The Friend's Request

The last song of the Sohila belongs to Guru Arjan — the Guru who gathered the bani into one prayer, and who would later show the world what its 'everlasting peace' looks like on a burning plate. Bhai Pinderpal Singh opens his katha of this shabad by pointing at its very first word. The Guru does not command here. Karau benanti — 'I make a request.' The Master of masters folds his hands to us, and calls us mita — friend. Every other voice in our lives gives orders, Pinderpal Singh says; the Beloved's voice, at the day's end, makes a plea. And what a friend asks at nightfall lands deeper than what a king decrees at noon.

Sant tahal ki bela — this is the hour. The kathakars turn the word bela over like a jewel. It means the opportune time, the tide that will not wait; Sant Gurbachan Singh hears inside it a second Punjabi word — the bel, the wild creeping vine — and asks: why are you wandering the jungle of the world like an untrained vine, when you were planted for a trellis? Both readings say the same thing: a human life is timed, and the timing is now. Then the merchant's language, which Guru Arjan — raised in a city of traders — uses without embarrassment: iha khat, earn it here. Bhai Pinderpal Singh, who began his series with Guru Arjan's other famous verse about this — 'you have been given this beautiful human body; this is your one turn to meet Gobind' — states the arithmetic plainly: every trader knows a market has hours; the soul's market is open exactly one lifetime. What is bought here is carried forward; what is merely piled up here is left at the door.

This rahau may be the most quietly devastating line a person can say to themselves in bed at night. Audh ghatai: the lifespan is not passing, it is decreasing — every sunset an audit. Sant Gurbachan Singh does the audit out loud for his sangat, and it stings: of a hundred years, he says, half go to sleep at the outset; the first fifteen to the fog of childhood; then youth, spent chasing and quarrelling; then old age, when the body will not obey — 'and how much was left for devotion?' But the kathakars insist on reading the whole line: the Guru names the wound and the medicine in one breath. Man, gur mil — O mind, meet the Guru; kaj savare — and the true work gets set right. Bhai Pinderpal Singh underlines the tenderness hiding in the grammar: the Guru does not say your time is short, therefore panic. He says your time is short, therefore come to me. And he seals the urgency with Kabir's couplet, the one every kathakar keeps within reach: what you would do tomorrow, do today; what you would do today — do now. Death keeps no appointment book that it shows to us.

Two things drown a swimmer in this verse's ocean: bikar, the pull of the vices we met in the fourth song, and sansa — doubt, the water a person cannot find footing in. Sant Gurbachan Singh dares a startling aside here: were it not for vice and doubt, he says, this world itself would be Brahm-roop — the very form of God. The world is not the enemy; the murk in the water is. Who gets across? The Brahm giani — and before pride can stir, the next line takes the credit away from every swimmer: jiseh jagai — whom HE awakens. Grace wakes you; grace tips the cup. And what the awakened one drinks cannot afterwards be reported: akath katha, the story past telling. Sant Gurbachan Singh reaches for the homeliest possible image for the highest possible thing — a mute man given jaggery. He tastes all of it; he can say none of it; his silence and his shining face are the only commentary. Every kathakar in this corpus, at some point, gestures at that boundary — fifty-three recordings of men speaking beautifully about what they keep telling us cannot be spoken.

Ja kau aae — the thing you came for. The kathakars love the image underneath: a villager sent to the city with one errand, who wanders the bazaars all day buying trinkets, and comes home at dusk without the one thing the household needed. The soul was dispatched into this world with a single item on its list. And the reward for remembering the errand is stated in the gentlest real-estate language in scripture: nij ghar mahal — the palace in your own house. Not a paradise elsewhere, purchased on departure; a mansion discovered under your own roof, in your own chest, sukh sahaje — at ease, without strain, the way a door opens that was never actually locked. Bhai Pinderpal Singh points out what follows from finding it: bahur na hoigo phera — no more rounds. The word is a trader's word too: no more circuits of the market, no more turns on the wheel. The bride of the first song went to her Husband's house; the fifth song reveals the address. It was hers all along.

And then the final verse of the final song of the day — the last words the tradition puts in a Sikh's mouth before sleep, and the last sung over them before the fire. Guru Arjan addresses God with the night's most intimate name: Antarjami, the Knower of the inside — the One before whom no unspoken fear or half-formed hope is hidden, which is precisely what a person needs to believe at bedtime. And the request itself is the whole of Sikhi folded into one image: not heaven, not safety, not even union — make me the dust of the saints' feet. The lowest thing in the sangat, and therefore the thing every blessing lands on. Bhai Pinderpal Singh closes his own series with the story of a man who was made exactly that. Rahmat Khan, a Pathan of Lahore, used to stand at the edge of Sant Attar Singh of Mastuana's kirtan — never introduced, never initiated, only listening. Years later, condemned for a murder he had not done, hours from the gallows, he cried out to the Baba Nanak those songs had sung of. And in Sangrur, Sant Attar Singh rose mid-morning and told his startled attendants to leave for Lahore at once — 'a servant does not question the Master's errand.' He reached the jail, called the weeping man by name, and recited to him Guru Arjan's own couplets: 'My strength is gone, my bonds are on me, nothing can be done — says Nanak, now the Lord is my shelter, and He will help, as He helped the elephant.' Within the hour, the true killer was found; the noose was cut. Pinderpal Singh's point is not the miracle. It is the mechanism: the dust the man had gathered, standing quietly at the edge of the sangat all those evenings, was already on his forehead when death came for him. That is the Sohila's whole promise, spoken as a bedtime story. Sing at the edge of the dark. Someone who loves you is listening, and He knows the inside.