Leonard Cohen and his Indian healing

As usually happens, only music reaches the parts that need reaching. 

Not any music of course, only those tunes and songs and chords that are burnished in the deepest crucible of human existence. What Leonard Cohen had once described to David Remnick as “anything deep…if the spirit is on you, it will touch on to the other human receptors.”

It was Cohen’s music that had always done that for me. Those dark and evocative lyrics that spoke of burning violins and rags and feathers and life as a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn...

So this Friday morning, on hearing that Leonard Cohen had died, I knew that I had to go to the exact same spot where I had first met him, sit on the grassy knoll adjacent to the Breach Candy Hospital — as we had done almost two decades ago and in a week when the world had turned on its head and nothing would ever be the same again — and listen to Hallelujah on repeat until the parts that needed reaching were reached.

It is a strange story by any standards, how I met and befriended Leonard Cohen at the Breach Candy Club in Mumbai two decades ago, during the time he’d spent living at a hotel in Kemps Corner as a devotee of guru Ramesh Balsekar. Even as I lived through it, I knew I would  be recounting it often with wonder and pride.

But first a caveat: I had cut my teeth on Cohen. That nicotine and Bordeaux-soaked voice which sang of birds on a wire and drunks in a midnight choir, had been the one that had been my most cherished. 
Stranger Music

Before I had learned to sing or strum a guitar, or pen a poem, as was the want for teenagers growing up in certain households in Mumbai in the Seventies, I had known that it was Cohen’s music that had spoken to me like none other.

No surprises then that one evening in the mid Nineties, as I was putting the newspaper I edited to bed, I received a phone call that made me act very strangely. 

“Hurry,” it said, “I’ve just seen Leonard Cohen in the swimming pool at the Breach Candy Club. He’s there still.” The caller had informed me. 

A perfect stranger, she was someone who’d heard me sing Suzanne in the days I had performed with an amateur band at a jazz club on Marine Drive and recalling my ardent admiration for the singer-songwriter, had thought of alerting me to his presence.

Usually diligent about supervising the final nuts and bolts before the front page went off for printing, this time I didn’t hesitate for a second. Calling it a day, I found myself pressing the accelerator to get to Warden road where the said Club was located. Fortunately I was a member. 

After one embarrassing false start, I spotted him: frailer and more grizzly than in his famous black and white portraits, older even, but Leonard Cohen all right, brooding, wry, watchful, sitting on the lawns of my neighbourhood club as if he belonged there.

“Mr Cohen, I hate to intrude and I never do this, but you’re the reason why I sing write, read…” I blurted out “I just had to meet you.” He had looked up at me crinkling his eyes at the sun. “Come sit,”  he said, patting the grass beside him. “This was meant to happen.”

And that’s how I had met my childhood idol. 

The teacher

“I’m here to meet my guru,” he’d said. “Lives a few blocks from here. I could take you to meet him tomorrow,” he’d said. The next morning, when I’d gone to the address he’d given me, he was there along with a rag-tag group of 20 or so devotees, many foreigners, a few Indians, standing patiently awaiting the moment when the doors would open and they would rush up to get their preferred spots for their morning darshan. That first morning, Cohen, who had an old world courtesy, had displayed endearing pride in introducing his cherished guru to me… encouraging me to ask a question, requesting people to accommodate me in the front row so I could best hear him and receive his wisdom.

Unlike other spiritual sessions, which I had attended in the past, this one instantly appealed to me. Balsekar, who’d retired as a top banker and an avid golfer, was an urbane, worldly Master, who lectured on some of life’s most complex subjects in words that I could understand.

Of course, that was not the last time I went there. Balsekar’s quotidian approach to spirituality, where some of the most complex philosophical conundrums were explained against the background sound of an ordinary middle class household waking up and the noise of the traffic on a busy Mumbai thoroughfare outside was tantalizing.

As were the occasions that I met Cohen, often during those morning sessions, sometimes at the Club and once memorably, in his room at the Kemp’s Corner hotel.

It occurs to me now that we spoke as two survivors of shipwrecks. He spoke of his tryst with depression, his money woes (his manager had already robbed him of his savings by then); his months at a Zen Monastery in California and his family. I told him of my own life — its peaks and troughs.

The undertow

Oddly, we hardly spoke about his music. Perhaps because it was always there, hanging like a familiar shroud around us.

The first time I had gone to his tiny, spartan, almost monk-like room at the nondescript hotel at Kemps Corner, my eyes had eagerly scoured the space for a guitar. But there was none.

 Cohen was here in Mumbai to do his spiritual work, trying to get stronger, to heal and rest. Music was not on his mind at that time. Later he was to say that his months in Mumbai had cured him of his depression. 
It was easy to see why. 

Each morning he would walk from his hotel to his guru’s home in a simple kurta pajama, carrying a cloth bag with his daily needs to listen to his spiritual master; retire for a breakfast of hot tea and idli at a café next door while debating the day’s discourse with fellow seekers and then walk to the Breach Candy Club where he would swim, soak in the sun and sit on the grass, mostly doing nothing or sometimes writing in his notebook.

Hallelujah 

This anonymous, primarily ascetic and deeply healing experience must have been exactly the preparation he needed when a few years later he was to embark on his career’s astonishing resurrection. To make up for all his financial losses, he was to heroically throw himself back into touring, composing and recording well into his senior years. And thus he had departed India and had gone on to create some of his finest music in the years that followed. Deeper, darker, more complex songs that could wrench the soul, lyrics that would gut and chords that would evoke which I would listen to in wonder and gratitude.

Which is why when in a week in which the whole world had seemed to turn on its head when I heard that Leonard Cohen had died, the only thing to do was to go to the very same spot where I had first met him to listen to his music.

And there, sitting on the exact same spot of grass listening to that familiar nicotine and Bordeaux-soaked voice on my iPod sing “And even though it all went wrong/I’ll stand before the Lord of Song/With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah” Cohen’s music reached the parts that needed reaching and finally, the tears came.