Leonard Cohen’s time in Bombay was not the origin of “Bird on the Wire,” nor can the available accounts show that the city caused his return to recording or touring. It was, instead, a significant chapter in a longer passage through silence, spiritual inquiry, and renewed public work. In a 2016 first-person account, Ratnesh Mathur recalls meeting Cohen in 1998 and building an eighteen-year friendship around the singer’s visits to Bombay and his attendance at the satsangs of teacher Ramesh Balsekar.
How Ratnesh Mathur met Leonard Cohen in Bombay
Mathur says he read that Cohen was in Bombay in 1998 and went to a small hotel in Kemp’s Corner, hoping to leave CDs and books for the musician to autograph. Instead, Cohen came out and invited him to talk. Mathur remembers their first conversation lasting five hours. He says it began a friendship that continued for eighteen years. These details come from Mathur’s own recollection, published in 2016, rather than an independently documented account of their private meetings. Read Mathur’s account in Scroll.in.
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Why Cohen came to Bombay
According to Mathur, Cohen had encountered the writings of Advaita teacher Ramesh Balsekar while living at Mount Baldy and wanted to meet him. Mathur says Cohen read Balsekar’s book Consciousness Speaks and attended his daily morning satsangs in Bombay. A satsang is a gathering centered on spiritual teaching or inquiry.
Mathur recalls Cohen reciting verses by Dnyaneshwar, the thirteenth-century Marathi bhakti poet, and reflecting on sagun and nirgun: devotion to God understood with form and without form. In this account, Bombay is not simply a stop on a travel itinerary. It is the setting for an encounter with a teacher and ideas Cohen had already begun exploring.
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What Cohen did during his Bombay visits
Mathur says Cohen spent much of 1999 and 2000 in Bombay, then returned for shorter visits through 2003. He describes Cohen attending morning satsangs and spending the rest of the day in his room reading, meditating, sketching, and writing. Mathur also recalls him emailing his children and manager.
Mathur portrays Cohen as interested in ordinary residents and not especially drawn to socializing with the city’s elite. These are Mathur’s observations of a friend, not a comprehensive record of Cohen’s daily life. They nevertheless offer a more intimate picture than the image of a touring musician passing through: a visitor who made time for spiritual practice, solitary work, and attention to people around him.
The silence before Bombay: Cohen at Mount Baldy
Bombay came after a substantial period of retreat. In a 2005 interview with Kari Hesthamar, Cohen said he had spent five years in meditation and silence with his Zen teacher at Mount Baldy. He also looked back on the period after his 1993 tour, saying he had been drinking heavily and had stopped thinking of his writing as a voice intended for the stage. Read Cohen’s interview with Kari Hesthamar.
Cohen described a divide between writing and performing: “I thought I had a voice, but I thought it was a written voice, so I never thought it was a voice that could be presented on the stage.” That retrospective helps explain why the idea of “finding his voice again” resonates. But it does not establish that Bombay, Balsekar’s satsangs, or any single event made Cohen resume performing. Mathur’s account documents the Bombay relationship and its practices; Cohen’s interview gives his own perspective on an earlier retreat and his relationship to performance.
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“Bird on the Wire” began before the Bombay chapter
The song and the Bombay story belong to different periods. Cohen’s recollections do not place the song’s composition in India. In Hesthamar’s interview, Cohen is unsure of the details he remembers and describes trying to revise the lyric while driving along the rainy west coast of America. An excerpt from a 1992 interview, meanwhile, says the song began in Greece, after telephone wires were installed on the island where he lived. The sources therefore support neither a Bombay origin nor a single, certain account of the song’s beginnings. Read the 1992 interview excerpt.
“Bird on a Wire” is also the title of Tony Palmer’s documentary about Cohen at work and on tour. That film is distinct from the song and from the later Bombay encounters Mathur describes. The official Leonard Cohen catalog lists the song; the Tony Palmer film archive describes the documentary.
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What Bombay’s role can—and cannot—mean
The phrase “helped Leonard Cohen find his voice again” works best as an interpretation of the arc, not as a proven cause-and-effect claim. Cohen’s five years of meditation and silence at Mount Baldy preceded his Bombay visits. Mathur’s testimony places the city within Cohen’s spiritual life and describes a sustained friendship, satsang attendance, and time for reading and writing. Cohen later returned to public work, but the accounts here do not demonstrate that Bombay produced that change.
That distinction does not diminish the significance of the Bombay years. They offer a grounded view of a private chapter in which Cohen pursued spiritual questions and formed a close connection with Mathur. To explore his life beyond this account, Mathur points readers toward Sylvie Simmons’s biography, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen.
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