The City of Desire

The fourth song changes voice. After three shabads of Guru Nanak, the Sohila gives one verse each to two of his successors — as if the night prayer itself wanted to show that the Light passes on. This one is Guru Ram Das's, and it begins in the dark: a walled city, crowded to the gates — and the city is you. Sant Gurbachan Singh opens his katha of this shabad with a sakhi of its author. A farmer once begged the young Guru Ram Das to shoo the animals out of his millet field, and the Guru, looking at the man, answered the deeper request: the field is your own body; the animals eating your crop are desire and anger; and the little word 'he' — the very sound a Punjabi farmer shouts to drive beasts off — rings at the end of every single line of this shabad. Listen to it in the Gurmukhi: bhariaa he, khanda he, manda he. Guru Ram Das built the farmer's shout into the poem itself. Each verse ends by driving something out.

Bahu bhariaa — not lightly touched, but filled. Sant Kartar Singh presses the word: 'rom rom bhariaa hoya hai' — saturated to every pore. And he will not let his sangat imagine that desire and anger are small enemies. He tells the old cautionary tales at full length: Saubhari, the ascetic so still that an anthill grew over him — undone in a day when desire woke; Shringi, whose penance could bring rain to a drought-struck kingdom, unravelled by one celestial visitor sent to touch his feet — 'and when the foundation of a building is dug out,' Kartar Singh says, 'the whole building comes down.' Then anger, which announces itself in the first person in his telling: 'When I arrive, I blind the seeing and deafen the hearing.' He tells of a court pandit who preached daily that anger makes a person an outcaste — until the day an actual outcaste stood at his door while he sulked in fury, and said: give me back my brother; you keep him in your heart. If desire could topple Saubhari and anger could inhabit a scholar of scriptures, what chance does an unarmed householder stand? That is the shabad's honest starting point — and then its mercy: mil sadhu. You were never meant to fight this city's garrison alone.

The weapon hidden in the verse delights every kathakar who touches it: khandal khanda — 'broken to pieces' — but a khanda is also the double-edged sword, the very blade that stirred the amrit of the Khalsa. Sant Gurbachan Singh draws the image out whole: 'Take the khanda of the sadh sangat from the scabbard of devotion, and cut down desire and anger.' Sant Kartar Singh calls the sangat a fortress and knowledge the sword kept inside it, and reaches back to Guru Nanak at Haridwar for the diagnosis that makes the weapon necessary: the Guru refused a meal cooked in a kitchen scrubbed to ritual perfection, because four uninvited guests sat in it unseen — crooked thinking, cruelty, slander, and wrath. Purity of floor is easy; it is the kitchen of the heart that needs the sword. And the second line answers the question every seeker asks — how did I come to be sitting in the sangat at all? Poorab likhat likhe: it was written before you arrived. Then, in Gurbachan Singh's loveliest turn, the conquered city becomes a dye-house: mandal manda — the Guru is the dyer, the Name is the colour, love is the water, and the mind is cloth lowered gently into the vat. What was a garrison town becomes a wedding garment. The same verse that draws a sword ends by dyeing you crimson for the Beloved.

The rahau prescribes something almost embarrassingly simple: fold your hands; bow down. Sant Gurbachan Singh, precise as ever, walks through the grammar of reverence — anjuli, the cupped and folded hands; bandana, the bow with them; dandaut, lying flat as a staff. And then he removes the floor from under all of it: prostration without surrendered ego, he says, is 'merely a wrestler's press-up.' The body's geometry earns nothing by itself; what the posture is for is to teach the ego the shape of lying down. Why is so much merit hung on so small an act? Because, the kathakars answer, desire and anger are both diseases of self-assertion — I want, I am wronged — and the folded hand is the one gesture neither of them can perform. Humility, Sant Kartar Singh says in his own summary of this shabad, is the warrior's actual armour. The sword is the sangat; the armour is being small.

The shabad now looks with pity — the kathakars insist it is pity, not scorn — at the sakat, the one who lives turned away. Sant Gurbachan Singh reaches for a kitchen image his village listeners would know: the one stubborn bean — the korhru — that stays stone-hard in the pot no matter how long the rest have softened. Some hearts, he says, have simply never let the sweetness in — not because it was withheld, but because a thorn is lodged where the tasting happens. Haumai kanda: the splinter of I-am. His analogies are almost tender — a thorn in a child's throat, so that even good food hurts going down; the thorn of envy, which cannot bear to watch another person shine. And the walking line is the shabad's sharpest mercy: jiu jiu chaleh, chubhai — the more you walk on a splintered foot, the deeper the splinter drives. Effort itself turns to pain when the thorn is still in. How many people, the kathakars ask, work furiously at life — even at religion — and only ache more? The shabad's diagnosis: nothing is wrong with your walking. Sit down first, in the sangat, and let the thorn be drawn.

Against the thorn-pierced walker, the verse sets the Har jan — the ones who have sunk into the Name the way the dyed cloth sank into the vat. For them the whole machinery of dread — birth, death, the fear between — is khanda he: cut through, the sword-word sounding one more time. Sant Gurbachan Singh does not let the promise stay abstract; he spells out what is being escaped with the old vivid physiology of the womb and the deathbed, pain he compares to fine wire drawn through a die, to a net of thorns dragged backward. The kathakars of every generation have kept these images deliberately fierce, not to frighten, but so the size of the rescue can be felt. And then the strange, generous last clause: the rescued soul's glory spreads bahu sobh — through the continents, through the universes. The ones who bowed lowest, who made themselves the least, are the ones whose praise will not stay inside one world. The Sohila keeps no middle register: lie flat as a staff, and be sung of across the brahmand.

And the shabad ends the way the Arti ended: face down, hands open. Ham garib maskin — we are poor, we are lowly. Sant Gurbachan Singh reads the poverty spiritually: poor as in owning no store of virtues, no spiritual capital, not even the 'family' of contentment and forgiveness to our name — and then he points at the two words that turn destitution into safety: prabh tere. Yours. A pauper who belongs to the emperor is not poor. This is the same word — maskin, the meek one — that a later devout age would give to Giani Sant Singh Maskeen as his very name; the whole tradition of katha understands itself as speaking from inside this line, poor at the door of the Word. The last verse then plants the staff: naam adhar tek — the Name as the walking-stick of a person whose thorn is gone but whose road is long. Desire promised joy and delivered a garrison; anger promised strength and delivered a splinter. The Name delivers what they only promised: sukh manda he — joy, adorned, made full, at home. The farmer's field is quiet now. The crop can grow.