Nine Lives(95)

In due course, many years later, after a terrible family tragedy, Kanai remembered the guru’s words and set off to find him. He joined him on the road, learning the songs and becoming in time one of the Bauls’ most celebrated singers.

Then, after the death of his guru, Kanai took up residence in the cremation ground of Tarapith, where Manisha, Tapan Sadhu and some of their friends helped arrange a marriage for him, to a young widow who looked after the shoes of visitors.

Kanai, Manisha told me, had arrived at the Kenduli Mela a few days ahead of me, and had already joined up with an itinerant group of other Bauls. They were all staying in a small house off the main bazaar: to get there you had to leave the bathers washing on the banks of the Ajoy and pick your way through the usual mêlée of Indian religious festivals: street children selling balloons and marigold garlands; a contortionist and a holy man begging for alms; a group of argumentative naked Naga sadhus; a hissing snake goddess and her attendants; lines of bullock carts loaded up with clay images of the goddess Durga; beggars and mendicants; a man selling pink candyfloss to a blare of Bollywood strings emerging from a huge pink loudspeaker attached to the flossing machine. All along the main drag of the encampment, rival akharas, or monasteries, of the different Baul gurus had been erected, interspersed with tented temples full of brightly lit idols, constellations of clay lamps and camphor flames winking amid the wafts of sandalwood incense filling the warm, dusty Bengali darkness.

By the time I found the house—a simple unfurnished Bengali hut—it was dark and Kanai’s Bauls were in full song. They had scattered straw on the ground and were sitting in a circle around the fire, cross-legged on the floor, breaking their singing only to pass a chillum of ganja from one to the other.

There were six of them: Kanai himself, a thin, delicate and self-possessed man in his fifties with a straggling grey beard and a pair of small cymbals in his hand. Beside him sat a fabulously handsome old Baul, Kanai’s great friend and travelling companion Debdas, singing with a dugi drum in one hand and an ektara in the other. His hair hung loose, as did his great fan of grey beard, while a string of copper bells was attached to the big toe of his right foot, which he jingled as he sang.

Facing them was another of the most celebrated Baul singers in Bengal, Paban Das Baul, who was flanked by his khepi, or Baul partner, Mimlu Sen, and his two younger sisters. Paban was a lithe, handsome and hyperactive figure in his late forties, with full lips, a shock of wiry pepper-and-salt hair, a short goatee and bushy sideburns. He was playing a small, two-stringed dotara and dominating the group as much by the sheer manic energy of his performance as by his singing: “Never plunge into the river of lust,” he sang with his rich, velvety voice, “for you will not reach the shore.”

It is a river without banks,

where typhoons rage,

and the current is strong.


Only those who are masters,

of the five rasas, the juices of love,

Know the play of the tides.


Their boats do not sink.

Paddled by oars of Love,

They row strongly upstream.



The three men—Kanai, Debdas and Paban—were old friends, and as the music gathered momentum they passed verses and songs back and forth, so that when one would ask a philosophical question, the other would answer it: a symposium in song. Paban sang a verse of a traditional Bengali folksong about his wish to visit Krishna’s home:

The peacock cries—

Oh who will show me the way to Vrindavan?

He raises his tail and cries:

Krishna! Krishna!



Kanai then answered with a verse reminding Paban that the only proper place of pilgrimage for a Baul was the human heart:

Oh my deaf ears and blind eyes!

How will I ever rid myself of this urge

to find you, except in my own soul?

If you want to go to Vrindavan,

Look first into your heart …



“Who knows if the gods exist at all?” sang Debdas, supporting Kanai.

Can you find them in the heavens?

Or the Himalayas?

On the earth, or in the air?

Nowhere else can God be found,

But in the heart of the seeker of Truth.



The voices of all three men were perfectly complementary, Paban’s resonant and smoky, alternately urgent and sensuous; Debdas’s a fine tenor; Kanai’s softer, more vulnerable, tender and high-pitched—at times almost a falsetto—with a fine, reed-like clarity. As Paban sang, he twanged a khomok hand drum or thundered away at the dubki, a sort of small, rustic tambourine. Kanai, in contrast, invariably sang with his sightless blue eyes fixed ecstatically upwards, gazing at the heavens. Paban would occasionally tickle his chin, and tease him: “Don’t give me that wicked smile, Kanai …”