Invocation, and the Plan of an Unusual Undertaking

The Tale of Rani Ketki and Kunwar Ude Bhan

I bow my head and rub my nose in the dust before Him who made me, who made us all, and in the space of a word brought about everything whose secret no one has ever found.

These breaths that come and go,
without the thought of Him, are all of them nooses.

If this clockwork puppet keeps its Player in mind, why should it fall into sourness, or turn bitter and astringent? Let it taste the sweetness of that fruit which the greatest of those who went before us have tasted.

He gave the eye to see and gave these ears to hear. He set the nose high above all the rest, and gave life as a gift to figures of clay. Where would an earthen pot find the strength to tell anything of its potter's craft? It is true: what has been made, how can it praise its maker, and what can it say? Anyone who likes may lie there and babble. If every hair from head to foot found a voice and all of them sang His praise, and stayed absorbed in it for as many years as there are grains of sand in all the rivers and flowers and pods in the fields, even then it would come to nothing.

Along with this bowing of the head, day and night I repeat the name of the beloved one whom that Giver sent, of whom it has been said, "Had you not been, I would have made nothing" [TN: a Hindustani rendering of the tradition *lawlaka lama khalaqtu al-aflak*, "But for you I would not have created the heavens", said of the Prophet Muhammad], and the thought of his cousin, who was married into his own house [TN: Ali, who married the Prophet's daughter Fatima], stays with me always. I swell with joy beyond what I can contain, and all their children and descendants are where my love lies. Whoever else there may be, nothing else pleases my heart. Apart from this household, what have I to do with any runaway, snatcher, thief or thug? Living or dying, at every hour of the thirty, I keep my hope in all of them and in their house.

The Plan of an Unusual Undertaking

One day, as I sat idle, the thought rose up in my mind of telling a story in which nothing but Hindvi [TN: the plain speech of Hindustan, with no Persian or Arabic words] would appear, and no other tongue at all: only then would my heart open like the bud of a flower. There should be nothing foreign in it, and nothing rustic either. One of my acquaintances, a very learned man, an old hand, a shrewd old fox, raised this objection. Shaking his head, pulling a face, wrinkling his nose and brows, rolling his eyes, he began: "I cannot see this being done. The Hindvi flavour must not be lost, and yet the rustic *bhakha* (country dialect) must not be stuffed in either. To keep the speech exactly as gentlefolk, the best of them, talk among themselves, with no shadow of anyone else's language falling on it: that will never happen!" Stung by the barb of his cold sigh, I said in irritation: "I have not said anything so strange that I must make a mountain out of a mustard seed, wave my fingers about while I tell truth and lies, and put up tangled, tuneless, groundless talk. If I could not do it, why would I let the words out of my mouth? I would have dodged the whole business somehow."

Now the teller of this story makes himself known to you here, and tells you what people call him. Passing my right hand over my face, I declare to you: if my Giver wills, I will show you such airs and graces, such comings and goings, such leaps and bounds and grapplings, that at the very sight the horse of your fancy, which is far more fickle than lightning and leaps like the deer, will forget its own capers.

Mounted upon my horse I come;
whatever tricks there are, I show them all.

If that Beloved wills it, then this moment
whatever I say, I do before your eyes.

Now lend me your ears, turn and face me, and watch for a moment how I set off, and in how many shapes I scatter flowers from these lips of mine, like the petals of a flower.