A Healing Song, 9/11
written by: Stephen Michael Berberich
I was ready to tell
the story of my life
but the ripple of tears
and the agony of my heart
wouldn’t let me….
– from “Story of My Life” by Afghan-born poet Rumi
Humayun rubs his sleepy eyes. He reaches for the bedroom clock. It is just past 9:00 a.m. He wonders why Mom is so excited, banging on my door, and so early?
She simply has to wake him. “Come, what are they saying on TV?” she asks in her native language. She doesn’t understand the live broadcast. She tells Humayun that an airplane has just hit a big building in New York City.
On mornings after he performs his music, his mother would normally let him sleep in at their home in Northern Virginia. Today, she also lets him skip his morning voice exercises. The music he plays—her music, from northern India and Afghanistan—is very demanding.
Humayun Khan has performed on the CD “Beloved,” a highly acclaimed celebration of the poetry and music of the 13th-century Afghan poet and mystic Mevlana Rumi. He also sang on an award-winning BBC program and performed on the soundtrack of the Harish Saluza inspirational film, “The Journey.” He is reportedly the “best rising star of Afghan music.”
But now Humayun’s music is unimportant. It won’t heal his pain this day.
Mother and son sit together on a big, overstuffed leather couch in their living room, staring at the TV. They suddenly feel very small and alone. They watch in horror as another plane hits the World Trade Center buildings with a fiery explosion. Human figures hang from the tall buildings’ windows, then fall, some jumping, others on the ground running. On-air broadcast reporters are themselves frightened and confused, in and out of the frame, frantic.
Then, just outside….Boom… a live sonic blast. The explosion is the loudest sound Humayun has ever heard. It rattles the sliding glass doors opened to the north across their spacious backyard, which joins a forest valley on the Potomac River plain, just a few miles from the Pentagon.
Humayun holds and protects his Mom. Within minutes, NBC confirms the local attack. The Pentagon is on fire too! They jump up, and his mother runs for the kitchen telephone to call her husband. He always drives past the Pentagon on his daily commute to downtown Washington, D.C.
Humayun watches his Mom on the phone. When she hears her husband’s voice, she breathes with a deep sigh, looking skyward. He is bureau chief of the Afghan language services at the Voice of America on C Street. This is the man who, 21 years ago, led his family from political strife in Afghanistan. He is the head of a culturally oriented family, rich in music, poetry, and the meditative traditions of their faith. He also inspired his oldest son Humayun to be a passionate student of Farsi poetry and music.
As a result, Humayun learned a form of religious devotional music from master musicians in India, music composed out of Hindu and Islamic influences during the past 1,000 years.
But this day, in their beautiful ranch-style house of 15 years, congenial Humayun and his gentle mother just sit and watch. They follow the tragic events throughout the day—with millions of others—in horror, tears, and undirected anger. But unlike most other Americans, either born or naturalized, they will soon be dealing with another kind of blast, a psychological one. They will learn that their own Afghanistan is harboring the guilty terrorists.
Afghan-born Humayun Khan is a well-groomed, serious young man of 29, basking in the success of a budding career, no different than other American young people in good times. He has become accomplished in singing while playing harmonium, a keyboard instrument operated with air from squeeze bellows, sort of a table model Western accordion. Humayun is gifted in singing the diverse song structures called ragas. He tells the uninitiated, “It is improvised music. Even the sounds of the words are not expressed as the meanings of words but used as musical intonations, like an instrument.” The form he likes is Khyal, a Persian word for imagination. “You take a phrase of music and improvise with it repeatedly to express the emotions of the moment.”
By nightfall on September 11, Humayun’s enthusiasm for his music has changed. Shocked by terror attacks in his adopted country, America, and the trouble in his native homeland, he relives fears and anxieties he has not experienced since he was a child fleeing Afghanistan.
In the coming days, he will stop practicing music because of the tragic and hurtful September 11th. Thus, his life—professionally, socially, spiritually—also stops. Humayun Khan falls into depression. Only his music could bring him back out of it. But even that has to wait.
***
It was a cold night in Kabul in 1979 when Humayun’s father decided to get his wife and two sons out of Afghanistan. They lived in a comfortable, fashionable house his father built for them in the city. But there was trouble lately. Humayun remembers agents of the Communists, the latest lords of the land, coming to their home and questioning his father. Two of his father’s uncles had also been questioned. One of them, an accomplished musician, had been tortured and killed, the musician says.
His father was an architect to the deposed king and educated at the University of California at Berkeley. Humayun recalls that in 1979 he was restoring the two giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan on the ancient Silk Road through Afghanistan to China, the statues later destroyed by the Taliban regime. He says their family was one of the best known in Kabul. Great masters of Indian music stayed in their home and performed for Humayun’s parents and friends.
But then, it was time for the family to flee. Humayun says his father left first, on a fake business trip to Germany, then continued to Washington, D.C. In northern Virginia, he rented an apartment and inquired about a job he later took at the World Bank. A few weeks later, his wife, eight-year-old Humayun, and his younger brother left their home forever, saying they were going to visit some relatives in Switzerland. It was a sad commentary to tell, he says.
“My father still complains in good humor, ‘Why didn’t you at least bring the pictures of my fond days at Berkeley?’” Humayun says, “But we were too scared. We left with nothing but a suitcase.”
Until September 11, 2001, they had been living at peace and unafraid.
It takes an old friend and fellow musician, John Wubbenhorst, to revive Humayun from his depression in late September.
John, a master bansuri (bamboo flute) player, had been meditating with his spiritual guru, Adi Da Samraj at the Adidam Temple in Middleton, California. Meditating allowed him to filter out thoughts of the world in turmoil. His mind transcended those thoughts. He suddenly remembered Humayun. The two friends had lost touch for more than a year.
John phoned Humayun, and they began talking about how they might work together, find a way to make Humayun’s music a healing force for all the turmoil caused by the September 11th attacks.
“I never dreamed this terrible day would come to America,” said Humayun to his friend. “It’s outrageous that these people work in the name of Islam. And yet I know there are people even more upset than me, those who have spent their entire lives in this beautiful country.”
The two agree to collaborate and create the appropriate healing music. They try out new musical ideas at a “Prayer for Peace” concert in New York City on October 5. They then fly to California to receive spiritual blessing from guru Adi Da Samraj to start composing and recording a new CD.
***
On a cool, misty evening in November, John arrives first at Omega Recording Studio in Rockville, Maryland. As they had planned, Humayun would come two hours later and percussionist Steve Bloom in four hours. Their goal is clear: begin writing and recording the signature raga for a CD they would name “Ornaments of the One Heart,” dedicated to followers of peace and tolerance in both Afghanistan and America. The musicians’ vision, born out of a deep gravity of music, is that different people, as ornaments of the whole, can learn to share a more heartfelt, peaceful way of life. The three musicians are well-versed in both Afghan music and the poetry of Rumi, who advocated unlimited tolerance, positive reasoning, goodness, charity, and awareness through love.
They decide to call the first and signature raga, “Compressed Karma.” It would express how rapid growth in technological ways of communicating has made the world small, making war devastating. “We all are living very closely. We have to learn to transcend our differences,” explains John. “For this world to continue, we have to get along at a deeper level. What better way to do that than through music.”
But the project will be slow and expensive. Musicians usually don’t pay for studio recording before they compose and rehearse the music. But they are anxious to get started. They say they don’t have much time.
For “Compressed Karma,” Humayun chooses an intense, emotion-filled raga called Puriya Dhanasri, usually performed late at night. The essential mood is of churning energy, tragic yet with some hope, with intense change or solution shining through, perhaps good for overcoming September 11. The raga starts slowly, as it captures listeners’ emotions, builds to a fast pace, then slows again. But they worry. Would a high-energy Puriya Dhanasri, a tragic yet hopeful raga, begin the healing for the listener? In simple terms, would their healing song work? John is a tall, lanky 43-year-old resident of Takoma Park, Maryland. He’s a music director and a natural motivator of collaborators. He will direct recording of the raga in methodical and rapid tracks of Humayun’s vocals and harmonium, John’s flute and keyboard synthesizer, and finally Steve’s percussion. As the studio engineer sets up microphones, John sits in the control room, mentally organizing tracks.
The Puriya Dhanasri, the healing song they need to open the CD, is on.
John goes to the studio and sits on a lone stool with his flute. Behind the glass divider, in the control room, the engineer throws a switch. A big Studer Master Recorder snaps down on two-inch Mylar tape. The raga opens with droning chimes and chords that John recorded earlier on a keyboard synthesizer. John experiments with the flute to find the right “fit.” The flute’s fluttering notes seem to herald the coming of ominous events.
John stops and asks the engineer, over and over again, to replay his two-minute solo opening. But his music is not working. “I am getting a very weird sound on the recording; I can’t play with that!” he says, irritated. John swivels his stool to face the keyboard. He tries to play but stops again. “Problem is, Humayun is not here.”
The healing song is off.
Soon Humayun slips into the control room, flashing a boyish grin he rarely shows lately. “Johnny, still recording flute?” he says through an open microphone to the studio.
“Yeah man, doin’ fine, just tryin’ to work out the tracks,” John replies with a broad smile, always the motivator. He begins to relax in his baggy cotton pants, moccasin loafers, and an old dress shirt. John comes to the control room to join Humayun there and curls his long legs into a chair. He improvises a soulful jazz riff on the flute that he suddenly likes. “Yeah! Maybe my music is going to be here after all.”
Then he says, upbeat, “Hey man, you ready to sing?”
Humayun looks confident in a black high-neck sweater and black slacks to match his thick black hair. His solid brow and squared, clean-cut features stand out against the dark outfit. “OK, John, can we do Bandish for, say, four minutes?”
Bandish is when an Afghan or Indian singer improvises three or four lines of lyrics to fit them into a defined structure of a particular raga.
John answers impulsively, “Just Bandish, man? Maybe eight minutes? Do it until you get the feeling, go with the flow.”
Humayun enters the studio alone and asks the engineer to dim the lights very low. He starts a little box to simulate rhythm, a sort of Indian metronome. Click… click…click… Humayun sits cross-legged in the darkroom on an oriental rug in front of his harmonium.
His right hand plays the keyboard. His left hand pumps the instrument’s bellows. He begins to sing, warming up his voice slowly, “ahhhhhh.”
Humayun sings long one-syllable notes, “ahhhh, ahhh, ehhhh,” each lasting several seconds, wavering and slightly quivering at times. His voice grows louder, fuller, filling the studio. Suddenly, this introverted young man has overtaken everyone there with the power of his emotionally charged voice. The song has a mesmerizing effect. Humayun’s head moves with the rhythm of the electronic metronome click…click…click….
John breaks the engineer’s concentration with, “Listen to the control Humayun has. There are such incredibly high standards to get to this level. When you learn from the Indian masters of this music, as both of us have, you get used to the incredibly harsh treatment they give you. It’s just brutal patronage,” he laughs nervously. “Yes, the ragas are structured, but you improvise within. The level of perfection and intonation, everything, is so high!”
Their healing song is on.
Humayun’s session is interrupted when Steve Bloom arrives. He asks John, Humayun, and two studio engineers to help quickly carry in a dozen different kinds of drums, chimes, bells, and cymbals from his van parked in the rain.
Before long, Steve is sitting in the studio on a short stool with an assortment of drums in a semicircle within his reach.
Steve Bloom, mid-40s, is a well-accomplished percussionist in Cuban, Latin, Brazilian, Jazz, Rock and Roll, New Age, Middle Eastern and Indian music. He joins John’s and Humayun’s passion for the project right away. “I feel like I have been building toward this my entire career,” he says to Humayun. They have never played together before, but Humayun welcomes him warmly.
Humayun, suddenly a curious spectator, sits with John in the control room as Steve plays timidly at first. He experiments on Indian tabla, a set of one metal drum and one wooden drum, trying different rhythms with Humayun’s pre-recorded vocals playing, “Sa Re Ga ma Pa Dha Ni Sa, Sa Ni Dha Pa ma Ga Re.”
John is excited, clapping and swaying, “Steve has lots of bells and whistles.”
Then Steve says to John through the glass, “You want it relatively busy, right, John?”
John says, “Yeah, your layers will get busy as we go.”
But Humayun is impatient with John’s multiple-path directing and suggests, “John, I think we should decide on the right vocal track now.” (before recording percussion)
John, irritated more with his own indecision than Humayun’s idea, says, “I don’t know, Humayun. I just don’t know right now, OK?”
Their healing song seems in jeopardy.
Steve taps, pokes, and slaps the tabla, then a large drum. He searches for the right sound and pressure, tapping on the drums.
Humayun, now standing in the control room, hands on hips, peers with grave concern through the glass.
Noticing, Steve taps more deliberately on the tabla and a large upright drum alternately. “Is that a stupid sound?” he asks.
“No, in fact, that’s the right sound,” replies the ever-pleasant Humayun.
John reassures his star vocalist, “You don’t really understand what Steve is doing until you hear all the parts. Then you hear this huge awareness coming from him.”
They watch Steve’s confidence build for 25 minutes, finding his groove, a rhythmic fit to the vocal and flute tracks…tapping, slapping, clicking, thumping, and chiming.
Finally, Humayun nods in approval.
They anticipate that several more recording sessions are needed.
Yet, they sense their healing song is back on.
***
It is a few weeks later at Branch House, a 90-year-old Tudor-style mansion in Richmond, Virginia, on a chilly evening. The three musicians are setting up to play “Compressed Karma,” their healing song, in public for the first time. It’s a benefit for the local Adidam Temple.
They are in front of a large fireplace in a huge living room. A 20-foot ceiling covers antique hand-carved, wood-paneled walls. They tune up, pleased with the superb acoustics in the room and the orange flickering light of the fireplace.
Twenty-one polite people, chatting quietly, watch the musicians from comfortable chairs arranged in a semi-circle. They don’t know what to expect. The benefit was billed in an arts newspaper as “World Music to Heal and Inspire, featuring musicians from Afghanistan and the USA.”
Steve is on a stool concealed by several drums and cymbals. On Steve’s right, John looks around at everyone. He is cross-legged on the floor in front of his synthesizer keyboard, bansuri bamboo flute in hand. Humayun, again in all black, is tense. He sits cross-legged on Steve’s left, staring at his harmonium. His posture is upright, formal.
Finally, John says pleasantly to the assembled ears, “This raga is for peace and healing in both America and Afghanistan. It’s a Puriya Dhanasri.”
Humayun appears to be in prayer.
Will the healing song work?
John, in a mauve long-sleeved shirt with an Indian pattern, switches on a small electronic box that eases out slow, droning reverberation. His first keyboard chords, every three seconds, explore the room.
Slowly, John picks up his flute and tosses weightless notes off the walls of the large old room. A minute into the song, his flute solo signals a coming change. The lilting flute increases tempo slightly, taking the audience to a new awareness.
Steve rolls the fingertips of both hands on a cymbal slowly, then more and more rapidly. He grabs and silences the disk.
Four minutes in, Humayun sings his first notes quietly, “ahhahhh….. ahhahhh….eehh.” The keyboard notes quicken the rhythm to every two seconds. Humayun adds energy to his notes, drawing them out for 20 seconds.
Steve fingers a second cymbal roll. The song is developing steadily.
As Humayun’s voice grows louder, the raga signals an approaching crisis.
John plays quiet chords on the synthesizer.
Steve softly thumps a muffled bass drum, creating sounds similar to distant thunder or bombing. Steve now taps an earthy rhythm, one beat per second.
Humayun chants, “Sa Re Ga ma Pa Dha Ni Sa, Sa Ni Dha Pa ma Ga Re.”
John accents Humayun’s voice with a much quieter chanting refrain.
Steve brings the tabla onto his lap. Tap…tap….tap….tap.
The music is sad and foreboding.
Humayun’s voice grows louder, wavering.
Six minutes in, Humayun sings in a wailing, almost agonizing way, yet the music is not unpleasant. It’s inspirational. His head waves from side to side to the rhythm of the chanting beat.
Tap…tap…tap…tap…
The singer forms the first, fully pronounced words: a call on universal truth, ala Rumi, expressing both the pain and wonder of the human condition, “Suual..taan…Aalam. Nizamuddin auliya.” He fills the room with quiet hope. “Suual..taan…Aalam. Nizamuddin auliya……Suual..taan…Aalam. Nizamuddin auliya…”
Nine minutes in, Humayun opens his mouth wide for the first time, his head leaning back. His deep-set dark eyes plead. He prays for sympathetic understanding and spiritual help.
As the song nears a climactic pitch, Humayun’s energy-charged voice captures the full attention of the audience. They sway a bit with the music.
For the next 14 minutes, the raga—the healing song—builds into a tranquilizing rhythm as Humayun’s voice becomes loud and overpowering; the keynotes, drums, and droning are also loud and intense.
He becomes more deliberate, his head low, chin dug into his chest. Some notes are more pleasant, transcending earlier notes of tragedy and suffering. His notes are every half second now, at 19 minutes in. His face becomes more animated, searching, probing, and questioning. His body sways, expands, contracts as his left-hand forefinger and thumb dance together up and down with the notes.
Tap…TAP…tap. TAP, tap, TAP, tap…
Then at once, the three musicians exchange a glance, a signal to return to the raga’s first downbeat. The circle—peace, turmoil, back to healing peace—closes.
Humayun’s voice quiets into softer tones.
Steve slows the tempo: Tap..tap….tap.…..tap……..tap……..….tap………….
Humayun’s voice offers hope in quieter, more earthly tones of resolution.
The synthesizer slows.
The tabla stops.
The remaining reverberation also fades.
The old room, which just a moment ago was bursting with powerful music, is stone silent. The collective audience, now transformed into the ornaments of one heart, stares as one soul
at the musicians with great anticipation. They refrain from applauding for long moments.
They watch Humayun, who takes a deep sigh.
John and Steve also look with anticipation at the Afghan-born singer, who is still peering into his harmonium.
Humayun looks back at them and smiles broadly.
Ovation becomes cheers.
Humayun knows.
The healing song works.
***
This true story was an assignment to be written in the present tense for my graduate literary journalism course at the University of Maryland in September 2001. It has never before been published or read outside of that classroom.
With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 forthcoming, I contacted Humayun Khan again for an update on his life and career. I was not surprised to find the very modest, polite, and courteous man I’d met 20 years ago. I asked him to recall the Richmond concert and what the healing song experience has meant over the years. At that time, he had been performing for most of a decade, singing and playing traditional instruments of North Indian classical music and traditional folk and modern classical music of Afghanistan. “That period of time, after September 11, put me into a broader frame of mind. It showed me that all these influences I had experienced were helping me to relate to so many different things.” He said the healing song “did the job” of easing some emotional pain, but that it meant much more.
“The music became an avenue for me, but also a way of communicating unity, and that music is a universal language; how we could all come together.” He focuses on communicating with music because, in any place in the world, simply combining melody and rhythm communicates regardless of the language to anyone. “And so, going forward, it has always been in the back of my mind, it was not just music. It gave me more of a significance that I am connecting with different cultures through music. Any time I collaborate with musicians of different backgrounds, it is both satisfying musically and (an awareness) to know we were doing something very positive.”
Khan continues to be the well-trained and widely traveled ambassador for music. His musical career has flourished.
Since early childhood, his musical path was influenced by famous Afghan singers and, since the 1980s, by American pop music and his father’s interest in Western classical music and Indian classical music. In high school, he was exposed to hip-hop with his friends. “All of these things were mixing together in a kind of fusion of music,” he said.
Following the violent terrorists’ attacks on September 11, 2001, he performed in a series of Concerts for Peace at the Kennedy Center. He has performed at the Asilah International Festival in Morocco, in the Library of Congress in the Neptune Plaza Series, the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institute and the Rumi Festival in Chapel Hill, N.C., among many other venues. He has been mastering a unique blend of Persian poetry and Indian classical ragas.
Humayun Khan also teaches master classes at several well-known universities, including the University of Virginia, James Madison University, Bennington College, India International School, and Montgomery College.
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