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A Pathway to Knowledge
Eventually, the first class came to a close and our group moved up
to the front. It was getting hot in the music room. Many were begin-
ning to use more and more powder to counteract their sweating, some-
times nervous, hands. When my hand started to sweat I could feel the
tabla bending under my touch. I would dip my hands in powder again
and again but it didn’t seem to do much good. My fingers kept stick-
ing to the black gab in the middle. Large bits of black ink stained my
fingers. Stefan nudged me to look at Zakirji’s hands as he started the
class using the same tihais played moments before. The tempo was
picking up. Stefan again whispered to me to watch Zakirji’s hands and
the placement of his fingers on the top part of the gab. “Look at how
they move; check out where the hand sits.” Indeed every gesture, ev-
ery movement, began to take on a new meaning, a new intensity.
Zakirji started to teach a new kaida composition phrase by phrase.
Eventually, the whole of the composition was revealed to us, but our
accents were not right; it did not feel right in the body or sound cor-
rect when we played it. “Now recite it,” Zakirji yelled out to us. After
much reciting, I could tell Zakirji was happier with our rhythm and
interpretation of the composition. “Now play it just in the same way
as you have said it,” he remarked. We attempted to play as Zakirji
had asked. Five or eight minutes into playing the bols, concentrating
only on doing what our teacher was doing at the same time, I felt an
overwhelming sense of connectedness to Zakirji and everyone play-
ing in the room. It was a kind of energy I had heard about from other
students but had not, until then, experienced. Was it an illusion that
what was coming out of his hands was directly going in my eyes and
out my hands? Nevertheless, there was some kind of energy transmit-
ted around and among tabla players at that moment that somehow al-
lowed for an extraordinary unified sensation. Mirroring our teacher
visually through the hands, and listening to his sound and interpreta-
tion of the composition in a focused way, ignited a kind of total com-
munication between us. I felt a similar kind of energy or altered per-
ception such as this only once before during one afternoon of practice
alone. I was working on a composition for well over one year and had
finally reached a significant speed in the process of doubling it. When I
began to play the headline at slow speed, I was playing faster than my
