It had been around the late Nineties when I’d received the call. “Leonard Cohen is in the pool at the XX Club,” the person said, mentioning one that I happen to be a member of “and knowing you’re a big fan of his – hurry there if you want to meet him.”
Want to meet him – are you kidding? Cohen’s songs about love, loss, beauty and death had entranced a generation of people, ever since he’d burst upon the scene in the Sixties. Along with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, he’d formed the triumvirate of troubadours whose records we‘d cherished and traded even in faraway pre-liberalization Mumbai, coveting, cherishing, borrowing and lending them to each other as if they were black gold –or a pair of Levis (which were just as precious -and scarce at that time).
You bet I’d want to meet him.
Of course, not everyone was a Cohen fan. Even back then we were aware of the ‘Godfather of Gloom’s secret handshake appeal’. Devotees of his dark lyrics, deep voice and exquisite music tended to be a certain type of person. What was known as the ‘sensitive poetic types’ or as we were informed in David Remnick excellent 2016 New Yorker profile of him, what Cohen himself had described as ‘inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists..’
***
I was at the Club before you could warble “And she feeds me tea and oranges…” Across the lawn, barefoot and clad in a crumpled kurta pyjama, seated cross-legged on a patch of verdant grass, was the diminutive, slightly hunched figure of Cohen; older more wrinkled than his album portraits, but the sensitive handsome face unmistakably that of my long cherished icon.
“Mr Cohen, I’ve never done this before..” The thirty-something me had stuttered all in a nervous rush: “Forgive me for imposing this way, but you’ve been one of my favourite musicians and I’ve grown up loving and singing your songs and I cannot believe how I’m meeting you in Mumbai on my street at my club in my city…”
Peering up at me, Cohen had smiled
“Come sit” he’d said, patting the grass beside him. “This was meant to happen.”
He told me that he’d been spending a lot of time in Mumbai to be near his spiritual guru, a revered teacher of Advaita, who resided a stone’s throw away from where we sat. Each morning he’d leave his sparse room at the modest hotel nearby where he lived and walk the short distance (past the building where I resided) to attend his guru’s daily morning satsangs. Afterwards, he’d go with fellow devotees to a local tea shop, to discuss the day’s session and later swim or spend the day at the club, or meditate or write back in his hotel room.
Would I like to accompany him the next day to meet his Guru? He asked.
And that’s how Leonard Cohen entered my life for a brief season.
***
We’d meet at the morning satsangs, where his guru’s crisp deliveries on profound aspects of the philosophy of Advaita, peppered with wit and wisdom, had become something of a sermon on the mount for me; but also, at the Club or on the road where I’d run into him often. On a couple of occasions, he’d invited me to his austere monk-like hotel room where our conversations on Zen Buddhism, the Kabbalah, Carl Jung and Advaita, his beloved children Lorca and Adam, his loves and losses and his life-long trysts of depression ( which he referred to as a constant hum of anguish) and which he was battling currently, had lasted late into the evenings.
By the time Cohen had come to Mumbai he was already a folk-rock legend and because of his inner demons had supped deeply at the fountain of many spiritual cups. Just prior to his Mumbai stint, he’d lived at a Zen monastery in Western California, for almost five years where he’d had to rise at 2,30, clean toilets and shovel snow.
He’d departed from there in the mid- Nineties when he’d read something written by the guru in Mumbai and here, he was, settled into an appealing routine: walking the streets anonymously, interacting with local people, sitting in the sun… He spent a couple of years this way in quiet reflection and reflection in the city.
Later, he was to say his months spent in Mumbai had cured him of his depression and I could see why. The city’s warmth and vibrancy had been just what he’d required. Also, those of us who he’d befriended and knew of his need for anonymity had protected it fiercely – including me the editor of a daily newspaper at that time. After all, Who would want to expose him to the harsh glare of publicity?
But Cohen’s new peace of mind had been short-lived; a few years after he’d stopped coming to Mumbai, he learnt that his long-time and trusted manager had robbed him of his money and left him virtually broke. It could have been a devastating blow for a lesser man. Not Cohen; In his Seventies, he’d risen like a phoenix to the challenge, undertaking almost a decade of arduous world tours, as his music underwent a huge revival reaching even newer heights of renown and success.
By the time he died in 2016 at the age of 88, he’d released 5 new albums to great acclaim (one, a few months before he died) -his lyrics growing even darker and more prescient, his famous voice, a growl many octaves deeper.
***
As we tend to do, I often wonder about my encounter with Cohen. We met at a strange phase in our lives and like a Zen koan it had been sublime, magical, intense -and complete in itself.
After he’d left Mumbai, Life had taken us in different directions and I hadn’t kept in touch, and though he gave me cassettes of his music- in those days before camera phones and selfies- I have very little to show for it. Neither did I share with him the many songs or poems I’d been inspired to write because of him.
Often, I am puzzled by my reticence. There had been someone whose work had inspired and sustained me. Why hadn’t I made something more of it? In a world of the show and tell where nothing exists unless it is amplified and enhanced – why had I allowed such a profound and unique experience to remain so unpronounced and unexpressed?
Since then, while inhabiting the same neighbourhoods walking on the same grass where Cohen had once walked, and swimming in the same pool, I wonder how he would have responded to the changes around us. Mumbai and the world around it are darker and more troubling since his departure. What would he have made of it?
But it is at such times, that the words from one of Cohen’s most famous songs, ‘The Anthem’ come back to me:
‘Ring ring the bells that still can ring/forget your perfect offering/there is a crack a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…’
After all, Cohen of all people understood the interplay between darkness and light, and how both are necessary for the existence of each other. You take the good with the bad, the happy with the sad. Things get broken and then remade, words are left unspoken and then said, but everywhere there is light waiting to get in and like Cohen, it is to that that we must constantly turn our face: ‘There is a crack in everything that’s how the light gets in.’
And he gave us ‘the music.’ We owe it to him.