From the way she boards an autorickshaw, you might be deceived into thinking she is a Mumbaikar. Balancing a violin in one hand, purse slung over her slim shoulder, Sarah MeeRan Cave executes the perfectly timed leap before the vehicle courses through Bandra’s multiple lanes.
Ms. Cave is equally adept at jumping into local trains. Over the years, she has developed a relationship with Mumbai and its ‘amazing vitality’. “There’s that whole train culture, you know, like, ‘Where are you getting down?’ And then you have to know what side your stop is going to be on, and you have to really be firm, or you’re just going to get shoved off the train.”
She had just one day in the city before flying off to Los Angeles, where she lives, and the separation was beginning to gnaw at her. She would return in the winter for sure. “Bombay always makes me a more open-minded, courageous person. I feel like I thrive more here,” she said.
No other city in India, or the world, makes her feel as free. Or as safe. “I’ve never had an issue as a foreigner.” The reason: “there’s an acceptance of different types of people. There’s a respect, like a, ‘You do your thing well, don’t get in my way and we’ll be fine.’ And then if something happens, 20 people will come and help you.”
Leap of faith
The pull came in the spring of 2015, in a way she would never have imagined.
Ms. Cave began violin studies at the age of three. She eventually worked for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and went on to teach violin in the U.S. and abroad, including the Bangalore School of Music, where she conducted their chamber orchestra.
From 2013 to 2015, she attended the Violin Making School of America. “In Utah, of all places,” she says. “It never quite felt right.” Those years were a struggle to find her centre.
In 2015, Ms. Cave won a full scholarship to a three-week Eastern music residency at the Banff Centre of the Arts in Canada.
The residency would give her an exposure to Turkish, Persian, Arabic and Hindustani music. On the faculty was renowned sarangi player Dhruba Ghosh. “From the moment he walked into the space and started to teach the workshop, I just knew. I thought, ‘this is exactly the music I’ve been looking for my entire life’.”
At the end of the three weeks, she sat with her friend in the practice room, crying. “I thought, I can’t go back to my old life, to this violin-making programme. And she said, ‘Well, could you actually just not go back to it?’”
Ms. Cave knew then, she had to move to India. “It was the most clear moment of my entire life.”
In 2015, she arrived in Mumbai, to study under Ghosh. “From the first day with him, nothing has ever felt more right and true to me. He had so much depth. Not only as a musician, but as a teacher and as a person. His presence could ignite something in you that you didn’t know is there. He gave me this sense of belonging that I had been missing.”
For a year-and-a-half, he helped her tap into her potential, little by little. “We would swim through one note for something like 20 minutes, but let that note fill me to completion.”
Her guru helped her stay grounded. “Where I was as a person and musician (before that) was different. I was overplaying notes, playing very fast, to be virtuosic, to play a solo with an orchestra, to win a job. But I never felt rushed by him.”
He helped her open up, free herself from the bindings of her old learning. “These notes (in Indian Classical music) didn’t have any expectations. I was able to dive into that freedom, and the teacher held that freedom.”
She never really connected with her Western music teachers that way. In her tribute to Ghosh on her website, she says, “He showed me the life force that literally lies in the sarangi and the violin themselves, that there is life and energy everywhere... He always welcomed me with an open heart and taught me to dive deep into my soul, into the grids of ragas and soar high above storms like the eagle. He said he wasn’t humble; this apparent humbleness was a natural result — when master and student or two friends sit at sunset and watch the sun set beyond the event horizon, both can share in that moment; both know they are part of that experience. The illusion of the ‘other’ dissolves.”
Signs from the universe
A friend told her about his death in a WhatsApp message in July 2017. She had gone back to the U.S. on her guru’s urging. About three days before he passed on, she had a dream where she was a swirl in a galaxy and her centre was shifting. And the night before his passing, before she went to sleep, she asked the Universe for a clear sign as what to do about moving forward with her Indian life, her musical explorations.
In many ways, Ms. Cave had received her guidance. She had always wanted to try composing. “I thought, ‘I’m going to go back to Bombay. I already have my flat, my community and I’m going to compose. Then I’m going to put a show together.’ And so that’s what I did.”
She creates, produces and performs in her show called Home en Root. Her influences span Bach and Brahms, Roma Gypsy music, Flamenco, Salsa, Arabic and Indian Classical. “It’s about celebrating different aspects of life in different types of music and genres.”
The confluence of cultures in her work excites her. People ask her how she will brand herself, with her “not quite Western and not quite Eastern” work. “For me, it’s like, how do I expand enough to encompass everything?”
It’s like two fish apparently swimming in opposite directions, an image she received in her meditation one day. “I realised the relationship between them does not consist of their moving in opposite directions, but only appears so,” she says on her website. “In order to hold the opposing forces, we simply need to see the two fish are actually part of a greater circle; they’re essentially in orbit... if we step back and expand our perspective, we suddenly see the two fish were part of one current all along.”
Ms. Cave recently put up a show called ‘Sacred Currents’ in Mumbai, to “honour seemingly oppositional forces”. A tabla player, a Carnatic electric guitar player and a Carnatic vocalist performed with her.
Mumbai, she says, is a place where people are more open to collaboration. It’s a tug that goes beyond the workings of her mind; “a grounding into where everyone has come from, in a way.”
Like a soul connect? “There’s no expectation, nothing you have to do; stuff just happens. It’s the perfect combination to allow creativity to happen and I feel like it’s so large, it’s infinite. It holds all of humanity. I feel that especially in the Himalayas or even in Bombay; it’s an energy of the city that isn’t anywhere else.”
