Irreplaceable Swami

Every night we were listening to that bongo drum, Swamiji’s fingers on that drum.  I remember one guy who came, that rascal named Eliot, who I knew before I started coming to the storefront.  He said, “The Swami gets some good licks in; I want to hear him play.”  They came to hear Swamiji just as they went to the park to hear the bongo drummers there.  I used to apologize to them, “The Swami is a very proficient mrdanga player.  You can’t judge him by what he’s doing now.  He’s doing the best he can with this little drum.  He doesn’t normally play a one-headed bongo, but we don’t have any of the drums that he plays in India.”

“All right, granted, but let’s hear what he can do with this one drum.”

So you can hear him.  His fingers walk on the drum.  People speak of Olantunji and his talking drums.  Prabhupada’s drum talks from his walking fingers (tick-tick-tick, tick-tick-tick, one two, one two three four, one two.)  It’s a simple thing he’s got going with his fingers on the drum, accentuating his walking beat, along with his own singing and the karatalas and tambour.  It seemed that sometimes he played it strictly, like a metronome’s measured beats.  But sometimes it was uneven, more human-like, hitting his fingers in rougher beats.  None of it was very fast.  He played that drum to accompany his own singing.  I thought, “Gee, he’s over seventy years old and thumping on that drum to his own singing.”  Yes, you could come to the storefront just to hear him play the drum.  Of course, he had a lot more to give than that – Lord Caitanya’s philosophy, "Бхагавад-гита", Lord Krishna, the Hare Krishna mantra.

The drum is for kirtana.  You chant over the drum, but still you can be fascinated by hearing Prabhupada’s very simple fingers walking on the head of that brownish and already worn bongo head.  There will never be anything like it, even now that we have many accomplished mrdanga players in ISKCON.  Nobody plays a bongo drum like Prabhupada did – simulating a mrdanga and yet not simulating a mrdanga.  Just playing on that little drum.

And his voice.  It was not velvety smooth like cream, but a little rough, some grating there.  Not unpleasant, but like a man at the end of the day with a stubble of beard, or the way a leader of men is sometimes a little rough in his speech.  It is an appealing roughness that comes from working and from singing, not a pampered, delicate thing.  An old man’s singing.  And not a “man” – but an aged, pure devotee.  His singing has its own appeal.  It goes along with the drum, the uneven finger beat, and the rough voice.  We were attracted by these things, almost hypnotized by each thing he did.