I'm Your Man (50 page)

The years Leonard had spent in the monastery had done nothing to dull his talent at sniffing out a nondescript hotel room. Kemps Corner was a two-star hotel in the south of Mumbai in a busy, built-up neighborhood. A small place—just thirty-five rooms—it was not more than a couple of hundred yards from the beach, though closer still to a highway overpass. The building was old but not elegant. There was a jaunty striped awning over the entrance door that led into a miniature, dimly lit lobby. Leonard took a small single room at the back of the building, where there was less street noise. There was a narrow bed, one side pushed up against the white-painted wall; an armchair; a wooden desk beneath a wood-framed mirror; a tiny TV; and a white-tiled bathroom.

In Mumbai Leonard once again kept to a fairly strict schedule. Every morning a little after eight he would leave the hotel, dressed in Western clothes—loose black shirt tucked into light-colored linen trousers, Leonard's formal take on casual—and walk to the
satsang,
which was a mile away. He always took the same route, which led him through the congestion of people and traffic, beggars and eternal car horns, and onto Warden (now Bhulabhai Desai) Road, the main road that ran beside the beach and the Arabian Sea. The buildings he passed—the Breach Candy Club and Gardens, the U.S. consulate—grew increasingly privileged the closer he came to North Gamadia Road, the small, quiet lane where Ramesh lived on the top floor of a five-story art deco apartment building, Sindula House. This part of town was considerably more upmarket than Leonard's, its residents a mix of old money, successful writers, well-known actors and retired bank presidents like Balsekar.

The apartment was well appointed though not luxurious. It had four rooms, the largest of which, the living room, was used for the
satsang
. It could accommodate around forty people sitting on the floor. Leaving his shoes outside the door, Leonard sought out an inconspicuous spot in a back corner and sat there, cross-legged, eyes cast down. At nine
A.M
. Ramesh, a small, trim man, his hair white, like his clothes, entered from the next-door room and took his chair at the front. Following a short formal reading, the question-and-answer session began, which Ramesh would start by inquiring of someone—usually a newcomer—what had brought them to India and what their background was.

“Most of the attendees were foreigners—a lot of them from Israel—with maybe three or four Indians in a group of thirty-five or forty,” says Ratnesh Mathur, an Indian banker who became friendly with Leonard during Leonard's first trip to Mumbai. Mathur had not heard of Ramesh until Leonard spoke about him and invited him to a
satsang
(the first of around forty
satsang
s Mathur would attend over the next four years) since Ramesh was relatively unknown as a spiritual leader among his countrymen. “Ramesh alienated himself from the cults,” Mathur says, “he didn't target the Indian mass media. He was not a big publicity seeker and he was clearly living on a pension so there was no financial motive. His articulation was in English, his mannerisms were Western, his message was rather erudite and intellectual, and his style was not part of the Ramana Maharshi legacy.” Ramana was a popular guru and some of his followers had cast aspersions on Ramesh as a spiritual leader. “Really, he lived like a retired banker—he liked his occasional golf and whiskey—except that one or two hours a day he would leave it open to have people come to his home. People came mostly by word of mouth. It was a very respectable crowd, not the traditional hippie crowd,” although some seekers had come to Ramesh after visiting the Osho commune in Pune, two hours from Mumbai. (Its leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, had established an alternative living community in Oregon in the early eighties, before controversy and scandal, and the guru's deportation, led to its closure.)

Ramesh was a straight-talker. He dealt with his
satsang
audience much as you might imagine he would his employees at the bank, imparting information and instructions in a direct, no-nonsense manner. Mathur says, “Ramesh easily lost patience with folks who spoke too much and tried to involve him in some esoteric argument. He would remind them that he charged no entrance fee”—if someone wished to make a donation they could do so later—“and then show them to the exit door.” When he spotted someone in the room who had been coming repeatedly for too long he would single them out and say, according to Mathur, “ ‘Don't you have anything better to do? My main message to you is that God is everywhere, so you can't just focus on religion, you don't keep meditating your way to God.' Basically he said, ‘Get a life.' ” Ramesh never said this to Leonard, though, whom he had also seen privately and with whom he became friendly. “He was always very polite and nice about Leonard.”

After approximately two hours Ramesh would look at his watch, which indicated that the questions and answers had come to an end. When Ramesh left the room, a
bhajan
singer, Mrs. Murthy, came in to lead the gathering in the singing of the traditional Hindu songs. A paper was passed around the room with the words written in both the original Sanskrit and the Roman alphabet. “But Leonard didn't need that,” Mathur remembers. “He knew every word.” When the singing stopped, everyone filed out past the table where Mrs. Murthy's husband sold copies of Ramesh's books and of the audiotapes made of every
satsang
. The tapes dating from Leonard's earliest months of attendance—when he had asked Ramesh questions, rather than sit quietly, as he would do later, concentrating on what he was saying—proved a popular sales item once word started to spread about Leonard's studying with Ramesh. Mathur started noticing that some attendees seemed to be seeking Leonard more than Ramesh. No one bothered Leonard during the
satsang,
but people would come up and talk to him by the table or on his way out of the building.

“He was normally very polite,” says Mathur. “He would talk to them. Occasionally if he found someone interesting, he would take them to a small tea stall,” an unassuming little spot some fifty yards away, the kind of place Leonard consistently found and frequented in whichever city he happened to be living. The workers in the tea shop all recognized him, greeting him with a smile and a respectful exchange of
namaste
. They did not know him as a celebrity but as a Westerner with short silver hair, a friendly man who came in regularly and always treated them well. “He told me most people didn't recognize him on the street when he walked and he loved that about being here.” Leonard, Mathur observed, “deliberately avoided spending time with the Mumbai rich and famous.” People always came to him with invitations, Mathur included, to which Leonard would politely make his excuses, “but he told me once about going to some taxi driver's slum home. I remember being surprised to see how he developed these bonds with folks who knew nothing of him as a famous singer-songwriter. Perhaps the folks who spent the most time with him in India are the cleaners of Kemps hotel and the workers at the tea stall.”

After tea Leonard left for the other regular item on his schedule, his midday swim. There were YMCAs with pools in Mumbai but nothing convenient, so Leonard joined the Breach Candy Club, an exclusive, private club on the seafront on Warden Road, which had a lap pool as well as an enormous outdoor pool, built in the shape of India.
*
The rest of the day was usually spent alone in his hotel room, meditating, sketching, writing and reading books written or recommended by Ramesh. Mathur had offered Leonard some books on related topics but he declined them politely; he did not want distractions. Early evening he would take himself off to a restaurant for a vegetarian meal, then return to his room, light some incense, put on a CD of Indian music and meditate and read some more. He had little interest in sightseeing, but he paid a visit to the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, which served a small Jewish community. Not far from the synagogue was a large, bustling record store, Rhythm House. He asked if they had any Leonard Cohen albums. They did. He could find them, he was told, under “Easy Listening.”

Leonard flew home back to L.A. in the spring. There he put the finishing touches to a song he was writing for an event in tribute to the late Canadian poet and intellectual Frank “F. R.” Scott, whom Leonard had known from his McGill University days. The song “Villanelle for our Time” was a Scott poem of the same name that Leonard had set to music. Working on the song, Leonard realized it needed a woman's voice. He called Anjani Thomas, one of his former backing singers, and asked if she would come over. They completed the recording in a single afternoon.

Then Leonard drove to Mount Baldy. It had been almost four months since he had seen Roshi and he wanted to pay his respects. As they had done so many times, they sat with a cognac in the old man's cabin, the world outside swollen up in darkness, moths pressed against the fly screen on the window like dried flowers in a poetry book. They talked little but when they did it was not about Leonard studying another discipline with a different master. Nor did Leonard discuss with Roshi what he had learned from Ramesh. “Roshi doesn't discuss,” not even his own teachings, Leonard said. “He's not interested in perspective or talking. You either get it or you don't. He doesn't give you any astounding truths that we come to expect from spiritual teachers, because he's a mechanic—he's not talking about the philosophy of locomotion, he's talking about repairing the motor. He's mostly talking to a broken motor. Roshi is direct transmission.”
37

Leonard did not stay in the monastery long. In June he came back down from the mountain. His close friend Nancy Bacal, who met with him in L.A., observed that “he was like a kid when he came back from Baldy; suddenly he could come and go as he pleased, do whatever he wanted. It took him a moment or two to figure that out, but when he did, it was a delight to see him so happy and so joyous. Baldy was wonderful for him. Now it was time to take the next step.”

For the first time in years, Leonard went back to Hydra. He packed the notebooks he had filled during his long stay in the monastery, and, in his old study, in the white house on the hill, he went to work on poems and songs in various states of completion. He also returned to Montreal and visited his old friend Irving Layton, now eighty-seven years old, suffering from Alzheimer's and living in a nursing home. Leonard had been rereading a good deal of Layton's poetry lately and was thinking about setting some of it to music, as he had done with F. R. Scott's.

Leonard also returned to Mumbai, once again taking his old room at the Hotel Kemps Corner. In 1999 the room was his home for almost five months. He spent his last birthday of the millennium there. When Mathur met with Leonard that day, he could not fail to notice how happy Leonard seemed. Leonard celebrated after
satsang
with a birthday lunch. “There was one girl who had come along with us, a girl who had come to Ramesh's sessions and was clearly enamored of Leonard. He had picked up a flower in the hotel vase and put it in the lapel of his jacket, and he smoked a cigarette or two that day, although I think he had given them up at the time. He said that he was very happy to be here, and this happiness was evident all the way through. It was on his face and in everything he was saying, which was all very, very positive.”

Something had happened to Leonard in India. Something, as he told Sharon Robinson, “just lifted” the veil of depression through which he had always seen the world. Over the space of several visits Leonard would make to Mumbai over the next few years, returning to his room at the Hotel Kemps Corner and making his daily walk to
satsang
—altogether, he spent more than a year studying with Ramesh—“by imperceptible degrees this background of anguish that had been with me my whole life began to dissolve. I said to myself, ‘This must be what it's like to be relatively sane.' You get up in the morning and it's not like: Oh God, another day. How am I going to get through it? What am I going to do? Is there a drug? Is there a woman? Is there a religion? Is there a something to get me out of this? The background now is very peaceful.”
38
His depression had gone.

Leonard was unable to articulate precisely what it was that had cured his depression. He thought he had read somewhere “that the brain cells associated with anxiety can die as you get older,”
39
although the general intelligence is that depression worsens with age. Perhaps this was
satori—
enlightenment—though if it was, it had come with “no great flash, no fireworks.”
40
Why it had come with Ramesh and Core Hinduism rather than Roshi and Zen Buddhism he could not say. Despite the differences in their teaching methods and approaches—Roshi's strict, rigorous regimen and his repetitive
teisho,
delivered on the in-breath and the out-breath and addressed not to the intellect but to the meditative condition; Ramesh's direct, straight-talking question-answer approach and his instruction that his followers should live however they choose—there was a great deal of consistency in their doctrines: overcoming the ego, nonattachment, universal consciousness,
tendrel,
the interrelatedness of all things. Most likely it was a combination of the two and had simply happened on Ramesh's watch. Ramesh implied as much. “You got this very quickly,” he told Leonard, adding that his thirty years with Roshi did not hurt.
41
Still, as Leonard's mother had always used to say to him, “Don't look a gift horse in the mouth,” so Leonard didn't. What was left in the deep, dark hole left after the anguish had gone was “a deep sense of gratitude, to what or who I don't know. I focused it on my teachers and friends.”
42