THEY REMEMBER YOU WELL, MR COHEN, AT THE KEMPS CORNER HOTEL

 

Kemps Corner is an intensely urbanized area of south Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and, were it not for the extensive wooded area bordering the south of it, you would see nothing but tall buildings as skyline and large birds soaring in the pale sky. The sea, the sea that is always close by in Mumbai, cannot be seen from there, you still have to walk a good few hundred meters down Desai Avenue to reach it. 

At the traffic lights at the top of the avenue there are men dressed as women begging for alms and when the light is favorable to cars they join the small group of other men dressed as women who, sitting, draw a circle on the adjacent sidewalk. Are they prostitutes, are they beggars, are they part of a caste? A little bit of everything, we are in India. 

As for the wooded area mentioned, which at first glance could be mistaken for a forgotten public garden where the trees and vegetation grew at the hands of an absent-minded gardener, this is the Tower of Silence, the place where the Parsis – a small but powerful ethnic group of Persian origin – dispose of their dead. The Parsis believe that it is not a good practice to contaminate the land, water or even the air with the remains of their loved ones and, as an alternative to wrapping them up for eternity, expose the corpses to the goodness of vultures and other birds of prey until only bones remain in the circular, uncovered tower where they are laid to rest. 

It was this area of the city that Leonard Cohen chose to live in during his stays in India, a country he visited frequently and at length during the second half of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s. Some hasty theory, based on fanciful associations, would be tempted to explain the choice of location by the omnipresence of the Tower of Silence, justifying the thesis by Cohen's fascination with the subject of death and invoking as an argument the haunted towers of his songs... But it turns out that it was nothing like that and the man chose the location because it was close to the residence of an Indian master in whose teachings he was interested. Mr L. Cohen had read his works and decided that the best thing to do was to go and see him in person, staying at a nearby hotel that would allow him to walk the distance to the meetings. There were two hotels in the area, almost neighbors, but Cohen didn't choose the reasonably more upscale Shalimar Hotel, opting instead for the Kemps Corner Hotel. 

The Kemps is a two-star hotel, but in terms of hotel standards it would be more appropriate to call it a guesthouse, it is truly a modest thing, the opposite of what one would expect from a all-star public figure. 

At the reception, I asked the lady on duty if I could see a room, and also for how long she had been working there. "Yes", she said, "just wait for a minute in the little room next door", and, for the second half of the question, she had been working at the hotel for three years. 

“You’re no good,” I thought as I looked around the cubicle where the sofa from yesteryear barely fit. Then a young man arrived and invited us to go up in an elevator where it would be difficult for anyone else to enter. The room he wanted to show us was still being tidied up, and there were two servants inside who hurriedly passed the used sheets and armfuls of towels to the room opposite, as I had asked if I could take a photo. A narrow wooden bed, leaning against one wall, a small wooden desk leaning against another, at the back the window through which a greenish light tried to crawl in, waving at the screen curtain that covered the upper half of the window and the air conditioning unit built into the remaining half. Next, opposite the entrance door, the bathroom: deep and narrow like the bedroom; a toilet, a sink and a shower head in the middle of a wall, with a plastic bucket next to it, on the floor. That was all, and the boy must have sensed my incomplete manner, because he offered to show us another, larger room with a double bed. 

The new room was apparently in another building, as we went out onto the street, where I once again said hello to the old doorman who greeted those arriving in the shade of the awning, swollen in blue and white, which lent a slightly festive air to the entrance. The new building was located behind the previous one, another blue and white striped awning extended the continuity, softening the dirty facade. It was then that I asked our guide for how long he had worked at the Kemps Hotel. 

“Twenty-six years,” he said. 

“Twenty-six! How is that possible?” I replied as I did quick math in my head: 2016-26=1990. “How old are you?” 

“Forty-four,” he replied. 

I commented that he looked like thirty and, considering the years he had worked there, suggested that perhaps he had met the – I hesitated on the term – writer and singer Leonard Cohen. 

“A very nice gentleman,” he replied immediately, “he died two weeks ago...” And he added, as if enlightened by the subject and raising an index finger towards the sky, “he always stayed in this building, always in the same room up there, on the top floor...”

I wanted to know if we could visit it. No, it was occupied at the moment, but it was the same as the one we had already visited in the other building. 

“So small?” I asked. 

"Yes, that small, he was a very simple person. He spent most of the day in his room, reading and writing; sometime he would go out for a walk or for swimming in a pool at the end of Warden" (the old, and still used, name from the English era of Desai Avenue). 

“A very nice gentleman”, he said again and went on with his life, realizing that our true interest was not picking a room. 

Outside, in the bright light of the late morning, under the striped awning, the old doorman was more gullible and did not let us leave without handing us a page, typed on some worn-out cartridge printer, with the hotel's rates. We shook hands. 

“Be careful,” he said in farewell. At the end of the alley, before dissolving into the avenue, I turned around, taking one last look at the blue and white awning and saw him following our movements, raising his hand in farewell, perhaps a "see you soon" if we reconsidered into account the attractive prices of the Kemps Hotel.

Photos: © Pedro Serrano, Mumbai (India), November 2016. Drawing: Leonard Cohen, The Book of Longing, 2006.