Who among us does not remember the first time they came to the East End, slinking by the sangfroiders strolling the streets with the languor of sunbathers in the sand, or driving past “the last winery before France”?
As summer’s sear gentles into fulsome fall, I think of my own first voyage, an August weekend 30 years ago when I came to Shelter Island to spend a weekend with Lynn Franklin, an acquaintance in India who had become a friend in New York.
That was a distant past, an almost medieval memory, a time when “mobile device” meant a bicycle, and there was a score of them lined patiently at Greenport that Friday afternoon, waiting to cross to the island by the North Ferry, to spend the bright and waning day on its pretty and unexpected roads and ending, perhaps, with a sundowner at the Ram’s Head Inn. There was only a small cluster of other pedestrian walkers, fresh off the bus from the city, clutching tokens wrested with crumpled dollar bills from a creakingly cranky machine.
As we were about to set sail, the large, bearded, and genial ferry captain came up to me.
“Are you from India?” he asked. I admitted I was. “You must be going to Lynn’s,” he responded. “We are both veterans of Ahmedabad,” a reference to the capital of the northwestern state of Gujarat in India, home to Mahatma Gandhi, a city where I had never been. Lynn, I knew, had visited it often to spend time with a family who were her friends, a family distinguished as much for the performing arts, particularly dance, as for entrepreneurship in industry and leadership in science and space exploration.
Why our captain, who introduced himself as Alan Shields, had been there I did not then know, and I did not ask. It was only later that evening, over Lynn’s always perfectly grilled halibut, that I learned ferrying was Alan’s day job; what he was known for, islandly and internationally, was his formidable artistic repertoire, not only as a painter but as a weaver of canvas. This last a skill he honed in Ahmedabad, where, at the Gandhi Ashram paper mill, he learned to design and create wholly distinct varieties of paper, some lattice-shaped, others with openings reminiscent of windows, allowing three layers of canvas, glued together, to seep colors onto each other, a tridimensional effect that was quite extraordinary, muted only marginally by the necessary coats of protective glass in which they were framed.
We visited his studio the next morning and returned with two of the pieces so crafted, mine an exuberant efflorescence of India’s national colors of saffron, green, and white steadied in an array of cross-like cuts through the layered sheets, Lynn’s a similar design, its hues more gentle pastels. Clutching my new possession, only a little shorter than I was, I boarded the midafternoon ferry the next day to return to Greenport, the bus, and the city.
As I looked at my watch, poised at 2:30 p.m., I realized it had just turned Aug. 15 in India, our Independence Day, the very moment, 47 years earlier, when our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke to a now almost free nation. “Long years ago,” he had said, “we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
And as I saw Shelter Island’s contours recede, I thought of the skyline of India that Gandhi, Nehru, and so many fighters for our freedom would have seen fade into the distance as they voyaged to Britain, to Europe, to South Africa and the reassurance of welcome it would always extend when they returned home. The East End had begun to become that for me, though I did not know it then. Thirty years later, I was to live on its South Fork with my wife, whom I had not known when I undertook that maiden journey. My voyage was complete.
And it was here that another midnight memory was kindled, just this past month. As the celebrations of Independence Day softened in India, and the flags fluttering proudly on streets and on homes were gently pulled down to be put away for another celebration, midnight was to bring its magic on Aug. 16 to the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton with a performance by the Jog Blues band. “Jog” (which rhymes with “vogue”) is an Indian classical melodic structure, played in the embers of the evening that mellow into midnight; its blending with blues at the hands and voice of the band is testament to the imagination and dexterity of its members, four American and three South Asian.
That it was at LongHouse had a special poignance. Its founder, Jack Lenor Larsen, like Alan Shields, was an artist and, like him again, had a fascination for India. What Alan did with paint and paper, Jack did with finger and fabric. In 1970, he created, with the designer Win Anderson, an upholstery fabric he called “Magnum,” echoing the joyful Indian textiles punctuated by small mischievous mirrors, an effect they created through the use of Mylar film.
When I first saw that fabric, I wondered at its name, and what within it connoted the original meaning of magnum, that which is great. Surely it could not have been just vanity or ego. Looking closely at it again, some of the Mylar mirrors exquisitely perfect, others less so, some manifestly maimed, I wondered if it were not a metaphor for the greatest creation of all, the human body, the many points of light reflected in its cells, some bright, some bruised.
That metaphor came to mind again when I discovered that the vocalist in Jog Blues was Siddhartha Mukherjee, the physician, scholar, and biologist, famed for his Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” and the more recent “The Gene: An Intimate History,” his voice soaring from a heart that had calmed so much cruelty with compassion and care, the moments in an oncologist’s life, as he once put it, of “hope and expectation and concern,” the very moments that animate the feelings each one of us has for the land in which we live as much as the land in which we were born.
Ramu Damodaran was the first chief of the United Nations Academic Impact initiative and a TV news anchor and radio disc jockey in India. He lives in Springs.