The House Where the Praise Is Sung

The first song of the Sohila is Guru Nanak's, in Raag Gauri Deepki — Gauri 'of the lamp.' Sant Kartar Singh Bhindranwale, teaching this shabad in the santhya tradition of Damdami Taksal — the slow, word-by-word reading passed down in the seminary — hears the whole prayer in that musical signature. Gauri, he says, is the intellect; raag is love; and deepki is what happens when the two meet: 'Whoever sings this Sohila with the love of the raag, this holy bani lights the lamp of divine knowledge in their understanding.' A lamp lit at night, inside the mind, just before sleep — the shabad does what its raag promises.

Which home? The kathakars answer with one voice first, and then each adds his own. The first home, they all say, is the sadh sangat — the gathering where the Creator is praised and pondered. Sant Gurbachan Singh points out that the verse itself describes a full evening in such a gathering: first kirtan, the singing; then vichar, the reflection — 'just as this katha is happening now,' he smiles, teaching in exactly the house the verse describes. But Sant Kartar Singh hears a second home inside the first: your own daily life. Read this way, the verse becomes a rule of practice: sing, and when singing tires, reflect; when reflection tires, remember — kirtan, vichar, simran, turning like a wheel. 'Do not let the mind sit idle for a single moment,' he tells the sangat, and gives them a village image to carry it: a potter hobbles his donkey before he loads it, or it wanders and spills everything. Simran is the hobble; the Name is the load; the mind is that donkey. Tie it kindly, every day, and it carries treasure.

This is the rahau — the line the whole shabad turns on. And its key word is Nirbhau, the Fearless. Giani Sant Singh Maskeen asks the question a child would ask: why sing to the Fearless One at bedtime, of all hours? Because, he answers, underneath every human fear — of poverty, of loss, of disgrace, of illness — sits one root fear: the fear of ending. 'Sleep is a small death,' Maskeen says, 'and death is a long sleep.' Every night we rehearse the letting-go we dread most, and so the Guru placed into that exact moment a song addressed to the only One who has never feared anything. He quotes the Guru's own promise: nirbhau japai sagal bhau mitai — remember the Fearless One, and every fear dissolves. You cannot argue fear out of the heart; but you can sing something larger into it.

And what is the 'everlasting peace' the rahau promises? Here Sant Kartar Singh does something only a teacher formed by Sikh history would do: he proves the line with martyrs. Bhai Mati Das, sawn in two at Delhi, reciting Japji as the blade came down. Bhai Dyala in the cauldron, asking only that the pot not be covered, so his eyes could rest on Guru Tegh Bahadur while he recited Sukhmani. Bhai Mani Singh, joint by joint, calmly correcting the executioner who tried to spare him. These are not stories of endurance, Kartar Singh insists — endurance breaks. They are stories of sada sukh: a peace that had gone so deep, through a lifetime of this singing, that the body's worst hour could not reach it. That is what the word 'everlasting' means in this verse — not comfort that lasts, but peace that cannot be confiscated.

Bhai Pinderpal Singh, teaching this verse to a modern sangat, tells a story he loves. A man complains to a faqir: I am so poor I can barely eat once a day. The faqir studies him and says, 'You? You are a millionaire many times over.' The man laughs bitterly. 'Then sell me one of your eyes,' says the faqir. 'Name your price — twenty million?' The man recoils. 'Both eyes, then — take everything I can raise.' 'Not for all the money in the world,' says the man — and stops, hearing himself. Tere daanai keemat na pavai: you are already carrying gifts you would not sell for the wealth of the earth, and you received every one of them free, before you could even ask. And then the verse takes the next step, the one Sant Gurbachan Singh warns us not to skip: if the gifts cannot be priced, do not imagine you can take the measure of the Giver. Kavan sumaar — what count could there be? The teachers of the Prof Sahib Singh school note that sumaar is a Persian word, a merchant's word for tallying — precisely the kind of arithmetic that fails here.

Now the wedding-song shows its face. In old Punjab, when a daughter's marriage date — the saha — was fixed, her girlfriends would gather in the evenings to sing sohile and rub oil into her hair: maiyan, the tender ceremonies of getting-ready. Guru Nanak lifts that whole scene and turns it toward the soul. Your saha is written too, he says — the year and day this soul leaves for its true home were fixed before you arrived. So do what a bride does: gather with your companions and prepare. The kathakars read the oil with great gentleness. Sant Gurbachan Singh calls it 'the oil of love' — worked not into hair but into one's own thoughts, softening them, so that what has been dry and tangled in us lies down smooth. And the blessings we are told to ask for? Those are the prayers of the sangat around us — because in this wedding, says the tradition, no one gets ready alone.

Sant Gurbachan Singh then adds a story from the old Puranic world, told the way he loved to tell them — with the Guru's meaning waiting at the end. The princess Rukmani was promised by her family to Shishupal, a match she dreaded. So she sent word secretly to Krishna, and on the day appointed, Krishna came and carried her away, and Shishupal's armies could not stop him. Kaal — death — comes for every soul like Shishupal comes for Rukmani, says Gurbachan Singh: with a claim, with a date, with a procession. But the soul that has already given itself to the Deathless One cannot be taken by death; it has a prior wedding. 'Those who have wed Akal Purakh as Rukmani wed Krishna — for them, Kaal is defeated like Shishupal.' The saha written over your head becomes, for such a soul, not a sentence but an appointment.

In the wedding villages of Guru Nanak's Punjab, the pahucha was the formal message carried house to house: the date is set, come. The Guru looks at the world and sees that messenger already on every street. News of a passing reaches this house, then that one — sadare nit pavann, the summons land daily — and each one is addressed, in the end, to everyone. The teachers of the Prof Sahib Singh school give the line its plainest force: the invitation is already travelling toward your door; the only question is whether you will be dressed. But Sant Gurbachan Singh finds a second, brighter reading, and it may be the most beautiful thing said anywhere in these fifty-three recordings. The sadare, he says, are not only death's notices. The saints themselves are the invitation-bearers — the vairagi, souls so in love with God that they have let everything else go, who go house to house like the bride's aunts before a wedding, calling out: this human life is worth millions of moments, why are you sleeping through it? Every katha, every kirtan, every nudge toward the sangat is a wedding invitation from the Caller Himself. Sadanhara simariai: remember the One who keeps sending them. However the summons finds you — as a warning or as a welcome — it is the same Beloved's handwriting on the envelope.

So the first song of the night ends where a wedding eve ends: the date known, the oil poured, the friends' blessings said, the house quiet. Maskeen draws the day's last lesson from it with his usual simplicity. We do not know the year written over us — mercifully. But we are given a rehearsal every twenty-four hours: a small departure, a lying-down, a letting-go. Sing the Fearless One's sohila into that small death each night, he says, and when the long sleep comes it will find you among friends, adorned, and unafraid.