چھلا Challa — The Ring, the Wanderer

What does the ring-wearer keep searching for, wandering? Friends, where is his house, he keeps asking the people, wandering.

The song opens by asking the wanderer what he is looking for and never lets him answer. Labhda phire is the verb of endless searching, find-wandering, and it is the sound of the whole song. The second question is the real one. Usda ghar keda, where is his house, asks after the beloved in the Punjabi idiom, and the lanes answer with the song itself.

چھلا challa

a plain ring; here the one who wears it, the wanderer

لبھنا labhna

to look for, to search: Punjabi

The wanderer goes about laughing. The wanderer goes about weeping. Lane after lane, the wanderer goes about losing himself. Wanderer, you belong to everyone. Wanderer, no one belongs to you. Lane after lane, he goes about losing himself.

The passage turns the wanderer's two faces into one. Hansda and rounda, laughing and weeping, are the same verb with different weather, and rulda, losing or scattering himself, is what he does in every lane. Then the song speaks to him directly, and the two lines are the whole biography: tu sab da, you are everyone's, tera koi nahin, and no one is yours. To belong to everyone and to no one is exactly the condition of the lover in this tradition.

رلنا rulna

to wander lost, to be knocked about: Punjabi

Her speech is a seven-coloured song, a bubbling of every colour. She walks on the feet of the sun, and her palanquin borrows no shade.

The beloved is described in two impossibilities. Her speech is bul-bula di boli, the bubbling speech, and it is seven-coloured, which means the way she talks is a festival. Then she walks in the full sun without shade, which in this song's own language is the highest compliment, because shade is what love gives and what she does not need. The line about the palanquin, the doli, keeps the bride in the picture.

ست رنگی satrangi

of seven colours

ڈولی doli

a palanquin, the litter a bride is carried in

In the black black clouds he finds the moon. He listens to the voiceless winds' melodies. Friends, my beloved lives right here, all around. He cannot be seen, and the wanderer breathes in his scents.

The searching turns inside out. The beloved is not far, the song says: he lives aase-paase, all around, and the reason he cannot be found is that he is not seen at all, only smelled. The lover has become a dog of love, tracking by scent. The moon in the black clouds and the voiceless wind's music are the two ways the invisible shows itself, and the passage ends with the only sense that works.

گونگی goongi

mute, without a voice

وسنا vasna

to dwell, to live somewhere: Punjabi

No meeting ever happened, and no separation either. There is no release for a prisoner of love. His promise to meet me lives inside people's dreams. All night long the eyes will not close. My breath comes a little shorter. My pulse beats a little lower.

The passage is the wanderer's real answer. Visal and judaai, meeting and separation, are the two states every love poem divides the world into, and this love falls in the crack between them: neither came. The beloved's promise of a meeting survives only in other people's dreams. Then the body gives its own report. Breath shorter, pulse lower, night after night. The laughter of the first passage has gone quiet, and the search has become a pulse.

وصال visal

union with the beloved

جدائی judaai

separation

رہائی rihaai

release from prison

نبض nabz

the pulse