All Is Given

by Linda Neil

  Caught behind 67.

  LBW 44.

  Stumped Gilchrist off Warne for 32.

  Clean bowled for 10.

  Out for a duck.

  Out for a golden duck.

  The cook continued, hovering, as the lights stuttered and went out again. It thrills my heart that you love our cricketers, because you know, madam, Aussies are the best cricket team in the world. Second to none.

  Outside, someone began playing a raga on a sitar. Not brilliantly, but not as clumsily as some westerners I’d heard, the ones who came to India for six months of lessons with a sitar master as a way of becoming ‘more Indian’. I’d met many of them along the way, in Delhi, in Rishikesh, heading to Varanasi or Kolkata, on their search for new sounds, new scales, new disciplines, and the surrender that seemed to come with it, entwined in the textures of the raga scales and their seemingly endless permutations.

  Back in Brisbane, a composer who’d performed with Indians in India had told me more about those permutations: how Indian music did things in threes, unlike western music, which mostly did things in twos and fours. How it seemed to be based on three principles:

  the principle of doing things in threes

  the principle of making things grow

  the principle of making them shrink.

  He described it further like this:

  They play three things three times that shrink while the rhythms inside them grow.

  I’d been dazzled by all the talk of numbers and things growing inside shrinking things. I was intrigued by the circularity of it, the idea of things that mightn’t have a beginning or an end. I thought of the mandalas from ancient India, the circles resting inside the squares, or vice versa. And the Christian writers, like Dante, who were obsessed with numbers too, who imagined the divine ordering of the world by creating subsets of numerical symbolism – trinities, holy or otherwise. Indian music was driven by textural rather than linear imperatives, unlike the climactic impulse that propelled the cadences of western music. Did this lack of forward movement, this exploring of intricate detail in repeated things, signify a state of existence beyond ‘progress’, I wondered, when all possibilities of action had been exhausted and the only way forward was down and inward rather than up and on towards something – a conclusion, a cadence, at least some harmonic change? Was the zero that Indian mathematicians had first notated as a big round empty circle, with a balanced space inside and a vast never-ending space around it, the natural signifier of everything that their country’s repeated musical rhythms seemed to embody?

  The raga melody stopped abruptly. The musician stumbled a few more times over the scale and then seemed to give up. I felt sympathy for them. I’d stumbled and given up many times too. But things would be different now. That’s what I always told myself anyway. Perhaps that was why I returned to places like India. To reacquaint myself not with the physical surroundings but with the feelings I experienced within them. To know that things would be different – that another tiny piece of my spirit had been liberated, like those tiny quarter-notes in an Indian scale, released from a dull melody and falling away to nothing.

  Things falling away to nothing.

  To the infinity of a zero.

  India seemed to promise that.

  Surprising India, the tourist brochures told me. Magical India, Mystical India.

  When people asked me why I travelled to the subcontinent I never knew what to say. Was it the mountains, they asked, the seas, the deserts, the plains? Did I come for the gurus, the saints, the Brahmins, the pandits, or the gods or the goddesses? No. It wasn’t the Himalayas, the meditations, or the old intelligence that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson had written, ‘in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us’. It wasn’t even for the music, which I always felt was a mystery that would be impossible to understand in one lifetime. So I didn’t know why I came to India. Except that perhaps sometimes I imagined myself like the thing inside the music that shrinks inside the thing that grows. Perhaps while India kept growing in its chaotic, random, relentless way, while the pandits and sages and gurus kept pulling it back to its most ancient traditions, I’d keep shrinking until I was reduced to the mysterious zero entity that India had given to the world and now – in particular, in a dark dining room in Bharatpur – given to me, with all the infinite potential of nothingness contained by that most balanced and beautiful number.

  *

  Bahut acha.

  That was it.

  The Hindi for very good.

  Very very good.

  Bahut acha.

  A cha cha cha.

  Starts with a b and sounds like a dance.

  When I first learned the words from Rahul I’d laughed with delight and repeated them over and over, like they were part of the lyric to a nursery rhyme. Rahul had thought I was being childish, as I think he secretly believed most western visitors to his country were. But he laughed along with me, flashing his incandescent smile in the candlelight of his kitchen, as if he had swallowed a mouthful of pearls. Later, I took my violin out and strummed a little song I wrote for him called ‘Bahut Acha A Cha Cha Cha’. I sang my song for him. I did a little dance for him. It had been a happy moment in Rahul’s kitchen. A light, childish, perfectly empty musical moment.

  Bahut acha, I called as I felt my way towards the exit of The Birder’s Inn, stumbling like a blind woman through the silence that had descended, like something divine, onto my world.

  The dal was bahut acha.

  Later, lying in a warm bath surrounded by orange candles, I felt embarrassed by how I’d devoured the dal and bread, as if I were a living example of the phrase my grandma liked to say when we were eating too greedily: Boy oh boy. You really wolfed that down.

  I wondered what the Hindi word for wolf was and if, in the warm kitchen of The Birder’s Inn, the cook had turned to his assistant near the shadows of the gas flickering on his big iron oven, below icons of the gods, goddesses and Indian cricket heroes that watched over them while they worked, and said in perfect lilting Hindi: Oh my God. Those hungry western women! That one was famished. She really wolfed it down. Boy oh boy! She really wolfed it down.

  The Flower Lady of Zhongshan Park

  I had recently left a place where spring was blooming, where the perfume of blossoming flowers filled the air. Near my house in West End, an inner-city suburb on the banks of the Brisbane River, there were garden walls and fences covered in jasmine flowers, which carry an especially rich aroma that seems to saturate the air on a warm spring evening.

  Even though it was autumn in China, I smelled the same aroma one night as I was walking along the footpath towards the New Space-Time Ruili Hotel, where I was staying, in Zhongshan Park, which was part of the business district of Shanghai. The smell was at once so unexpected and so familiar that I had to stop. I followed the scent and discovered behind a dividing hedge a small Chinese woman standing beside a bicycle adorned with flowers. The larger bouquets were arranged around the seat and frame of the bicycle, while the basket at the front was lined with smaller bunches of jasmine blossoms. At first, the woman thought I would be interested in the larger, more expensive blooms at the back: the long-stemmed lilies, the red and crimson carnations, or the pink and yellow roses. So she laughed with genuine surprise when I leaned forward into the basket at the front of the bicycle, buried my face in the little bunches of jasmine and almost sang out with joy.

  She giggled. I laughed as I emerged, my face tingling and bright. She said something in Chinese; I answered in English. I pointed at the jasmine.

  Duo shao qian? I asked. How much?

  Huh? she said, shrugging quizzically.

  Duo shao qian?

  She laughed again, I suppose at my terrible Chinese pronunciation. She said something. I imagined it was a price. I shook my head and held out my hands to con
vey: I don’t understand.

  She repeated the same words and held up one finger, then five fingers.

  I couldn’t tell whether this meant fifty, five or fifteen yuan. I responded by holding up ten and then five fingers.

  She nodded, laughing. I said fifteen.

  She said: Shi wu! Shi wu!

  I repeated her Chinese with my awful Australian accent.

  Shi wu? Shi wu?

  She laughed so hard she had to bend over and slap her thigh.

  Eventually, after much laughing and shrugging and slapping of thighs, the transaction was complete. I went back to my room and put the jasmine in one of the drinking glasses from the kitchen and placed it on the ledge in front of the window. I would perch on this ledge sometimes at the end of the day and watch the street gradually empty of pedestrians and motorists, until the flashing screen above the Cloud Nine shopping mall was switched off and a stillness that seemed unimaginable in the hectic business of the day settled over this part of the city. That night, as I perched on the ledge near the flowers, their perfume reminded me simultaneously of two places, the street where I lived in Brisbane and the street where I now lived in Shanghai.

  I bought flowers every couple of days after that. I still didn’t know the name of my flower lady, which was what I called her in emails back home. She didn’t know my name either. Perhaps to her I was the flower lady too. And though we communicated mostly through the silent international language of gesture and mime, over a short space of time, in this city full of strangers, she became something constant and familiar.

  One Thursday just before 10 pm, I sat on the steps outside Starbucks near her bicycle and watched her as she worked. It was quieter than usual and, despite it still being the National Day holiday week, business was slow. My flower lady wanted me to buy some flowers. But I had two full vases already in my room and the only jasmine she had was an old bunch with drooping stems and falling petals.

  I offered her some of my takeaway tea; she offered me the dying flowers. She refused my offer, but I accepted hers. I didn’t want to take the flowers for nothing so I gave her a few yuan, which made us both happy.

  We were silent as she leaned against her bicycle and I sat on the steps, holding my tea in one hand and the rotting flowers in the other. Again I thought of home. And suddenly I thought of hers too. I didn’t know where she came from or how far she’d travelled to arrive here, but sometimes I don’t know where I come from either, or even what that word – home – really means.

  I didn’t carry a camera with me when I travelled; I took only my laptop and my instrument, usually a violin. So to remember that moment I began to compose some music that only I could hear on the stringed instrument I kept inside me for occasions such as these. Along with the music, I composed a vision in my mind, as I sometimes did – a virtual video clip, if you like – of my flower lady riding her bicycle up the street towards my house in Brisbane. She was smiling and waving as she cycled past gardens and fences and footpaths dripping with jasmine. Then, to make her more graceful as she cycled up the hill, I visualised her in slow motion. And I suddenly felt so free that I even gave her little wings, as she had given my mind and heart wings here in Shanghai so that they could fly more lightly in this concrete and neon and endlessly active world, through the gift of her rotting flowers.

  As she rode I lifted my violin on the corner of my street and played for her the melody of a traditional Chinese folk song called ‘Jasmine Flower’. The music swelled as she reached the top of the hill. And lining the streets were my neighbours and friends, my family and my colleagues from Brisbane and here in China and from all over the world, holding up ten fingers, then five, as they sang in honour of the jasmine flowers and the lady who sold them, in the echo of a plaintive Chinese melody: shi wu, shi wu, shi wu.

  Outside Starbucks, my flower lady noticed that I was smiling and singing to myself. I didn’t know what she thought I was doing, whether she worried I was one of those crazy people who smile and sing in the street. She laughed again and hit her hand on her thigh.

  I waved goodnight to her and said thank you in Chinese, xie xie, which in my Australian accent sounded like share share. I walked back to the hotel, trailing dead flowers as I went, up the stairs, through the lobby, into the lift, along the corridor and through the doorway of my room, shedding petals on the floor beneath me just as I had to shed the skins of my old dead selves whenever I travelled – so that I could arrive in a new place as vulnerable and open as a child might be in a land of giant and mysterious things.

  In my room, a fresh bunch of jasmine was arranged in a glass sitting on the ledge, a fragile silhouette against the window, through which I could see the roads and neon and train lines extending out into the unknown darkness of Shanghai.

  As I entered, for a split second it was as if time had stretched through space and a tiny portal had opened up in which I could hear a harmonic whisper resonating: xie xie, xie xie, xie xie. It was so persistent I had to stop in my tracks and listen. And as I listened I was overcome with gratitude for that moment and for that sound and for the travel that had brought these words and a music so delicate and quiet I had to stop and breathe deeply if I wanted to hear it whisper share share, share share – thank you, thank you – as the scent of jasmine from near and far slowly filled the room.

  Singing Love Songs in Kathmandu

  The bald man stuttered in broken English as he asked the Nepali manager exactly where the Vipassana retreats were being held that month in Kathmandu. I was in the internet café halfway down Freak Street, the cheap tourist area of the city where I’d come to get my Indian visa renewed. I had been answering emails from friends back home when the connection dropped out. I was sitting in front of the black screen and drumming my fingers on the desk in the haughty way I’d acquired with the unstable subcontinental computers.

  The manager couldn’t be bothered even trying to respond after the man stammered his question for the fourth time. Instead he turned back to his own work, leaving the traveller stuttering to himself.

  I turned to look at him, interested in what kind of person made such a sound. He was brown and slim and his head was shaved. I couldn’t pick his accent; I thought at first he must be French. From the back he looked like a man who didn’t need to claim his space too strongly or loudly. There was something about the unassuming way he stood with his hands in his pockets as he stuttered that made me think of silence.

  I wasn’t in the habit of engaging with strangers. After being in India for five months, in that country of a billion people, I had learned to keep my head down and my self to myself. I was always drawn, though, to the vibrations of silence around a person.

  The internet was still down. I got up from my computer and stood behind the stammering stranger as I spoke to the manager.

  I think he wants to know where the Vipassana meditation retreats are held.

  Vipassana? The Nepali man beamed at me, while scowling simultaneously at the stuttering man. A scowling beam, I noted in my inner vocabulary. Or a beaming scowl.

  The Buddhist retreat, I told him, granting him one of my completely scowl-free beaming smiles.

  I turned to the traveller. Do you know for sure there is one here? I asked him. He nodded eagerly.

  Yes, there’s one in Kathmandu, I told the manager.

  Ah … yes … there is, he said, pretending that he hadn’t known all along as he took a card from underneath the counter and handed it to me.

  Here is the number. And the internet address is dhamma dot org. You can Google it, madam.

  I handed the card to the stranger. There you go. I turned to walk out the door to buy some curd from a vendor who had just set up on the broken road near the internet café.

  Um … um … ahh … he stuttered.

  Just ring the number. They’ll help you.

  I knew the rules of engagement: smile sweetly a
nd keep on moving. Besides, my mouth was watering already at the thought of the curd making its way, soothingly, down my throat.

  Could you …? Would you … um … ah … would you? He smiled again, embarrassed.

  Can’t you … um …? I found myself stuttering like him. I took the card back from him and asked the manager for the phone. I rang the number and waited while it connected. After a few rings I turned and asked the traveller: Who shall I say the booking is for?

  Um … um …

  I couldn’t wait for him to finish. I just said, Gabriel.

  Huh?

  You’re Gabriel, aren’t you, I said, more a statement than a question.

  He laughed again. I’m anything you want me to be.

  So? I teased him. I smiled. It felt like a rainbow had come out across my face after a long bitter storm.

  Yes. He nodded. Gavriel.

  He pronounced it the Hebrew way, with a v rather than a b. I figured then he must be one of the thousands of Israelis who travel through India and Nepal every year.

  His name wasn’t Gabriel; of course it wasn’t. Yet from that moment on he would be Gabriel and all that particular name entailed.

  I had hardly ever thought of the name before, but I often gave my friends names other than the ones they were assigned at birth. I had changed my own name several times too, and went by Lily in those days. It was like being reborn, I would explain, a chance at a new approach to life. Name-changing was playful and fun, but also significant and, I believed, transforming.

  I didn’t think about transforming anything, though, when I casually renamed Gabriel. I didn’t associate the name with angels, as other people immediately did when I mentioned the name later. It didn’t register at all that it had Biblical references, and I would find out only much later that the name was significant in Islam and Judaism as well as Christianity, and even in the New Age book of angel names I would pick up in a crystal shop a few years after I first met my Gabriel in Freak Street. It was just a momentary playful thing, the way I called him Gabriel. I liked the sound of it and the fact that, as well as a man’s name, it was also a woman’s name, although with a slightly different spelling: Gabrielle. But if there is significance in a name, I would discover later that I had chosen his well.