Morning Raaga

Thank you, my faithful companion, for coming with me on this voyage. The Taoists have a proverb that The journey is the reward, and it certainly seems to have been the attitude of Dispatch in sending us here: barely forty-eight hours since we docked at the small fishing village of Munambam, and already I am getting a ping to warn me that the elastic is being stretched. When I say docked, what I should say is that the ship anchored offshore in the Arabian Sea and we were permitted to go ashore at Munambam.

The first thing I appreciated about Munambam was the variation in diet made possible by our brief stop: bananas! fresh, ripe bananas which must surely be proof that God loves us! Even in a small fishing village like this, there are brilliant colors everywhere, and here and there, small shrines piled with offerings from the faithful. So far, I have seen several shrines to the elephant-headed Ganesha as well as the universal presence of the Buddha.
With the captain's permission to spend the night in the village at the tiny inn to wait for the village market today, I was too excited to sleep much and the constant chattering of the monkeys from the jungle around the village, and the songs of the night birds populated my thoughts with vivid images of ancient temples and mossy stones beside quiet streams. When the sky was just beginning to lighten, I caught the strains of a sitar somewhere nearby and it was then that I left my bed to go in search of the music.
The old man I found, accompanied by his son and nephew, was introduced to me as Baladhi after perhaps three hours of almost hypnotic improvisation repeating the same underlying theme until the music ceased and the spell broke. It is to Baladhi, and Haresh that I am indebted for the following morning raagas, which I hope I have transcribed (more or less) correctly allowing for the differences between the western scale, and Indian thaat. As explained to me briefly, Indian music not only employs more complex rhythmic devices (taals) than can be easily represented in western notation, but much more subtle divisions of the thaat.

The village market was a surprisingly variegated event; a travelling silversmith set up a small workshop with anvil and forge repairing jewelry and selling beautiful work set with turquoise stones and red coral. The local farmers bring yams, peppers, goats and chickens for sale, and buy fish, and a merchant has a stall selling bolts of cotton.
I hope that at some point it will be possible for me to return to India and explore the culture more thoroughly; it seems nonsensical that despite the technology that makes it possible for me to traverse time and space, the constraints of the project do not permit me to linger even though I can return almost to the same instant from which I departed. Being a mere mortal however, I have a limited number of years available to me, no matter how I use them, so perhaps should take care to spend them carefully!

References

If you're interested in Taoist proverbs, there's a small but concentrated collection of them here.

Gaiye Ganapati; (Real Player) a song in praise of Lord Ganesh
Performed by Chandrakantha Courtney.

                   

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