The diary, despite his compulsive addiction to various genres of music, was seldom hooked to reggae. To him, Bob Marley was a mere T-shirt graffiti, which though he has profanely flaunted in his days of rebellious misadventures (read readiness to bunk classes for a cause that never was). Marley's music, by his skewed perceptions and confused sensibilities, was garish.
Ignorance it was, and grave at that, but the diary hardly cared, as long as he chalked out make-belief causes to skip classes. And not until he was assigned a trip to the Caribbean did he begin digging up Marley's archives. There was still no instant spark of liking.
So a week later, there he was, at the famous Bob Marley Museum on Hope Street, a plush locale with more churches here per head. A 20-dollar ticket isn't exactly cheap, more so when your are always tonking the currency-converter tab in your brain. But he snatched the ticket, accompanied by a yellow leaflet of Marley's commandments (smoking grass wasn't one of them though).
A few yards outside the house, more Victorian than native, stood Marley's battered 1975 jeep, a rather draggled statue in his epic index finger-up posture and a herb garden “where he used to roll up, smoke, drink herbal tea and meditate”, informs our guide. Inside are rooms of yellowing newspaper clippings (Reggae King Marley Hits at Birth Control, flashed the Irish Times in 1980); Bob's juice blender; Bob's pipe; Bob's slippers; Bob's CIA file; Bob's seatless, pedal-less, flat-tyred bicycle; a reconstruction of Bob's Trench Town Wail'n Soul'm record shack; Bob's denim stage shirt; the stage clothes of Bob's backing singers, the I-Threes; Bob's hammock, “in which he would meditate and smoke his ganja spliff”, and a tusk. The reggae beat, like the incense of weed, is omnipresent and overwhelming. So are his haunting eyes.
At the rear of the house is the kitchen where Marley was shot in the chest and arm one December evening in 1976, a few days before a stage concert, and an incident that prompted his two-year exile in the UK. Of course, he kept his word and performed the concert with the left-arm in the sling. The bullet holes are huge, big enough to push your thumb and forefinger into.
Beyond the house is a desultory stretch, inhabited by ganja-smoking Rastafarians, who repeatedly pester, "You got anything for me maan?" You nod in the negative, and they instantly offer a puff of Marley's favourite herb.
For them, this is a shrine of their deity. “To me, Bob don't die. To me, he is here now,” hollered out a typical jaw-jutting Rastaman, old enough to be older than Marley himself.
The trip ends with a documentary on his life, and though the diary didn't convert instantly into a Rastaman, his musical sensibility was considerably enriched, and he hummed the still vague lines of One Love out of the museum — “One love, one heart, Let's get together and feel all right.”