new home in scatting and vocalese. In addition, Bharata Natyam, the form she has been studying all her life, the oldest and most widely danced style in India, was designed to manifest the divine entity she was dressed up to portray and whose legend she acted out with precise hand and footwork amidst the placement of arms and the movements of eyes and eyebrows, all synchronized in tala. By mastering the ten postures of the body, thirty-six of the hands, nine of the neck and thirteen of the head, she discovered that currents generated by repeated rhythmic movements of her body brought a powerful mojo to her performance, and from her non-stop hours listening to these women sing, she could, by way of make-up, mudra and mimicry, manifest their murti on the bandstand. So she sang and danced every morning, and every afternoon she poured over books by or about Ginsberg and Blake. Every Wednesday evening before the music came on she told the radio what she made of it all—their poems, arrests, libertarian politics, restless lifestyles, quests for spiritual experiences and searches for inspiration—for it now held a new kind of light. No longer worried about being wrong, nuts, too imaginative or cursed, she found her suspicions confirmed: many everyday people in normal lives experienced para-normal events. She observed that it wasn’t that odd things happened that mattered; it was what people made of the event. Most people were afraid so they denied the event and the odd things stopped happening. But not in her case. On a beautiful spring afternoon Bhajan noticed her deep in Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” in the quietest part of the library. He sat down next to her as if they were old friends and said out of the blue, “We’ve taken notice of you.” “Is that so?” “Just so, and we’ve a proposition for you, mem sahib.” “If it’s about giving me my job back, no thank you.” “I fired you from that job to offer you this one.” “That’s not as clear to me as it may be to you, Dr. B.” “The job’s about going to the States.” “I don’t want to go to the States.” “To enrich your jazz studies.” “But I’m not in school for jazz studies.”
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