Conspiring With Love

We met a week before the Gujarat Genocide event in LA. I bought him a ginger beer while I gripped the slender end of a pint of stout. I said I heard he was a healer. He said he heard about the event I was co-organizing, said it seemed to be a dialogue on the history of Gujarat, his native state, that was missing from his childhood education. That, as a Hindu man, it was crucial he come and fill in the blanks of his heritage. That was April 2012.

Now, in March 2013, we’re settling into our new flat across from Parimal Garden in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Every Sunday we sweep and mop the entire place together. Every morning and evening we sit side by side for Vipassana meditation. And when gravity relents and orbits bloat, we facilitate play and healing and conversation with youth.

In one such circle we sit now. In the Muslim ghetto of Jamalpur. Famous for its fruit stands. Different sized palms, an array of gradient browns, cupped and held. Knees a braid of continuity. We sit together in meditation. The children close with a prayer. We marinate in blessings of the most potent. “May we trust in ourselves…” Later we’d be told that all throughout the rest of the afternoon, as other children joined for tuitions, a seven or nine year-old instructor would emerge. “Ok, so you have to sit very still. And then close your eyes like this. Right. Good. Then listen to your breath and just pay attention.” From 2 guides, splinters of seeking and sharing yield a dozen. And sitting with stillness, sitting with self within community becomes joyful. A practice that’s passed like eager turns at kabadi. Spirit heights climb over 3 feet bodies. And the profound wisdom of youth drenches us all in brilliant smiles. 

Strange How a Melody...

Strange how a melody can call you back despite its words. Makes you wonder where this prayer came from? Whether it really originated in you? In your circle, in your crossed legs numb from refrains? Arwa ben’s voice sugary even as it carried the accounts of martyrs from Karbala into the basement gathering in Ohio. Not knowing, I called them songs and was sternly corrected. We didn’t sing, we mourned into infinity. I didn’t join. Then or ever. Even a catchy melody couldn’t draw out my voice, already stuffed into an anxious chest and refusing to be aroused by empathy. Also, the stories fitted to this melody, they didn’t belong to me. Arrows puncture thirsty infant throat. A family outnumbered, one by one slaughtered. Description vivid, yes, but my imagination remained unemboldened. No colors filled in the shadows, no place hugged the characters into reality, not even red oozed from their wounds. I felt. Nothing. Even more nothingness when the sobs broke the melody and were passed around like turns with a razor blade, each person daring to dig deeper into the pulse and pity of the past until it erupted from wrists. The more that sprang, the more secret glee. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with this wave of hysteria I wondered how they related to the faceless. Maybe tragedies of this life, of fathers buried by someone else’s hands, of 7-year old brothers catching death from one skinned knee, were cut and pasted onto those blank faces. Not one line, one phrase stays with me today, but the melody that housed them, when it resurfaces, brings a comfort and a connection I can’t explain.

Each time its not the story, but the weight and sway of the notes. The repetition of nostalgia that rouses me. And it comes unexpected. A different basement. Hollowed out shopping center re-walled with play. Races dipped in colors and tracked on the walls. Their prayer evokes no solitary suffering. Doesn’t bang on chests demanding blood rise and fall with battles of ancestors. It crescendos to present joys, to the hopes of children enchanted by a single ajwain plant thriving from a humble clay base. Framed by rare squares of sun. In this circle, hands are little yet kinetic conductors of greatness. Chorus overcomes. Familiarity sinks my knees deeper. A reincarnated melody sputters my heart to restart. And prayer comes to life.