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LEAVING RISHIKESH

Audio: LEAVING RISHIKESH

from Linda Neil, 11.11.09

I was once asked to leave an ashram in Rishikesh for playing a song called Like  Flower. I guess the priests didn't like me playing something that wasn't a sacred mantra or in Sanskrit--even though Indian literature and prayer are full of images of flowers offered in devotion to the Dark One.

I was also once asked to leave a church for laughing when I was a child and my expulsion in Rishikesh brought back those memories of being cast out because I couldn't control my laughter my facial expression, my bodily joy, or my voice.

I was feeling kind of miserable that day as I walked away form the ashram and headed down the road towarsd the Ganges, that most sacred of Indian rivers.

Here’s what I wrote at the time about how this violin piece  came about:

 LEAVING RISHIKESH
 
Feeling like an outcast, I trudge with my violin along a stony road down towards the Ganges where I see a dead body whirling above the river’s eddies A crowd gathers as another body floats by The western travellers are shocked by the casualness of the river’s dead cargo.
 
"We see them all the time floating past," an Indian boy tells us. "We can’t fish them out because police will think we killed them."

No one grieves over them or marks their passing as they float on down the Ganges all the way--apparently--to Varanasi. I imagine the crows and vultures feasting on flesh as it slowly dissolves into the swirling waters. As I take my violin out and play the dead body along its way, the Indian boy quivers and weeps because he has never heard a violin up close before.

"Here. Feel my heart," he tells me as he takes my hand after I finish playing. "Is this my heart breaking? Or is it so full that it hurts."

Later I say goodbye to Rishikesh with the same music which I play under a banyan tree besides the Ganges. The wordless violin sings of love for a place and an experience where things move effortlessly between love and death and where a wondering musician can only grasp at fleeting moments of sound Here are some of these moments of sound: an elegy for the dead bodies in the river and for the leaving of a place that had  entered me and gone to the place inside that had no verbal language

This is a live recording of "Leaving Rishikesh” from ABC RADIO NATIONAL'S Music Show last Saturday 31st October. Thanks to Andrew Ford for having me on as his guest--to discuss my recently released book, Learning How to Breathe.

The accompanying image is from julep2323 at flickr.com with thanks for sharing http://www.flickr.com/photos/julep2323/

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