Falstaff has written the best homage to Ustad Bismillah Khan I have read so far in the "blogsphere". I have been listening to Ustad Saab's music (his own & his jugalbandis) over at MusicIndiaOnline all day today. As Falstaff put it:

"Each time Ustaad Bismillah Khan put that shehnai to his lips what came out was music as revelation, as a life force, music that transcended itself to become something even more elemental, music (to use the exact urdu word) as ibaadat. To hear Bismillah Khan play was to lose sight of the boundaries between man and music, so that it was no longer clear whether the shehnai was the instrument of the player or the player was the instrument of the shehnai. Music erupted from this man as a metamorphic force, a sort of beautiful magma. It wasn't just the silence that was torn apart, it was the music itself."

Go listen, and be moved.

After a rainy night of disquiet, as the cloudy morning comes, he sits and stares out of the window, a coffee cup in hand, at the Bird Central Station, a feeder that hangs from the dogwood. A whirl of wings, waiting, fighting, eating, departing from the two holes - very much like two ticket counters - that dispense seeds from a glassy tube. At some point he has learnt all their names, and as each of them descends from a tree to the feeder, he calls out their names: cardinal, house finch, titmouse, chickadee, two kinds of woodpeckers (red bellied & downy), and finally a hovering spot of lovely golden yellow, a gold finch. All of them are twenty or so in number, and they have come singly, as couples, or as in the case of the cardinals, as a family to assert the desire of living in a world which, even when it appears inert, is never dead. And that will be his morning parable, a truck painted in a bright bird colors as it floats down in the morning traffic of all his thoughts.

As he runs in the rain which grows heavier by the minutes, rainwater obscuring his vision, he remembers another rainy evening from years ago, when he was running too in the shadow of a range of hills with many silver tongues of waterfalls next to a suburban train barreling towards Bombay (a city which was only visible as a glare or a portent on the horizon in the distance) - an evening in which he was attempting to outrun the overwhelming sensation of being forsaken, abandoned, rid of all hope under a stormy thundering darkness. He remembers that evening as he mixes and drinks a cocktail of tears and rain now. And it occurs to him that even though he has switched countries and cities, the rock-salty taste of emptiness, and of despair doesn't change.