He sat on the temple stairs, with a sound recorder in a hand and a feather in the other. The feather would go at the back of his quirky hat with all the others, the peacock, the eagle, the quail. Tying up the laces to his muddy boots he glanced upwards, Pushkar was a riot of colors. It echoed of conch shells and bells in the evening. It was the city of the creator, they said, the Brahma. “How must have that felt like, being the creator, the first artist,”he thought to himself. After all wasn’t it an ordeal of some sort, wanting to outshine yourself everytime you create something new Wanting to surpass your own benchmarks. He knew that feeling well. He was a musician, a creator of melodies. 

Although the world was adept at creating genres out of every art, classifications out of every science, nature was always whole, the universe, an entirety. And so was his art. They rejected him, countless times, back then, producer after producer, label after label for what he had made was new. Unheard of.

“Umm, ok, so we can’t play this at a bar,”.

“It’s a cacophony,” some would say.

“This would only work in raves”.

Of course in their heads! From their rejection emails, they would try to be as polite as it could get.

“Thank you Mr Simon Posford for sending in your work, which we listened to with great interest. Unfortunately, this is not what we are looking for at the moment”.

After a while, he would just look at the word ‘unfortunately’ and dump the rejections away.

Those unending questions that he would always have, as a child. Questions that have no answers in language. Who am I? Why am I? What is the purpose? What is the source? How could language, a medium devised by mere mortals, explain something eternal. That was always Simon, an English lad from countryside Surrey , who had an option to study botany after high school and instead he chose to be a tape operator at the Virgin Studios in New York, spending his days commuting from Oxford to London every day, working 18 hours, making tea, plugging in cables, doing total recalls. Fairly menial tasks, but he was getting to work with some of the greatest engineers and producers of the time learning how music is made. After years he finally made his own. He knew what he wanted to do. Create!

As the priest chanted incessantly the twisted Sanskrit mantras, Simon closed his eyes to the rhythmic sound of the syllables he uttered, while he recorded them, envisioning what he could do to them. Before he could go any deeper into the abyss of his creativity, Raj nudged him in his usual jittery playful old self. The old, bearded, flute playing, cartoon as Si would often call him. Raj was after all a bit of his everything. At 72, this man would talk non-stop, pouring out ideas for their music, making faces that were as funny as his anecdotes of how he grew up in Australia, joined the hippie trail, played jazz and then eventually found his bittersweet success in the psychedelic music world.

“You are wondering how this fat bald priest is never going to know what we are going to make out his monotonous everyday prayer ritual, isn’t it?” Raj remarked.

“Stop, stop reading my mind Mr. Cunning Linguist!” Si chuckled.
The Epiphany Of Mrs Kugla.