"What if..."

Morning brings with it a healing. The moods of the previous night are quickly dissolved in the bustle of early domestic activity and the brilliant sunshine that greets the day. We wash, dress and walk down the road to the little Hindu cafe where we can order breakfast of curry and nan or sweet honey-drenched, fruit covered pancakes that would be the envy of any Canadian lumberjack. However, something of the night's previous mood plagues us still, lingering in the background like the effects of a hangover.

What caused us to explode after such a lovely evening? Was it not only a little girl crying or perhaps the demons of our discontent go far deeper than we would care to imagine? Shannon has forgiven us but we have not forgiven ourselves. We exchange guilty, silent looks as we eat, knowing that we have some far deeper healing to accomplish than we are perhaps willing to admit. What have we brought with us to this land, from the West or from our distant childhood that is not being looked at in an effective, conscious way?

Karen lights a beedie, a local cigarette and I scribble furiously in my journal, both of us victims of habitual avoidance patterns. At a table next to ours, young travelers pass a chillum, a hash pipe and the sweet, acrid, intoxicating smell drifts over us at our table increasing our sense of numbness. We are not the only ones escaping something here. No one seems to care whether or not the local authorities will intervene. After all, is this not paradise we have arrived at with its license to bathe nude on the beaches to the amusement of the locals, to smoke marijuana in public and to protect ourselves by waving our passports and travelers cheques like flags whenever we encounter resistance to our accustomed modes of behavior?

After breakfast we make our way down to the beach for our daily swim. Karen has been trying to convince me to swim nude and I have been resisting her, mostly because I am embarrassed to be seen naked by the locals. My bleached, northern whiteness of body does not make it any easier. Karen herself has only managed to bare her top at carefully monitored intervals although the children have been romping fully naked since day one.

This morning we find a secluded spot down the beach next to some overturned boats, a good spot, I reason, to prove to Karen I am not afraid to bare my buttocks to the sun. Karen aids me in my hesitant maneuvers to make sure I am invisible to eyes miles off along the beach, by yanking my shorts off. The children are splashing in the surf a few steps away and checking once more to make sure there is no one coming, I carefully stretch my body out on a towel and breathe a relaxing sigh. Closing my eyes I drift off into a luxurious meditation.

Suddenly, impossibly, there is a strange female voice sounding directly above my head. I leap up to grab my shorts which are nowhere in sight, eyed dispassionately by a young fruit seller, her basket of wares perched jauntily on her head. Karen is trying to suppress her laughter. The strange young woman, while not amused, is clearly undisturbed by the scene before her and reaching up into her basket proffers a handful of bananas toward me, quoting me their price and singing their praises. I cover myself with the sandy towel and hop over the hot sand gingerly, to fetch my shorts which are lying on one of the sun bleached hulls nearby. Karen purchases some fruit and the woman gives some free bananas to the children before sauntering off.

With mock anger and insulted dignity I swear to Karen that this is the last time she'll cajole me out of my shorts in public.  I recline again and close my eyes. Another voice, male this time, shocks me out of my reverie. These villagers seem to be appearing out of the sand. This man is smilingly brandishing a long handled miniature spoon, some sticks and a towel. He is offering to clean my ears! I fend him off but only to glimpse yet another figure approaching us, draped in yards of colored cloths.

This man displays his wares meticulously to Karen who, of course, is very interested in buying something. Anything! She purchases a length of red material run through with gold-filigree thread which she wraps around her body like a sari. She looks striking in it and I compliment her choice. She reads this as "spend more" and when another man approaches carrying a heavy black suitcase she waves him over gregariously.

This man is selling hand-crafted jewelry, ornaments, thangkas and bells from Nepal. This time the prices go up accordingly and I guess the word of our presence must be spreading up the beach. We purchase two thangkas, some earrings, bracelets and a Tibetan bell. The price is over a hundred dollars, cheap in Canada, very expensive here. Ah well, don't we only live once!

But now comes another man selling embroidered cloths from Kashmir and when Karen begins bargaining, I beg her to take his card and dragging my reluctant family behind me, flee from the beach for all I am worth. I reason that if I can get out of range in time we'll be spared another purchase. No such luck. Karen has his card and that means a later visit to his place of business and a further, near hundred dollar expenditure. This is like riding a roller coaster!

Back at the pension we are greeted by Laxmi and Cheenapah, two servants of Madame Silva-Pareda with whom we have struck up a friendship. Impossibly I am able to carry on a kind of conversation with Cheenapah, Laxmi's husband, without the use of a common language. We do this by piecing together a patchwork of French, English, Spanish and Hindi words and rounding it all out with sign language.

He smokes while we talk. His mouth is stained bright red from betel nut juice and the effect is startlingly amplified by his constant habit of coughing up blood into a handkerchief. This is a result of a heavy smoker's addiction and Karen is horrified to see  this. All along she has been struggling to supplant her cigarette intake by chewing cardamom seeds instead and after witnessing our friend's distress her resolve is strengthened.

Laxmi, who looks like a dark skinned gypsy woman, prepares a coconut for us, hacking away expertly with a machete to reveal the snow-white meat and without spilling the precious rich milk that we all love to taste. She divides a watermelon with the same machete, her strokes reminiscent of a samurai swordsman. I try to learn this art but come close to cleaving my shins on several occasions while the machete leaps clumsily out of my control.

We have all agreed to cook a noon meal together and to pool our resources to do so. Cheenapah finds a tank of propane to fuel the stove and Karen and I purchase rice and flour in the market. We set up the stove in the center of the kitchen floor and all of us hunker down on our haunches to cook. Laxmi and her husband have cooked this way all their lives but Karen and I soon have to repair to chairs while scrubbing, washing, peeling and rinsing the vegetables. In a matter of minutes the meal is ready, spicy rice pilaf, Indian-style, with enough left over to snack on later in the day. The cooking is a little too spicy for Karen's taste and after a week or so of sharing cooking duties, we agree to stop. Our palates' needs are just too different and some really do like it hot.

Occasionally Cheenapah is drunk at mid-day and we notice him surreptitiously swigging from a bottle of feni. During these bouts he and his wife argue violently, usually out of sight but not out of hearing range and we feel he beats her. Poverty brings with it the same curses the world over.

By now Karen is so disgusted to see Cheenapah continuously coughing up blood yet relighting his beedies, that she purchases a fresh supply of cardamom seeds and flushes her cigarettes down the toilet. This time, she quits "for good".

After two weeks here in paradise, I begin to question our motives for staying. Of course it is beautiful here but Delhi is drawing me back to it in my thoughts. Perhaps it is only because it is more westernized than Goa but I tell myself that we have things to do. Our visas are only good for three months and we have either to renew them or leave the country.

We had previously decided to go to Nepal or Tibet and thus technically leave India, enabling us to return afterward on a new three month visa. All this does not have to be decided immediately but we have heard stories that sometimes it may be difficult to get a visa to Nepal and that Tibet, now under Chinese rule, would need some real groundwork if we were to find our way there.

More deeply than all of this though, I am thinking of returning to see Ali Moosa. There is something I have not completed with him and it has to do with his promise to teach me how to talk to God. My journal is full of entries on this subject alone. After all, perhaps I will become a Sufi, who knows? I can barely entertain this thought without the exotic aspect of it overpowering my reason.

If I became a Sufi, would that not solve a lot of my personal and life difficulties? Perhaps it is my karma to go all through these years of struggle with music, so that like Inayat Khan before me, I can come to the realization of my true work in the world as a Sufi teacher? These thoughts however, have the same dreamlike quality as my previous thoughts of super stardom in the music world. "What if, what if...", and the videotape would begin to run.

Breathing deeply, I shake myself out of the reverie, realizing that I am going home to face the same difficulties I have always faced in terms of music. My experience tells me that when I want something as bad as I desire spiritual clarity (or success in music) I push it away from myself. When I don't really care, things come to me.

Karen has also given me an ultimatum in this regard. She has said that I must make a firm decision by the time we return to Canada. She doesn't understand why I have given away my music so freely over the years, why I don't become more serious about the business of it. She feels I am not making an honest effort to support my family.

If I cannot succeed financially in music, she reasons, then I must make an attempt to secure employment of some kind in another field. Either that, or change my tactics and become a firm, hard-working musical businessman. At the very least, I can get an agent, she says, to do the business work on my behalf.

The problem is that I have struggled so long as an unknown musician, with no credibility in the sense of having had a hit record or had other artists record my songs that the agents I have approached that I feel could possibly make a difference have no interest in working with me. I have apparently done nothing that will appeal to their sense of adventure in terms of taking on new artists. Then there is the factor of my age. A guy of 40 who has not made it in the business yet, is probably not going to make it.

How can I explain my attitude in all this without sounding like I have given up? Karen, certainly, is tired of hearing my arguments in my own defense and I am tired of offering them. I suppose it has to do with my lifelong attitude toward competition and struggle.

As a child I avoided battle and competitive sports. Since I did not develop a particularly keen academic edge, I shied away from struggling to do anything but make passing grades in school. I had a true love for music and a highly developed romantic nature and sense of adventure. The fact that I could not succeed in any given arena did not seem a death knell to me because in my heart I felt that there was a territory of the spirit that was mine to claim. This had nothing to do with religion or even God but with that sense of the mystery of life.

Out there in life, in that wide open space that no one owned or had control over, who was to deny me the ability to express my own spirit, my own way of seeing, being and developing as a human being? In my deepest self I felt that no matter what happened to me in the world, I could not fail to live and to be. This was more important to me than trying to make money or to succeed in any kind of competition between others.

This is still the way I feel although my bright philosophy has not spared me the struggles and perils of having to survive in a society that doesn't see things in this light at all. Moreover, we live in a civilization that tries to make everything over in the image of what it holds as perfect and necessary, that is the ability to amass wealth and to hold onto it at whatever the cost. Not that I have anything against making money. Only that I have never found the means within myself to do so effectively, in a way that satisfied my spirit and made me feel like a whole human being.