The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar

Author:David Davidar [Davidar, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670081431
Publisher: Penguin Books India
Published: 2006-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

9

The Tower of God

Noah and I had arranged to meet at ten so that we could be at the shrine a little after noon, when Professor Menon was expecting us. He had told us Brother Ahimas would be free then and had invited us to stay on for lunch. I had intended to set off from Cypress Manor a little later than I would have normally done in order to give Noah an extra half-hour for any extra-curricular activities he might have planned, but just as I was closing the gates behind me, I heard an engine labouring up the hill. Within minutes the priest’s scooter came into sight. Noah pressed the horn in welcome and it gave a weak chirp. He looked slightly less scruffy than usual having swapped his lungi and old T-shirt for jeans and a T-shirt with a faded picture of Jimi Hendrix printed on it. When I complimented him on his appearance, he laughed and said, ‘I had to freshen up or your neighbours would have set their dogs on me. First time I’ve come up this hill in years, so I thought I’d break out my favourite T-shirt featuring Shri Hendrix.’

‘My room-mate’s a fan…’

‘And you’re not? Come on, da, he just happened to be the greatest guitarist who ever walked the earth.’

I confessed that I didn’t know too much about rock music, whereupon he leaned over, almost toppling the scooter, grabbed hold of me, and said sternly, ‘OK, you’ve got to make me a promise. When you go back to Bombay, I want you to listen to your room-mate’s Hendrix tapes…’

I laughed and said I’d do as he suggested. It took a little manoeuvring to turn the scooter around, and as he did so he told me a story about Hendrix. ‘You know, the guy was re-imagining the way the guitar was played, taking it places that hadn’t even been thought of let alone tried before, so on his first visit to England, all the great guitar gods of the time, Clapton, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, the Led Zep guy, you know fuckers of that calibre, trooped over to the club where he was playing to check him out. During the intermission Richards went to the loo to take a leak, and the guy in the stall next to him asked what the superstars who were all bunched up next to the stage thought of the show.

“Oh, it’s very wet up there…” Richards said.

“Wet?’’

“Yeah, from all the tears of envy that are being shed…”’

The scooter’s front wheel had got stuck at an angle, and Noah was wrestling with it. ‘That’s the only way to be, man, so far ahead of the pack that you basically make the rules… Otherwise you’re fucked, you either have to conform or find a cave, drop out of sight… Here, help me with this scooter, da, I want to be out of here before someone tells the Brigadier and his cohorts that I’m trespassing on his hill.’

I thought of

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