Music of India. Performed live. Southern California, UCLA, Occidental College, Pasadena where the new Indian Restaurant Mint Leaf serves up flavors of heat from one to ten, enough to set the mouth on fire, and I said, “The Music Circle should come here,” and they said, “They do. All the time.”

Shirley introduced me to Indian music as she introduced me to everything. I married up, and she kept opening the world. She focused her later studies in World Arts and Cultures and we became honorary members of the Cambodian community.

We also entered The Music Circle a number of times. We were drawn in by Amy Catlin and her husband Nazir Jairazbhoy who started Ethnomusicology at UCLA and we went to parties at their house and played ping pong and ate Indian food.

We were all friends and collegial, and there were concerts at venues where you take off your shoes and sit on a rug. For hours.

The reason I mention it now is because I just got an e-mail announcing the next concert of morning ragas, Early Bird Tickets on sale at $35 until 11 p.m. on Sunday when they go up to $48. Buy now.

I have fond memories. It was Shirley’s thing, so it became mine. It was another chance to spend hours with her, near her, and that’s another reason I mention it. Every memory is a treasure.

Uday Bhawalkar (Dhrupad vocalist) is quoted, “when immersed in the note and raga, the self dissolves and only the music remains.”

How true.

And I remember the concert hosted at a big house in the south end of Pasadena, with gardens and paths and a little bridge, and the big added room the floor just right for an audience, and we left our shoes by the door with all the other shoes, and some people sat on cushions, and some leaned against the wall.

And some dissolved into the music and some tried, and some were India upper middle class so they knew the expected pose and sat, and some moved or nodded with the rhythm, and some sat like stone, some younger sat and shifted and looked toward the door, and one, on the right, toward the front, lithe, his teen age feet visibly bare, was immersed, showing to anyone who noticed that the past and present can exist together in the moment. For hours.

And after the concert, and food and drink and mingle, the Mistress of the Manse, establishing ex-pat Upper Class, gestured to her domain and said, “Ravi Shankar stayed with us when he was in town.”

So I thought about Ravi Shankar, and revered him again, and thought how in the third of the Apu trilogy the light floods with the burst of music and I cry again remembering. And I seem to remember everything. And I want us to watch the rest of the trilogy. I want the self to dissolve, and the music remain.