Pour yourself a cuppa; this one’s long!

In September 1982, I bid farewell to my dog, Mollie, my cat, Dharma, and my housemates who kindly agreed to care for my pets, and to my bookkeeping clients and my Northern California life in general. At least for three months, I did.

[Photo: Francine turns 35 in Israel, Dec 1982]

I flew to New York and then Karachi, Pakistan, with a woman who became my closest friend for many years, on our way to meet nine other California Sufis for a pilgrimage which began in New Delhi, India. Krysten and I spent one day with an old Pakistani Sufi friend in Karachi, and it was a cultural shock in many respects, especially after two long flights.

The purpose for most of us was to visit Sufi teachers and holy places and to share our style of singing the traditional chants celebrating God, which is an integral Sufi practice in all Sufi Orders all over the world. At least that’s what we thought we were going to do. It became apparent along the way that our leader, Vasheest, a lifelong Californian and accomplished tenor, also wished to seek alignment and acknowledgement from a different Sufi order since he was feeling at odds with the one we belonged to in the United States. In this quest we did meet with several esteemed Sufi teachers—all men, unlike in the west, although there are female spiritual teachers in India.

We were in India for five weeks, where we enjoyed a lot of good food, but it or even more likely the water didn’t always agree with all of us and there were a lot of days when we barely felt like singing. We stayed in the least expensive places we could find, including an acceptable YMCA in Delhi which smelled of kerosene disinfectant all the time; a rather unclean hotel in Agra, home of the Taj Mahal; a guest house in Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama (he wasn’t there), where we used buckets of warm water we paid for in order to “shower,” and the former southern Indian Kerala ashram of the Hindu saint, Papa Ram Dass, led at that time by Mother Krishnabai, his successor, and her assistant.

In Delhi, we frequented the shrine of Sufi teacher and leader (father of Vilayat Khan, my first Sufi teacher), Inayat Khan, in the neighborhood of Nizamuddin Alia. We would set up in a large plaza there at twilight and ten of us would sit in a semi-circle, men at one end and women at the other. The first time, the people, mostly men, who came to hear us sat on the marble pavement in front of the women and faced the men, thinking we were there just as support people. Then as we sang the lead parts, and the men the supportive lower parts, the surprised crowd shuffled their seating to face all of us. This was somewhat radical, although in India and other middle eastern countries women do sing, both secular and spiritual songs and chants, which are called Kawal, and the singers are called Kawali singers. On one of my lone daytime visits to the shrine of Inayat Khan, to meditate and pray, a boy of perhaps ten rushed up to me and cried out, “Madame Kawal!” having recognized me from the singing we’d done. We smiled at each other, and I said hello to him; feeling as if he thought he had run into a celebrity from America. It was a strange and sweet feeling; I wanted to say to him, “Oh, dear boy, I am nobody but thank you for the compliment.” But he didn’t speak English. I just tried to be gracious.

We had some fun in Delhi also, partly because everything was so inexpensive. We spent a couple of days at a fancy hotel which had a pool and drank alcoholic drinks and had a sumptuous dinner most of us would not have been able to afford at home. I shopped and bought a lot of merchandise (musical instruments, shawls and jewelry) to either ship back or take home in my suitcase to sell to help pay off the loans I’d taken to finance the trip.

In Agra, we sang zikr each evening inside the Taj Mahal, which is constructed entirely of marble and has the best acoustics I have ever heard in the world, in any of the myriad buildings I have visited. (I would say that Saint Chappelle, built in the Middle Ages in Paris, is a close second.) For the three days we were there, I was extremely ill. In the daytime, all I could do was make my way to the garden of the Taj, sit in the shade, and read a novel. But the first morning I had felt decent enough to get up very early and go and sing a song I loved in Arabic and record it on my little cassette recorder. That was a lifetime highlight and privilege, to be able to sing alone inside the Taj Mahal. We also briefly visited Jaipur, where the highlight was riding elephants which was somewhat terrifying.

Only a few of us went to Dharamsala, and we did more absorbing of the Tibetan Buddhists’ teaching rather than any singing. In Kerala state where we visited the ashram, only the women went, since this was to visit Mother Krishnabai. There, the music we did was chanting Hindu and Vedantic chants, and then we would sit near Mother Krishnabai, and she’d give a teaching about loving acceptance and devotion (in her toothless voice) which her assistant would translate in his formidable English. The chanting would start outside our bedroom window at four or five in the morning, so there were no late nights for us there. I made an emotional connection with Mother Krishnabai’s maid, who also had polio. It is not unusual for people who have disabilities or physical deformities there to go and serve a spiritual teacher to have access to room and board, since they are considered unmarriable essentially, and sometimes “untouchable.” I came to understand that with my extreme limp and paralyzed leg, Indians regarded me as probably very wealthy to be able to travel.

Our next stop, having spent five hours in the office of Air Pakistan to arrange our flight, was back to Karachi. There we met with wealthy industrialists who were also Muslim leaders, and they showed us a mammoth refugee camp they were supporting for Afghans who had fled when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. We sang for them in their homes and in a mosque, and they told us they thought our form of “jazz” zikr was a good thing that would help spread Islam. We didn’t really see it that way but nodded politely.

In Karachi, it was strange to be women. We were careful to keep our heads covered in public and also knew that we could not go out on the street alone. Women stayed home or in friends’ or relatives’ homes nearly all the time; there was and probably still is a law which says that if a woman is raped, there must be two men relatives as witnesses. So that keeps women off the streets. When we met with some of the wives and daughters, they told us they felt sorry for us because we must work, and that they were very happy to have earned college degrees in home economics. We again politely nodded. Even when we were in the group or in small subgroups, we had to be careful of some of the men, who made unwelcome advances, thinking we must be American prostitutes or something to be freely going out. The local newspaper published an article about us and said that we women were disheveled. I couldn’t wait to leave.

Next was Cairo, Egypt. When we arrived, we were told our visas were good for three months. We stayed at a hotel which was the best place we’d been in so far, and we had a living room where we could do zikr for ourselves every night. Vasheest was sick while we were there, so he didn’t feel like doing much outreach. We met with one sheikh who chastised us as women and would only allow us to do zikr silently and didn’t at first even want us to be in the same room with the men. But at the hotel we were treated with great kindness; we were there for our Thanksgiving and they went all out to find a (skinny) turkey and decorate our table with fall colors. They loved that we were doing zikr each evening, didn’t care if we wore head coverings, and felt we were a blessing on their house.

We toured the immense Egyptian museum (Mummies! Gold paint! Three days didn’t begin to cover it!) and had drinks at the big western hotel next door and sat around there reading. We also toured the pyramids at Giza, just outside Cairo, and the ruins at Saqqara which I found to be more impressive with their undamaged hieroglyphs on the walls. I stood on a princess’s tomb there and it started to vibrate, and I got right off. No one else felt this. We also learned that Egyptian taxi drivers would exploit us by charging three times the correct fare when some locals who spoke excellent English invited us to share their cab instead. One in our group had her passport pickpocketed out of her tote, so that meant a trip to the embassy (she was British and the replacement went quickly). We took a train to Alexandria, which is a beautiful calm city on the Mediterranean with a small but remarkable aquarium and a large Roman amphitheater which is in good condition.

We took a bus to Israel, and I celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday there. It was so good to be in a country that was clean and more westernized, and where it seemed that at least one in eight people spoke English. I could take a bus and get to a department store to buy a belt or something warm to wear. There we met with more male Sufi teachers and their friends or disciples who told us about how Israeli settlers had taken some of their land, but Vasheest felt that a teacher we met there was the best one we’d met thus far: “Now THAT was a sheikh!” he proclaimed. (I thought he seemed a bit misogynistic.) We shopped in the old town, where you need to know the religion of the shop keeper in order to know whether he closed on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, and visited the Mount of Olives and both Christian and Sufi holy or secular sites, including the Wailing Wall, the assumed birthplace of Christ at Bethlehem, the assumed Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem, the outside of the mosque where the temple of David had been, the Dead Sea and others. One of my favorite things in Jerusalem was discovering large sesame bagels.

When we left Israel by bus we got stuck at the border, where we learned that our three months’ Egyptian visas were only good for staying in the country, not leaving it, so we had to go to Tel Aviv for two days to get new visas at the Egyptian embassy which was only open for two hours on Tuesdays. We felt lucky that Israel welcomed us back after sitting in a cement yard with a chain-link fence on the Egyptian side for a few hours. In Tel Aviv we women enjoyed the incidental sight of the tall handsome Yugoslavian basketball team members wandering the streets.

We only were one night in Cairo to catch our scheduled flights either to Yugoslavia (four of us) or to the United States (the other seven). We were hosted by a young man who had been studying Sufism and was a computer programmer, and spent a week in Yugoslavia teaching zikr and other western Sufi practices such as walking with an attunement to different religious teachers or saints, from many traditions, not just Islam. We spent time in Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo meeting Sufis and other spiritual seekers who were mostly more liberal than the ones we’d met so far, as evidenced by one of the first women we met being dressed in corduroy jeans, the daughter of a sheikh (teacher). She said, “Are you dervish?” We didn’t want to make claims that might be misunderstood and were hesitant to answer. She quickly interjected, “*I* am dervish…,” so we felt like we could answer yes, knowing she meant we were all spiritual seekers.

We were invited to do zikr there in a shrine where Sufi teachers were buried, and were not required to cover our heads, stand to the side of the men, or any of that. The teacher clearly just wanted to pray with us, not make an impression or chastise us for whatever our tradition was. We were sobered by the general sense that the populace was a bit depressed after their socialist dictator Tito had led the country from communism to socialism, though he had died two years before. We learned that only people with a lot of money could send their servants to stand in line to buy real coffee once a week, and everyone lived in apartment buildings that to us looked like tenements, although on the inside people could maintain them as nicely as they wished. The Yugoslav people seemed serious, but when you got to know them, they had a wry sense of humor. They would say they didn’t speak English because they were not completely fluent, but they did speak it and we were able to communicate.

At the end of our trip, I traveled with one friend for a few short days by train through Italy, Switzerland and Paris, since we’d never been to Europe, getting little sleep so that we might see everything we could before we flew home. Highlights for me were Christmas in Montreux, Switzerland where we took a tram to enjoy a breakfast of steak and eggs and coffee with cognac at the top of the spectacular alps and a goose dinner that evening, seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, and going to a jazz cellar. I hadn’t heard western music in three months and was starved for it.

Although this trip had not been fully focused on music, music certainly lived at the center.

Next: Musical variety 1983- 2010