Pilots, Planes, and Pachyderms
During the eight years that Joel and I shared the same roof, we always invited our friend Sheldon Chumir to join us on holidays. A former Rhodes scholar, he was a Liberal member of Parliament from Alberta who used his legal expertise to champion human-rights issues pro bono. Sheldon’s educated perspective on the world complemented his good-natured eccentricities and offbeat sense of humour. Before my arrival on the scene, the two bachelors had shared adventures from the Arctic to the Amazon. Having Sheldon along was ideal, as it provided Joel with an extra companion while I practised, and what woman would not appreciate the company of two attentive men? Sheldon was always in search of his perfect soulmate, but apart from the North African trip, when he brought along a girlfriend, he seemed content to play second fiddle. Our ménage à trois shared holidays in England, Costa Rica, Burma, Thailand, Mexico, Morocco, Martha’s Vineyard, and Mustique.
In December 1983, we rented Mick Jagger’s beach house on the Caribbean island of Mustique. Only Jerry Hall’s beach clothes in the closet, Mick’s friendly dog, and a gigantic trampoline hinted that this was the hideaway of one of rock’s megastars. A canopy of netting draped over the bed offered some protection from the mosquitoes, but we had to resort to lighting repellent coils when the wing-borne wildlife became fierce at dusk. Serenading the fiery sunset cost me an irritable few days of scratching. I should have realized how closely the name Mustique resembles the French word for mosquito, moustique!
Nevertheless, the tiny island was an idyllic playground. We snorkelled in the balmy reefs, sailed around the Tobago Cays in a private yacht, dined in Mustique’s Cotton House, danced to tropical steel bands at Basil’s Bar on Christmas Day, and became acquainted with some of the community’s colourful characters. Sir Rodney and Lady Ouida Touche, friends from Canada who lived along the beach from Jagger, introduced us to Colin Tennant (Lord Glenconnor), the flamboyant British aristocrat who had bought the island in the late fifties and threw scandalously wild parties at his colonial mansion. We dined at the resplendent home of Arne Hasselqvist, who had designed many of Mustique’s exotic mansions, and sipped cocktails with Diego Arria, former governor of Caracas; and George Lang, owner of Café des Artistes. Princess Margaret, who maintained an estate on a rocky promontory, had chosen this secluded jewel of the Caribbean for her retreat. With its bumpy dirt roads and white sand beaches, it provided an ideal getaway for the “beautiful people,” yet after two weeks, I started to tire of the claustrophobic cocktail scene and titillating society gossip.
For several hours each day, while Joel pored over CDIC files or ruminated with Sheldon on political ethics, I laboured away editing music and guitar fingerings. Even though our holidays were mostly recreational, the passion for our careers was always evident. When we flew back to Toronto, thanks to an indiscreet secretary, one headline read “Liona Boyd Sleeps in Mick Jagger’s Bed.” Well, yes, and in Gordon Lightfoot’s bed, too, several years before, but not in quite the way people might have concluded.
The beds in Morocco were less comfortable than on Mustique, but there were no bugs to disrupt our sleep — at least not the flying kind. During Christmas of 1986, we had somehow steered ourselves into Tafraout, Ouarzazate, Taroudant, and Tagounite — the remote villages and towns of central Morocco. Agadir, Casablanca, and Marrakesh seemed too commercialized for our tastes, so we had headed off along the desiccated desert highways of the vast Drâa Valley, where the barren fields seemed to be growing nothing but stones, and goatherds by the roadside watched their scraggy animals climb spiny-branched trees in search of new shoots. Never had I seen cloven-hoofed creatures manoeuvring themselves precariously high into the branches of trees whose parched leaves seemed to be their only food source. The sight of trees filled with agile, hungry goats in Chagall-like phantasms was both amusing and distressing, as it brought to mind how harsh life was for both humans and animals in this inhospitable terrain.
We were invited to partake of pigeon pie and tajine (a vegetable and couscous dish), in the hillside home of a handsome “blue man” and his family — with sign language and smiles the only method of communication. Kneeling on thick carpets, we scooped up steaming food with our fingers and swilled it down with fresh goat’s milk. Their cuisine tasted even better than a similar meal I had shared in Washington, D.C., in 1981 with the two Saudi Arabian princes Saud Al Faisal and Bandar bin Sultan at the home of Abdeslam Jaidi, the Moroccan ambassador to the U.S. and good friend of Pierre Trudeau. Our gifts of my black MuchMusic T-shirt and Sheldon’s Pink Floyd one delighted our hosts: symbols of a world so foreign to theirs, in which videos and rock music played no role. After shopping in the souks amid silversmiths’ wares and leathergoods, we playfully decked ourselves out in djellabas, the long Moroccan robes worn by both men and women, and rode camels in the sand dunes. The red desert dust aggravated Joel’s allergies, causing us sleepless nights, but if we were determined to experience “the real Morocco,” some discomforts were to be expected. If one always adheres to well-trodden tourist routes, frequenting recommended hotels and eating in safe Michelin Guide restaurants, one can count on an enjoyable, but rather predictable, holiday. By contrast, I have always had a predilection for those spontaneous adventures whose memories and surprises will remain long after momentary hardships have been erased by time.
Our trip to Costa Rica had moments of discomfort, moments of sublime tranquillity, and one moment of pure terror. The three intrepid Canadians, Joel, Sheldon, and I, and a Japanese beach guitar set off in December 1988 for Tortuguero National Park on the shores of Costa Rica. Basing ourselves at the main lodge, we explored the fascinating jungles and wildlife, introducing ourselves to exotic toucans, iguanas, and howler monkeys. Navigating through tropical waterways after nightfall, we spotted caimans and tree-hanging sloths amid the sultry and eerie chorus of the rainforest. Only the day before, Joel and I had been battling freezing rain and snow in Toronto, so the lush vegetation and sweet, aromatic air of the rainforest filled us with contentment.
Joel’s acquaintance, Maurice Strong, had invited us to stay in his beach house in Puerto Viejo, where his colourful friends Julio Garcia, a former witch doctor, and Carlos Echeverría, the minister of culture, were fellow houseguests. As my fingers plucked out the notes to “Mallorca,” I could tell the minister was intrigued. “Liona, how would you like to play with our symphony orchestra?” he inquired. I was thrilled, as I needed an orchestra to premiere Concerto of the Andes, which Richard Fortin and I had been working on for the past two years. You can never tell when a spontaneous practice session might result in career opportunities.
While practising in the first-class lounge of the Dallas–Fort Worth airport three years earlier, I had caught the attention of a Latino man and his blond companion who, like me, were passing time before a flight departure. The Latino seemed mesmerized by my playing, smiling appreciatively, then disappeared momentarily. “Ma’am, do you know who you’ve just been playing for?” the blond fellow asked as he came over to shake my hand. “That was the great Edén Pastora, or Comandante Zero, Nicaragua’s national hero, who led the fight against the corrupt Somoza regime. We sure like the way you play guitar!” At this point el comandante returned and, seeing his friend in conversation with me, came striding over. Realizing I understood Spanish, he spoke in his own language. “Our plane is leaving soon, but I want to invite you to come to play in Nicaragua once we have won the war and my country is at peace. We love the guitar and I have never heard it played so expressively. My home is in the high Sierras where we are training our guerillas, but when the time is right we will meet again.” Then he penned the following note in Spanish: “Liona, I saw your beauty and heard your music which left me fascinated. I will remember you all my life. With the heart of a guerilla and the soul of a patriot, and with much affection — Edén Pastora.” Latinos do not waste a minute when it comes to impressing a woman!
Several months later, Edén Pastora’s name was flashed across our television screen during the nightly news. He had held an international press conference at La Penca, a jungle hideout accessible only by river. His purpose was to inform the world’s press of Nicaragua’s plight: the corruption of the government and the CIA’s involvement in his country’s civil war. A terrorist’s bomb planted there had exploded, killing an American journalist and injuring many; Pastora escaped with only superficial burns and a broken leg. They never determined for certain who was responsible, but many clues pointed toward the CIA. Pastora blamed them for ten attempts on his life, and later recounted to us how they had tried to bribe him with a briefcase containing half a million dollars in cash. Idealists such as Pastora cannot be bought. It was rumoured that the blond companion whom I had met in Dallas was a CIA agent whose assignment had been to kill the courageous comandante. Pastora had been in a helicopter that had exploded, and the blond was a prime suspect. Thank God no bomb had been planted in the airport lounge.
The Costa Ricans had welcomed Nicaragua’s charismatic visionary to their peace-loving country. Miraculously, Edén Pastora materialized at the Cariari Hotel, where Joel and I were staying after Sheldon returned to Canada. We greeted each other like long-lost friends, and he invited us to spend a couple of days with his wife and children in the remote fishing village of San Juanillo. Getting there involved a one-hour flight in a small one-engine passenger plane and my memory was still raw. Only three days earlier, I had experienced the worst flight of my life. Joel and I, travelling alone with a pilot from Puerto Limón to San José, had been caught in a thunderstorm over the mountain range of central Costa Rica. The hands of our panic-stricken pilot had flown off the controls as he yelled unintelligible words into his headset, punctuated by an expression I understood only too well: “Ay, Dios socorranos! (Oh God help us!)” Our aircraft was careering through the clouds and plunging out of control as wind currents tossed us around like a paper plane; screaming with fright and clutching onto Joel, I was convinced that we were about to meet our Maker. My stomach contracted into knots and my heart pounded with adrenalin while Joel remained stoically calm, gripping my shoulders and yelling that we would be all right. When we finally emerged from the black storm clouds and landed on terra firma, I kissed the earth in gratitude. We never should have taken off in such dangerous skies, and I swore it was the last time I would risk my life in one of those flimsy one-engine planes. Now Comandante Zero was offering us a unique experience that required another mountainous flight. Being an incorrigible adventurer, I rationalized away my recent terror and accepted. Pastora flew with us from Pavas airport assuring me that after ten failed assassination attempts, he surely led a charmed life, so I felt more relaxed as he directed the pilot to a tiny landing strip by the Gulf of Nicoya. Joel nudged me, pointing to a gun inside Pastora’s jacket. His son Pánfilo greeted us at the airport and drove us for an hour over rugged terrain in his sturdy jeep. As we forded muddy streams and strained up steep inclines, I pictured myself in an Indiana Jones movie. My guitar certainly led me to some unusual places.
Pastora’s charming wife (number four), Yolanda, greeted us, introducing five of the twenty-one children he had fathered. The house was humble, yet perfectly situated on the shores of an exquisite cove. A group of Pastora’s disciples, who had followed him to this northwest corner of Costa Rica, gathered at the house. What better way to tame the heart of a Latin guerilla than with music? My beach guitar resonated off the walls of Pastora’s home, playing songs by Falú and Ponce as Yolanda and her daughter prepared a feast of ceviche, pineapple chicken, rice, and beans. Our accommodations were minimal — a couple of the children’s beds in a room half open to the sky. At 2:00 a.m., peeking onto the beach, I was met by the phenomenal sight of thousands of spider-like hermit crabs all marching across the sand in the same direction. As far as my eyes could see stretched an army of shells and moving claws.
At the comandante’s suggestion, we decided to rise at 4:00 a.m. to go tuna fishing. Everything was dark and cold to the touch, our jeans and socks damp from the salty air. Revived by hot coffee, we clambered into one of the motor boats being prepared by several fishermen who were compatriots of Pastora. I was frozen once we started across the barely lit ocean; the bumping of my body against the boat as we hit the waves every few seconds made me feel as though my spine was being jolted out of place, but since nobody else complained, I suppressed those unpleasant sensations, trying to enjoy the aquarelle sunrise and exhilarating speed of the boat.
After an hour, such a spectacular sight greeted us that it made all my corporeal complaints disappear. Hundreds of dolphins danced around us, leaping high into the air, arching and frolicking in the boat’s wake, splashing me with salty water. Dolphins indicate the presence of tuna, but they were in no danger from this type of fishing, I was relieved to learn, though they are from the large commercial drift nets that ensnare them. The indigo seas were calmer, and I was elated by the resplendent vision we had observed. How wonderful to be on the sparkling tropical waters of the Pacific with a coral sunrise, a legendary comandante, my stalwart fiancé, and hundreds of nature’s friendliest creatures performing playful acrobatics before my eyes. That magical moment has remained strong and clear in my mind’s eye.
My lifestyle has necessitated a great amount of flying, with thousands of hours logged in airports and planes. These supraterrestrial imprisonments provided welcome stretches of time in which to listen to music, attend to correspondence, and keep up with my diary. Although hardly a white-knuckle flyer, I must confess to a sensation of relief each time I re-establish contact with terra firma. The bigger the plane and the bluer the skies, the better I feel about installing myself inside whatever flying contraption the schedule provides, be it helicopter, 747, Concorde, or Cessna.
When I was flying out of Thailand on Canadian Airlines, three DC-10 pilots invited me to sit up front with them for the trip from Bangkok to Hong Kong. In retrospect, I would have been much wiser to refuse such kind offers, as by the time we touched down in Asia’s most congested capital, I had been reduced to a mound of jelly.
Taxiing to our takeoff position, the pilots requested permission to select an alternative route, as a dangerous typhoon was lurking in the normal flight corridor. The control tower had plotted our course right through it moments before takeoff. “We must be careful not to stray into Kampuchean air space, or we risk being shot down,” the friendly captain chuckled to me over his shoulder. “Here’s your oxygen mask, but if anything should happen, just follow us,” they joked. The hundreds of knobs and dials were reminiscent of mixing consoles in recording studios, and I hoped these men knew, better than some studio engineers, what every switch represented. The pilots ran through their routine checklist, which gave me some reassurance because all answers appeared to be affirmative. If the lightest feather falls to earth, how do these steel monsters conquer gravity with only thin air for support? I pondered. Obviously my understanding of aerodynamic thrust was abysmal.
From a cockpit perspective, the miraculous act of takeoff is suffused with a sensation of unreality: a slow-motion release from the ties of earth. Once airborne, the pilots had dozens of dials to fine-tune and buttons to press. A continuous dialogue between the pilots and the control tower kept everyone alert. Quiet as a mouse, I listened as mysterious numbers were read aloud and dials corrected to keep our flying machine on course.
The mosaic of muddy canals and green, watery fields surrounding the city of Bangkok shrank smaller and smaller as we climbed heavenward. The pilots seemed to breathe easier now, and we questioned each other about our contrasting careers. “Seventeen thousand hours, my dear,” the senior pilot informed me, which I presumed was the time he had spent behind the controls of various planes. I wondered how that compared with my thousands of hours behind the guitar strings.
Soon we were flying over the brown rivers of Laos, avoiding the typhoon that was stirring up some nasty business in the South China Sea. Layers of black clouds were visible to our left, and I was thankful the pilots had insisted on their detour. Finally, we made contact with the Hong Kong tower, and an air-traffic controller with a Chinese accent instructed us to take “the checkerboard approach.” “Oh, Liona, wait until you see this particular route to the runway. It’s the trickiest one and requires a sharp turn banking low over a heavily built-up area.” My memories of Hong Kong were that the entire city was heavily built up and visions of an Asian version of the opening scenes from West Side Story flashed through my mind.
“I sure hope they’re not going to make us circle around,” the second-in-command muttered. His words were no sooner spoken than new instructions came over the headset asking us to assume a circling pattern over the city, which was obscured by a woolly layer of grey clouds. We had resigned ourselves to fifteen minutes of cruising above the cumulus, when the captain suddenly yelled, “Jesus Christ!” A large jet zoomed straight at us from out of nowhere. “Where the hell did he come from?” The co-pilot and reserve pilot looked at each other anxiously, then scanned the skies to make sure no other projectile was heading our way. The plane had come so close that we were able to read the Northwest Airlines sign on its side. “Don’t worry, honey, there was lots of space between us,” the captain reassured me, but he continued to peer around through the windshield, alarming his guest. I checked my side, preparing to yell, “Duck!” if I saw another plane hurtling in our direction. Was this any way to steer a jumbo? “What happens when you can’t see at night?” I queried, but a nod in the direction of the instrument panel was their answer. Didn’t the radar screen warn of nearby flying objects? Apparently not; it is used only for plane-to-ground contact.
“They’d better not keep us circling ’cause we’ll soon be out of fuel and will be forced to land in Canton” was the next tense announcement, as we took off on our third loop around Hong Kong. “Geez, does the air-traffic control guy down there own shares in the fuel company?” This was the pilot’s effort at humour. “We’re already an hour late due to that damn typhoon.” Intermittently, they read the fuel-level numbers to each other; they seemed to be going down at an amazing rate.
In the nick of time, we were cleared for landing and banked steeply into dense clouds as the windows streaked with rivulets of water. Alarming red lights and loud buzzers caused me to grip my seat a little tighter. In the movies, red lights and noisy buzzers signify “failure,” “loss of power,” “abort landing,” or “fire,” hardly anodyne to one’s nervous system. Suddenly, in our headsets we heard the air-traffic controller yelling, “The rain, the rain!” which seemed a strange comment for someone surely accustomed to landing planes in any weather. “What does he mean?” I anxiously asked the assistant pilot, as I sensed a sudden lift in altitude, then noticed a rocky hillside not far from my side of the plane. “He’s warning us we’re too damn close to that mountain,” the co-pilot grumbled. The controller had apparently been yelling, “Terrain, terrain!” I thought of the other lucky passengers calmly sipping their cocktails back in the cabin.
“Are you up to this landing now, Bill?” was the next comment that jangled my nerves. The pilot flipped through his map madly searching for what I feared was the correct approach, but later realized was the terminal layout. Surely, in all those seventeen thousand hours, he had performed this “checkerboard approach” a few times, I prayed. “Here we go,” he told me and made an announcement over the PA. “Many passengers become nervous when they see the plane coming in so close to the buildings,” he confided. “Yup,” I gulped, noticing that by now my knuckles were as white as the tops of Mount Kilimanjaro. As with the takeoff, the landing seemed to happen as if in slow motion, but I conceded that the pilots scored an A-plus for a smooth touchdown.
It surprised me to hear them admit that their adrenalin had been pumping away, that they expected to feel “wired” for the next few hours. Performers often suffer adrenalin rushes, but I had no idea that experienced pilots succumbed to nervous tensions akin to my own. After all, nerves have been known to wreak havoc on my surest pieces! “Yeah, sometimes we have real trouble getting to sleep after a tricky night landing,” they admitted. So much for my theory that pilots have nerves of steel and underactive adrenals. I looked thankfully at the wet tarmac beneath us.
For the flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver, a different crew again offered me their jump seat, but I politely declined and knocked myself out with sleeping pills. If the next leg involved a midair rendezvous with an unannounced airliner, fuel shortages, typhoons, enemy airspace, checkerboard landings, or warning calls of “terrain, terrain,” I would rather sleep away in ignorant bliss.
Flying through the clear night sky above the Arabian Desert, I gazed down at the lights of Bahrain on the Persian Gulf, twinkling like so many stars in an inverted sky. In February 1987, my mother and I were at last on our way to India. After a long flight, while drowsily imagining what countries and oceans were passing beneath us, we finally landed in Bombay at three in the morning. Still sleepy from being propelled halfway round the world, we were greeted at the airport with bouquets of roses and cameras demanding publicity shots for the morning papers.
The silent night streets looked empty as we sped along in the stifling heat toward the Queen’s Necklace, a semicircle of lights that blinked on the coastline of the Arabian Sea. Once our eyes adjusted to the dark, we realized that the earth-coloured bundles along the sidewalks were bodies of people sleeping in family heaps like clustered sandbags. Guiltily we glided through the night to our opulent Oberoi Hotel, with its luxurious beds and air-conditioned rooms. The next morning, an opalescent sky emerged while we stared from the high window of our room to the brown-sailed fishing boats below. The opposite coast of the bay came into view when curtains of pastel mist rolled away, revealing huge black birds whose wings, like spiky, broken umbrellas, flapped through the air. Our first morning in India rang out like an epiphany — a homecoming to a land unseen.
Later, leaving the cooled air of the hotel, we ventured into a steamy cauldron of sights and smells that titillated our senses and seduced us to explore. I could understand the powerful allure that this continent must have had on the empire-building, colonial British of the last century. Wide-eyed children with beautiful smiles — denizens of the dusty sidewalks — played in the humid heat, while women draped in rainbow-coloured silk saris glided past like exotic birds of paradise. Street hawkers, holy men, snake charmers, beggars, and businessmen all blended into a fascinating tapestry of humanity that proved a challenge to drivers and pedestrians alike; so much colour, so much variety. I was grateful that Air Canada, the sponsor of the tour, had allowed me two free days to play tourist and recover from any jet lag. After ferry-hopping to see the temples on Elephanta Island, I reflected on the contrasts and similarities of their enormous elephant god, which was carved into the walls of a dark, mysterious cave that once enshrined supernatural power and dread, to the towering nuclear power station dominating the bay — a monument to twentieth-century omnipotence.
We paid obeisance to Gandhi’s spinning wheel, absorbing the silence of his simple room, then walked to the Bombay harbour, where so many thousands of colonials had first set foot on Indian soil. The usual round of receptions ensued, and expatriate Canadians expressed pleasure in greeting visitors from back home. An Indian friend of my mother’s, whom she had not seen since her student days in London, told us, with a glint in his eyes, how much his friend Indira Gandhi had enjoyed Margaret Trudeau’s tell-all book Beyond Reason. How far the written word travels, and into such unlikely hands! My concert in the Tata Theatre was well received in spite of the audience’s annoying habit of whispering to each other during the performance; apparently, it is acceptable Indian etiquette to exchange remarks and wander in and out of concerts. A garland of headily fragrant gardenias was placed around my neck, almost intoxicating me during the encores.
The following day, thinking that some of the raggedy street urchins could earn a few rupees by selling my lovely bouquets of roses, which I would otherwise be leaving in the hotel room, my mother and I handed them to a couple of little girls; as we walked away, they started to hungrily eat the petals. Equally perturbing was the action of a leper to whom we gave some hard-boiled eggs left over from our room-service breakfast. He grinned with appreciation and, balancing the eggs on his two stumps, started to munch away — shells and all! There was no such thing as waste among India’s poor.
In New Delhi, many Canadian diplomats, including former prime minister Joe Clark, were in attendance at my two concerts in the Kamani Auditorium, part of a Canada Week celebration. The Hindustan Times wrote, “Boyd’s playing with such precision, grace and supremely elegant phrasing ranks her amongst the finest exponents of classical guitar today.” One even-ing, which stretched into the early morning hours, I found myself jamming with several of India’s leading virtuoso tabla and sitar players. My attempts to fake a raga amused the guests. I was fascinated by the plectrum that sitar players wear on their index finger and the huge callouses that build up as a result. This instrument was even harder on the hands than classical guitar. The tabla player explained that he had been studying since he was three years old, practising ten hours every day. Enjoying the incredible Indian rhythms and harmonies, far more complex than those of our Western musical language, I marvelled at how his entire life had been devoted to music.
Since the long, hypnotic concerts in India traditionally last for several hours, one flustered reviewer came backstage demanding to know why I had played for only two. “Here, we expect at least a four-hour performance, madam,” he asserted rather piquantly while several others nodded, leaving me feeling guilty for having cheated everyone out of another two hours.
Visits to the ethereal Taj Mahal, the bustling Crawford Market, and the sloshing waters of the Dhobi Ghat (where cartloads of clothes were washed, then trundled off to dry along the railway lines) filled our free days before we had to fly off to Calcutta, near the Bay of Bengal. Hiring an old wooden boat, we drifted down the steamy Hooghly and watched timeless Hindu washing rituals being performed along the muddy shores amid rafts of orange flowers floating on the murky waters. Whiffs of burning incense reminded us that we were witnessing a spirituality expressed through symbolic ceremony. My mother and I were guests at the White House, the home of Hugh Faulkner, a former Canadian secretary of state, and his wife, Jane. They kindly put their home and driver at our disposal, and invited us to dine with their amusing friend Princess Roma of Nepal. My concert, organized as a benefit for the Calcutta School of Music, took place in the Birla Auditorium beneath a Hindu temple. Several Canadian students fought their way through the backstage curtains to talk with me afterwards, and one young man suggested I bring my guitar over to Mother Teresa’s hospice, where he was a volunteer worker.
The poignancy of that visit to Calcutta’s most renowned eleemosynary institution will remain with me forever. There, in the sweltering heat, with only a few tropical ceiling fans for relief, rows of terminally ill people lay on narrow cots: some, on hearing my guitar, raised their heads to see where the strange music was coming from. I played in both the men’s and the women’s wards, perching on the edge of vacant beds whose previous occupants had, no doubt, recently departed this world. Being surrounded by a strong smell of disinfectant, intrusive noises from the busy street outside, and the debilitating heat was hardly my concept of “dying with dignity.” As I looked into the soulful brown eyes of those skeletal remains of mankind, I was overcome by a mixture of compassion and anger. India could not continue to increase her population without thousands of people such as these paying a tragic price. Having to scratch out an existence in the gutters of Calcutta was no life at all for nature’s most godlike creation. Here were people whose limbs had been eaten by leprosy, people with open sores, malarial fevers, and wasted bodies. Much as I had to admire Mother Teresa for her self-sacrifice and dedication to the world’s poor, I felt that travelling around the world preaching vehemently against abortion and calling on women to have more babies was wrong. In that humble hospital, the pitiful and miserable results of overpopulation were clinging to their lives by threads that were rapidly unravelling like broken guitar strings. Smiles illuminated some faces, but others were obviously too feeble, or in too much pain, to open their eyes. Their hours were numbered. I hoped all their religious beliefs came to their aid, and prayed that karma would deal them a better life next time around.
After I was driven to the sanctuary of the Mother House, where Mother Teresa and her staff of nuns resided, I gave a twenty-minute recital in the courtyard under the dark velvet canopy of night sky. Classical guitar and Western music are not too familiar to the general population of India — I was somewhat of a novelty — but the silent blue-and-white robed sisters sat on the ground in a semicircle enthralled by this unusual diversion from their daily routines of mercy. I wondered if they could feel Bach’s passion for life as I played “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in the midst of so much death.
Later that evening, my foolhardy mother and I hired a bicycle rickshaw, risking our precious lives while careering through chaotic traffic to experience Calcutta by night. The red-light district, always one of the most colourful and lively parts of any city, was a seething sea of commerce where everything and everyone seemed to be for sale. Pungent smells of spicy curries from street stalls mingled with cheap tobacco and saccharine perfumes. Jewelled baubles, cobra-skin wallets, and multicoloured yards of sari silk were all traded alongside girls with lustrous brown eyes, who displayed themselves in doorways and windows. In spite of all the poverty, we were struck by the astonishing vibrancy and energy of the populace. Was I already being seduced by these exotic superficialities? Although life was cheap and apparently disposable, it possessed such an intense vitality that was fuelled by the wealth of constant human contact. I felt more thankful than ever, however, for my privileged life in North America.
Joel flew in from Toronto on Valentine’s Day, journeying on with us to Kathmandu on Royal Nepal Airlines through explosive thunderstorms. We gripped our seats through the buffeting roller coaster ride, and while lightning ricocheted from cloud to cloud and skated across our wings, we descended into the mountain kingdom. The town seemed much more orderly, quieter, and cooler than India. Colourfully clad men in Sherpa hats wandered around the centre square selling their trinkets; alongside them was the odd American remnant from the psychedelic era, still drifting around with headband, long hair, sandals, and beads. We had entered the legendary land of the gurus, where one came to seek spiritual enlightenment.
Another excursion took us up the mountain roads that wove and whorled around hairpin bends with spectacular Himalayan vistas of the rooftops of the world. A towering Mount Everest shimmered powder-white against a hyacinth sky. In the town of Bhaktapur, I was transported back to medieval times, watching craftsmen and potters squatting on the streets practising their primitive skills. Attracted by eerie-sounding wind instruments, we trailed a small street procession until, to our horror, we realized that a bleating lamb was about to be sacrificed. As we were the only uninvited strangers in this assembly of weird-looking men, whose music had become more and more frenzied and off key, it felt time to beat a hasty retreat. Pashupatinath, another town where we lingered, is one of the holiest shrines of the Hindu world. Weathered-looking pilgrims and barefoot holy men with otherworldly eyes were descending on the town from remote corners of India. While we sat watching this motley crowd, the wild unfriendly monkeys in the park eyed us suspiciously, spitefully grabbing at our legs as if sensing we were outsiders.
My concert to benefit the United Church Mission to Nepal was somehow fitted in during these days of new excitements. Joel was unfortunately summoned to Paris on urgent business and missed a memorable safari to Tiger Tops Lodge. After we arrived by bush plane, Mother and I headed into the falling dusk atop a mammoth-sized elephant in search of wild animals, with the fervent hope that we not encounter a sleeping tiger. Our majestic beast, driven by a tiny guide perched on the elephant’s neck, swayed through tall dry grasses and waded across rocky river beds, stopping whenever a rhino, hippo, or warthog came into view. Several people had apparently been mauled and killed by startled tigers or charging rhinos, but what good is any wildlife safari without an element of risk?
Exhausted from the elephant ride, we ascended into our tree-top accommodations, where cozy hot water bottles had been tucked into our camp beds. At two in the morning, alarm bells interrupted my dreams of swaying pachyderms. We had been told there was a possibility of observing a tiger kill in the wild. In haste, we pulled on our clothes, grabbed flashlights, and piled into an open Land Rover that steered several miles along bumpy jungle roads through the Stygian night. Two guides led us single file along a narrow path, signalling us to remove our shoes. As we silently padded barefoot along the barely visible sandy trail, I felt like a character from the books of Rudyard Kipling. Strange bird calls and distant animal sounds resonated through the moonless forest, filling us with eerie sensations of unreality. Where was this tiger, and what could our guides do to protect us if he were suddenly disturbed and angered? This was the real thing, not a National Geographic documentary! Crouching in silence in the “blind,” a flimsy tent-like structure, we observed a large female tiger tearing apart the carcass of a hapless young gazelle. Since we were downwind of her, we apparently attracted no attention, but as I watched those massive fangs dismembering her poor victim, I hoped the wind did not decide to change direction. Back at our tree-top encampment, with my jungle-dusty feet on the hot water bottle, I pondered the strange surprises that my tours as a classical guitarist were continually providing.