Words Without Music: A Memoir

Every station of any size had a bookstall that carried the whole Penguin Books series, brought out from London. I clearly remember reading George Orwell’s Burmese Days between Lucknow and Patna Junction, and Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers between Patna Junction and Siliguri.

Mashhad is considered a holy city, where saints are buried. We planned to spend a few days but soon found that whole parts of the city were closed to us. There were no signs or warnings. If we wanted to enter a part of the city that, unknown to us, was closed to foreigners, a crowd of people would quietly but suddenly block access. It was not violent, but it was decisive. We never were able to see any of the religious sites of Iran.

was interested in the acoustics and how they worked, so Allen would go on the stage and recite the famous W. B. Yeats poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” The tourists who were around would sit down in the seats in the amphitheater and listen, because here’s someone with a big head of hair who looked like a professor—I don’t think anyone knew it was Allen Ginsberg—and the guards didn’t stop him. He would walk to the center of the stage and recite, and it was amazing how beautiful and clear the poem would sound in that open environment.