India, 2011
The train spat us out onto the deserted platform, and with a weary groan, heaved its shuddering bulk back into the night. We were alone. Well, as alone as anyone could be in an Indian train station, for experience had taught me that there were always people in the shadows. But this was more of a dusty backwater stop, and I was dismayed to see no rickshaw drivers at this late hour, even though they must have known that the train from Mumbai had been grossly delayed and there was business to be had. My father looked at me incredulously, hunched under the weight of his backpack. Give me the backpacker experience, he’d said. He already looked defeated. We hadn’t slept properly for days.
It had started with an unfortunate incident on the plane. I had been making my way to the toilet at the rear, past sleeping passengers, when I noticed a couple of stewardesses hunched over a body. Closer inspection revealed it was my father. He was out cold. I panicked. Slowly though, he came to. We got him back to his seat, the stewardess giving a knowing look as she spied our stockpile of tiny empty wine bottles (mainly mine but I had shoved them over to his side). It was my fault, I had insisted we celebrate the beginning of our Indian adventure with the complimentary red wine. He had become so dehydrated (and a little tipsy) that he had fainted, knocking his head as he fell.
We arrived in Mumbai, my father still groggy from the knock to his head.
“First time in India, gentlemen?” the taxi driver called over the rumble of his engine, as he zigzagged haphazardly from lane to lane through the cacophonous traffic.
“No, I’ve been a few times,” I assured him. I looked over at my father, white-knuckle-clenching the edge of his tatty seat with a look of dread in his eyes.
“But it’s my father’s first time.”
It would be a few days before we finally made it to the abandoned train stop in Goa late that night. One thing after another had delayed us. We were exhausted. We walked to a road and after a while found a rickshaw to take us the rest of the way to Arambol. The village was quiet when we arrived and as we ambled down its stoney street I could sense my father getting more and more irate.
“Don’t worry Dad. This is India. Things just happen,” I said as a way of reassuring him, but it just sounded flakey.
“I’m not sleeping in one of those bloody things,” he said, pointing to the bamboo-framed stalls that lined the street with their tarpaulin fronts drawn closed.
“I wouldn’t expect you to, Dad. They’re shops.”
And then we heard a beautiful song drifting through the warm night air. I noticed my father’s disposition start to change. We pursued the sound down a sandy path, sensing the sea close by, but before we reached the water the music pulled us through a portal in a hedge and we found ourselves in a hidden enclave. Bamboo huts circled a clearing where people were sat around a fire, performing or listening to the music. An Israeli man with kind eyes greeted us. He found a hut for us to stay in then fetched food and beer. We sat down and I took out my guitar. My father was in his element, chopping wood for the fire. He had finally started to relax.
I wrote this song the following day, swaying in my hammock with my guitar, my father happily reading a copy of the Bombay Post, sipping a cup of tea. It felt like a wonderful, fortuitous thing to have stumbled across this place, and maybe travelling with my father wasn’t going to be so bad after all. I had watched the way he had interacted with the people the night before. I was proud of him. And I had realised that night he wasn’t only my father, he was also a dear friend.
52 Silent Songs 