renowned virtuosa and musical genius, is relegated to demi-diva. That is, in all likelihood she will only get about five minutes in the show. The bar is high in India, a country where immense social problems create immense divas who draw on a long tradition of fighting poverty and injustice.

Just before independence, a musical renaissance for women began. Only in the past sixty years has it been possible for a woman who did not belong to a family of hereditary musicians to take up music as her life’s work. Despite the renaissance, Anuradha Pal is an anomaly, because the tabla, a two-piece drum and one of the most popular percussion instruments in India, is still very much a guy thing.

Pal lives in a swank high-rise with her parents and their small white stringy-haired dog, all of whom have welcomed us into their home with a kindness and savvy that indicates they are well versed in receiving the press.

Anuradha has a wide face, long brown hair with curly bangs, and a zeal for both her music and her family, to whom she attributes her opportunities and considerable confidence. While John sets up, and Julie and I knock back chai, Anuradha changes her outfit four times (old-school-diva behavior) and simultaneously educates us on the tabla.

“The right, treble side of the two-piece drum is usually referred to as the tabla,” she says, “and the left, which makes a bassy sound, is called the baya
.
The tabla is played with every part of the ten fingers—the tips, the middle, and the base of the fingers where they connect with the palm.” When Anuradha picks up the instrument and begins to play, my snooty reaction to her multiple wardrobe changes evaporates into the searing heat of her pure, unfathomable
talent.
Now I understand why
The Hindu
magazine touted her as having “the most pliable fingers in the world” and how she dazzles crowds with her virtuosity. Anuradha delivers ten minutes of genius in motion. We will end up threading her music throughout the program.

We sit down to talk about the historical and cultural implications of her music-making. In a global music landscape of remixes and sampling, Anuradha Pal creates new music within very old frameworks.

“What does it means to be creating within a culture that is five thousand years old?” I ask, thinking about how Kiran Bedi said she draws on time past for her creative solutions.

“I think it’s a great legacy to live up to. Absolutely, you have to be very individualistic, and as a musician you’re not performing set compositions. I’m talking about the pattern of improvisation. You’re creating new, but it’s coming from something of the past. You have to be very well rooted into what your tradition is, but be able to look ahead, have a broad vision and move from today into tomorrow.

“You’re not doing things that just your guru has taught you. You have to go ahead. You have to give it your own individuality,” she says, pushing back the red sash on an otherwise bright orange sari.

When one’s body of knowledge about something is considerable (five thousand years considerable), the brain is then poised to ignite—to leap to a higher plane of creativity. (Knowledge + magic intuitive potion = inspired creation.) I can’t relate musically, but I understand this phenomenon from fishing. Anglers can approach a river, full of generations of fish facts and strategy, as writer Howell Raines noted, but in the end it is a mysterious intuitive message that tells us exactly where the fish are. Anuradha’s description of inspiration sounds like the same thing.

“Tell me about your gurus. The concept of guru is—I think, um, it means something different to me than it does here,” I say.

“What does it mean to you?” she asks.

“Well, guru in my mind is someone to whom you have sort of a blind devotion,” I say, treading lightly, thinking
Jim Jones! Jim Jones!
“And my sense of what it means here is, um, more of a teacher,” I say, with tentative diplomacy.

“Well, actually, it
is
a blind devotion. It is a teacher—but more than a teacher. You know a teacher is somebody who can teach you anything, you can go learn science, physics, math, whatever from a teacher. In the case of the guru, what our Indian tradition tells us to do is a
surrender.
It’s love, worship, and devotion towards a particular guru, his music, his style, his approach to music and you’re following that with a degree of not only devotion, but a certain surrender. Which I think is alien to the Western rational mind,” she says.

My Western rational mind does flinch when I hear the word
guru.
The moniker conjures up fat cats in white Mercedeses cruising along wide Texas roads. But what Anuradha seems to be describing is a very intense mentoring relationship. So intense that the guru’s power, for his or her part, must be responsibly wielded.

“But how do you become an individual? How do you express your individual creativity within that context? Isn’t there a conflict?” I ask, wondering,
Must we surrender to evolve?

“Oh there’s a huge [conflict], but that’s a very good question, because that’s exactly what I was saying—that you have to have this improvisatory attitude while sticking to the traditional setup. And that is where the challenge is. We are interpreting according to the moment, so that’s why you would hear the same artist perform it differently depending on what that audience gives him,” she says.

I think of the Penan’s
mal cun uk,
“following our feelings,” which allows them to navigate the Bornean jungle with only pure intuition to guide them.

“Basically the tabla is within me. I mean, I think rhythm has gotten inside,” she says, touching her sternum, “and there is a need to express it. So if somebody were to take that away, oooh, I’ll be dead. Playing tabla for me is a need; it’s something that’s necessary to my survival. It’s a spiritual experience, because when I practice, when I sit onstage, that’s when I’m feeling at peace with myself. It’s what delights my soul, like nothing else,” she says.

Crap. I thought we would have a simple five-minute virtuosa bio (shoot, write, edit,
easy
) but once again life, death, and the universe have been invoked and “the story” is anything but straight ahead. India seems to be a place where spiritual sustenance, through anchors, drumming, service, or other practices, is integral.

I look at Anurhada’s
bindi
and suspect, not for the first time, that the ubiquitous red dot ties into India’s spiritual story. By now Anuradha and I have a rapport going, so I charge ahead with the gusto of a rhino and the protective shield of a cultural ignoramus.

“What does
—that—
mean?” I say, pointing to the red dot on her forehead.

Turns out that the
bindi
is decoration for some, like lipstick, but at its purest, a
bindi
symbolizes the powers associated with the third eye. For the aware woman, the
bindi
is the gathering place for her whole person and a reminder of her spiritual dimension.