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My arrival coincides nicely with the arrival of a new year. I have barely one day to get my-
self oriented to the Ashram, and then it is already New Year’s Eve. After dinner, the small
courtyard starts to fill with people. We all sit on the ground—some of us on the cool marble
floor and some on grass mats. The Indian women have all dressed as though for a wedding.
Their hair is oiled and dark and braided down their backs. They are wearing their finest silk
saris and gold bracelets, and each woman has a brightly jeweled bindi in the center of her
forehead, like a dim echo of the starlight above us. The plan is to chant outside in this court-
yard until midnight, until the year changes over.
Chanting is a word I do not love for a practice that I love dearly. To me, the word chant con-
notes a kind of dronelike and scary monotony, like something male druids would do around a
sacrificial fire. But when we chant here at the Ashram, it’s a kind of angelic singing. Generally,
it’s done in a call-and-response manner. A handful of young men and women with the loveli-
est voices begin by singing one harmonious phrase, and the rest of us repeat it. It’s a meditat-
ive practice—the effort is to hold your attention on the music’s progression and blend your
voice together with your neighbor’s voice so that eventually all are singing as one. I’m jet-
lagged and afraid it will be impossible for me to stay awake until midnight, much less to find
the energy to sing for so long. But then this evening of music begins, with a single violin in the
shadows playing one long note of longing. Then comes the harmonium, then the slow drums,
then the voices...
I’m sitting in the back of the courtyard with all the mothers, the Indian women who are so
comfortably cross-legged, their children sleeping across them like little human lap rugs. The
chant tonight is a lullaby, a lament, an attempt at gratitude, written in a raga (a tune) that is
meant to suggest compassion and devotion. We are singing in Sanskrit, as always (an an-
cient language that is extinct in India, except for prayer and religious study), and I’m trying to
become a vocal mirror for the voices of the lead singers, picking up their inflections like little
strings of blue light. They pass the sacred words to me, I carry the words for a while, then
pass the words back, and this is how we are able to sing for miles and miles of time without