Jahaan Dekha, Tahan Tu Hi Tu

July 22, 2025

A Ballad of Bopa Rai

By Narinder
Category: Philosophy

Jahaan Dekha, Tahan Tu Hi Tu: Finding the Sacred in the Profane

Memories Bubble

It began on one of his beer-fuelled wanderings.
Somewhere ahead — voices.
Women, singing together.

Clear. Beckoning. Sirens?

It came from across a dry, cracked ditch — the kind of shallow wound that divides places without warning.
Beyond that, a mound of soil.
There was a path… but Bopa took the shortcut: slipping, crawling, dust smearing into mud on his skin, knees scraping. Finding the Sacred in the Profane

An unease hung over him.
Curiosity — or was it devotion? Bhakti? Or only… the itch of an unanswered question.Wherever I looked, there was You. Only You

Who is singing?

Shabri Mata.

And suddenly he remembered Mamo — the woman who carried away their waste in a bucket balanced on her head between two raised platforms. Old, deliberate, never in a hurry.
Clean in a way no soap could teach.
Sometimes she pressed a hard sweet into his hand. He had liked her in the honest, unreasoning way of a child.

In his boyhood’s private religion, her wrinkled face began to merge with the barefoot forest-dweller Shabri Mata — offering Lord Rama berries already tasted, already trusted.

Again Finding the Sacred in the Profane

Circle of Hands

Years later, another connecting memory. Bopa remembered the ICU. An elderly comatose woman was not passing faecess,instead dripping blood through her rectum. Bopa asked the nurse to prepare a rectal examination tray. The nurse brought the tray—gloves, proctoscope, the unspoken expectation. The medical adage returned: “If you don’t put your finger in it, you’ll end up putting your foot in it.” He inserted index finger and encountered a blockage of semi-solid stool. There was nothing to do except bring out some feces on a curled finger. A wave of foul gas hit me. I gagged, retched into a bucket while the nurse doubled over in laughter. Then, after a pause, I returned to the task, completed the examination, and ordered an enema. It was only fecal impaction—not catastrophe but obstruction—relieved by humble, necessary service.

There was another day, the theatre echoing with bright light and antiseptic confidence. A senior surgeon operated on a deep perianal abscess. The patient was in lithotomy, the nurse attentive, an anaesthetist at the head. When the abscess was pierced, pus burst forth with a vengeance, splattering surgeon and assistants alike, unleashing a stench so overwhelming that all but the surgeon fled outside, gasping for clean air. After a minute, chastened and silent, we trooped back in. The senior, unfazed, worked on alone—no blame, only gravity in his hands. Our respect for him grew, not in spite of the indignity, but because of it.

Sacred in the Profane

The Shabari Mata Bhajan Crescendos: The Ditch

He reached the other side — mud-streaked, bleeding. Silence.
A man stood there. Also mud-streaked — as if the ditch had marked them both.

“Who is singing Shabri Mata?” Bopa asked.

The man just stared.

A quiet woman appeared, guiding him back toward his car without a word. He gave her a little money, a reflex.

At the car, whispers followed: A man is giving away his money.

Bopa shrugged. He drove away.
But the Bhajan clung to him — not as a song now, but as a riddle.

Revelation

Days later, it came to him. The “divine call” was the waste collector’s jingle — a melody to lure neighbors out with their garbage.

A summons to waste, not worship.

Still… its pull hadn’t vanished. As if the truth of the song mattered less than the way it entered him.

Cry Of The Pups

Whisky warmth still in his veins, the sound returned — not a Bhajan this time but shrill, urgent cries.
The ditch again.
The same dip in the earth, the same ragged edge.

In its shadow, a mad dog tearing at a pup’s belly. The others fleeing. The mother — a thin bitch with eyes clouded like the old woman’s in his memory — frozen in helplessness.

Bopa didn’t think; he moved. His friend grabbed a stick and together they plunged in, his boot catching the attacker. A snarl, a bite at the boot leather — and the mad thing fled into the dark.

For a strange moment they were a pack: man, friend, mother-dog, united against chaos.

When quiet returned, it was the wrong kind: dusk falling, earth littered with little silences. Only one survivor alive, trembling behind a tree.

Bopa scooped him up. Felt his pulse — quick, uncertain. His friend found another.

They crossed the road, as if the ditch were a border they could choose to erase.

When Bopa set his down, its trembling stopped at once. From the scrub behind, a second mother emerged with her own brood. The rescued pup ran to them, his belonging instantly claimed.

And again, the bramble swallowed them whole.

Brambles and Forgiveness

Bopa followed — as he had followed the song.

Thorns caught his shirt, roots curled around his boots. The pups darted in and out, identical in their quicksilver joy.

He reached out for one; they evaded him, gentle in their refusal.
The mother’s tail wagged once — not to invite him closer, but to let him know there was no grudge.

At sixty, he returned home: without darshan, without pup.
Bloodied and scratched, carrying nothing in his hands — but something restless in his chest.

The Song Remains

All night, the Shabri Mata bhajan returned — but now it carried the cries of pups, the rustle of brambles, the stillness of that other side of the ditch.

Chaos fashioned into order.
Order fraying into chaos.

The world, pretending to be one thing, revealing itself as another.

No redemption.
No loss.

Wherever I looked, there was You. Only You.