Dhyana at the Soiree

At the beginning, I was restless.
I wondered if it made any sense for me to be there when where I really wanted to be was the library, as I had lots to read. But it was a recital by the maestro who invented the Mohan Veena-Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and I was curious to listen to him play. So, at 8 o'clock in the night yesterday, I was to be found in a second row seat at the Ravi J.Mathai Auditorium in IIMA.
Initially, once concert began, I simply watched the changing expressions on the musician's visage and his nimble fingers that gracefully played the Veena. I even turned back to look at the audience in the auditorium. But I was still too distracted to appreciate the music, rich and mellifluous though I could feel it was. Was I incapable of appreciating Indian classical music, I wondered but barely for a moment. After all, I had so immensely enjoyed at the concerts of Pandit Jasraj and Pandit Ajoy Chakravarty and I have few memories as stupendously beautiful as the one of the stormy, April night last year when I had sat alone in the balcony of our first floor flat until dawn, listening to a singleKhayal based on the raaga Megha Malhar sung by Sawai Gandharva, while it rained incessantly.
I presently realised that I have a flaw-I am a slave of words, written and spoken. I am incapable of appreciating any form of art or communication that did not involve usage of words and which my mind could not analyse rationally.
It was a stunning discovery, and disconcerting. All around me, people had their gazes fixed on the stage in front of them while a few-perhaps, the most ardent connoisseurs-repeatedly and vigourously nodded their heads, right and left. I could not do either.
I shut my eyes and listened; gradually I began to grasp the cadence of the music that was being played. Concomitantly, images kept fleeting before my shut eyes-the interior of a dark cave that had at a great distance, a very tiny opening through which entered a faint beam of day-light, the silhouette of a beak-nosed man on a dimly lambent window pane.
After a time, the images ceased to appear and all that I was aware of now was the music-the rhythmic flow of sound waves that reached the crescendo once in a while, and constantly weaved intricate, evanescent patterns in the darkness that enveloped me.
When the recital finally ended, I realised so only when the audience began to clap and applaud. I opened my eyes and found myself seated in Sukhasana; my hands were on my thighs in the lotus mudra and my mind was calm. I realised that for the past half an hour or so, not a single thought had crossed my mind and there was not a single human face that I had looked at. There had been nothing between the music and my auditory senses. During that period, I could have been anyone-a Maori woman, an eighteenth century English squire and even a dog or a pigeon!
I had ceased then to exist, as myself. During the recital , thus, I had my first real session of Dhyana(meditation). Thank you, Panditji.