The first time I met Humayoun Shadhu I was struck by the beauty of the man, inner and outer. It was at a festival and he was constantly surrounded by people so I had no conversation with him but I sat near him for almost a whole day. People came to pay their respects to him, gave him fruit, incense and the like, touched his feet, spent some time listening to the songs being sung, and went on their way.
The most noticeable group who came to pay their respects were several women dressed in long white robes and with their heads covered. They almost seemed to throw themselves at his feet and his response to this was incredibly moving. He held their heads as they touched their heads to his feet, then as they raised their bodies again he held their hands and looked deeply into them with his huge, sadly smiling eyes.
It was his eyes that really drew me to him. He would fix your gaze and just keep on staring, never looking away. There was such overwhelming kindness in those eyes. I felt that of all the shadhus one saw around the place, he had to be something special. That day I resolved to try to spend more time with him, whenever I got the chance.
Since the event was not long after the baul concert where I first met the shadhus who had invited me here, I was carrying my berimbau. They had made it very clear that I should bring it with me when I come. So there I was, one of only two or three foreigners there the whole day, sitting with this huge instrument. It was inevitable that at some point I would be asked to play it. Initially I just played along with their songs but finally Humayoun Shadhu asked me if I could sing a song from my country. I explained that I could sing but the songs would be Brasilian not English. This was fine.
Looking around me at the assembled crowd, I was petrified. There were hundreds of people crowded into the small space, many of them dressed in the white robes of the sufis. To sing in front of them, people of such deep truth, felt like I would be opening up my soul for them to see. But I didn’t have a choice. I got the impression that if Humayoun Shadhu asks you to do something, you do it. And so I began to sing.
I sang a song that became a staple of mine in Bangladesh, especially when I was carrying my berimbau with me. It was Clara Nunes’ stupendously powerful song Canta das Tres Racas. I had learned it a year or so previously to sing at a Brasilian-themed cabaret I had put on. The situation could not have been more different. But I closed my eyes and a beat began around me and I sang. And perhaps the surroundings did something for me, because I sang more openly than I felt I had ever sung before. The people seemed struck – something to do with the strangeness of this funny foreign girl with her bizarre instrument singing in such an incongruous environment I have no doubt. But I had found myself a certain respect among these people, that much was clear. They wanted more, and I sang a few capoeira songs, then they went back to singing their songs. Humayoun Shadhu leant across to me. “You will learn to sing Lalon” he said. It was more of a statement than a request. It was simply something I would do.
I felt a strange kind of a high for the rest of the day. I realized I had discovered something and that it might stay with me for some time.
The next time I saw him was more than a year later at the Shadhu Shongo described here. I was rather taken aback to see how he had changed. He looked much older, kind of crumpled, and the light in his eyes, though still strong, seemed to have faded. He sang, which I had not heard before, but his voice was slight. Late at night over at the smaller tent I found him standing by the entrance, holding onto the side of the tent and struggling for breath. His whole body arced with the effort it required for him to take a breath and the wheezing sound was painful to hear.
In the morning after we had eaten and not long before we would have to leave, I sought him out, just to sit with him for a while. I took him a big bottle of water and shosha, a kind of fat stumpy cucumber, sliced long-ways into quarters and sprinkled with salt and chili, the most refreshing street snack. He took some and smiled. We sat and listened to the music for a while and eventually I had to leave. I moved over to him, touched his feet and told him we were leaving. “Tui ashbi amar okhane” he proclaimed, “You will come and visit me”. Again it was a statement not a request. And again I felt that I probably would.
So in the weeks leading up to my time for leaving Bangladesh I made arrangements to go and visit him with a friend. Ali is from Kushtia, the place where Lalon Shah lived most of his life and where a lot of the shadhus come from. I had worked with Ali at the BBC and on other projects since then and he seemed to me to get straight to the reality of the bauls. He doesn’t stand for any of the commercialization of them and their music that has become so popular in Dhaka. He himself is on the lookout for a “real” shadhu who really deserves his respect. He also has a Tascam recorder, with which he can get high-quality recordings of music in any setting, and he loves to record the bauls. He was the perfect person to take me there.
We planned to take a train but were scuppered by timetabling so ended up getting a bus which is guaranteed to be a much less comfortable, more hair-raising kind of journey. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon, took a tempo the final 20 minutes or so to the village and were soon deposited, simultaneously stiffened by the ride and relaxed by being plunged into the depths of the country. It is always such a vast pleasure to leave Dhaka and its madding crowds.
The home is a large square building with open sides, high rafters and a raised platform in the centre where the higher-status shadhus and visitors sit, smoke, play, eat, sing and sleep. Visitors from local villages sit around the edges and comprise a sort of chillum-building factory. The chillum is the highly phallic clay pipe that shadhus in both Bangladesh and India use to smoke their ganja. In India it is usually charras, the dark brown hash rubbed from the leaves of marijuana plants high in the Himalayas. In Bangladesh it is usually rough green weed, which comes in varying strengths but is much less fragrant than charras.
The factory was something to behold. I think the only time people stopped building chillums was when they ate or slept. Otherwise throughout the day small groups of men sit around the required instruments: a small square wooden block with a pit hollowed out in the middle by much cutting, a hook-like knife used to cut the tightly rolled balls of weed which are wrapped in a square cut from a tobacco leaf, cut, re-wrapped and cut again so that it is fine before it is plugged into the hole in the chillum. The industry is quite impressive; there are always plenty of chillums to go around, and the place was at most times full with between 20 and 30 men.
I say men specifically. The women of the family – sisters, cousins and aunts – kept to the home itself, a smaller, more closed building next to the shadhu’s space. We only saw them when they came in to bring food or to sweep the floors. This realisation was my first disillusionment of the visit. In all I had learned from the bauls I had understood that they treated women as equals who were to be worshipped as their Mother, closely affiliated with the idea of a Goddess. But here I saw with my own eyes the way they live. The women are not invited to sing, they do not play instruments, they do not join in and smoke – they are simply expected to come and go, cooking and cleaning, much as they are in the more traditional Bangladeshi homes.
They did make wonderful food though, and I very much enjoyed eating it. Wonderful fresh ingredients, mostly vegetables with some fish and always followed by fresh mangoes or other fruit that we and other visitors had brought.
Much of the time was filled with singing, both theirs and mine, as they insisted that I sing some of the songs that I had learned by this time. I think I got away without completely embarrassing myself, although several times I had to be reminded of the words and my nervousness had me galloping away at a ridiculous speed so I hardly had time to take a breath. They had me sing four songs in the evening and again the next day – it seems they thought I needed practice.
After singing the first night they also persuaded me to smoke a little with them. It’s not that I don’t smoke normally, but often my Bangla gets a little ropey after smoking so I wanted to protect it somewhat so as to be able to communicate as well as possible. This didn’t happen however, and in the end I opened up to Humayoun Shadhu more than I might have done otherwise. I asked him some of the questions that I wanted to find answers to. How can one really follow one’s own heart? Meditation he said. Pure and simple.
I also asked, when we are all individual beings, how can we see one another as part of the same being? His answer was beautiful. The idea is that we all share one soul. This soul moves between us as freely as breath. We do not see breath as our own, so why should we with soul? There is not one soul each which is attached to our bodies, there is one freely moving and morphing soul that we all have responsibility to look after.
This idea seemed particularly apt to me as it fit in with an idea I had been forming over some time – that there is a finite amount of life energy in the world and that it is shared between us all. So as humans multiply the energy gets thinner as it is shared between all of us – or perhaps the way we are destroying the natural world is like the way of balancing this. The life energy is shared with animals and plants as well, so animals and plants necessarily die off in order to keep enough energy for our rapidly expanding species.
By tying this idea in with that of soul you also face the responsibility of looking after the universal soul in order to look after oneself. So if we harm other people we are actually harming ourselves, and if we wish to take care of ourselves we have to take responsibility for those around us. There is of course nothing new in this thinking, but it somehow makes the concept more concrete.
This was where my second disillusionment came. Having seen how sick Humayoun Shadhu was, the way he struggles for breath, is constantly coughing and hacking, I did not expect that he would be smoking to keep up with the rest of the men. I was not aware of the ritual element where every chillum that is made is first taken by him before it is passed to anyone else. So in fact he was smoking as much as if not more than anyone else. Through the course of the 24 hours that we were there he looked constantly exhausted. He frequently fell asleep as he was sitting, his head nodding and his body crumpling beneath his exhaustion. He kept a kind of spittoon beside him where he coughed up phlegm before, during and after his frequent coughing fits.
I could not help thinking that as a man who is supposedly a spiritual guide and an example to those that choose to take him as their guru, he has a responsibility, as with the idea of soul, to take more care of his physical body. When I questioned him on this he insisted that it is part and parcel of being who he is, even if he is sick and might not live as long if he continues to live like this.
I: Are you sick?
HS: Yes, I suppose I am.
I: You don’t seem to be able to breathe very well. Is smoking good for you?
HS: Maybe not. But I have to smoke, if I don’t I will not achieve the same state of purity.
I: You know you can eat hash, don’t you, and it also has a very good effect?
HS: Yes you can but it is not the same as inhaling, you do not reach the same state.
I was certainly glad to have gone to visit him, so that I did not leave with an elevated expectation of an individual who is actually just mortal like the rest of us. He might have some powerful teachings but he also has his failings and I suppose it is for all of us to find our own of each.
Tags: Bangladesh, baul, bauls, humayoun shadhu, lalon, sufi, sufism
