In Search of Heer

by Manjul Bajaj

The world hates those who do not conform. It is easier to forgive liars and cheaters, thieves and murderers than to tolerate someone who does not aspire to the same things as others.

He who shuts his eyes to his own beauty becomes blind to the rest of the world’s magnificence too.

Before there was life, there was sound. We are all, creatures big and small, birthed of the same seven notes. He who has complete mastery of the seven notes can communicate with the soul of all things.

Travelling gave me brighter eyes and keener ears, jolting my senses to a fine alert.

isn’t faith our home away from home?

The whole world loves a lover. The more impossible his quest for love seems to them, the more they love him for it.

Deprive a peasant of his harvest with a flash of the sword once and it is called robbery. Do it at random intervals and it’s described as banditry. Do it systematically, year after year, backed by swordsmen in uniforms, and it is called governance.

I stepped into the water knowing that it would decide my fate one way or the other. It was not that I was a loser, a quitter. It was just that I did not wish to fight any battle in which God was not on my side.

a warrior is only as respected as the justice of his cause. The difference between the hero and bandit lies not in how well each wields the sword but in the cause to which their weapon is drawn.’

As long as there are men around offering to protect them, women have everything to be scared of. She was better off fighting her own battles.

In the temporal world, ours is known as the land of the five rivers but it is equally the land of the five saints, the five realised souls who watch over its mountains, rivers, fields, meadows, and animals. The Panj Pir, or the Five Masters, as they are called, hold the pulse of our people and our land between their fingertips. First, there is Baba Farid Shakarganj of Pakpattan, the patron saint of the Syals. Then there is my beloved Khwaja Khizr, the ruler of the waters, the evergreen presence. There is Sayyid Jalal Bukhari, the brave, who had transformed Genghis Khan’s fire of wrath into a rosebush and later married his daughter. There is Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalander, the red-robed keeper of the Sindh. And then, there is Bahuddin Zakariya of Multan, whose seven sons took the word of the Sufis to all corners of Hindustan.

Music is a pure art, unlike words or images. The meanings of words change with each listener, reduced or expanded to fit the comprehension of the listener’s mind. Images get tainted by the judgment in their viewers’ eyes. The notes of my flute, however, were not constrained in this way. They were free to sing of the ecstasy of coition without being reduced to smut by the vulgarity of the human mind or gaze.

‘I do believe this match is made in heaven but between heaven’s wishes and earth’s acquiescence to them, lies a huge unchartered terrain along which we have to make our own way cautiously, step by careful step.’

The Ravi is the river of commerce, its rich alluvial banks providing a fertile soil for the ambitions of humankind, for growing grains and nurturing grand cities. It is rumoured that ancient cities, now lost to us, were founded on its banks, as are present day Lahore and Multan. The Chenab, meanwhile, is the river of lovers, poets, mystics and storytellers. Its waters are sublime with emotions and imagination. Its tales of passion never die, its music soars out into the sky.

At heart, I was a lover of peace. I abhorred violence.

‘Ranjha, have you ever stopped to think why a girl’s place in the world is so small, why a woman’s work is constantly belittled or why she is considered inferior to men, even though she is the one who gives birth to them and raises them? I’ll tell you why. Because if she leaves her father or husband’s house she might be physically harmed, she might be dragged into a field or an alley and raped, she might be sold to a brothel, she might be carried off by bandits or by enemy soldiers and kept as a sex slave. So she learns, like generations of women have done before her, to trade her freedom for security, her dignity for physical safety. She chooses to live with a hundred little insults to her spirit every day instead of the threat of that one big assault on her body. In the end it all boils down to not being helpless.’

Women can rescue each other. Women can refuse to starve, scare and suppress their daughters. They can be friends and comrades with their daughters-in-law. Women can look out for the safety of their house maids and farm labourers. Women can insist that other women be treated with respect and dignity. But for that they first need to stop feeling helpless and scared themselves. They need to stop needing a man to protect them. The price of that protection is just too high.’

What one pigeon knows every pigeon knows, for our consciousness is a collective one. Our stories travel from generation to generation not in words and songs as humankind’s do but as an inner knowledge of our own narrative. We are special. Very special. We can see colours unlike other birds and we can even view rays that elude human eyes. We can charter our course using the earth’s pull. And we can recognise ourselves in the mirror. Self-awareness is a trait not common to many species. Least of all humans, who see and yet do not see, who have divested mirrors of their original purpose and made of them polished surfaces for reflecting their own vanity.

A pride of pigeons is an invincible entity for we are programmed to breed faster every time our population is decimated. Attack gets our procreative juices flowing faster and better, so each attempt to kill us actually ends up enhancing our numerical strength.

There is nothing more abhorrent to pigeons than captivity and forced mating with strangers from other areas in order to sire progeny that conform to human ideas of beauty. We pigeons know a bit more about conjugal love than humans. Once we have cast our troth, it is for life. We do not cheat, or hanker for a little bit of something on the side. We don’t keep mistresses or glibly utter ‘talaaq’ thrice and renege from our commitment. We don’t devise religions that allow us to marry multiple times. We do not think of monogamy as monotony. We do not squander away the future of our young for a few moments of varied pleasure. We are fully invested and committed to the ideal of raising our progeny in a predictable and safe environment.

When body and soul are torn, suffering is a foregone conclusion.

Imagining the death of one’s beloved in graphic detail, comes easy to all lovers as the possibility of losing the object of one’s affection sits just below the surface of the consciousness. The slightest scratch and it’s out in the open, tossing up a hundred different versions of disaster for the mind to wrestle with. To possess love is to be vulnerable to loss. To have too much happiness is to tempt fate.

I wanted justice for myself, not punishment for the offenders. I wanted happiness in life for myself, not eternal suffering after death for them. If there was a way of achieving these, my will could not see it.

A woman is not a man even if she is a warrior like Heer. She still bleeds each month. She cannot simply run away and live a life on the road. Her body’s curse goes with her. She needs a place to be private in those days. Even a temple or a mosque will not allow her in because she is unclean. Don’t you think it is unreasonable, Nanhi, that the Maker should turn his back on the body he created, during those days?’

It had been a mistake to chuck away his flute. Heer was lost to him. Music wasn’t. He was confusing the issue. You don’t cut off your second limb to protest against being deprived of the first one. His music would have healed him, kept him going, helped him sublimate his sorrow and rise above it. But then, he did not want to be healed.

I wanted the arrogance of one who has nothing left to lose,

What I knew of myself

was worth less than a fingernail in the body of knowledge available to the great jogis.

I had been brought up to believe that sorrow, like menstruation, was something women were meant to suffer in secret, hidden from the eyes of the world. The everyday suffering of women was as ineluctable as their bleeding each month, and as inappropriate to show. Good women did not reveal tear-stained faces or blood-stained clothes, besmirching the reputation of their families by these untoward displays of the weaknesses of their minds and bodies. They wept, like they bled, in quiet, darkened rooms and emerged out of them only when they were clean again, clear of all tell-tale signs of bodily fluids.

Was I in love with him? Was he in love with me? Was love, then,

not a game one played in one’s head but a real thing which demanded actual decisions and irrevocable actions?

This was the moment to be so sure of what we desired that the universe had no

choice but to bow to our will.